MSNBC host Chris Hayes on Tuesday compared gun enthusiast Republicans, such as Donald Trump Jr., to Osama bin Laden.
The footage: The MSNBC host weighed in on video backdrops used by Trump and Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert, which prominently featured items from their gun collections.
According to Hayes, the displays amounted to an “implicit threat” from Boebert and Trump.
- “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 said.
- “Osama bin Laden, for one, liked to pose in front of a bookshelf with a gun prominently displayed,” he said.
- Hayes also invoked the Irish Republican Army and the communist revolutionaries of Cuba as users of “the aesthetic of armed struggle, of revolution or insurrection.”
Context: Liberal journalists and Democratic members of Congress have cheered recent crackdowns on the populist right and urged investigations into whether GOP members of congress or law enforcement and military officers at the Jan. 6 Capitol riot were in league with potentially violent pro-Trump extremists.
- House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has called for a 9/11 Commission-style inquiry into the events surrounding the riot, a move condemned by one former head of the 9/11 Commission as dangerously partisan.
