[guest post by Dana]

Hoo boy. A bit of hysteria today over the posting of an National Rifle Association (NRA) ad on the organization’s new Facebook page. The ad features conservative commentator Dana Loesch:

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.

Looking into what is upsetting people about the ad so much – so much that the Women’s March is demanding the NRA apologize – I found a few things: There is anger that the NRA remained silent about the shooting death of Philando Castile, who was legally carrying; that using the term “clenched fist of truth” is an “open call to violence”; that it is “barely a whisper shy of a call for full civil war,” as well as the ad being a call to Americans “to arm themselves to fight liberals. Violence is coming.” And there is even a question of whether the ad is anti-Semitic.

Loesch reminds critics of where that “clenched fist” originated:

It is entirely possible to heartily support the Second Amendment, condemn equally the violence coming from the far-left and the far-right, dislike guns, and have a queasy feeling about the NRA, this ad, and seeing term “incite” be indiscriminately used when someone on either side demands that their cause be seen as the righteous one.

(Cross-posted at The Jury Talks Back.)

–Dana

[guest post by Dana]

Deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee defended the president:

“I don’t think that the president’s ever been someone who gets attack and doesn’t push back. There have been an outrageous number of personal attacks, not just to him, but to frankly everyone around him,” Sanders told host Bill Hemmer.

“This is a president who fights fire with fire. And certainly will not be allowed to be bullied by a liberal media and the liberal elites within the media or Hollywood or anywhere else,” she added.

Unsurprisingly, so did Melania Trump via her communications director:

“As the First Lady has stated publicly…when her husband gets attacked, he will punch back 10 times harder.”

Keep on telling me how great it is that our president tweets directly to the people because I just can’t even. How about using the medium to advance sound policies and solid principles, all in the name of conservatism (or whatever it is that the GOP now embodies) or just stop tweeting altogether…

–Dana