Roslyn area-raised gun control advocate Linda Beigel Schulman has made headlines in recent days as a critic of U.S. Rep. Marjorie Greene (R-Georgia), who has refused to publicly disavow conspiracy theories about numerous mass shootings, including the one in which Beigel Schulman’s son died.
Her son, Scott J. Beigel, taught geography and coached the cross country team at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. On Feb. 14, 2018, he was among the 17 people killed when a gunman equipped with an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle entered the school and pulled the fire alarm. Footage of the shooting shows Beigel herding 31 students to safety in his classroom before he was shot.
Since Scott Beigel’s death, Beigel Schulman has led a foundation in her son’s name and worked to pass gun violence legislation and spoken across the country on the topic of gun violence, including attending the 2020 State of the Union with Congressman Tom Suozzi (D-Glen Cove) and giving a talk on her experiences alongside Suozzi at Temple Beth Sholom in East Hills, the temple she attended growing up.
Her initial comments criticizing Greene, a conservative commentator-turned congresswoman who has come under fire for endorsing conspiracy theories including QAnon and Pizzagate, came in a Jan. 27 interview in New York Magazine in which writer Olivia Nuzzi notes that Media Matters had reported that Greene had endorsed and promoted the conspiracy that Parkland was a “false flag” operation in since-deleted Facebook posts, as well as taunting David Hogg, a survivor of the shooting, on video.
“Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, the shooting where my son was murdered protecting his students was not a ‘false flag,’” Beigel Schulman told the magazine in a statement. “It was not staged. It really happened. Do not trivialize my son Scott’s sacrifice to save his students for your own political gain. As Joseph Welch said to Sen. Joseph McCarthy [at the] Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in 1954: ‘Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. Have you no sense of decency?’ Congresswoman Greene, I ask you the same question. Are you that cruel? HAVE YOU NO SENSE OF DECENCY??”
“What do we need to do?” she told Nuzzi later. “Show her the video? Do I need to take her over to Scott’s mausoleum? Does she need to see how he was shot six times from three feet away? It’s wrong. It’s just wrong.”
She elaborated on her comments in an interview last week with CNN anchor Don Lemon.
“She has no right to negate Scott’s heroism, and she has no right to demean my son’s memory with her conspiracy theories,” Beigel Schulman said. “She just has no right, and we need to speak out, because we need to take that right away from her.”
Lemon asked if she had anything to say to those like Greene who touted conspiracy theories about Parkland and other mass shootings. Beigel Schulman replied that in modern culture, “unless it touches a person directly, we look away.”
“We heard about it day in and day out, and now we hear it [and think] ‘Oh, there’s just another mass shooting,'” Beigel Schulman said. “There’s no such thing as ‘just another mass shooting.’ Until somebody is touched personally, it seems like they don’t want to do anything about it, and we need to do something about it. We need to stop this because it’s hurting. It very, very much hurts me, and I can speak for the other 16 families, it has to stop. It can’t go on like this where everybody just looks away.”
On Monday in an interview with MSNBC’s Alex Witt, Beigel Schulman said that she had asked Suozzi to put her in touch with Greene, which resulted in the two meeting on Zoom. Suozzi’s office confirmed this in a statement to Blank Slate Media.
Beigel Schulman described their conversation as “friendly and cordial.”
“My first question to Congresswoman Greene was, do you really believe that Parkland and Sandy Hook were false flags and staged?” Beigel Schulman said. “That was a really important question to me. I just to this moment cannot fathom that somebody could say something like that. Her answer to me was, unequivocally, ‘No I do not.'”
She said that she then asked the congresswoman if she would come on MSNBC with her and publicly disavow her statements.
“I asked [Greene] if she would come on air with me today and make a public statement,” Beigel Schulman said. “I said ‘You know what, if that’s really, really what you believe in, come on the air and tell the public just that.’ Well her statement is clear, because here I am with you, and she’s not here right now.
“Truth is power. And if Congresswoman Greene believes that Parkland and Sandy Hook were in fact real events, she would be willing to say that publicly, and her failure tells me that for Congresswoman Greene, politics, [former President Donald] Trump’s truth, his lies and conspiracy theories are more important to her than honesty.”
Beigel Schulman added that “silence is not an option.”
“I would like Congresswoman Greene, especially after our conversation, to publicly disavow her comments and apologize to those from Parkland and Sandy Hook, who she has hurt and devastated with her words, because she has definitely devastated all of us,” Beigel Schulman said.
“I would also like her to acknowledge that the massacre was not staged, and not a false flag. I would like her to acknowledge the massacre was real and really did happen. And I’d like her to acknowledge that Scott and many others were murdered. And you know what, along with that, I think it’s really important that she acknowledge that David Hogg was not a paid actor. Because anyone who does not call this out needs to grow a conscience or find the conscience that they have, if they have one.”
A spokesperson from Greene’s office told Newsweek after the MSNBC interview, “The assertation that Rep. Greene believes that those two tragedies are anything other than mad men committing horrific acts is absolutely ridiculous.” The congresswoman herself has not responded to the comments.
