In dealing with an American adult who actively pushes for gun control, one must apply a simple rule: Assume malevolence.
Twenty-three-year-old Harvard graduate David Hogg, a survivor of the 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida, and barely an adult, might have more surface-level excuses than other prominent gun-control activists, but he remains a malevolent actor nonetheless.
During the question-and-answer session of a debate on Wednesday with former Libertarian Party vice-presidential candidate Spike Cohen at the Dartmouth Political Union in New Hampshire, Hogg delivered a high-sounding-yet-logically-incoherent response to a Chinese immigrant who told him to “go to China to see how gun control works for the dictatorship of the CCP.”
That immigrant turned out to be Lily Tang Williams, 2024 Republican candidate for Congress in New Hampshire’s 2nd Congressional District.
“I was 23 when I fled tyranny,” Williams wrote in a pinned tweet on the social media platform X.
“I fear that the country I love is becoming like the country I left,” she later added.
I am Lily Tang Williams. I was born in China to illiterate working-class parents, suffered under Mao’s Cultural Revolution and Communist dictatorship. I wanted freedom. America was my promised land.
I was 23 when I fled tyranny. Arriving with $100 in my pocket and knowing very… pic.twitter.com/cIoTlMOMxx
— Lily Tang Williams (@Lily4Liberty) June 1, 2023
Williams’ background as a survivor of Chinese Communist tyranny made her question to Hogg all the more powerful.
Do you support gun rights?
“Under Mao [Zedong], you know, 40 million people were starving to death after he sold communism to them, and 20 million people died — murdered — during his Cultural Revolution,” Williams said.
“So my question to you, David, is that can you guarantee me, a gun owner tonight, our government in the U.S., in D.C., will never, never become a tyrannical government? Can you guarantee that to me?”
Hogg, of course, could not.
“There’s no way I can ever guarantee that any government will not be tyrannical,” the 23-year-old activist replied.
“Well then the debate on gun control is over,” Williams shot back. “Because I will never give up my guns. Never, never.”
At that point, she told Hogg he should go to China to see how gun control works for that dictatorship.
Hogg’s response combined all the elements of young liberal activism: logical incoherence, insincere paeans to civil liberties and a palpable condescension barely concealed behind expressions of sympathy.
“I am extremely sorry that you’ve gone through that and witnessed that,” Hogg said. He also called the Cultural Revolution “horrific” and pledged to “do everything in my power” to stop such a thing from happening in America.
The attempt at rhetorical disarmament continued.
“I’m not advocating for you having your gun taken away. I am genuinely not,” Hogg said. “I know it may be hard for you to believe that. But I am not advocating for any law-abiding, like, citizen, to have that happen to them.”
Hogg’s hesitation as he searched for the word “citizen” amounted to what poker players call a “tell.” And the activist’s next set of comments made that clear.
“What I believe is that the real danger that we have in America right now is all of these people that increasingly believe that elections are not real, that are denying the results of them, being heavily armed, and repeatedly saying that they need to overthrow government because they’ve been fed lies and misinformation. That is really what I fear becoming a tyrannical government,” he said.
Readers may view the entire debate in the video below. Williams’ question began at the 1:28:30 mark.
To shore up his liberal bona fides, Hogg also bemoaned tyrannical legislation such as the Patriot Act and the FISA Act.
But it was too late, for he already let his own Maoist cat out of the bag.
On one hand, he insisted that no “law-abiding, like, citizen” should suffer disarmament.
On the other hand, he channeled his inner MSNBC anchor by identifying “heavily armed” election deniers as “the real danger.”
One simply cannot object to tyrannical governments like that of Communist China while denouncing armed citizens as “the real danger.” It lacks logical coherence and exposes all other libertarian-sounding comments as fraudulent.
Furthermore, it shows the Ivy League graduate’s true attitude toward ordinary Americans.
In other words, assume malevolence.
