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A new book from former NRA executive Joshua Powell purports to show how a top organization lost its way through corruption and political extremism. But instead, the book shows the real reason the NRA, and countless other conservative groups, have gone astray: They let moral cowards like Powell work there.
Powell was a senior executive at the NRA until January of this year. Now, not even nine months after being fired, Powell has a new book out seeking to destroy his old employer. Inside the NRA promises readers “A Tell-All Account of Corruption, Greed, and Paranoia within the Most Powerful Political Group in America.” In reality, Powell himself is central to any account of NRA corruption. Powell wasn’t fired for ineffectiveness (though according to an NRA source, this would have been wholly justified), but rather for expense account fraud. Powell is one of the targets of far left New York Attorney General James’ ongoing lawsuit seeking to dissolve the organization completely, and seize its assets for potential distribution to left-wing groups.
While the corruption allegations of Inside the NRA may be partly or entirely accurate, sources within the NRA have told Revolver.news that firing Powell was a key step toward cleaning up the organization.
At one point, Powell purported to lead a compliance training seminar, which exasperated staff.
“He was probably the most corrupt guy in the building,” a source said. “Wayne LaPierre flew on private jets, but Wayne LaPierre is the face of the gun rights movement. He pulls in all the donations, he sets the agenda. Josh was a joke.”
The source elaborated that Powell “rarely darkened the door” of his lavish office at NRA headquarters, and had a personal coffeemaker so luxurious it was the butt of internal office jokes. A popular rumor at NRA HQ was that Powell refused to even ride the elevator with low-ranking staff.
But Powell’s corruption and arrogance at such an important conservative organization isn’t his greatest betrayal. The real danger of Powell is what he wants to do to the NRA.
Because of his own personal weakness, he has taken a knee to the left-wing establishment that wants the destroy the NRA’s basic mission, and turn it into another ineffective “conservative in name only” institution co-opted by the left’s agenda.
Here he is prostrating himself before the opponents of gun rights in a desperate plea for approval:
Instead of focusing on corruption and greed, Powell’s book makes predictable attacks on the one, unequivocally good thing about the NRA: Its steadfast refusal to submit to the left-wing narrative on guns. In the book, Powell claims that the NRA’s one wrong move has been its failure to copy countless other conservatives institutions by surrendering to the left.
It is Mr. Powell’s comments on gun control — speaking as a former senior official at a group dedicated to opposing such change — that are the most striking. He is unconvinced that universal background checks would be effective, but he says “the N.R.A. is not in step with the majority of gun owners” on the issue and should take it off the table.
He also expresses support for red flag laws allowing law enforcement authorities to confiscate a gun owner’s weapons after warnings from relatives or friends — “as long as there is a process” that “involves both medical doctors and psychiatrists, and some sort of bipartisan oversight.”
Instead of considering such measures, the group, he writes, has been transformed into “an organization of ‘No,’ in response to any effort to quell gun violence,” and that also repeatedly blocked federal studies of gun violence, fearing their findings. [New York Times]
As explained in a previous Revolver.news post, the left’s effectiveness derives in large part from its willingness to impose its moral framework on everybody, while crushing all dissent. Rather than offering their own competing moral framework, and defending it with equal conviction and rigor, conservatives routinely submit to the left’s moral imperialism, with predictably disastrous results. Powell’s submission to the leftist narrative and moral framework is yet another example of this dynamic, and of how the left will always be better than its sad imitators at following and enforcing its moral worldview.
READ MORE: To Save Civilization, Stop Kneeling Before the Left’s Moral Imperialism
Again and again, conservatives have seen churches, schools, charities, magazines, and their own politicians submit to the inverted, imperialistic moral agenda of the left. Sometimes, this submission is rewarded with a charitable newspaper article or a few minutes of praise on CNN as one of the “good Republicans,” but that is it. In the case of Powell, he can make the rounds in the mainstream media and enjoy some head pats, at least while he remains useful as a tool to shame the very gun owners Powell once purported to represent. The Powell approach of capitulation never makes organizations stronger, and it never results in them achieving what they care about. At best, it allows the organizations and their members to cash-in with the cushy sinecures set aside for Washington’s designated losers.
For decades, the NRA was different. No matter how many “bad news cycles” they endured, they stuck to their core principles: Americans have a constitutional right to bear arms, and any compromise on that principle is just an invitation for the left to erode that right further. Thanks to this absolutism, guns are one of the few issues where conservatives are in a stronger place now than they were 20 years ago. A vast pro-gun movement, led by the NRA, achieved key Supreme Court rulings like Heller v. District of Columbia while blocking all misguided efforts to impose new federal gun control. The NRA has maintained such a powerful position on the right, for so many years, precisely because it is “an organization of ‘No,’” as Powell calls it.
Even Powell’s own book makes it clear how useful the NRA’s resolve has been. The book describes the organization successfully lobbying the Trump administration to back off from new gun control measures on two separate occasions. This worked for only one reason: Unlike with most groups, the NRA’s condemnation means something. The group isn’t simply a Soros or Koch astroturf operation. It is powerful because it represents millions of Americans who view gun rights as one of the most critical issues in American politics, and who won’t vote for a candidate who falters on that issue.
To the extent the NRA is weakening now, it’s not because of any alleged corruption by Wayne LaPierre, but because the organization may finally be wobbling in its unshakable opposition to the radical left, and infected by the very same attitude Powell represents in his vanity tour with the media. As reported in our Revolver Exclusive, the organization filed a ridiculous lawsuit publicly canceling an elderly judge for “racism.” The lawsuit even cited the discredited left wing extremist organization Southern Poverty Law Center. The suit, of course, won the NRA no friends, and did nothing to slow down liberals bent on its destruction.
READ MORE: NRA Gets “Woke” on “Racism” and Ignores Urgent Gun Rights Issues
In the last two months, the NRA has also been silent on the two most salient cases of self-defense with guns: The McCloskeys in St. Louis, and Kyle Rittenhouse in Kenosha. The McCloskeys’ appearance at the RNC, and the enormous amount of fundraising for Rittenhouse despite the left’s efforts to suppress it, show that both causes are enormously popular with ordinary Americans — and surely, therefore, rank-and-file gun owners. But NRA leadership has has stayed aloof, apparently afraid that defending Americans who defend themselves might upset the cocktail party set in New York and Washington D.C.
Now, Powell is presenting this losing strategy as the “way forward” for the NRA. It’s not. It’s the fake strategy of a corrupt and weak ex-executive trying to get back at the people who fired him and win praise from liberals.
Ironically, while Powell now presents himself as a reformed moderate, Revolver’s source says that during his time at the NRA, Powell bragged constantly to NRA staff about his close connections with various figures in President Trump’s orbit. Now, those connections seem illusory. Frozen out by the circles he coveted, and fired for corruption by the executive team that once trusted him, Powell has taken the desperate measure of bending his knee to the left. No one should follow him.
And that is the ultimate lesson of the entire Joshua Powell saga. For conservatives, the greatest sin of all is weakness: Being too flimsy to stand by one’s ideals, too clueless to identify the modern left’s coercive, authoritarian impulses for what they are, and too cowardly to push one’s own beliefs rather than debasing them for approval from The New York Times. The NRA is well-rid of Josh Powell. But all conservative groups ought to watch for potential Powells in their midst, and make sure they get nowhere near power.
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