When NRATV launched in 2016, it was supposed to be the future of the National Rifle Association's modern media presence—a dynamic, slickly produced digital platform that would reach millions of viewers and develop more dues-paying gun aficionados. Instead, the NRA pulled the plug on the venture after just three years, citing sagging viewership numbers, ballooning production costs, and messaging that the NRA says it found "distasteful and racist." Today, the fallout from NRATV's collapse is the focal point of an ugly, sprawling legal war—one that has shed new light on how the leaders of the famously secretive organization exploit America's gun culture to get and stay rich.

The genesis of NRATV began with an Oklahoma-based advertising agency, Ackerman McQueen, that helped shape the NRA's public image for more than three decades. Ackerman helped create former NRA president Charlton Heston's famous slogan: "I'll give you my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead hands"—which he usually growled with a rifle held aloft. That long-standing, lucrative, and consequential relationship recently soured. According to a federal lawsuit the NRA filed against Ackerman last October, the NRA paid the company more than $40 million for services rendered in 2017, and developed "extensive trust and confidence" in its ability to implement the organization's vision.

Beginning in the early 2000s, Ackerman assisted the NRA in the development of its own branded media platform, in addition to placing advertisements in traditional media. A digital video outlet branded as NRA News launched in 2004, and the partners continued to roll out more original gun-adjacent programming in the decade that followed: A channel called NRA Women profiled "armed and fabulous" moms proudly exercising their constitutional rights, while NRA Freestyle featured, among other things, a weeknight talk show in which "urban gun enthusiast" Colion Noir dished the "latest on firearms, fashion, pop culture and other hot topics." In 2016, Ackerman and the NRA launched NRATV, an expanded version of the platform that brought most of these ventures under the same umbrella. It streamed on Apple TV, Roku, Google, and Amazon Fire devices for anyone who cared to watch.

NRATV's explicit right-wing rhetoric was frequently bizarre and inflammatory, as you might expect from an organization that spends millions of dollars every year warning people that their constitutional rights are under attack. Much of what the outlet broadcast had little to do with upholding the Second Amendment, and occasionally bordered on parody: In one fever-dream sequence, NRATV personality Grant Stinchfield wordlessly destroys an expensive-looking flat-screen TV with a sledgehammer—a stunt presumably intended to convey a distaste for the media, but just resulted in the clean-up of a lot of broken glass.

Other frequently invoked culture-war tropes were far more insidious and violent. NRATV personality Chuck Holton, who once referred to President Barack Obama as a "mocacchino [sic] stain" on the nation, blamed terrorist attacks in Europe on "multiculturalism," "socialism," and "gender-bending" in 2017. The following year, a few days after a massacre at a Florida high school and a few months before another at a Maryland newspaper, Stinchfield excoriated the media—"your local paper, your local news, the cable news networks," he said—as "the worst America has to offer." During one NRATV appearance, frequent Fox News guest Dan Bongino encouraged viewers to make "owning the libs" a "lifestyle." In another, he derided a Nike ad campaign featuring Colin Kaepernick, who lost his job for peacefully protesting police violence during NFL games, as "a backhand to patriotic Americans who love their country."

NRATV talking heads also served as reliable defenders of Donald Trump, pushing conspiracy theories about a Deep State plot to sabotage the administration's agenda and lashing out at professional journalists exercising that other constitutional right. Dana Loesch famously railed against outlets like The New York Times in a series of disturbing video clips, threatening to light a copy on fire, calling it an "old gray hag," and vowing to "laser-focus" on the paper's "so-called honest pursuit of truth" going forward. "In short," she concluded, looking directly at the camera, "we're coming for you"—an unsettling thing for a bombastic representative of a prominent gun-rights organization to say.

None of these right-wing screeds came cheap, though. NRATV cost more than $12 million in its first year, and about $20 million in 2017. Yet, according to court filings, the NRA wasn't seeing the returns on this substantial investment, in terms of either sponsorship dollars or membership growth, that Ackerman had promised. Instead, the NRA claims, Ackerman inflated viewership numbers to preserve what had become a profitable source of work for the agency, and refused frequent requests for more details from its increasingly suspicious client. At one point, Ackerman allegedly reported that NRATV netted more than 200 million views in an eight-month period, "thereby suggesting that NRATV content had reached two-thirds of the United States," the NRA says. Traffic was apparently a small fraction of that figure.