Blowing Smoke - Michael Wolraich [105]
But the NRA would never in its wildest dreams have taken up the black radical cause. NRA leaders bound the organization to the right from the very beginning. William Conant Church, who founded the organization in 1871, was a sworn enemy of “Communists, Socialists and other outlaws” long before red-baiting came into vogue.21 Throughout much of the twentieth century, the NRA has closely associated with the U.S. military, and it established headquarters in Washington, DC, to be near the Pentagon.
When the right wing veered into persecution politics in the late 1970s, the NRA turned in parallel. Harlon Carter staged the Cincinnati coup against the NRA old guard and transformed the organization “from a hunter-rifleman service organization to one of Washington’s most committed conservative lobbies” in 1977, the same year that Anita Bryant fought off the militant homosexuals in Miami and one year before the religious right defeated the secular humanists in the IRS.22
The alliance between gun rights activists and other paranoid conservative movements has been a fertile one, characterized by a cross-pollination of heroes and villains. Thus, Glenn Beck’s fear of fascism and Representative Paul Broun’s warning that Obama would confiscate guns and lock up dissidents originated in the NRA’s jack-booted thug obsession, while the NRA’s paranoia about George Soros and immigrant gangs came straight from Fox News and Pat Buchanan. One of LaPierre’s fundraising letters even criticizes Obama for his association with Rev. Wright.23
Likewise, the NRA champions conservative heroes like Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin, and Glenn Beck. At the NRA’s annual meeting in 2010, Palin warned, “Don’t doubt for a minute that, if they thought they could get away with it, they would ban guns and ban ammunition and gut the Second Amendment.”24 Beck spoke about “a well-regulated militia and why you might need one because the government’s not doing its job.”25
But no one has done more to interweave the NRA’s jackbooted thug narrative with the metanarrative of persecution politics than Charlton Heston. In his younger days, Heston had been a Democrat who supported the liberal Adlai Stevenson for president. Following the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., Heston publically campaigned for passage of the Gun Control Act of 1968.26 But in the 1970s, he fell under the sway of the new persecution narratives of the right and became a strong opponent of affirmative action and gun control. He worked for the Reagan administration and appeared several times on Pat Robertson’s 700 Club television program. 27 In 1997, Wayne LaPierre recruited Heston to become president of the NRA, and Heston joined the NRA’s board of directors in preparation for the role.
In this capacity, Heston delivered a forceful speech on gun rights and the culture war to the Free Congress Foundation, a right-wing think tank founded by Paul Weyrich. The speech stands out as one of the most explicit and comprehensive presentations of right-wing persecution politics in recent history. Beginning with an invocation of Abraham Lincoln, Heston told his conservative audience, “You are a victim of the cultural war. You are a casualty of the cultural warfare being waged against traditional American freedom of beliefs and ideas ... Your pride in who you are, and what you believe, has been ridiculed, ransacked, plundered.”28
“I remember when European Jews feared to admit their faith,” warned the man who had once played Moses, “The Nazis forced them to wear six-pointed yellow stars sewn on their chests as identity badges. It worked. So what color star will they pin on our coats?”cq
Then Heston began to list all the suffering “lesser citizens” of modern America:
Rank-and-file Americans