In early April, the National Rifle Association published to YouTube and its video hub, NRATV, a lacerating monologue about the New York Times. Dana Loesch, a conservative commentator who had recently become a national spokeswoman for the association, speaks directly into the camera. “We the people have had it,” Loesch says. “We’ve had it with your narratives, your propaganda, your fake news. We’ve had it with your constant protection of your Democrat overlords, your refusal to acknowledge any truth that upsets the fragile construct that you believe is real life. And we’ve had it with your pretentious, tone-deaf assertion that you are in any way truth or fact-based journalism.”
Loesch—who once ran a popular motherhood blog, Mamalogues, before becoming a newspaper columnist, radio personality, and then Tea Party activist—alternately sneers and smirks, relishing her takedown. She warns that the Times should “consider this the shot across your proverbial bow,” flings a few more epithets at the newspaper—“old gray hag,” “untrustworthy,” “dishonest rag”—and ends the video with a declaration: “We’re coming for you.” The three-minute-and-fifty-seven-second episode, part of a “Commentators” video series sponsored by the gun manufacturer Kimber, attracted relatively little attention when it first went up. Another video the N.R.A. posted just over a month earlier, challenging the Times’ “The Truth Is Hard” television ad during the Academy Awards, had similarly struggled to gain traction. But, last week, NRATV shared a trimmed-down version of Loesch’s video on Facebook and Twitter. “@DLoesch has a message for the @nytimes: ‘We’re coming for you,’ ” the tweet said, followed by the hashtag #ClenchedFistofTruth.
An axiom of digital video strategy nowadays is that different types of videos are better suited for different platforms. This particular segment, it turned out, worked well for social media, attracting, as of late this week, a hundred and twenty-three thousand views on Facebook, along with fourteen hundred retweets and more than twenty-four hundred likes on Twitter. Loesch’s vigorous social-media jousting with detractors, who thought she’d threatened at one point in the video to “fist” the Times, helped boost traffic. (Loesch insisted—and the transcript accompanying her video on NRATV supports her case—that she had said “fisk,” a slang term, popular among bloggers in the two-thousands, that refers to a point-by-point rebuttal.) Perhaps most important for the N.R.A.’s communications shop, the video garnered an avalanche of “earned media”—writeups in the Guardian, Slate, USA Today, Newsweek, Vice, Salon, and elsewhere.
Over the past few months, the N.R.A. has released a succession of Web videos, all strikingly bellicose even by the standards of the association. They’re also notable for how far they seem to veer from the N.R.A.’s ostensible priority, defending gun rights. In early April, NRATV published a video that featured images of the Times’ headquarters and interspersed footage of violent protesters with commentary from Loesch—coiled and urgent—accusing the left of inciting people “to smash windows, burn cars, shut down interstates and airports, bully and terrorize the law-abiding, until the only option left is for the police to do their jobs and stop the madness.” Biting off each word and brimming with derision, Loesch says, “The only way to stop this, the only way we save our country and our freedom, is to fight this violence of lies with the clenched fist of truth.”
In another video, posted in July, Dom Raso, a barrel-chested former Navy SEAL and NRATV contributor, declared that the country had fallen into “organized anarchy, led by people who hate our President and who hate the people who support him.” After a Washington Post article commented that Raso’s “dark video” had failed to even mention guns, the N.R.A. went after the Post. Grant Stinchfield, another pugnacious NRATV personality, accused the Post of fomenting “the organized anarchy of the violent left” and promised that the N.R.A. would “never stop fighting the violent left on the battlefield of truth.” Stinchfield kept up his assault this week, lashing out at two reporters, Adam Goldman of the Times and Dave Weigel of the Post, who had expressed consternation at the Loesch ad on Twitter.
For several years, I worked on investigations at the Times on gaps in gun laws and the influence of the gun lobby. They were often highly critical stories, examining the N.R.A.’s efforts to stymie firearms research, its lobbying to make it easier for people with a histories of mental illness to have their gun rights restored, and its work blocking legislation that would make it harder for domestic abusers to keep their guns. Yet, through all of this, I can’t recall the N.R.A. going after the Times—or me, for that matter—in such a direct way. (I did once have my photo posted on a Web site called Ammoland.com.)
I called Richard Feldman, a former N.R.A. lobbyist, to help me understand the organization’s latest tack and why the gun lobby would stray from its focus on the Second Amendment. In 2007, Feldman published “Ricochet: Confessions of a Gun Lobbyist,” a memoir of his time working for the association. In the book, Feldman wrote about his gradual realization that the association’s aims and those of gun owners did not always align, and that wielding power and wringing contributions from members sometimes “overshadow protecting Constitutional liberties.” The N.R.A. is certainly at a crest in power today, with Republicans in control of Congress and Trump in the White House. The gun lobby was an early endorser of Trump and spent more than thirty million dollars, more than any other outside group, to get him elected. In April, at the N.R.A.’s leadership forum in Atlanta, Trump became the first sitting President since Ronald Reagan to address the association.
Feldman told me that this kind of political success can actually be problematic for the N.R.A. “The N.R.A. is not so much interested in winning,” Feldman told me. “They’re interested in fighting, because fighting is great for fund-raising and membership recruitment.”
Hillary Clinton in the White House, with her support for tougher gun laws, would have been a boon for the N.R.A. Trump’s surprise election meant the association needed to recalibrate, and quickly. Philip Bump, a writer for the Washington Post, published a chart last week that tracked the N.R.A.’s paid Twitter ads since November, 2016, and the mentions of the terms “left,” “violence,” and “media” (and including the Twitter handles of the Washington Post or the Times). The spike is startling and revealing about the way the N.R.A. has decided to adjust its customer-acquisition strategy, aping the angry rhetoric of the candidate it championed. And the ensuing media outrage over the videos only fuels the virtuous cycle for the N.R.A.
It is, of course, perfectly within the prerogative of an advocacy group to stir anxiety and fear among its members or potential members for the sake of attracting donations. But gun owners, contemplating whether to re-up their forty-dollar annual memberships or hand over their credit cards for the first time, might consider the fact that they’re being manipulated. And for those (rightly) outraged by the intimations of violence in the videos, it is worth weighing the reality that we’re part of the N.R.A.’s strategy, too.
