To show you how far from reality the National Rifle Association used to be, and how much closer to reality they have become in the post-Trump age, you might want to take a look at a recent rant by Grant Stinchfield, who used to headline NRA-TV.

              Stinchfield now does a show on Newsmax, which is one of the alt-right media venues that began popping up on the internet a decade or so ago.  Their website draws a whole, big million visits a day, which in a country whose population now is more than 325 million, that number is what Grandpa would call ‘kasha mit varnishkes’ (read: a disgusting dish made of oatmeal and boiled pasta) which is what he called everything that had no real value at all.

              Stinchfield used this episode to advise the Republicans how to deal with the debt issue before they ‘caved in.’ And his advice was to shut down four federal agencies which eat up a lot of government spending and aren’t doing anything worthwhile at all. First on his list, of course, was the Department of Education, because everyone knows that only fools and liberals want to learn how to read and write.

              The other three agencies which aren’t any more important than the Department of Education are Commerce, EPA and Energy.  After all, we don’t need to know how much the economy is growing or sometimes not growing. We certainly don’t need to worry about clean water or clean air. And if we don’t need to worry about clean air then we certainly don’t need to be concerned about how much energy we are using, so to hell with the Department of Energy as well.

              Obviously, Stinchfield is just reading from a script that his producer knows is what the Newsmax audience wants to hear. Whether he actually believes any of this nonsense is beyond the point. What isn’t beyond the point is that when he did a daily rant for NRA-TV, his comments were just as stupid, just as loony, and just as focused on the most extreme, far-right idiots who happen to own guns.

              The NRA always promoted some degree of political messaging because, after all, the organization needed to speak out publicly to support gun owner’s rights, which meant the usual patriotic stuff about the 2^nd Amendment versus the idea that liberals and Democrats didn’t like guns. 

              Every year at the NRA national show, a few Republican politicians would show up and say he same thing about talking to a group of ‘real Americans,’ but the year that Gaston Glock appeared and signed autographs at the Glock booth, he outdrew all the political luminaries by maybe ten to one.

              NRA’s descent into crazy political messaging really started in 2016 when they endorsed Donald Trump at their annual meeting. At the time, I wasn’t surprised that they broke with their tradition of endorsing the GOP Presidential candidate in October and endorsed Trump in April because Hillary was a fearsome candidate who was talking about guns in a rather unpleasant and confrontational way.

              In fact, I am convinced that had Hillary become President with a blue Congress behind her, she would have re-introduced the gun-control measure that Andy Cuomo, then head of HUD, had written for Bill Clinton, a plan which would have effectively ended the retail gun business in the United States.

              I also wasn’t particularly bothered by the $30 million that the NRA anted up for the 2016 Clinton campaign.  It was more money than the NRA had ever given to any, single Presidential campaign, but when you’re talking about a political campaign which runs into the hundreds of millions of dollars, thirty million is still chump change. Would that money get Wayne-o into the White House from time to time?  Of course it would. But the NRA was always on the VIP list whenever a Republican sat behind the Resolute desk.

              What bothered me was that the NRA turned itself into a video production company featuring some of the worst, most inflammatory and stupidly alt-right messaging that I had ever seen.  You had that other idiot, the home-school queen Dana Loesch talking about how everyone needed a gun to protect themselves against cities being burned to the ground by radical hordes, and you had Stinchfield ranting on and on about how liberals would not only take away all the guns but were in the process of building a Fascist-style state, using illegal immigrants to take apart what good, law-abiding Americans had built over the years.

              The whole NRA-TV deal collapsed when it turned out that NRA’s then-PR company, Ackermn-McQueen, was lying about the number of people who watched NRA-TV video shows. The legal wrangle between the NRA and Ack-Ack is still going on, but NRA-TV closed down in June 2019.

              Go to the NRA website today and it’s business as usual once again. The lead stories are about next year’s annual meeting, a new banking relationship with a real bank, a chance to win a Ford truck and, by the way, the re-election of Wayne-o as the outfit’s Executive VP.

              In other words, maybe the NRA has learned something from the 2020 election, which is that the country, including both gun owners and non-gun owners, have a few more important things to be worried about than the predations of the Deep State.