‘Most Sinister’ Propaganda: Examining The NRA’s Ominous New Ad

‘Most Sinister’ Propaganda: Examining The NRA’s Ominous New Ad

A new advertisement put out by the National Rifle Association — which calls on conservatives to fight the left with a “clenched fist of truth” — has the Women’s March demanding an apology, activists calling it an “open call to violence” and a propaganda expert labeling the video “sinister.”

The video, which was published on the NRA’s Facebook page on June 12, begins with talk radio host Dana Loesch criticizing the media and the way liberals use it to “assassinate real news.” It calls out liberals in the public school system for teaching “children that their president is another Hitler,” Hollywood for progressing “their narrative” and for using their “ex-President to endorse the resistance.”

Loesch goes on to say all these venues are a means to create reasons for protest, “to scream racism and sexism and xenophobia and homophobia. To smash windows, burn cars, shut down interstates and airports, bully and terrorize the law abiding,” all said alongside video clips of people marching and exhibiting violent behavior.

“The only way we stop this, the only way we save our country and our freedom is to fight this violence of lies with a clenched first of truth,” she said, closing out the advertisement saying, “I’m the National Riffle Association of American and I’m freedom’s safest place.”

A New York University professor, whose research has focused on modern propaganda, called the video irresponsible and said he could “safely say the (video) is a textbook example of propaganda.”

“It’s actually an example of propaganda when it’s most sinister,” Mark Crispin Miller of NYU told TPM. “It’s extremely hostile, takes a dark view of dissonance and protest and lauds the police as our only protection against this unprecedented threat.”

The advertisement takes on the classic method of creating a “they” mentality, he said, while saluting police power.

“What it basically does is create this nightmarish image of an all-powerful ‘they,’ which would be protesters, it would be Democrats and liberals and Hollywood, the media. They’re all the same, one big monolithic entity and the goal of that entity is to destroy not just the Trump presidency, but the whole country,” he said. “The images suggest chaos and violence and brutality by an undifferentiated mass of malicious actors. … It’s aimed at resentful denizens of ‘fly-over states.’ It suggests that there’s a kind of malevolent group that’s in control of everything and trying to destroy the rest of us, the good people and our president.”

While Miller called the video a “sinister” form of propaganda, Paul Baines, a professor of political marketing at Crainfield School of Management in the UK who studies propaganda from terrorist groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda, said the advertisement was “weak propaganda” and a potentially “dangerous” method for building up the NRA’s membership.

“It’s weak in terms of its fervor. ISIS uses a similar approach, reduces the world into a binary place where the alternative is disgusting and they tend to dehumanize the others. … It potentially is dangerous if they move down that avenue. It could incite members to respond to the far left with agitation. It’s not particularly clever to build up membership in this way because it could cause sufficient concern, where people could follow through with this message and create problems,” Baines said. “These (groups) often use a fear-based appeal. … That in itself is problematic. They’re essentially saying, ‘the far left is causing problems and the only thing you can do to save yourself is to buy a gun. The only way to reduce this fear is buy a gun.’”

The Women’s March group, which organized a massive protest in Washington after President Donald Trump was inaugurated, sent a letter to NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre, calling on the organization to “immediately remove the recent irresponsible and dangerous propaganda videos” and issue an apology for the advertisement that “suggests armed violence against communities of color, progressives and anyone who does not agree with the (Trump) administration’s policies.”

The advertisement comes as groups across the U.S. have called out the NRA for not making a statement about the not guilty verdict for the Minnesota police office who killed Philando Castille, a gun owner who was reaching to show an officer his gun registration when he was shot.

The message behind the video was disturbing enough to push politicians and activists to tweet about the video, with Sen. Chris Murphy saying he thinks “the NRA is telling people to shoot us” and Black Leaves Matter leader Deray McKesson calling it an “open call to violence to protect white supremacy.”

Chris Murphy ✔ @ChrisMurphyCT
I think the @NRA is telling people to shoot us.

Now might be the right time to cancel your membership.

deray mckesson ✔ @deray
This NRA ad is an open call to violence to protect white supremacy. If I made a video like this, I’d be in jail.

And while some are outraged by the video, Jonathan Auerbach, who teaches English at the University of Maryland and is a co-author of “Weapons of Democracy: Propaganda, Progressivism and American Public Opinion,” called the video “pretty standard” for a group like NRA.

“(It’s a) routine example of propaganda designed to recruit new members by rousing indignation against a perceived enemy,” he told TPM in an email. “Not especially innovative or nuanced, but perhaps effective for a brief clip since (there’s) no need to address the substance of ‘the enemy’s accusations.”

On Thursday’s Infowars broadcast, Steele alleged the kidnapped children were not only being kidnapped for space labor, but also murdered for their blood and bone marrow.

wv wrote:

Since I’ve known you, you have never said anything like “I like capitalism” or “I dont like capitalism” — What can you say about what you think about ‘Capitalism’.

Say…’something‘.

At this point, capitalism exists.

It however can’t be allowed to run things because that’s purely undemocratic. Right now it runs things. Will capitalism change? Most likely. Can it be altered, limited, modified, transformed into something else and better? Yes that’s possible. What keeps it in place as it is, is beliefs.

wv wrote:

I can never really make sense of what you mean when you talk about not liking ‘philosophical’ answers to ‘big questions.’ I wish you could put that another way. What is a ‘philosophical answer to a big question’? Give me an example.

It;s just a contrast between looking at things historically, which accounts for messiness and contradictions and paradoxes and for concrete practical reality, and idealism (in the philosophical sense) or essentialism (either term really), which deduces things just based on ideas.

So for example, essentialism: since religion is lies, if we get religion out of social and public life, it will improve people. That’s a social engineering idea. Thinking about political life solely in terms of big rational ideas of justice or good is social engineering; in turn, social engineering is always based on someone’s arm chair ideas of what people are and how they can turned into what they should be instead. So another term for all this is “dogma.”

So for example in the French Revolution the Jacobins replaced Christianity with worship of the Supreme Being, a rational and deistic idea of proper spiritual belief. Result: old religion didn’t go away, it just lurked in opposition, because people don’t abandon beliefs that define them if you simply impose systematic social structures on them from the outside. So, there was chaos, the terror, the regime was always unstable, and it ended up leading to a military dictatorship (Napoleon). Napoleon, ironically, was just fine with Catholicism because it kept the masses in line. So the Jacobins were not wrong about religion making people non-revolutionary, but they tried to fix it through dogmatically imposed social engineering.

Lesson: if you dictate systematic changes from the top down that are based solely on principles of reason, you just end up creating another monstrosity.

Practical solution: there is no general, overall practical solution, those are always rooted in time and place. So in case of the French Revoluion, you don’t attack religion, you declare religious freedom generally, ally with what is practically speaking useful in existing religious belief (charity? hey good idea!), leave it alone, but exclude it from matters of state, law, economic policy, and any form of public administration.

The problem? Reason said destroy traditional religion and replace it with something that is more directly in keeping with the aims of the Jacobion revolutionary state, because that way everyone becomes better citizens, “better citizens” also being something defined by reason.

But history is messy and never does what reason says it should or ought to.

What does aligning with history mean? You do what is practically possible and necessary to achieve things organically in the name of sound political principles.

And, practically speaking, that means you have to choose which people you can never appeal to, and find ways to end-run them without The Terror or genocide. So practically speaking, there are racists, and you defeat them politically and keep them out of power. But you don’t start executing them in mass, like they did with the guillotine in The Terror.

wv wrote:

Well what would your broad definition be?

I wish we had not lost the old board because there was a time when I worked hard on defining that.

One principle is this though.

Someone on the left will see economic policy as subject to public interests, not just as some natural or inevitable outgrowth of the market. The market itself is not free exchange but regulated exchange (the free market is what you see in The Road Warrior). The question then, once you acknowledge that, is to regulate markets in such a way that they support a democratic society and public good.

To some that’s “abolish all capitalism.”

To some that’s “Norway does it right.” (Social democracy.)

There are other approaches to that whole question.

So for example, absolutely, in practical terms, you can’t have the financial center controlling the society (Citizens United) and there is no defensible good reason to make something like health insurance a private, for profit enterprise. (We can all think of other things.)

Okay that;’s just ONE thing. Now that I have tried to be general (defining state borders) let me speak for me now. I always have one big qualification: as a leftist I believe in history which means, among other things, that philosophical answers to big questions are as often as not going to be too narrowly rigid. History consists of contradictory competing patterns, not simple problems or solutions. So for example, the corporate world is not one thing. Many powerful american corporations criticize Trump’s attack on the Paris climate agreement. That doesn’t make them good guys, just as a good king doesn’t make monarchy reasonable. But it;s also true that the corporate world is not one thing when it comes to climate change.

To put this another way,. to me there cannot be a dogmatically predetermined answer to the issue of economic policy. That would be because reason isn’t sufficient to sit down and come up with a realistic and workable “plan” to fix all that with one big embracing systematic change. We have far more examples of large scale, pre-determined rational ideas for “fixing society” going very, very wrong (including, say, The French Revolution) than we have of humans actually pulling that off. Reason cannot accomplish this. It just can’t.

Actually as a leftist I don’t accept her definition of what a leftist is. I think it’s too strict and narrow.

I think that in the big aggregate of generally allied views that exist on the left, hers is certainly one.

I don’t think it is THE one. I think it’s one among others.

When I try to define the left, I try to draw a sort of line designating where people with a lot of different (and even competing) views can exist. It seems to me that some people I read try to define the left in a way that gives a specific street address. I try to define it by saying here are the state borders, like Maine’s border with New Hampshire, and within that state there are lots of towns and cities and villages and streets and roads and different addresses, and in fact some people live in more than one.