Bill Berkowitz / Buzzflash @ TruthOut – 2017-07-31 23:57:57
http://www.truth-out.org/buzzflash/commentary/attacking-black-lives-matter-and-selling-fear-guns-and-racism-on-nratv
Attacking Black Lives Matter and Selling Fear:
Guns and Racism on NRATV
Bill Berkowitz / Buzzflash @ TruthOut
(July 25, 2017) — Without the drummed-up fear that a black president would take guns away from law-abiding citizens, the National Rifle Association is turning toward vilifying and pillorying the Black Lives Matter movement against police brutality in order to drum up gun sales.
One of the platforms it now has at its disposal is NRATV. While the fledging network may not yet be among the choices in your cable television package, or available through existing streaming services, given the power of the gun lobbying organization, NRATV may soon be coming to screen near you.
Launched in October of last year, NRATV’s declared mission is to provide “The most comprehensive video coverage of Second Amendment issues, events and culture anywhere in the world.” The network offers such programing as NRANEWs, presented by Ruger, NRAWOMEN, presented by Smith & Wesson, NRACOUNTRY and NRAHUNTING, as well as an array of commentators.
Grant Stinchfield is a host of a program called Stinchfield. During a recent broadcast, Stinchfield let go a broadside against Black Lives Matter, claiming that “racist violence” in South Africa, “where white families are being tortured and killed almost every day in racist violence. . . . is a warning for the United States.” And because of the liberal media, “you will never hear [about this] from the mainstream media in this country.”
Stinchfield interviewed Chuck Holton, a veteran Army Ranger, and co-host — alongside Iran-Contra figure and NRA board member Oliver North — of the NRATV series Frontlines. Holton who appears to be a master of alternative facts and seems to have a hate/hate relationship with African Americans, maintained that “the blatant racism and violence we’re seeing from people like the Black Lives Matter crowd, from people like Louis Farrakhan and his minions, is happening in spades in South Africa.”
The Daily Banter’s Justin Rosario declared that Holton’s words were not just “a racist dog whistle,” they were “an open call to violence against Black Lives Matter.”
“Pair this with the recent ‘liberals are the enemy of freedom’ ad that effectively calls on NRA members to get ready to kill anti-Trump protesters and you have a very stark picture of the NRA’s agenda,” Rosario noted. “No longer content to just sell guns and fear, the gun industry’s mouthpiece is actively inciting violence against the left, using both political and racial tensions as a justification.
When Obama welcomed, and shook hands with, then-president-elect Donald Trump at the White House, Holton tweeted: “Photo finally surfaces of Trump grabbing a pussy.” And two days after Trump’s inauguration, Holton tweeted “Okay! Party’s over. Let’s get busy scrubbing Obama’s mocacchino stain off of America!”
According to Media Matters for America, last August on the NRA’s radio show Cam & Company, “Holton talked about gangs, absent fathers, and welfare, before saying, ‘And you hear college students complain about white privilege. You know my definition of white privilege? It’s just simply the culture that we have created, that our fathers and grandfathers have worked hard to create.’
Holton went on describe white privilege as ‘a culture of individual responsibility, where you take responsibility for your own actions, a culture that respects authority.’ He also positively cited a video about ‘white privilege’ released by ‘alt right’ blogger Stefan Molyneux.”
Immediately after the attack in Manchester, England, which left 22 dead and dozens injured, Holton told Stinchfield that England “has had this coming,” due to the country’s firearms regulations, open borders for refugees, “multiculturalism” and “gender-bending.” At the end of the segment, Stinchfield stated that European countries have “disarmed their citizens, so . . . terrorists operate with impunity.”
After the January 21st Women’s March on Washington, commentator Bill Whittle had Holton, who also works with Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network, as his guest.
Together they blamed the Women’s March “for vandalism and property damage that took place on Inauguration Day, January 20,” Raw Story reported. Whittle and Holton confidently predicted that a Women’s March on the NRA – scheduled for July 14 – will “certainly not be peaceful.”
“Well, they’re certainly not peaceful. And they’re certainly not even protests. What they are is sort of temper tantrums by spoiled children, is the best way I can describe them,” Holton said.
The July 14 and 15 protests against the NRA – which included a nearly 18-mile walk from NRA headquarters to the U.S. Department of Justice – was carried out peacefully.
The events were in part a response to an incendiary one-minute NRA recruitment video, which featured NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch, who in the video argues that demonstrators “bully and terrorize the law-abiding until the only option left is for the police to do their jobs and stop the madness.”
“They use their media to assassinate real news,” The Blaze’s Dana Loesch said in the ad. “They use their schools to teach children that their president is another Hitler. They use their movie stars and singers and comedy shows and award shows to repeat their narrative over and over again.”
Women’s March co-president Tamika Mallory called the ad is “direct endorsement of violence” against protesters. “We haven’t taken a position that people shouldn’t have guns, we don’t want to prohibit folks from exercising their second amendment rights,” Mallory told CNN ahead of the march.
“But the NRA ad puts our First Amendment rights in jeopardy, it puts the lives of people who are exercising their right to protest in the middle of danger. We are looking for a change in NRA’s behavior and its policies and practices.”
The event’s Facebook page urged the NRA to “take down the recent irresponsible and dangerous advertisement videos from all social platforms immediately; issue an apology to the American people for the video that suggests armed violence against communities of color, progressives and anyone who does not agree with this Administration’s policies; and make a statement to defend Philando Castile’s Second Amendment right to own a firearm and demand the Department of Justice indict the police officer who killed him for exercising his Second Amendment.”
Attacks on Black Lives Matter are nothing new. Since the inception of the movement, conservatives have been gunning for the organization. Recently, Jacob Grandstaff, writing for the conservative Capital Research Center website, argued that the Women’s March against the NRA “show that the group is primarily concerned with Left-wing coalition-building and not women’s issues.”
Grandstaff added: “The Women’s March characterizes itself as a feminist movement organized in opposition to President Donald Trump and his supposedly anti-women comments and political stances. The anti-NRA demonstration, however, appears to have little to do with women; and instead meshes more with the greater Left’s accusations of racism against the NRA.”
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