The Precipitous Collapse of NRATV

When NRATV launched in 2016, it was supposed to be the future of the National Rifle Association's modern media presence—a dynamic, slickly produced digital platform that would reach millions of viewers and develop more dues-paying gun aficionados. Instead, the NRA pulled the plug on the venture after just three years, citing sagging viewership numbers, ballooning production costs, and messaging that the NRA says it found "distasteful and racist." Today, the fallout from NRATV's collapse is the focal point of an ugly, sprawling legal war—one that has shed new light on how the leaders of the famously secretive organization exploit America's gun culture to get and stay rich.

The genesis of NRATV began with an Oklahoma-based advertising agency, Ackerman McQueen, that helped shape the NRA's public image for more than three decades. Ackerman helped create former NRA president Charlton Heston's famous slogan: "I'll give you my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead hands"—which he usually growled with a rifle held aloft. That long-standing, lucrative, and consequential relationship recently soured. According to a federal lawsuit the NRA filed against Ackerman last October, the NRA paid the company more than $40 million for services rendered in 2017, and developed "extensive trust and confidence" in its ability to implement the organization's vision.

Beginning in the early 2000s, Ackerman assisted the NRA in the development of its own branded media platform, in addition to placing advertisements in traditional media. A digital video outlet branded as NRA News launched in 2004, and the partners continued to roll out more original gun-adjacent programming in the decade that followed: A channel called NRA Women profiled "armed and fabulous" moms proudly exercising their constitutional rights, while NRA Freestyle featured, among other things, a weeknight talk show in which "urban gun enthusiast" Colion Noir dished the "latest on firearms, fashion, pop culture and other hot topics." In 2016, Ackerman and the NRA launched NRATV, an expanded version of the platform that brought most of these ventures under the same umbrella. It streamed on Apple TV, Roku, Google, and Amazon Fire devices for anyone who cared to watch.

NRATV's explicit right-wing rhetoric was frequently bizarre and inflammatory, as you might expect from an organization that spends millions of dollars every year warning people that their constitutional rights are under attack. Much of what the outlet broadcast had little to do with upholding the Second Amendment, and occasionally bordered on parody: In one fever-dream sequence, NRATV personality Grant Stinchfield wordlessly destroys an expensive-looking flat-screen TV with a sledgehammer—a stunt presumably intended to convey a distaste for the media, but just resulted in the clean-up of a lot of broken glass.

Other frequently invoked culture-war tropes were far more insidious and violent. NRATV personality Chuck Holton, who once referred to President Barack Obama as a "mocacchino [sic] stain" on the nation, blamed terrorist attacks in Europe on "multiculturalism," "socialism," and "gender-bending" in 2017. The following year, a few days after a massacre at a Florida high school and a few months before another at a Maryland newspaper, Stinchfield excoriated the media—"your local paper, your local news, the cable news networks," he said—as "the worst America has to offer." During one NRATV appearance, frequent Fox News guest Dan Bongino encouraged viewers to make "owning the libs" a "lifestyle." In another, he derided a Nike ad campaign featuring Colin Kaepernick, who lost his job for peacefully protesting police violence during NFL games, as "a backhand to patriotic Americans who love their country."

NRATV talking heads also served as reliable defenders of Donald Trump, pushing conspiracy theories about a Deep State plot to sabotage the administration's agenda and lashing out at professional journalists exercising that other constitutional right. Dana Loesch famously railed against outlets like The New York Times in a series of disturbing video clips, threatening to light a copy on fire, calling it an "old gray hag," and vowing to "laser-focus" on the paper's "so-called honest pursuit of truth" going forward. "In short," she concluded, looking directly at the camera, "we're coming for you"—an unsettling thing for a bombastic representative of a prominent gun-rights organization to say.

None of these right-wing screeds came cheap, though. NRATV cost more than $12 million in its first year, and about $20 million in 2017. Yet, according to court filings, the NRA wasn't seeing the returns on this substantial investment, in terms of either sponsorship dollars or membership growth, that Ackerman had promised. Instead, the NRA claims, Ackerman inflated viewership numbers to preserve what had become a profitable source of work for the agency, and refused frequent requests for more details from its increasingly suspicious client. At one point, Ackerman allegedly reported that NRATV netted more than 200 million views in an eight-month period, "thereby suggesting that NRATV content had reached two-thirds of the United States," the NRA says. Traffic was apparently a small fraction of that figure.

Eventually, the NRA resorted to filing a lawsuit—a different lawsuit, this one in Virginia state court—in a bid to obtain Ackerman's billing records and conduct an audit. Ackerman retaliated by launching an ambitious blackmail campaign, according to the NRA, threatening to leak humiliating dirt unless the organization agreed to drop the suit: its tolerance of sexual-harassment accusations against a senior NRA official, for example, and Chief Executive Wayne LaPierre's lavish spending on vacations and fancy suits, all funded by membership dues and donations. After so many years of working so closely together, Ackerman knew about every skeleton in the NRA's closet.

To make matters more complicated, the person allegedly transmitting Ackerman's demands to LaPierre was the NRA's own president, Oliver North, whose lucrative NRATV contract perhaps made him willing to participate in what amounted to a de facto attempted coup. In the spring, LaPierre called North's bluff and vowed to fight for control of the organization he'd led for nearly 30 years. The NRA's board of directors sided with LaPierre, and North abruptly announced he would not seek re-election; later, the NRA would file another lawsuit against Ackerman for these attacks on LaPierre. Watching at home on TV, the president found the proceedings very upsetting.

Swirling palace intrigue aside, the NRA claims it was also concerned that NRATV's content often amounted to a "dystopian cultural rant" that veered into "distasteful and racist" territory, thereby deterring more would-be members than it attracted. A few NRA board members even voiced this sentiment to The New York Times in March, ominously characterizing NRATV as an "experiment" with an uncertain future. In its complaint, the NRA draws the court's attention to one memorably insane bit of agitprop in which beloved characters from Thomas & Friends were outfitted with digital Ku Klux Klan hoods.

As documented by Snopes, Loesch introduced the images while mocking the show's presentation of diverse characters. The ethnic composition of the animated cast of a children's TV program, of course, has little to do with efforts to "promote and encourage rifle shooting on a scientific basis." According to a board member who spoke with The New York Times, LaPierre was "livid and embarrassed" by the clip. The NRA, whose longtime board member Ted Nugent called President Obama a "subhuman mongrel" and suggested that black communities exhibit a "mindless tendency to violence," seemed to decide that creating their own branded video decrying multiculturalism was beyond the pale.

Last June, as the relationship deteriorated and legal fees mounted, the NRA finally shut down the streaming channel altogether and severed its ties with Ackerman. In a statement to members, LaPierre framed the cessation of live TV production as a "significant change in our communications strategy" that would help the organization refocus on its "core mission" of Second Amendment advocacy. In August, the NRA filed a federal lawsuit to try and force Ackerman to scrub evidence of its prior work for the NRA from its website, too—the legal equivalent of demanding that your ex delete every photo they posted of the two of you together in happier times.

Electing to fight fire with fire, Ackerman countersued, claiming that NRATV was made out to be a scapegoat for the NRA's mounting financial and legal difficulties. New York attorney general Letitia James, who called the NRA a "terrorist organization" on the campaign trail, opened an inquiry earlier this year into the organization's spending habits, allegedly spooking LaPierre and placing the nonprofit's coveted tax-exempt status in jeopardy. Around this time, congressional investigators and law enforcement officials were also carefully scrutinizing a 2015 trip that NRA board members took to Russia—a trip hosted by Maria Butina, the Russian spy who successfully leveraged her NRA connections to infiltrate U.S. conservative political circles before her arrest in 2018.

According to Ackerman, LaPierre and company were satisfied customers who approved every expense, and had never complained about billings or insisted on diligent timekeeping as long as Ackerman remained within the agreed-upon annual budget. ("[S]trategy and creative value are determined by outcome rather than by how much time was spent," the counter-complaint says.) Only when walls began closing in around him, Ackerman argues, did an increasingly paranoid LaPierre start pushing these out-of-nowhere audit demands in an attempt to save money and perhaps divert investigators' attention from his own graft. The complaint is unrelenting in its needling of LaPierre, pointedly noting his past as a Democratic lobbyist, his "reserved" and "awkward" personality, his "dictatorial" management style, and an innate defensiveness that Ackerman attributes to his "lack of military service and multiple deferments obtained during the Vietnam conflict."

Ackerman's narrative also includes the rather gratuitous assertion that LaPierre was skeptical that Trump would win the 2016 presidential election, and reluctant to support his candidacy—an embarrassing bit of purported history to emphasize, given the organization's close ties to the president, the Republican Party, and the conservative movement.

Although NRATV is dead and the NRA-Ackerman relationship is over, the parties' interest in litigating with each other remains significant. In federal court, they continue to spar over Ackerman's website and the NRA's unpaid invoices; in Virginia, they are fighting over who smeared whom in the dispute that kicked off this acrimony in the first place. Every filing in each case seems to prompt a fresh round of mudslinging. After the NRA leveled its "distasteful and racist" accusation in court, it blasted NRATV in a statement to the Daily Beast as "a failed media enterprise" propped up by "misleading accounts of viewership and promised commercial viability." Ackerman responded by taunting the NRA for "grovel[ing] at the feet of the media they used to decry," and calling the lawsuits "another cynical attempt to distract from Wayne LaPierre’s documented mismanagement of the organization and the captive board’s complicit behavior."

If the NRA has designs on getting back into the propaganda-streaming business with another business partner, it hasn't announced them publicly. The nratv.com URL redirects to the NRA's official website, and the NRATV YouTube channel and podcast feeds, while still available online, haven't posted anything new in months. The Amazon landing page for NRATV's Android app still appears in Google search results. Clicking on it now, though, just yields an apologetic error message and a picture of a cute dog.


The Bureaucratic Method

There's no telling how many guns we have in America—and when one gets used in a crime, no way for the cops to connect it to its owner. The only place the police can turn for help is a Kafkaesque agency in West Virginia, where, thanks to the gun lobby, computers are illegal and detective work is absurdly antiquated. On purpose. Thing is, the geniuses who work there are quietly inventing ways to do the impossible.

Originally Appeared on GQ