im so proud of you for this one, at least I know you're not in deep enough that you repeat the "LG and Hexbear are all chinese bots!?!?" cliche.
Still it hurts, can't you stroke our egos more like normal liberals do by pretending we're important enough for China to pay attention to us like that 
Lol, imagine thinking that Hexbear and Lemmygrad are funded right out of Big Man Xi's own pockets... No, the truth is actually that all the other Lemmy instances are funded directly by Spez in order to stomp out his competition!
By the way, I keep seeing this emoji, and I get that it's supposed to represent laughter, but what's the context behind it? Who is that guy?
Is it Michael Brooks?
The emoji is called michael-laugh so evidently. I'm assuming you're referring to Michael Jamal Brooks (political commentator, 1983-2020) as opposed to the inexcusable number of other notable Michael Brooks on Wikipedia.
I was. I've never listened to his stuff but he seemed to be well liked.
Yes, we all loved the direction he was taking MR on r/cth and then he suddenly died right before the launch of chapo.chat (now hexbear), so we of course created this in memoriam.