So, the National Rifle Association is apparently violent.
So says the Left after watching the NRA’s newest ad, starring Dana Loesch. The ad uses inflammatory language to describe the activities of the Left:
They use their media to assassinate real news. They use their schools to teach children that their president is another Hitler. They use their movie stars and singers and comedy shows and award shows to repeat their narrative over and over again. And then they use their ex-president to endorse the resistance.
All to make them march, make them protest, make them scream racism and sexism and xenophobia and homophobia. 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.
And when that happens, they’ll use it as an excuse for their outrage. The only way we 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. I’m the National Rifle Association of America, and I’m freedom’s safest place.
Now, this may not be your cup of tea. You may find it over-the-top in its description of the situation. You may think it undermines the discourse. I’m not a fan of describing the “violence of lies” or the “assassination” of real news, because I don’t think words are violence or should be likened to violence; it seems to call for a violent response.
But there’s no question that this ad is not endorsing violence. In fact, the ad explicitly says that the proper response to violence is legally mandated authority to stop violence. And the ad is correct that the Left has incentivized riots in major cities – President Obama did it routinely – and use character attacks rather than policy arguments. When the ad talks about the “clenched fist of truth” to fight “violent lies,” it’s using metaphors for both. The same kind of metaphor that Barack Obama used when he talked about bringing a gun to a knife fight. The same kind of metaphor the left uses when it uses this sort of imagery, as Dana points out:
What’s really happening here?
Ever since a Trump-hating Bernie Sanders supporter attempted to assassinate a bevy of Republican Congressmen, the Left has attempted to shift the narrative away from their own rhetoric and back toward the Right’s. That means screaming about Trump and attempting to find an excuse for targeting the Right’s verbiage. The Left has always wanted to paint the Right as hyper-violent – their goal is to take guns away from those nut jobs. But this ad is a pretext used by the Left, not a good faith attempt by the Left to calm the waters.
