This feature appears in the April ‘17 issue of NRA America’s 1st Freedom, one of the official journals of the National Rifle Association.
I recently had the honor of participating in a wide-ranging strategy session at the White House. At a small table, I was seated next to the president of the United States, Donald Trump. At that moment, I realized—and perhaps President Trump understood—that each and every member of the NRA was sitting next to him. Each of you deserves that place at the table. In all the years of my working for the cause at the NRA, I have never seen our association given such recognition, such honor by a president.
I came away from that meeting feeling very much as you do, that with the presidency and majorities in both houses of Congress we will be working in a much less hostile political world.
It is not to be.
As Trump has begun the arduous task of rebuilding the nation, the good citizens who voted for his vision of a rebirth of American exceptionalism and restoration of individual freedom find ourselves faced with an unprecedented threat. Never before have we seen a change in administration that has been met with such widespread organized hatred. That hatred is amplified by a national media that has thrown out the rules of journalism and has become a part of the mob.
In fact, with a seismic change in which the far left’s tactics and goals are mainstreamed, the threat to American values will become even more treacherous. Our job of taking back lost liberty and restoring the American culture we cherish through the peaceful transition of government is increasingly being poisoned by well-organized political guerilla forces using “resistance” tactics on a massive scale.
The job of making America great again will be a fight for every inch of freedom. And as NRA members, we must be at the center of the coming battles to oppose a kind of political sabotage never before seen in our nation’s history. We are being jolted into a new reality.
We are up against a destructive, corrosive movement built around the dangerous lie that “Trump is an illegitimate president.” This is something not seen before in our nation—something straight out of a banana republic failed state. We are up against a destructive, corrosive movement built around the dangerous lie that “Trump is an illegitimate president.” This is something not seen before in our nation ...
At the heart of this revolutionary “resistance” are a series of far-left organs—some new, some old, but all united by the election and all bent on taking down Trump, and with him his agenda to restore individual liberty.
The most troubling aspect of this transformation of orderly democracy into mobocracy is led by ex-President Barack Obama’s private political squad, Organizing for Action (OFA). OFA, created out of Obama’s 2012 election campaign organization, converted voter lists and campaign funds into a shadow White House lobby agitating for Obama’s agenda—including his multiple attempts to bring about gun control based on his embrace of the Australian gun-ban model.
Soon after leaving the White House, Obama told the nation he would remain prominent on the national stage declaring, “Now is the time for some organizing.” Immediately after Trump’s election to the presidency, Obama told supporters, “We’re going to be in a position where we can start cooking up all kinds of great stuff.”
Great stuff? You can read that as subverting the national will, deep-sixing our system of government.
Until now, never in the history of the nation has a former president reinvented himself as an activistic shadow “community organizer.”
But now, with citizen Obama, OFA has morphed into something entirely new to America—the private political army of a former president, designed to destroy the presidency—no, the success—of his successor.
Like OFA, Obama himself has transformed, going from commander in chief to organizer in chief.
Don’t take my word for it. Check out a Feb. 11, 2017, analysis published by the New York Post:
“When former President Barack Obama said he was ‘heartened’ by anti-Trump protests, he was sending a message of approval to his troops. Troops? Yes, Obama has an army of agitators—numbering more than 30,000—who will fight his Republican successor at every turn of his historic presidency. And Obama will command them from a bunker less than two miles from the White House.”
NBC News headlined its matter-of-fact coverage: “Obama-aligned Organizing for Action relaunches for Trump era,” saying in that report that the organization was originally conceived as an adjunct to the White House “to raise a grassroots army it could command at will to push Obama’s agenda through Congress.”
OFA is seen as a fulcrum to creating angry coalitions to organize against Trump’s very presidency. In its coverage of the new and improved OFA, Canadafreepress.com warned that, “Obama is coming out of exile—with a vengeance—said to be supported by a stealth army of some 30,000 foot soldiers, and that’s not even counting the thousands of White House and government insiders waiting to join his army.
“Protests to date will pale by comparison to Obama’s new Protest Era called ‘Getting Even!’” The mob, carrying signs blaring the word “resist” shouted down the congressman and silenced local constituents.
The Canada Free Press ominously warned, “Obama’s return is a coup d’etat in itself, made possible by a myriad of propaganda and public distractions.”
In the race for primacy among now-mainstreamed far-left organs, an outfit called Indivisible, which NBC touted as “a buzzy newcomer to the progressive movement,” has emerged on the national scene. Credited with remarkable grassroots organizing prowess—including internet distribution of a protesters’ how-to manual—Indivisible has been at the epicenter of mass “protests” that have been highlighted by shouting mobs shutting down civility at traditional Republican town halls.
Jason Chaffetz—the popular congressional representative from Utah and chairman of the House Oversight Committee, a man who won reelection with 73 percent of his electorate—was mobbed for 80 minutes by “resistance movement” agitators, brought in by OFA. The mob, carrying signs blaring the word “resist” shouted down the congressman and silenced local constituents. The resisters demanded to know why Chaffetz—who helped expose the Obama administration’s “Fast and Furious” gunrunning operation that resulted in the murder of Border Patrol Agent Bryan Terry—had not investigated Trump’s first two weeks in office.
It’s insane. And it is just a taste of this crowd of sore losers, who would destroy our country in a heartbeat.
The determination of these self-declared revolutionaries is the very reason that the NRA must stand stronger than ever.
