In early April, the National Rifle Association published to YouTube and its video
hub, NRATV, a lacerating monologue about the New York Times. Dana
Loesch, a conservative commentator who had recently become a national
spokeswoman for the association, speaks directly into the camera. “We
the people have had it,” Loesch says. “We’ve had it with your
narratives, your propaganda, your fake news. We’ve had it with your
constant protection of your Democrat overlords, your refusal to
acknowledge any truth that upsets the fragile construct that you believe
is real life. And we’ve had it with your pretentious, tone-deaf
assertion that you are in any way truth or fact-based journalism.”

Loesch—who once ran a popular motherhood blog, Mamalogues, before
becoming a newspaper columnist, radio personality, and then Tea Party
activist—alternately sneers and smirks, relishing her takedown. She
warns that the Times should “consider this the shot across your
proverbial bow,” flings a few more epithets at the newspaper—“old
gray hag,” “untrustworthy,” “dishonest rag”—and ends the video with a
declaration: “We’re coming for you.” The three-minute-and-fifty-seven-second episode, part of a “Commentators”
video series sponsored by the gun manufacturer Kimber, attracted
relatively little attention when it first went up. Another video the
N.R.A. posted just over a month earlier, challenging the Times’ “The
Truth Is Hard” television ad during the Academy Awards, had similarly
struggled to gain traction. But, last week, NRATV shared a trimmed-down
version of Loesch’s video on Facebook and
Twitter. “@DLoesch has a message for the @nytimes: ‘We’re coming for you,’ ” the
tweet said, followed by the hashtag #ClenchedFistofTruth.

An axiom of digital video strategy nowadays is that different types of
videos are better suited for different platforms. This particular
segment, it turned out, worked well for social media, attracting, as of
late this week, a hundred and twenty-three thousand views on Facebook,
along with fourteen hundred retweets and more than twenty-four hundred
likes on Twitter. Loesch’s vigorous social-media jousting with
detractors, who thought she’d threatened at one point in the video to
“fist” the Times, helped boost traffic. (Loesch insisted—and the
transcript accompanying her video on NRATV supports her case—that she
had said “fisk,” a slang term, popular among bloggers in the
two-thousands, that refers to a point-by-point rebuttal.) Perhaps most
important for the N.R.A.’s communications shop, the video garnered an
avalanche of “earned media”—writeups in the Guardian, Slate, USA
Today, Newsweek, Vice, Salon, and elsewhere.

Over the past few months, the N.R.A. has released a succession of Web
videos, all strikingly bellicose even by the standards of the
association. They’re also notable for how far they seem to veer from the
N.R.A.’s ostensible priority, defending gun rights. In early April, NRATV
published a video that featured images of the Times’ headquarters and interspersed footage of violent protesters with commentary from Loesch—coiled and
urgent—accusing the left of inciting people “to smash windows, burn
cars, shut down interstates and airports, bully and terrorize the
law-abiding, until the only option left is for the police to do their
jobs and stop the madness.” Biting off each word and brimming with
derision, Loesch says, “The only way to stop this, the only way we save
our country and our freedom, is to fight this violence of lies with the
clenched fist of truth.”

In another video, posted in July, Dom Raso, a barrel-chested former Navy SEAL and NRATV contributor,
declared that the country
had fallen into “organized anarchy, led by people who hate our President
and who hate the people who support him.” After a Washington Post article commented that Raso’s “dark video” had failed to even mention guns, the N.R.A. went after the Post. Grant Stinchfield, another pugnacious NRATV
personality, accused the Post of fomenting “the organized anarchy of the violent left” and promised
that the N.R.A. would “never stop fighting the violent left on the
battlefield of truth.” Stinchfield kept up his assault this week, lashing out at two
reporters, Adam Goldman of the Times and Dave Weigel of the Post,
who had expressed consternation at the Loesch ad on Twitter.

For several years, I worked on investigations at the Times on gaps in
gun laws and the influence of the gun lobby. They were often highly
critical stories, examining the N.R.A.’s efforts to stymie firearms research, its
lobbying to make it easier for people with a histories of mental illness to have their gun rights restored, and its
work blocking legislation that would make it harder for domestic abusers to keep their guns. Yet, through all of this, I can’t recall the N.R.A.
going after the Times—or me, for that matter—in such a direct way. (I
did once have my photo posted on a Web site called Ammoland.com.)

I called Richard Feldman, a former N.R.A. lobbyist, to help me
understand the organization’s latest tack and why the gun lobby would
stray from its focus on the Second Amendment. In 2007,
Feldman published “Ricochet: Confessions of a Gun Lobbyist,” a memoir of his time working for the association. In the book, Feldman
wrote about his gradual realization that the association’s aims and those
of gun owners did not always align, and that wielding power and wringing
contributions from members sometimes “overshadow protecting
Constitutional liberties.” The N.R.A. is certainly at a crest in power
today, with Republicans in control of Congress and Trump in the White
House. The gun lobby was an early endorser of Trump and spent more than
thirty million dollars, more than any other outside group, to get him
elected. In April, at the N.R.A.’s leadership forum in Atlanta, Trump
became the first sitting President since Ronald Reagan to address the
association.

Feldman told me that this kind of political success can actually be
problematic for the N.R.A. “The N.R.A. is not so much interested in
winning,” Feldman told me. “They’re interested in fighting, because
fighting is great for fund-raising and membership recruitment.”

Hillary Clinton in the White House, with her support for tougher gun
laws, would have been a boon for the N.R.A. Trump’s surprise election
meant the association needed to recalibrate, and quickly. Philip Bump, a
writer for the Washington Post, published a chart last week that tracked the N.R.A.’s paid Twitter ads since November,
2016, and the mentions of the terms “left,” “violence,” and “media” (and
including the Twitter handles of the Washington Post or the Times).
The spike is startling and revealing about the way the N.R.A. has
decided to adjust its customer-acquisition strategy, aping the angry
rhetoric of the candidate it championed. And the ensuing media outrage
over the videos only fuels the virtuous cycle for the N.R.A.

It is, of course, perfectly within the prerogative of an advocacy group
to stir anxiety and fear among its members or potential members for the
sake of attracting donations. But gun owners, contemplating whether to
re-up their forty-dollar annual memberships or hand over their credit
cards for the first time, might consider the fact that they’re being
manipulated. And for those (rightly) outraged by the intimations of
violence in the videos, it is worth weighing the reality that we’re part
of the N.R.A.’s strategy, too.