Keep grifters away from money. Or for smaller organizations, don’t let financially distressed people assume positions of power if you can possibly help it. NRA is big enough, the pot is going to be temping for even a well-to-do grifter. For smaller outfits, you can help things by trying to promote people who have enough money that the smaller outfit’s funds aren’t enticing enough to be worth the trouble.
Be wary of narcissistic assholes. Often they are hard workers and quite talented. But they are never worth the bullshit they are going to bring to the table.
Cultivate a competent management team who will take projects and own them, and who you can count on to do things right. This is probably the hardest part, but it’s superseded by the other two. Don’t accept grifters and narcissists, even though they might help you. Honest hard workers are worth their weight in gold. That goes double if you’re not paying them.
Everybody has an agenda. Know what agenda the people who are close to you really have. Be clear about your goals too.
Which of these things has Wayne and the NRA Board done right? How many violate all three of these “rules?”
NRA has to stay in the DC area. If they are worried about Virginia’s gun laws, look at West Virginia, parts of which are turning into suburbs for long-haul commuters to DC. At least then they won’t be too far from where the worker bees need to be.
I think NRA is looking at Texas because that’s where Wayne wants to be (or maybe at least where Mrs. Wayne wants to be), and instead of just retiring like a normal person in his 70s, he’s going to drag the whole organization along with him.
I am not an expert on NRA history, but I’ve read a lot and talked to people who have been around for most of the history of the modern (post 1977) NRA.
Wayne succeeded Warren Cassidy, who I understand cost NRA significant sums in settled sexual harassment lawsuits, and was generally not well liked. Wayne was selected because he was boring, and not the type anyone figured would cause that kind of trouble for The Association. As best I can tell, Wayne is not a womanizer. While there’s accusations flying around about other top NRA folks, I think they made a good choice if they didn’t want a repeat of Cassidy.
However, Wayne was not without controversy, and he pretty immediately saw challenges from hard liners. Many of the accusations leveled against Wayne by that coalition weren’t always wrong. I don’t know too many people who would argue they didn’t have a lot of points. That pretty much set up the struggle in the NRA that would continue through to the early 2000s, between the pragmatic wing of the NRA and the hard liners.
Wayne was basically a policy nerd. He was not a charming figure. So he needed help, which came from Ackerman McQueen. The Wayne LaPierre everyone knows today was largely their creation. It was Ack-Mac who helped Wayne cultivate his public image and establish himself.
I don’t know whether Wayne could have survived all these years if it wasn’t for the widely held view that the alternative was the hard liners. Many NRA folks, myself included, viewed that a hard-line takeover of the NRA would result in the organization’s political irrelevance. You don’t always get a choice between winning and losing. Sometimes the choice is whether you get lube or not.
I don’t think Wayne has ever been an ideal leader, and he’s long past his expiration date. The financial malfeasance seems a lot worse than I realized, and I think many realized. We knew the relationship with Ack-Mac had become toxic. But I think everyone figured Wayne would retire and Chris Cox would move into the EVP role, and there would be some needed change. That’s not what happened, and NRA is now in heap big trouble.
The one thing I’d warn our opponents of is that NRA’s members haven’t disappeared. We are still out here and paying attention, and figuring out how to organize around this mess, and around the networks of censorship now established via unfriendly tech monopolies. NRA’s political power didn’t come from Wayne, or the NRA Board. It came from us, and you still have to get past us.
John Richardson has the details. I no longer have the time to get as far into the weeds as John is going, so he’s been a great resource in all this. Additionally, my contacts in the NRA were all pushed out during Wayne’s purge of Chris Cox and his circle. So I have no real insight as to what’s going on anymore.
I don’t know who the “good guys” are, or if there even are any in this awful mess. I don’t write much about it because to be honest, it all makes me sick to my stomach.
John notes:
I have always held that this bankruptcy filing was a gamble. Wayne and Brewer are too clever by half and I think the result will not be to their liking.
I think they had a choice between awful and even more awful, from their perspective, so they chose awful. I’m not sure Wayne, or NRA, is getting out of this easy.
Wayne’s been past his shelf life for some time, and in my opinion out of his league. It’s always seemed to me that he needed someone to tell him what to do, and that went from being Angus McQueen to to Bill Brewer.
I keep going back to this: they knew exactly where to hit us.
There’s a lot of reasons you don’t see my old posting volume, and overall it just comes down to the fact that I believe my energy is better spent on other endeavors these days. To some degree we are beyond talk: beyond hearts and minds. This current political environment is a struggle of zealots, and I’ve never been very good at being a zealot. I’m not in the mood as much to talk 2A politics because I feel that issue is now adrift, and its fortunes tied to the greater realignment that’s happening. 2A rights are a component of that, but won’t decide the whole thing. Plus, whether the righties here want to acknowledge it, there’s a decent amount of support for gun rights on the far left. The gun control movement is almost entirely funded and lead by our modern nobility, with some support from what in Marxist theory would be Bourgeoisie.
Anyways, back to one of my reasons for scaling back. I know our political opposition read gun blogs, especially back in the day when we had more influence. One day I was speaking with someone on the front lines, who did the difficult work of influencing lawmakers and opposing these people on a regular basis. He told me something that went like: “You know, you bloggers are too smart for your own good. We’ve had a great asset that the people I go up against don’t really understand our issue very well. But they are getting a lot better, and I think it’s because you guys are telling them everything they need to know.”
That really hit me when the shit started to hit the fan with Tish James.
While I was always careful not to air inside baseball publicly, I can’t help but think a lot of useful information about the gun rights movement emanated from this blog that was quite useful to our political opposition. I honestly never worried about it when blogs were a bigger thing: the Brady team were honestly over a rope and couldn’t do much. And they knew that. CSGV was a clown show. They were zealots who let their own zealotry get in the way of learning and winning.
Bloomberg’s people were entirely different. Bloomberg’s people are very interested in learning and winning. I’m not talking about the front people like Shannon Watts. She’s more in line with what you see coming out of the gun control movement traditionally. I would not be surprised to find they view her as a liability, but sometimes in any movement you’re stuck with troublesome allies.
Bloomberg’s behind the scenes people weren’t and aren’t fucking around. And it’s hard to have public discussions about our movement, and correcting our movement, that won’t be useful to the opposition. I keep going back to that lobbyist’s statement in my head, over and over, because I know it was true. We helped them get better. And there’s no equivalent of that kind of intel source on our side because the gun control movement is organized very differently.
That’s why I’m thinking we need to go back to basics, and figure out effective ways to communicate that aren’t necessarily broadcasting to everyone who cares to look. Not that I don’t think blogs and their place, or have no place now, but we need to figure out that balance between what we share publicly, and what we keep in our circles. That’s what I need to figure out.
I’m starting to wonder if the only goal of Brewer’s law firm is just to keep adding more and more complexity to NRA’s lawsuits so as to extract more and more fees. Because I haven’t been able to see the sense in this strategy. I am not an expert, by any means, in bankruptcy law. In fact, I know next to nothing about it. But given we now have an opinion from someone who does, I’m now really wondering what Brewer’s strategy is here. Maybe it’s a Hail Mary. Who knows. But either way, I think things are a lot worse than we’ve been lead to believe.
I’m actually wondering if we might see a split in the NRA… NRA North and NRA South? With NRA North being the pieces of the original NRA that have been picked up by others, and NRA South being Wayne and Bill, Inc?
I am fairly certain Tish James isn’t just going to let NRA transfer everything to Texas without a flight, and it’s hard for me to see how this is going to improve NRA’s position, let alone give them trump card over James.
And it’s moving the corporate entity to Texas. Any bets on how much of Wayne’s mistakes get buried in that bankruptcy? Any bets on whether there’s new bylaws that will, de jure, end NRA as a member controlled organization? (I recognize that, de facto, membership control has been tenuous for some time). Will NRA move to Texas? We know Wayne has wanted to.
Leticia James will actually have a say in the dissolution of a New York non-profit. So I’m sure she has a next move, and I doubt this is over.
Finally, I will say this: my club has a provision requiring members to belong to the NRA. I am no fan of Bill and Wayne’s NRA, but I haven’t been willing to move on that issue, because if there was a power struggle, I wanted to be able to throw our weight behind the not-Wayne faction. It’s also a massive PITA to get bylaw changes done.
But if the door closes on members having the ultimate say, if it becomes just another group run by grifters who’s sole purpose is perpetuating the graft, if there’s no hope for a different NRA beyond Wayne and whoever he chooses to be his successor, that changes the calculus. Right the ship. My patience is not infinite.
To be honest, if they knew the price of their virtue signaling ahead of time, they probably would have still done it. Why wouldn’t they? It’s not like it’s their money. I expect ACB will change the balance of the Second Amendment on the Supreme Court, offering the lower courts the smack down they so richly deserve. But don’t get cocky. Next time the Dems are in charge, we’re probably looking at some court packing!
Speaking of that, Glenn Reynolds has a pretty good take on court packing, suggesting that maybe it would lower the stakes if the court were bigger anyway. My big problem with a packing scheme is that once it starts, what’s the limiting principle? But maybe it’s when an individual justice just doesn’t matter that much.
We could stand to do a lot of de-escalating. Politicians and bureaucrats are, for the most part, the worst kind of people to be found in society. The solution to what ails us, if you ask me, is to give them a lot less power.
NRA filed a civil rights lawsuit in the Northern District of New York yesterday. It is possible that Letitia James is a second rate tyrant who is violating the NRA’s civil rights, and that Wayne LaPierre is a hapless grifter. Both things can be true. I believe that both things are true. James does not have your best interests at heart as a gun owner and NRA member. She is trying to silence political opposition, and she should be ruined for it. I sincerely hope this suit succeeds. I’m surprised by how many gun people I see who seem fine with dissolution. James’ move here is unconscionable and naked totalitarianism. It will invite tit for tat if the courts are silent (note that SPLC is in Alabama, and probably has more skeletons in its closet than NRA does by far).
If I’m a judge, no way would I allow a politician to dissolve their political opposition. This is Soviet level shit. I would consider the remedy of removing Wayne. That needs to happen. But as guilty as they might be, most charities and non-profits are going to show issues if put under a microscope. Not saying Wayne is a straight shooter. We’ve known for years a lot of this stuff was going on, and shame on us as members for looking the other way because times were good.
I suspect James knows she won’t get dissolution, but she has political ambitions, and the Dem base will eat this shit up. The cancel cultural warriors will love this. But hopefully adults will intervene and we can just be rid of the problem at the top and move on.