NYTIMES.COM September 8, 2020 – This is a sad book, and a bad one, and you shouldn’t buy it. The thinking in it is poor; the writing is worse. The author “exposes” evils that, if you’ve been paying even scant attention, you already know. Expect it soon in a Walmart remainder bin near you.

To summarize my argument thus far: No.

Joshua L. Powell, the author of “Inside the NRA: A Tell-All Account of Corruption, Greed, and Paranoia Within the Most Powerful Political Group in America,” is a former Chicago options and derivatives trader. He met his hero Wayne LaPierre, the sunny rhetorician and National Rifle Association chief executive, on a duck-hunting trip.

Powell joined the N.R.A.’s board of directors. A couple of years later, LaPierre asked him to become his chief of staff. Powell writes: “It was like having Vince Lombardi say, Hey, do you want to come help me coach the Packers?”

Powell looked the part; in photographs, he resembles the urbane bad guy in a Nordic thriller. He became the N.R.A.’s senior strategist, the second in command. He presided there from 2016 until he was pushed out early this year.

For a time, Powell loved it all — the cigars, the steakhouses, the rooms at the Ritz, the Pol Roger Champagne, the flags and the eagles, the crushing of libtards, the “oddly intoxicating” adrenaline spikes on school-shooting days and the war-room strategizing in their wake.

He liked “freedom,” including the ability to open-carry his sidearm in the office. Maybe someone would make his day. He had thoughts of succeeding LaPierre, who is 70, as chief executive.

The administrative warfare inside the organization was intense. Powell began to lose some battles, and felt marginalized. He began to see — in the way a writer will notice, when his or her work isn’t going well, that the literary world is broken — everything that was wrong with the N.R.A.

Now he’s a singing insider in the year of the singing insider, a misfit chorus performing a cappella around a trash can fire.

Powell’s apostasy is the primary news here. He comes out in favor of minor forms of gun control, things like background checks and so-called red flag laws and the closing of loopholes around gun show sales. This counts as fearless speech only in the paranoid and steroidal world of the N.R.A., which brooks zero dissent.  [full article]