Live-Streaming the Apocalypse With NRATV

N of the National Rifle Association, first impinged upon me in July of last year. There she was one morning, on my computer screen: a dark-haired woman giving off a blue-white afterlife aura, against a black background, chanting a strange and vehement rosary of disdain: “They use their media to assassinate real news. They use their schools to teach children that their president is another Hitler.” The invective accelerated. Scurrying violins were heard, electro doom-clangs. “They use their movie stars and singers and comedy shows and award shows to repeat their narrative over and over again.” Then a fast-cut, black-and-white montage of societal crisis: broken glass, street scuffles, someone bleeding. “All to make them march. Make them protest. Make them scream and and and .” , , ; , , . Scorn on her lips, scorn flaming in the way we stop this, the way we save our country and our freedom, is to fight this of lies with the clenched of .” This was pure brimstone. Less a diatribe, or an oratorical flight, than “an invitation”—as the novelist Mary Gaitskill once described the voice of Axl Rose—“to step into an electrical stream of pure aggression.” And who was this swaying, sneering, smolderingly glamorous woman? She looked like the villainess on a daytime soap—the one who steals the baby or pretends to have multiple personalities. “I’m the National Rifle Association of America. And I’m freedom’s safest place.”