After spending three years churning out deranged content about the almighty virtue of guns and the inherent evil of anyone who’s against them—along with a bunch of anti-immigrant, anti-LGBTQ, anti-weed screeds that don’t have anything to do with firearms whatsoever—NRATV is finally, mercifully dead. The National Rifle Association pulled the plug on it Tuesday after its own board members complained about how demented the streaming service had become, the New York Times reports.
NRATV’s live shows are all donezo, and it won’t be creating any new content from here on out—a move that comes after months of infighting between the NRA and the ad firm that runs NRATV, Ackerman McQueen, which the NRA just formally cut ties with. According to the Times, that means Dana Loesch won’t be the public face of the NRA anymore—thank you, god—and the rest of the network’s hosts just lost their platforms.
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To celebrate the death of this truly, truly cursed propaganda machine, we’ve put together a handful of the most unhinged segments it ever aired, starting with…
That Time Dana Loesch Put KKK Hoods on the Trains in ‘Thomas & Friends’
After Thomas & Friends announced it would be adding two female characters to the kids’ show, including one from Kenya named Nia, Dana Loesch completely lost her shit, railing against its move towards diversity, calling Sir Topham Hatt an “authoritarian maniac,” and declaring that “SJWs” were “ruining childhood.” Then, inexplicably, she put a bunch of Klan hoods on all the trains? Still unclear on why this happened.
This Scowling Man Smashing a TV with a Sledgehammer
Back in 2018, NRATV aired a spot called “Our Greatest Weapon Is Truth,” in which we see a television playing news clips from CNN, ABC, CNBC, and the like. The camera slowly zooms out, revealing a man in a “socialist tears” T-shirt scowling, in complete silence, holding a sledgehammer. He never speaks. He just does this:
Whatever This Is
A truly incomprehensible spot: Over shots of mountain ranges and rolling hills, a man with a gravelly voice recites a barely intelligible spoken word poem about “a million little dictators eager to purge humanity of its hunting instincts.” It sort of sounds like something Allen Ginsberg would write if Allen Ginsberg took, like, 200 tabs of acid and really, really loved guns.
Dana Loesch’s Tirade Against the New York Times
Oh look, it’s Dana Loesch again! This time, she’s making a thinly veiled threat against the New York Times, taking a “shot against [the] proverbial bow” of this “old gray hag” that has “subsisted on the welfare of mediocrity” for “decades,” whatever the hell that means. This one gets increasingly terrifying, culminating in the moment Loesch tells the Times “we’re coming for you.” Eek!
Dom Raso Lavishing Praise on the Bank Robbery from Heat
So there’s this show on NRATV in which Dom Raso, a former Navy SEAL and self-proclaimed “warrior for Christ,” reenacts a bunch of scenes from action movies and evaluates whether they got all the gun stuff right. In this particular episode, he turns his attention to Heat—specifically, the big bank robbery scene—and continually heaps praise on just how well Robert DeNiro’s crew pulls off their extremely bloody heist. “If we get past the fact that they’re robbing a bank,” Raso says, it’s a shining example of how to “shoot, move, and communicate.”
Some Guy Calling Weed a ‘Prostitute’
Despite the fact that there’s no clear connection between cannabis and gun rights, NRATV is solidly, emphatically against weed. The way they talk about it is just baffling. Take, for example, this segment, in which some guy refers to pot as “a prostitute of sorts,” a “seductress,” and a “harlot.”
Dana Loesch Going Fully off the Rails
Here is NRATV at its most NRATV: a fever-dream of a segment in which Dana Loesch rages against a vague “them,” whoever they are, and basically calls for outright violence against liberals. She paints left-wing activists as people who “smash windows, burn cars, shut down interstates and airports,” and “bully and terrorize the law-abiding.”
“The only way we save our country and our freedom,” Loesch says, “is to fight this violence of lies with the clenched fist of truth.”
Legitimately terrifying stuff. Rest fitfully in hell, NRATV. We will not miss you.
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