I’ve delayed in writing my blog post this week because the subject of corruption, in particular lawyers, judges, and six justices of the not-so-Supreme Court, has become overwhelmingly tiresome and disgusting. Holding greedy men accountable happens few and far between in this nation, and it takes far too long for justice to be served.
Yesterday while we waited with no relief on SCOTUS to render a decision that might actually hold accountable the most disgustingly corrupt, greed-mongering American to ever reside in our nation much less in the White House, we finally have one bit of good news of corruption successfully prosecuted.
A New York jury found the NRA and its former CEO Wayne LaPierre liable for mismanagement, for spending millions on personal extravagance, to the tune of $5.4 million in damages. Jurors also determined the NRA failed to include or misrepresented tax filing information and broke New York law by not adopting a whistleblower policy.
This couldn’t happen to a more corrupt, conniving, selfish, bigoted, ignorant, hateful bunch of gun-mongering blowhards. I should know. I once lived, and was a newspaper columnist, in a rural central Nevada county seat. A vile place where elected officials known as the Lyon County Commissioners—all white Republican males, occasionally with one token white Republican female who had no more integrity than the men—officially declared it a “Second Amendment sanctuary.”
The kind of shameless people who have their little gun-monger club called Friends of the NRA hold an annual fundraiser with a rifle raffle at the local Boys & Girls Club on Yerington’s Main Street. Where the local gun store was a stone’s throw from the high school and middle school, and adjacent to the parking lot of county school buses.
Yesterday’s news brought a great deal of I told you so satisfaction for me. Because in May 2019, before I left that ridiculous “Second Amendment sanctuary” of white supremacists voting Republican—while spending their meager earnings on meth, cigarettes, and tattoos because they obtained government-issued food stamps to feed their children from the federal government they hated—I wrote a newspaper column about Wayne LaPierre, among other things. It was about how true patriots stand in front of a gun, not sniveling and hiding behind them, devoting themselves to lowdown cowardly gun rights for themselves—and only for themselves. Because I guarantee you these dudes didn’t want people of color to have guns, or any rights at all.
Yes, it’s amazing I got out of there alive, because these ignorant cowards soaked up NRA lies like sunshine. They actually believed it was their Second Amendment right to shoot anyone they pleased. I am not making this up. I heard their idiotic outrageous statements at official county meetings. Literally the most disgustingly stupid people I have ever been witness to.
Four months after that column was published, while I was moving to Clark County, I won the Nevada Press Association first place award for local columnists in the state of Nevada. So I must have done something right, as opposed to Mason Valley’s alt-rightwing bidding. Here’s an excerpt from that May 22, 2019 column, which I’m sharing because it’s downright prescient and makes yesterday’s NRA news even more gratifying:
Back in March when Lyon County Commissioner Joe Mortenson chose an official meeting to recruit dues-paying members for the NRA, asserting his belief that constituents should join even if they can’t afford to because “liberals hate it,” I wondered why anyone would abuse their official status to shill for an organization that promotes domestic terrorism. It’s true there’s plenty of hate to be found therein, but it’s not liberals extorting it.
On some level, it’s comical Mortenson spends his money and urges Lyon County residents to spend theirs on the NRA. Because the NRA is being criminally investigated for financial mismanagement, not to mention fighting a legal battle against its own advertising firm whose idea of public relations is stirring racial tension with culture wars. But that’s not what bothers the NRA, which merely claims the firm won’t explain what it spent money on. How ironic.
Obscenely highly paid NRA executives are currently struggling to prove they’re abiding by laws governing tax-exempt organizations. It could be because they’re not. They’ve got scandal-plagued Ollie North (what could possibly go wrong there?), who had to step down as NRA president, embattled with NRA Chief Executive Wayne LaPierre as they fire off claims of corruption at each other. Everything from sexual harassment to squandering NRA funds on fancy suits. This while elitist LaPierre eschews elitists, not at his own arrogant expense, but at the expense of NRA members paying for his designer togs.
Meanwhile the Russian government is laughing all the way to our voting booths at how it can so easily manipulate and use NRA leadership for subterfuge. The jokes on you, dues-paying NRA members. But it’s not at all funny how America is paying for this traitorous stupidity.
Did that part about Russian government manipulation and voting booths send a chill down anyone’s else’s spine? I’d forgotten I’d written it. Hence, I took a look at a few other columns written in that timeframe. The May 15, 2019 column published just prior to the NRA column bears the headline: Mueller Report review: Disbar Barr. Talk about not holding corrupt lawyers accountable. The column following it on May 29, 2019 was titled: Men trying to control women are out of control. Care to guess what it was about? Corrupt misogynist SCOTUS justices perhaps? Looks like I’ll be revisiting these columns for future blog posts.
For now, I’m going to take the weekend to try to enjoy the NRA and its chief greed-and-gun-monger getting a richly deserved comeuppance, even if Lyon County Republicans likely remain too entrenched in their gun-mongering ignorance to grasp the truth. They’ve been had. Couldn’t happen to a more rotten, racist group of despicable human beings.