Watch John Oliver Cock Both Hammers at NRA TV on Last Week Tonight
Image via HBO/YouTubeThe latest episode of Last Week Tonight decided to take a look at one of the vestiges of the NRA that seems to be keeping major tech corporations like Apple, Amazon and Roku (there’s another one for you, Harry) from severing their business ties with the beleaguered pro-firearms group: NRA TV.
While the free streaming channel has flown relatively under the radar until the weeks following last month’s shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., Oliver’s trademark deep dive reveals it to be a weird mix of confounding, tone-deaf, slapdash programming that serves a single purpose that so many other alt-right media groups preach: guns good, mainstream media bad.
Imagine any genre of TV show that has existed in the past 25 years. Now, slap a gun on top of the treatment and you have basically every show on NRA TV. Everything from a gun-focused Antiques Roadshow knock-off to a female-focused program where two women literally shoot jars of paint to craft some glowing nursery artwork for an expectant mother is featured on the channel.
The most ridiculous has to be Media Lab, a show where an ex-Navy SEAL reenacts action scenes from movies. Think the meaty bro-meat attitude of Deadliest Warrior meets the supreme lack of logic of Deadliest Warrior, only every reenactment has guns.
Beyond the channel’s simplistic theory of programming, Oliver also details the dark side of the channel. Its hunting videos and news programs do their best to cultivate anger against those who want to better regulate guns. Its personalities label “anti-hunters” as “one million little dictators” and allude to America as a nation under attack from “drug traffickers and human traffickers” who are embedded in “every single American city.” The answer to these ‘dangers’ is simple: Grab an AR-15.
Oliver reveals NRA TV to be nothing more than an extended infomercial, operated by an ad agency that utilizes fear-mongering and violent resistance to fact-based reporting to prop up the financial machine of guns and gun accessories manufacturing—also, whatever the hell Super Beets is.
The message is clear, though. NRA TV is by far the dumbest aspect of the NRA, but it’s still a cog of the organization that values gun sales over human lives.
Check out Oliver’s informative piece on the dumb, yet insidious streaming channel below, and watch out for the Lake Dog.