An Undercurrent of Extremism Runs Through the NRA’s Board of Directors
Click here to view this media [Note: This is the first in a series of posts I'll be doing this fall in conjunction with the fine folks at Media Matters -- where this will be cross-posted -- exploring issues related to right-wing extremism and gun-rights advocacy. See the note at the end. -- DN] Those of us who grew up around the NRA are all too familiar with one of the more striking facets of the organization’s relentless fearmongering, its paranoid style: namely, it not only traffics in wild and groundless conspiracy theories about “gun grabbers” and Bircherite “New World Order” takeover schemes, but it forms deep associations with the very extremists whose far-right worldview fosters such paranoia. The most recent example of this has been the way the NRA’s fearmongering about President Obama has fostered real violence from right-wing extremists. The reason for this kind of extremism is in fact a top-down phenomenon: increasingly, the people running the NRA are themselves deeply extremist. The folks at the Educational Fund to Stop Gun Violence have put together a directory of the NRA’s board titled Meet the NRA Directors . It’s a fascinating site, one that well rewards scrolling through and reading. In addition to what you’d expect — a lot of ties to the arms manufacturers who funnel much of the money that is the NRA’s lifeblood — there is also, predictably, a deep undercurrent of right-wing extremism. The most striking example of this is Robert K. Brown, the longtime publisher of Soldier of Fortune magazine. As David Holthouse has explored in some detail already, Brown’s magazine was for years the monthly Bible of the “militia” movement in the 1990s, one of the movement’s more prominent promoters. The magazine not only promoted the concept of militias but offered advice on how to form them and urged participants to prepare for persecution from the New World Order. The ties to violent extremists run deeper, in fact: Soldier of Fortune distributed copies of a newsletter called The Resister during the 1990s. The Resister was published by Steven Barry, then a member of the Army’s Special Forces and leader of the unsanctioned Special Forces Underground organization. The newsletter initially drew inspiration from the controversial siege at Ruby Ridge. The content of the newsletter evidenced a “white Christian militia mentality,” according to Michael Reynolds from the Southern Poverty Law Center, containing racist and anti-Semitic content while also exploring “New World Order” conspiracy theories. When Timothy McVeigh was arrested for the Oklahoma City Bombing, in his possession was a Soldier of Fortune -distributed copy of The Resister . Also on Brown’s record: an array of crimes (largely would-be contract killers) associated with the magazine, as well Brown’s associations with right-wing death squads operating in Central America in the 1980s. As it happens, one of the writers for Brown’s magazine — indeed, he penned one of the first Soldier of Fortune pieces promoting militias in 1994, titled “Join A Militia — Break The Law?”
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An Undercurrent of Extremism Runs Through the NRA’s Board of Directors
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on September 16, 2011. Filed under