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Despite Widespread Calls For Him to Go, the NRA is Stuck With Nugent

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by Frank Smyth, February 16, 2016

The 1970s-era rock star and longtime National Rifle Association board director Ted Nugent lit a firestorm last week when he made a series of anti-Semitic posts on his Facebook page. Nugent accused prominent Jewish Americans of promoting gun control as part of a plot to disarm citizens and impose Nazi-like tyranny across the United States.

In response to criticism of his posts Nugent wrote, “what sort of racist prejudiced POS could possibly not know that Jews for gun control are nazis in disguise?”

Nugent has sat on the NRA board for more than twenty years. He’s also very popular among the organization’s leaders and members alike. Now, however, there is a movement from both outside and within the NRA demanding that Nugent finally be ousted.

But what casual observers of the gun lobby fail to realize is that the NRA’s own bylaws—withheld from the public, but obtained by The Progressive—make removing Nugent all but impossible anytime before 2017, and doubtful even after that. As I previously reported in Mother Jones, the National Rifle Association’s governing board of directors are elected through a tightly controlled nominating process, one that even former NRA directors have compared to a Soviet-style Politburo.

Previous efforts to recall NRA directors have dragged on for years, or have failed altogether. Nugent is up for reelection this year, but the bylaws that govern NRA board elections make it hard for any director with name recognition to lose. Eligible NRA members are asked to vote for up to twenty-five candidates out of no more than thirty officially sanctioned nominees. Nugent would have to end up being among the very least popular candidates not to be reelected.

In other words, it doesn’t matter how many members vote against him, only that he get more votes than a few others at the bottom of the pack.

Nugent could, of course, still step down voluntarily for the good of the organization. But his vigorous self-defense makes that seem unlikely. The NRA’s response to date makes it unclear whether they would even ask.

What is clear is that any effort to oust Nugent would divide the NRA.

Debbie Schlussel, a self-described conservative commentator, religious Jew, and gun rights advocate wrote on her blog site:

“Although thousands of people ‘liked’ and shared Ted Nugent’s scurrilous anti-Jewish screed and it drew a lot of anti-Semitic comments and support from Neo-Nazis and other anti-Semites, I’m very proud to note that many gun owners, particularly Christians and conservatives, posted comments attacking Nugent’s comments and disavowing them.”

It’s also unclear whether a movement to remove Nugent from the NRA board would succeed. “In this era of Trump, preceded by years of jackbooted PC thought policing, I don’t think the membership have much patience for ‘you can’t say that,’” wrote “Sebastian,” a Pennsylvania gun rights blogger and voting NRA member who wants Nugent off the board.

The NRA leadership, notably, has yet to weigh in. “Individual board members do not speak for the NRA,” spokesman Lars Dalseide told The Progressive, neither denouncing nor embracing Nugent’s remarks.

A few gun rights groups have denounced Nugent. Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership, whose founder Nugent accurately states was a friend, recently posted on the group’s Facebook page that they were “appalled” at Nugent’s “deeply anti-Semitic comments.”

Another is Gun Owners of America, a much larger organization to the right of the NRA. The watchdog group Media Matters has linked longtime leader Larry Pratt to various white supremacist groups. But even Pratt denounced Nugent after his recent anti-Semitic rant.

“We’re very disappointed to see what Ted has done,” Pratt told the online magazine The Trace. “Gun Owners of America very strongly disagrees with his point of view.”

“Quite a few of the pro-gun people that I’ve spoken with today are simply done with Nugent,” wrote Bob Owens of the pro-gun website Bearing Arms. Owens stated that Nugent should apologize, and that if he wouldn’t, “then he has no business being on the board of an inclusive organization such as the National Rifle Association.”

This quote in particular has been repeated in The New York Daily News, The Washington Post, Huffington Post and Media Matters as evidence that gun owners at large are demanding the NRA oust Nugent from its board. On Friday, Charles C. W. Cooke in the National Review weighed in with a piece titled, “It’s Time for the NRA to Cut Ted Nugent Loose.”

But Cooke and other critics are all missing the same thing. The NRA could not cut Nugent loose even if most board directors wanted to. NRA bylaws that govern the organization have been written to maintain control over the board and to prevent challenges—more likely to come from the right-wing than from gun reformers.

“If they could, I’d say yes,” said the pro-gun blogger Sebastian in a public conversation with me on Twitter. But “NRA bylaws don’t allow it.” His Pennsylvania gun rights blog has long been sympathetic to the NRA. But many gun rights blogs have also been highly critical of the NRA for the way its leadership has long manipulated its own board elections.

“[T]he NRA insists on keeping election information and their board of directors shielded from public scrutiny,” noted Jeff Knox of the Firearms Coalition blog. “I don’t think most people who vote in NRA elections have much of a clue,” said Sebastian on Twitter. The process is so controlled that, in most years, fewer than seven percent of eligible NRA members bother to vote.

Similar to the way NRA bylaws control who gets elected to the board, the same bylaws control how a director may be removed once elected. Recalling a board director requires first the signatures of at least 450 eligible NRA members including 100 signatures each from three different states. But the signatures must be collected over the seven or eight month period beginning after the last NRA annual convention, held this past April in Nashville, and 150 days before the next NRA convention, taking place this May in Louisville.

So with May 20, the start of the Louisville convention, little more than three months away, it’s already too late for this year.

The signatures would then need to be validated, and, if enough were upheld, a hearing would be required within thirty days. If the hearing were to rule against Nugent, NRA voting members would be mailed ballots with pro and con opinions. Then, if a majority of responding voters were to mail back their ballots in favor of recall, that step would finally get Nugent off the board.

In other words, there is nothing that anyone can do to even start the process until nearly summer. Even then, the procedures would be sure drag on into 2017, to be decided perhaps at least a year from now, if at all.

Petitions to recall NRA directors have failed before. There has been an ongoing effort to try and recall Joaquin Jackson, a storied Texas Ranger who has acted in Hollywood films alongside stars like Tommy Lee Jones. In a 2005 interview Jackson said that he did not understand why any hunter would need more than five rounds. Jackson has been since derided as an “Elmer Fudd,” the bungling cartoon character whom NRA hardliners use to label those who fail to support the need for high-powered, high-capacity weapons.

Despite the decade-long effort, the former Texas Ranger remains on the NRA board.

This year another NRA director with even more name recognition faces a stronger challenge. In ballots slated to arrive this week, eligible NRA voters are being asked to vote for or against the recall of NRA director Grover Norquist. The prominent Republican and director of Americans for Tax Reform is accused of having ties to Islamist groups including the Muslim Brotherhood. Part of the concern is that Norquist’s wife is a Palestinian Muslim.

But the effort to recall Norquist has been in process within the NRA for nearly two years, and it also seems unlikely to succeed. “I urge you to VOTE NO on the recall of Grover Norquist,” wrote Todd Rathner last week on the Ammoland blog.

The lengthy bylaw requirements, of course, are one reason why Nugent is going nowhere. But another reason is that many eligible NRA members might still vote for the aging rocker despite his recent anti-Semitic remarks. Said Sebastian about his fellow voting NRA members, “People are not in a mood to be persuaded, or to think rationally about things like this.”

Frank Smyth is a freelance journalist who has written about the National Rifle Association for The Progressive, The Village Voice, The Washington Post, Mother Jones and MSNBC.com.

– See more at: http://www.progressive.org/news/2016/02/188561/despite-widespread-calls-him-go-nra-stuck-nugent#sthash.CH9ZhCgu.dpuf

Cat Scratch Fever—Is Ted Nugent’s Racism Too Much for Republicans?

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by Frank Smyth, February 10, 2016

Racism has long bubbled quietly beneath the surface of America’s gun rights movement, even as its well-heeled leaders have wrapped themselves in the cloak of respectability. White Supremacists and neo-Nazis openly hostile to blacks, Jews, and other minorities continue to appear in public at gun rights rallies. But the National Rifle Association, in particular, has long held openly racist groups at arm’s length from their conservative but still very much mainstream political organization.

Not anymore.

Yesterday longtime NRA board member Ted Nugent went further into racist territory than any previous NRA director—including himself. Nugent posted a graphic on his Facebook page featuring photos of Jewish-American leaders who have spoken out in support of gun violence prevention. The accompanying text states that Jews are “really behind gun control” and that they “really hate freedom.” Within hours the Anti-Defamation League denounced Nugent saying that “anti-Semitism has no place in the gun control debate.”

At the root of Nugent’s Facebook post is the notion that gun control can lead to tyranny, if not genocide, as Republican Presidential candidate Ben Carson posited in his book and on the campaign trail last year. Other Republican candidates including Donald Trump and Ted Cruz have made similar statements. But claiming that gun control could lead to genocide is still not the same as claiming that Jewish-American leaders are supporting gun control to take away Americans’ rights as part of some absurd racist plot, as Nugent—an NRA board director for the past 20 years—has suggested.

How will the NRA respond to Nugent’s rant? The NRA’s polished leadership, based just outside the Washington beltway in Virginia, has long walked a fine line between extremism and respectability. NRA leaders have tried to mollify gun rights absolutists, including the racist extremists in the base, while maintaining the mainstream respectability that continues to make the NRA America’s most powerful single-issue lobbying organization. To hold this balance, NRA leaders, some of whom could teach Karl Rove the finer points of deflective communication, say different things in public to mainstream audiences than they do behind closed doors.

A more timely question is how the field of Republican presidential candidates—all of whom have made statements sympathetic to the NRA and gun rights—will respond. What will they say when asked if the NRA should remove Ted Nugent from its board? At least one gun control group is already demanding the NRA board remove Nugent, although, to be fair, the same group has made the same demand before. Nugent once called the late Trayvon Martin, who was fatally shot in 2012 in Florida by neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman, a “dope-smoking, racist gangsta wannabe.”

Nugent may be a has-been performer in today’s music charts, but he remains a favorite son of influential Republicans. In 2013, Texas Republican Congressman Steve Stockman invited Nugent to come to Washington to attend President Obama’s State of the Union Address. The 67-year-old rocker, an avid gun owner and hunter, enjoys support among conservatives even though he once told High Times and later the Detroit Free Press how he took crystal meth, defecated on himself, and stopped bathing or brushing his teeth for weeks to fool his local draft board into relieving him of military service in Vietnam. He also told them how he often slept with underage girls while on tour with his band.

Nugent’s social media post yesterday, however, crossed a line, even for him.

“Know these punks. They hate freedom, they hate good over evil, they would deny us the basic right to defense & to KEEP & BEAR ARMS,” he wrote. Beneath his words is a square image with individual photos of twelve Jewish-American figures including former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Senators Diane Feinstein, Chuck Schumer and Barbara Boxer, Richard Blumenthal and Carl Levin, former Obama aide and Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, and Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, each emblazoned with the Israeli flag.

Within hours the New York Daily News wrote a brief online piece protesting the post. Nugent soon fired back: “Just when you hope that mankind coudnt (sic) possibly get any dumber or more dishonest, superFreaks rise to the occasion. What sort of racist prejudiced POS could possibly not know that Jews for guncontrol are nazis in disguise?”

Nugent then made another Facebook post, this time of a late 1930s-era photo of German Nazis rounding up Jews showing one man wearing a Star of David. Beneath the image were the words: ‘Back when I learned about the Holocaust in school, I remember thinking, “How did Hitler get MILLIONS of people to follow along blindly and NOT fight back? Then I realized I am watching my fellow Americans take the same path.”

Images and texts like these—claiming that the Holocaust was the result of gun control—circulate widely on social media among gun rights absolutists and so-called Second Amendment advocates. To make sure Nugent’s 2.7 million Facebook followers got his point, Nugent wrote himself in the same post: “Soulless sheep to slaughter. Not me.”

Among the Republican Presidential candidates, Ben Carson has claimed that gun control in Nazi Germany helped produce the Holocaust. In his book, A More Perfect Union, Carson wrote that “German citizens were disarmed by their government in the late 1930s, and by the mid-1940s Hitler’s regime had mercilessly slaughtered six million Jews and others whom they considered inferior.”

Carson repeated this claim in October as he was running for President in a CNN interview with Wolf Blitzer, and then again a few weeks later in a speech at the National Press Club. Other Presidential candidates in both major parties chose not to weigh in at the time. But Alan E. Steinweis, a University of Vermont professor of history and Holocaust studies, debunked his claims in a New York Times op-ed.

“Mr. Carson’s argument,” wrote Steinweis, “is strangely ahistorical, a classic instance of injecting an issue that is important in our place and time into an historical situation where it was not seen as important. I can think of no serious work of scholarship on the Nazi dictatorship or on the causes of the Holocaust in which Nazi gun control measures feature as a significant factor. Neither does gun control figure in the collective historical memory of any group that was targeted by the Nazi regime, be they Jews, Gypsies, the disabled, gay people or Poles. It is simply a non-issue.”

Neither the NRA, nor its paid stable of legal scholars—whose undisclosed NRA financing I have documented here and one of whom, David Kopel, recently appeared on NPR’s Diane Rehm show talking about gun issues without disclosing his NRA funding—have since weighed either in support of Dr. Carson, or to challenge Dr. Steinweis.

But that didn’t stop NRA board director Nugent from going ahead and putting forth the theory again. After all, such unsubstantiated claims thrive in Twitter posts with hashtags including #NRA #2A (Second Amendment) #TCOT (Top Conservatives on Twitter) and “Molon Labe.” The term Molon Labe derives from the Greco-Persian wars of 480 B.C. and means “come and take them” or, what in contemporary NRA vernacular might be more like: “If you want to take my gun, you’ll have try pry it from my cold, dead hands.”

What motivated Ted Nugent to make such an unambiguously racist post now is unclear. He could not be reached for comment. On his Facebook page I queried him: “Ted, So why are you raising the sheep to the slaughter issue now? Do you know something we don’t?” Although he “liked” my comment, he hasn’t responded further.

One cannot help but wonder if he may have been influenced by some of the rhetoric used by candidates in the current Presidential campaign. After the terrorist attacks last fall in Paris, Donald Trump suggested that they were the result of France’s relatively strict gun control policies—policies that are similar to  those in every other Western European nation. The French ambassador Gerardo Araud responded to Trump’s remarks on Twitter: “This message is repugnant in its lack of any human decency. Vulture.”

Nugent endorsed Trump’s candidacy this past fall.

One of Trump’s challengers, Ted Cruz recently echoed a similar theme: “The right to self-defense is an essential component of the liberty we enjoy as Americans and is embodied in the Second Amendment.” The Canadian-born Texas senator’s view is shared by many American gun rights advocates. But whether gun control itself can lead to tyranny, or a genocide like the Holocaust, as Nugent just claimed, is a question that neither Trump nor Cruz has yet to address.

Ted Nugent’s statements may seem extreme to outsiders, but they reflect gospel truth within the gun rights absolutist community. The community even includes a few Jewish-Americans. “The founder of Jews For the Preservation of Firearms Ownership called me his 2nd Amendment/Freedom hero,” Nugent wrote yesterday on Facebook. The founder of this Jewish, pro-gun group, Aaron Zelman, passed away in 2010. He was a longtime friend of the NRA. I once heard him speak behind closed doors in Minneapolis at a 1994 NRA board meeting—one year before Ted Nugent was elected to the NRA board. Zelman made the claim then that Nugent made today—that the Holocaust resulted from gun control. He received enthusiastic applause from about 75 listening NRA directors.

But NRA leaders—for decades—have been far more circumspect in public. In 2012, NRA Executive Director Wayne LaPierre addressed a Small Arms panel at the United Nations in New York, and unequivocally explained the real purpose, in his view, of the right to bear arms.

“Our Second Amendment is freedom’s most valuable, most cherished, most irreplaceable idea. History proves it.  When you ignore the right of good people to own firearms to protect their freedom, you become the enablers of future tyrants whose regimes will destroy millions and millions of defenseless lives,” he said. The statement remains posted on the NRA lobbying wing’s website.

But less than a year later, when pressed on this point by Democratic Senator Dick Durbin from Illinois during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in response to the carnage at Sandy Hook Elementary School, the NRA leader chose more guarded language.

Sen. Durbin asked LaPierre point blank about the purpose behind the Second Amendment, saying his own constituents who are NRA members have said it’s not just about hunting, shooting targets, or even defense against criminals, telling the senator: “We need the firepower and the ability to protect ourselves from our government—from our government, from the police—if they knock on our doors and we need to fight back.”

It seemed like the perfect opportunity for the NRA leader to lay out how the NRA cherishes the Second Amendment for its defense of freedom. But LaPierre, in a far milder tone that he used at the United Nations in New York seven months before, gave a far more subdued answer on camera in Washington:

“Senator, I think that without a doubt, if you look at why our founding fathers put it there, they had lived under the tyranny of King George and they wanted to make sure that these free people in this new country would never be subjugated again,” said LaPierre.

But in today’s world, the NRA leader went on, the Second Amendment remains “relevant and essential” for other reasons. People fear “being abandoned by their government. If a tornado hits, if a hurricane hits, if a riot occurs that they’re gonna be out there alone. And the only way they’re gonna protect themself (sic) in the cold and the dark, when they’re vulnerable is with a firearm.”

Ted Nugent is one NRA leader who has never been guarded in his talk about the Second Amendment which, in his view, is still all about the right to not only bear arms, but to bear them against the government when and if needed to prevent tyranny. If recent Twitter posts are any indication, many NRA advocates agree with him. “Ted Nugent is right!” reads one such post that included a news headline, “Jewish groups push for action on gun control.”

So what does the NRA think about Ted Nugent’s claim that Jewish-Americans who support gun control are really Nazis in disguise trying to disarm Americans to impose tyranny? This is one question to ask NRA leaders like LaPierre. Another is, should the NRA remove Nugent from its board?

The same questions should be put to Presidential candidates starting with Carson, Trump, and Cruz.

Frank Smyth is a freelance journalist who has written about the National Rifle Association for The Progressive, The Village Voice, The Washington Post, Mother Jones and MSNBC.com.

– See more at: http://www.progressive.org/news/2016/02/188548/cat-scratch-fever{2ef06ca992448c50a258763a7da34b197719f7cbe0b72ffbdc84f980e5f312af}E2{2ef06ca992448c50a258763a7da34b197719f7cbe0b72ffbdc84f980e5f312af}80{2ef06ca992448c50a258763a7da34b197719f7cbe0b72ffbdc84f980e5f312af}94-ted-nugent{2ef06ca992448c50a258763a7da34b197719f7cbe0b72ffbdc84f980e5f312af}E2{2ef06ca992448c50a258763a7da34b197719f7cbe0b72ffbdc84f980e5f312af}80{2ef06ca992448c50a258763a7da34b197719f7cbe0b72ffbdc84f980e5f312af}99s-racism-too-much-republicans#sthash.cbgVPR93.dpuf