NRATV and conservatism today
By Paul Waldman
June 26 at 12:40 PM
... NRATV had some success in garnering attention, particularly its marquee star Dana Loesch, whose angry rants about fighting liberals with “the clenched fist of truth” were somewhere between comical and terrifying. She jumped the shark with a segment complaining about the children’s show “Thomas the Tank Engine” adding girl trains, bizarrely illustrated with an image of Thomas trains in KKK hoods.
Which, as you might have noticed, has nothing to do with gun rights. Even some gun rights advocates thought that the NRA should stay in their lane and not worry about fighting the culture war. But can a conservative organization do that in 2019?
It was one of the defining successes of the NRA, and the gun rights movement more broadly, that they convinced one of our two great parties to put a categorical opposition to nearly any restriction on guns at the absolute center of their ideology, along with low taxes and small government. That success was never more evident than after the Sandy Hook massacre, when congressional Republicans killed a proposal for universal background checks, which has the support of over 90 percent of Americans in just about every poll on the subject.
But Donald Trump’s election presented a serious challenge to the NRA. When there’s a Democrat in office, gun sales tend to go up, as manufacturers and the NRA warn gun owners that any day now the government is going to confiscate all their guns, so they really need to stock up. It’s a lot harder to make that argument when the government is controlled by a Republican, which is why the gun industry is now experiencing what is being called the “Trump slump,” with sales down 16.5 percent from 2016 ...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/06/26/what-demise-nratv-says-about-conservatism-today/?utm_term=.5ba8af133cad
