Chris Hayes Compares GOP’s Gun Imagery to Bin Laden, Cuban Rebels, IRA: It Signals ‘Violent Overthrow of the Government’
MSNBC’s Chris Hayes drew a direct line between the politicized gun imagery being deployed by current, high-profile Republicans and a long history of terrorists and revolutionaries similarly centering firearms and weaponry in their symbolism.
During his Tuesday night show, the MSNBC host played recent clips of Donald Trump Jr. and Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) ostentatiously posing in front of backgrounds decorated with multiple handguns or assault-style rifles. (And in Boebert’s case, it involved leaving two, conspicuously loaded high-velocity assault rifles out in the open in a home with four children.)
“The use of guns in that way, as props, and the implicit threat that comes with them has a long, not necessarily great history among various movements around the globe,” Hayes noted.
Osama bin Laden, for one, liked to pose in front of a bookshelf with a gun prominently displayed. The Irish Republican Army would display guns in its propaganda posters and its murals. Cuban revolutionaries, they posed with guns all the time, too. No single side of the spectrum has a monopoly on this aesthetic. You can see it all over the world. It is unquestionably the aesthetic of armed struggle, of revolution or insurrection. A movement or faction that puts images of guns, a celebration of guns front and center in its political aesthetic is a movement that’s engaging in something that we would not call the rhetoric of elected democratic politics.
Hayes then showed a tweet from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), where she photoshopped an image of herself carrying an AR-style rifle next to pictures of members of the progressive “Squad” of House Democrats.
“You can’t escape the meaning of it. It communicates that they’re open to at least the possibility of violent overthrow of the government,” Hayes continued. “You’ll remember Marjorie Taylor Greene posed with this gun in her campaign ads next to governmental members of Congress. She wears a mask that is ancient Greek for ‘Come and take them’… The implied message seems to be, if you try to take away our guns, we’ll start shooting.”
“They use the excuse that they can be violent at any time and they’re willing to brandish that claim as a threat in pursuit of their political aims,” Hayes said, referencing recent examples of right-wing violent threats and assaults like the plot to kidnap and murder Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and the now-infamous Capitol insurrection on Jan. 6.
“It’s not some academic thing, right?” Hayes pointed out. “It’s become increasingly standard for the most hardcore devotees of Trump and his faction to, at the very least, wink at the notion that they’re ready to hurt anyone who gets in their way.”
Watch the video above, via MSNBC.
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