TTAG:

David Dell’Aquila says he finally realized that his attempts to reform the National Rifle Association from within were doomed after a conversation he had with NRA President Carolyn Meadows (she hadn’t been given the top job yet at the time). It happened during a party for large donors like himself that was held before the Indianapolis annual meeting in April.

Dell’Aquila tells TTAG that he approached Meadows because he’d received information indicating that a high-ranking NRA employee was receiving payments from vendors to whom he directed business. Meadows asked where he heard that (he told her it didn’t matter). She then told him none of it was true.

Then Dell’Aquila said he asked Meadows — strictly hypothetically — if she had a problem with an NRA official collecting a salary from the Association while using a vendor with which he either had an ownership interest or received payments for business directed its way (i.e. kickbacks).

According to Dell’Aquila, Meadows told him, “That’s how it’s done in D.C. Everyone does it.”

That’s when he says he knew his year-long effort (it started following the 2018 Dallas annual meeting) to bring about change and accountability by working with NRA officers and employees was futile.

Dell’Aquila, a retired Nashville technology consultant, then set about developing a four-phase strategy to force EVP and CEO Wayne LaPierre and his supporters — both in management and on the board — out of their positions.

I like the cut of his jib.  Then there’s this (readers and I have discussed the issue of fiduciary responsibility of NRA board members and just how far that goes).

It is important for each member of the Board of Directors to completely understand his or her responsibilities. For example, current NRA officers who have stated “I don’t know anything about that,” “that is the first time I’m hearing it,” “I trust Wayne completely,” etc., are not deemed within the law as valid acceptable legal defenses. It is your responsibility to know or take the necessary actions to obtain such knowledge.

Again, we’ll see just how far that responsibility goes, but I do hope it goes all the way to actual personal legal liability.

With all of that said, I still doubt that the NRA can be reformed.  I think it’s dead.

David Codrea links this Ammoland piece by Jeff Knox.  Boy is this some disturbing reading.  I cannot possibly rehearse all of the dirty laundry there, but there is this titillating little fact that may catch your interest.

Heston won that election by four votes, and immediately left the meeting to jet back to LA and appear on a radio talk show, during which he repeatedly stated that it was inappropriate or civilians to own AK47 type rifles. He eventually learned his script better, and the following year stepped up to become President of the NRA.

Embarrassingly, I didn’t know that.  Well then, Charlton Heston was a traitor, clear and simple.  I need no other evidence.  Jeff also discusses Adam Kraut, whom he supports for the board, and after reading his response to Marrion Hammer, I do too.

As for me, you could easily guess my own position.  Marrion Hammer can go traffic in her lies and misdirection somewhere else.  I’m not impressed in the least.

There is a deep, dark problem within the NRA.  Their history is a divided one, and their traitorous actions (e.g., the Hughes amendment) have harmed the firearms community, and I might also point out something I have before.  By outlawing the manufacture of machineguns after 1968, which the NRA didn’t fight, and also by the existence of the National Firearms Act, the engineering and design of open bolt firearms essentially ceased within the United States.  This has weakened the U.S. military and possibly lead to deaths of service members on the field of battle.

I cannot cipher the NRA willingness to hop in bed with traitors unless they are in fact traitorous themselves.  Let’s assume for a moment that the NRA actually chose to wield their power on Capital Hill.  Let’s assume for a moment that the this forthcoming bump stock ban wasn’t the NRA’s idea.  Let’s assume for a moment that they informed every Congressman and Senator that they expected a vote on this, and that the vote would be tallied and scored, with NRA money behind their efforts to primary enemies of the second amendment.

In other words, let’s assume that the NRA was doing its job.  Wayne Lapierre could be literally one of the most powerful men in Washington.  The red carpet would be rolled out for him everywhere he goes.  Who wouldn’t want that?  But instead of this, we see that the board is so discombobulated that it cannot accomplish anything of value or worth, and Wayne and Chris continue their deconstruction of the second amendment unabated.  Note this comment on Adam’s piece by Rob Pincus.

The Board of Directors is far too large and almost completely powerless, but voting out the Status Quo Old and voting in the new is what it needs.

Creating a large board and hamstringing their efforts with rules is the surest way to render them powerless.  What happens if the NRA sells us out over bump stock bans and other future gun control laws (I also suspect Marrion Hammer is the reason we don’t have open carry in Florida)?  Well, the gist of various comments from TTAG sums it up nicely for me.  If the NRA doesn’t do an about-face, and that, very soon and very quickly, and without any more of our money, they need to be destroyed.

They need to be finished as an organization.  They can turn their board over to the Fudds for gun control, or some other such nonsense group, and go broke for all I care.  But if they don’t do a U-turn, they will have no more of my money or attention.  This war needs to get ugly, and fast.  I realize that many of my readers have already come to the same conclusion long ago.

I have discussed what I assess to be deep, troubling and dangerous character flaws in Alan Gottlieb before.  In what is yet another manifestation of these character flaws, Gottlieb has endorsed Grover Norquist for the NRA board of directors.  As reported by David Codrea:

The Second Amendment Foundation’s Alan Gottlieb sent out a March 3 email notice to members and supporters in which he endorsed the candidacy of Grover Norquist for director in this year’s National Rifle Association board election.

“My good friend Grover Norquist who is also on the NRA Board and up for reelection this year had an excellent interview with Newsmax that I want to call your attention to,” Gottlieb announced, directing readers to an interview on concealed carry decreasing crime. “He got my vote for the NRA Board and if you haven’t cast your vote yet I highly recommend that you also vote for him. A strong NRA helps us all.”

The problem with Gottlieb’s endorsement is that Norquist is what even “progressive” MSNBC acknowledges to be an “amnesty-loving immigration activist.”

As a stand-alone issue, this is enough to dismiss his candidacy outright, and it proves that Grover Norquist is a progressive collectivist who is merely looking for another board membership (presumably because his calendar is empty during the board meeting days and he wants something to do, or we can only guess – if Mr. Norquist would grace us with his presence here and tell us why he wants to be reelected as a member of the board we would know more than we do now).

Let’s again deal with where we are concerning Hispanic and Latino voters.  “As to whether the GOP will ever be able to rely on votes from the Hispanics, that is a non-starter.  “Hispanics are not historically and ideologically aligned with what the GOP is supposed to be.  To point to Roman Catholicism and claim that Hispanics will vote GOP because of socially conservative viewpoints misses the bigger picture of the state of Catholicism in South and Central America.  It is a synthesis, or a hybrid mixture, of Catholicism, superstition, Marxism, and in some cases evil “patron saints” for the cartel criminals.”  They will not vote conservative or liberatarian, no matter what you’re being told by the elitists and chamber of commerce.

In order to understand why the state of Roman Catholicism in Mexico and Central America is what it is, one has to understand its roots.

“For historical reasons to do with the nationalisation of the land under Lázaro Cárdenas and the predominant form of peasant land tenure, which was “village cooperative” rather than based on individual plots, the demand for “land to the tiller” in Mexico does not imply an individual plot for every peasant or rural worker or family. In Mexico, collectivism among the peasantry is a strong tradition … one consequence of these factors is that the radical political forces among the rural population are on the whole explicitly anti-capitalist and socialist in their ideology. Sometimes this outlook is expressed in support for guerilla organisations; but struggle movements of the rural population are widespread, and they spontaneously ally with the most militant city-based leftist organisations.”

One of the reasons for this reflexive alignment with leftism has to do with the the mid-twentieth century and what the Sovient Union and allied ideologies accomplished.  South and Central America was the recipient or receptacle for socialism draped in religious clothing, or in other words, liberation theology.  Its purveyors were Roman Catholic priests who had been trained in Marxism, and they were very successful in giving the leftists a moral platform upon which to build.  This ideology spread North from South and Central America into Mexico, and thus the common folk in Mexico are quite steeped in collectivist ideology from battles that were fought decades ago.

Hispanics and Latinos will be among the most progressive and socialistic voters in the history of the country, which is why the progressives want amnesty for them.  And there will indeed be a very large burden to shoulder for the presence of immigrants in America.  “It helps the corporate bottom line by forcing the middle class to pick up the tab for medical care, which burden happens largely on the backs of nurses in emergency rooms (my daughter is a nurse in an ER), with medical insurance premiums escalating in order to pay for the service.  Food stamps (so called SNAP) also factor into the calculus, as well as driver’s insurance (for uninsured motorists coverage).

It isn’t that there is no cost for low paid workers.  It’s that the cost is borne by the middle class as welfare to corporations and the wealthy.  The GOP is connected at the hip to such interests in terms of money, while the Democrats are connected in terms of future voters.

This all has to do with the middle class shouldering the cost for immigrants in general, but it does indeed go to show that pro-immigration candidates and politicians are progressive in their world view.  But more specifically as it relates to gun rights, Hispanics and Latinos favor gun control rather than gun rights, and not just by a trivial fraction.  Grover Norquist is a liar playing a game with NRA members.  He favors immigration, including amnesty, but says he favors concealed firearm rights.  Both cannot be true.

But just as disturbing about Grover Norquist is that he keeps company with terrorists and jihadists as we discussed before.

On September 11, 2001, Grover Norquist met in his office with a group of terrorists – “jihadis” if you prefer – to determine how to mend relations between Muslim leaders and American government officials, while the smoke was still rising after the attacks in which 3,000 of our citizens where murdered.

That alone should have put Mr. Norquist outside of the circle of trust among discerning and patriotic American leaders in the conservative movement, but it did not.

Mr. Norquist creating the Islamic Free Market Institute with money from Al Qaeda financier Abdurahman Alamoudi should be a red flag to rational thinking people in “conservative” circles, and should ostracize Mr. Norquist from any participation among patriots in matters of import – nope.

Grover Norquist – the founder of Americans for Tax Reform – continues to move within conservative circles with ease. and has support from some prominent Republicans.  Not only are many leaders in the American conservative movement failing to raise serious questions about Norquist’s defense of easily identifiable terrorists, they defend him and call those who lay facts on the table “bigots” or other similarly absurd names.

Now, he is again up for election as one of the members of the Board of Directors of the National Rifle Association (NRA).  Will the NRA allow a man who promotes and defends terrorists to be re-elected to their Board?

In February 2014, a group of prominent Americans prepared a report entitled “The Islamists and their Enablers Assault on the Right – The Case Against Grover Norquist and Suhail Khan.”  The report contains facts surrounding Mr. Norquist’s history with and support for terrorists.  Among those who signed the report were:  the Honorable Michael B. Mukasey, 81st Attorney General of the United States; and the Honorable R. James Woolsey, former Director of Central Intelligence.

The facts detailed in this report include:  Grover Norquist provided access to the White House for a number of terrorists during the Bush administration; Norquist is the registered agent for the Islamic Free Market Institute in Washington, D.C. which received money directly from terrorist/jihadi organizations including convicted Al Qaeda financier Abdurahman Alamoudi and the SAFA Trust;  Alamoudi’s deputy at the American Muslim Council (AMC), Khalid Saffuri, was made the Director of the Islamic Institute with Norquist’s approval; Norquist promotes, works closely with, and defends a Muslim Brother/Jihadi named Suhail Khan, whose father, Mahboob Khan, was one of the most prominent Muslim Brotherhood leaders in the world prior to his death; and Suhail Khan served under two successive Secretaries of Transportation with a security clearance, and continues to be promoted and given access to positions of trust inside conservative circles by Grover Norquist.

Grover Norquist is a quisling and traitor, but as we return to Alan Gottlieb, he is a collaborator with quislings and traitors.  What does this make Alan?  NRA members should vote ‘no’ to Grover Norquist for NRA board, and smart men should stay as far away from Alan Gottlieb as they can get.

I was once a member of a Presbyterian church (and ostensibly, a conservative one at that).  I came to believe that next to the communist party in Russia, the session of elders in Presbyterian churches was the most corrupt, self serving, loathesome group of men on the planet, and the Presbyterian process the worst ever invented by sinful man.  Perhaps I was wrong.

First, Mike Vanderboegh penned an article explaining how NRA Board of Directors candidate John K. Brown is an ATF snitch.

As I noted here back in September, ATF snitch John Brown is running for the national board of the NRA. That he IS a snitch is indisputable (see here and here for starters).

Colonel Robert K. Brown of Soldier of Fortune magazine pointedly does not endorse this wholly-owned ATF minion, saying in large letters and italics, “SOF is NOT endorsing John Brown, who is no relation of mine.”

Brown does endorse the following folks:

“SOF endorses the following current BOD members for reelection: Scott Bach, Ronnie Barrett, David Coy, Joseph DeBergalis, Antonio Hernandez, David Keene, Wayne Anthony Ross, Don Saba, William Satterfield, Ronald Schmeits, Robert Unkovic and Robert Viden.SOF is also endorsing Sean Mahoney and Timothy Knight, who are running by petition. “

There are many questions raised by the John Brown candidacy, not the least of which is WHO on the current board backed him enough to get his name on the ballot? What is Wayne LaPierre’s role in this? Chris Cox’s? The more important question is why is a militarized federal police agency — entrusted with enforcing our firearm laws — trying to penetrate the highest levels of a group as powerful as the NRA?

I have just now gotten around to reading my February edition of American Rifleman.  In it is an insert from the nominating committee and a ballot, the nominating committe headed by none other than Tom King.  I’ve had my run-ins with Tom King, saying that he was “as emblematic of everything that’s wrong with the NRA as I’ve ever seen.  It’s the perfect example of how not to think about our rights.”

It’s not okay with me that Tom King is head of the NRA nominating committe.  It’s even more not okay with me that the nominating committe would have the audacity to nominate someone like Grover Norquist (number 19 on Tom’s list).  John Guandolo, with Understanding the Threat (whom I have heard speak with with whom I have exchanged mail and spoken), sends this along.

On September 11, 2001, Grover Norquist met in his office with a group of terrorists – “jihadis” if you prefer – to determine how to mend relations between Muslim leaders and American government officials, while the smoke was still rising after the attacks in which 3,000 of our citizens where murdered.

That alone should have put Mr. Norquist outside of the circle of trust among discerning and patriotic American leaders in the conservative movement, but it did not.

Mr. Norquist creating the Islamic Free Market Institute with money from Al Qaeda financier Abdurahman Alamoudi should be a red flag to rational thinking people in “conservative” circles, and should ostracize Mr. Norquist from any participation among patriots in matters of import – nope.

Grover Norquist – the founder of Americans for Tax Reform – continues to move within conservative circles with ease. and has support from some prominent Republicans.  Not only are many leaders in the American conservative movement failing to raise serious questions about Norquist’s defense of easily identifiable terrorists, they defend him and call those who lay facts on the table “bigots” or other similarly absurd names.

Now, he is again up for election as one of the members of the Board of Directors of the National Rifle Association (NRA).  Will the NRA allow a man who promotes and defends terrorists to be re-elected to their Board?

In February 2014, a group of prominent Americans prepared a report entitled “The Islamists and their Enablers Assault on the Right – The Case Against Grover Norquist and Suhail Khan.”  The report contains facts surrounding Mr. Norquist’s history with and support for terrorists.  Among those who signed the report were:  the Honorable Michael B. Mukasey, 81st Attorney General of the United States; and the Honorable R. James Woolsey, former Director of Central Intelligence.

The facts detailed in this report include:  Grover Norquist provided access to the White House for a number of terrorists during the Bush administration; Norquist is the registered agent for the Islamic Free Market Institute in Washington, D.C. which received money directly from terrorist/jihadi organizations including convicted Al Qaeda financier Abdurahman Alamoudi and the SAFA Trust;  Alamoudi’s deputy at the American Muslim Council (AMC), Khalid Saffuri, was made the Director of the Islamic Institute with Norquist’s approval; Norquist promotes, works closely with, and defends a Muslim Brother/Jihadi named Suhail Khan, whose father, Mahboob Khan, was one of the most prominent Muslim Brotherhood leaders in the world prior to his death; and Suhail Khan served under two successive Secretaries of Transportation with a security clearance, and continues to be promoted and given access to positions of trust inside conservative circles by Grover Norquist.

I’m sorry to lift so much out of John’s article, but I know he won’t mind.  Go read his entire piece.  It’s just that important.  The NRA has on its ballot for board of directors a terrorist enabler.

So let’s say that you are Mr. Steve Hornady or Mr. Ronnie Barrett on the same ballot and you are offended by being placed in the same category as these two men (or Tom King).  Let’s say you don’t like sweeping judgments or a broad brush. Let’s say you’re offended by all of this.

Very well.  It was written to offend, so I have been successful.  I’m delighted you are offended, and that I was the one to do it.  If you don’t like the company you keep, if you want the NRA to straighten up, then get yourself some clorox, some rags, and a wire bristle brush.  Go to work and clean out your damn nasty-ass house.  Then we won’t have to have words like this.  We can be friends.