Chris Hayes Hearts ChiCom Propaganda

Here is a state-run Chinese newspaper mocking Americans and guns.

First of all, this ChiCom propaganda — written in English — isn’t directed at the Chinese people who are banned from Twitter. It’s directed at folks like MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, who dutifully shared the cartoon with his 2 million followers, noting that he continues “to be grimly fascinated by how much America’s truly exceptional levels of gun violence figure in the perception of the country around the world.”

Considering the number of Chinese people who would eagerly immigrate here to escape truly exceptional levels of state-induced poverty and violence, I suspect that perceptions of America remain quite good, actually. Then again, there is a decent chance that the perception of this nation is better among foreigners than progressives.

Obviously, many on the left agree with sentiments of the Xinhua cartoon — that liberty isn’t worth the price. Only a few weeks ago, Joe Biden was lecturing legal gun owners about how useless their AR-15s would be in the face of fighter jets and tactical nuclear weapons. You might recall Ben Carson getting hammered in 2015 for suggesting that the Holocaust may have been “diminished” if Jews had been armed.

Counterfactual history is nothing but guesswork. Different cultures cultivate long-standing notions about freedom and the state. We have no idea how things would have turned out. Yet, it is also self-evident to contend that even a few guns can make life more difficult for tyrants — as the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising demonstrated. There’s a reason the first thing authoritarians do is disarm the populace.

Mao, arguably the greatest mass murderer in history, famously said that “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” And, unsurprisingly, China’s gun laws are the world’s strictest — with a blanket ban on nearly all private ownership of rifles and pistols. It isn’t a coincidence that no place on Earth has experienced more state-sanctioned murder, torture, imprisonment, and terror than communist China. Thousands of large-scale concentration and forced-labor camps were in operation during China’s communist history. It’s estimated that around 10 million Chinese were imprisoned on average every year for decades. Perhaps as many as 20 million Chinese perished in camps by the early 1990s. None of this is to mention the tens of millions that died in various deadly social experiments over the communist nation’s history. These days, Xinjiang “re-education camps” are populated by a million (perhaps more) ethnic Muslim Uyghurs.

Does Hayes, or any other left-winger, ever contemplate what these situations might look if these men and women had been armed and able to defend themselves and their families? How easily would the communist oppression of Hong Kong be implemented in the face of widespread gun ownership? Sure, Hong Kong would have a higher crime rate. But surely, the ChiCom state’s job would be a lot more difficult. Perhaps impossible.