‘Stop Kneeling’: The NRA Tightens its Ties to Trump

“Stop Kneeling, Stand and Fight” is the new slogan of the National Rifle Association (NRA), part of a media campaign announced Monday that “encourages everyone to join in the NRA fight.” 

The “Stop Kneeling” language is new, and it could be meant to include the protesters, many of whom have taken a knee, demonstrating in the name of George Floyd. But few, if any, of these protestors seem likely to see it that way, since the NRA has said nothing to date about either Floyd’s murder or the police attacks on people protesting police brutality.

It’s hard to see the group’s new slogan as anything less than a provocation, one designed to mock the protesters, including people of many backgrounds, marching over the video-documented death, in police custody, of George Floyd.

The unexpected move comes at a time when the NRA leadership is facing its worst crisis in more than forty years, and its CEO Wayne LaPierre is still weathering the worst crisis of his career. The turmoil was precipitated by an ongoing tax investigation by New York State Attorney General Leticia James, which prompted a billing dispute between the NRA and its longtime communications partner Ackerman McQueen. But, if the NRA’s latest phrasing is any indication, NRA messaging since the split has hardly lost its edge.

Wayne LaPierre, after all, knows the power of language. “[O]ur communication media” should no longer use “the following terms, ‘gun violence, assault weapon, gun show loophole, or gun control,’ ” as each of these terms is “misleading” and “damaging to our cause because they shift the terms of the debate onto our opponents’ ground,” reads a 2001 report to the NRA board found among the Bob Barr papers in the Ingram Library at the University of West Georgia.

Barr was a former Georgia congressman and one of the House managers for the impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton. The NRA board report went on, “We should develop a lexicon of our own.”

“Stop Kneeling” sounds exactly like that. It co-opts the symbol of both Floyd’s murder and the protests that have spread across the nation and around the world, and it incorporates this tragic image into the anti-government rhetoric that the NRA has promoted over the past forty-three years. It’s hard to miss the NRA’s meaning. 

For years, Dana Loesch, its former spokeswoman and NRATV talk star, now hosting her own show, repeatedly attacked the NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick after he began taking a knee in 2016 to protest police brutality during the playing of the national anthem at NFL football games.

Significantly, the NRA chose to release its new slogan just a weekend after the NFL came out saying it was wrong not to have supported its own players’ non-violent protests, and after another NFL quarterback, Drew Brees, similarly apologized and reversed himself after saying that he saw the taking of a knee to protest police brutality as “disrespecting the flag.” 

It’s as if NRA leaders are signaling to President Donald Trump that, as he continues to lose allies from his own former and current military advisors to NASCAR, which just announced it’s banning Confederate flags from races, that the NRA is standing by his side.

New York authorities have been investigating whether the NRA illegally diverted funds from their tax-exempt foundations, threatening the organization’s nonprofit status.

Oddly, in a way, since the litany of documented cases of police violence against black people throughout the country over decades, especially since President Barack Obama’s years, seems tailor made for the modern NRA and its professed core belief that guns are needed in civilian hands to prevent the government itself from imposing tyranny on the population. 

“Never is the Second Amendment more important than during public unrest,” an NRA video declared in March as both COVID-19 infections and gun sales were starting to rise.

Yet, apart from its new slogan, the NRA hasn’t said a word about the recent protests. In April, the rock musician and NRA board member Ted Nugent called the armed protesters in Michigan “my people,” saying he, like Trump, supported their efforts to “liberate” their state from White House-recommended COVID-19 health measures. 

On June 7, Nugent posted on Facebook in praise of men, nearly all armed and many in paramilitary garb, in northwestern Idaho who gathered to oppose a rumored “antifa” rally that never occurred.

It was the NRA that led the effort across the nation to pass concealed-carry laws in most states over little more than the past thirty years. In 2016, in Minnesota, Philando Castile was driving with his partner and her daughter with both a handgun and his permit to carry it within reach. 

Castile, a black man, was fatally shot by a Latinx police officer. Then-NRATV’s talk star Colion Noir spoke out: “As I put on my Monday morning quarterback Jersey, it is my opinion that Philando Castile should be alive today. I believe there was a better way to handle the initial stop.” 

But the NRA as an organization said nary a word.

When it comes to Trump and the NRA, it’s hard to tell who’s following whom. For decades, the NRA has railed against Democrats, claiming “[t]here is no difference” between Democrats and Socialists and that Democrats are threatening our “bedrock values” and “freedom.” LaPierre’s speeches were often filled with nostalgia, too, for a time gone by. By striking these two chords, the NRA presaged Trump’s claims including both his attacks and promises.

The NRA, as its own internal documents show, has long chosen its words carefully. But this week, it seems, NRA leaders made a point of crossing the line. 

It’s hard to see the group’s new slogan as anything less than a provocation, one designed to mock the protesters, including people of many backgrounds, marching over the video-documented death, in police custody, of George Floyd—while at the same time seeming to celebrate other protesters, many of them armed and nearly all of them white, who in recent months have normalized armed intimidation as a political lever.

The timing of the NRA’s new slogan is important, as well, since the organization is in turmoil. Already in debt from the more than $30 million it spent on the election of Trump and other candidates in 2016, the recent split in the leadership has already cost the NRA an additional $100 million, according to secret recordings obtained by NPR this year. 

“To survive,” LaPierre is recorded as saying, he took the group “down to the studs,” laying off dozens of people and cutting the pay of others.  

LaPierre’s total compensation package in 2018 was $2.2 million. Meanwhile, New York authorities have been investigating whether the NRA illegally diverted funds from their tax-exempt foundations, threatening the organization’s nonprofit status. The NRA has been chartered in New York since it was founded in lower Manhattan in 1871.

The past few weeks have been among the most tense and polarizing times since the Civil War. Some rightist groups, especially white power paramilitaries, see the protests over George Floyd’s killing as a chance to accelerate tensions, if not provoke a race war. The NRA’s new slogan only adds fuel to America’s fire.