In the days after the March for Our Lives in Washington, D.C.—at which Samantha Fuentes, a survivor of the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, made the event’s most eloquent and incontestable statement by throwing up in the middle of a poem named “Enough!”—I spent a little time watching NRATV. Loesch is all over it, either monologizing savagely to the camera or nodding in vituperative agreement with her fellow members of the NRATV commentariat. It’s a heavy crew, doing heavy work: Grant Stinchfield, Cam Edwards, Colion Noir, and others, all squinting into the cultural headwinds, all facing down the storm of indecency, all rebutting, rebutting, reframing, and rebutting. Are they entirely wrong all the time? Of course not. I watched the ex–Secret Service big mouth Dan Bongino, for example, rather neatly pop a momentary liberal outrage-bubble over Sean Hannity’s use of the phrase civil war. “This country is headed towards a civil war in terms of two sides that are just hating each other,” Hannity had said on his god-awful radio show, prompting the usual howls. In rebuttal, Bongino offered a montage of talking heads from CNN and MSNBC, all blandly characterizing the current scene as a blah-blah “civil war.” Touché, Dan Bongino: When Hannity says it, it’s incitement; when Carl Bernstein says it, it’s … sociology.

I started my foray gently, with a show called NRA Gun Gurus: a white-gloved Jim Supica, from the NRA National Sporting Arms Museum, telling the story of the turn-of-the-century lawman Bass Reeves, “a master tracker, a deadly good shot, and one of the first African-American U.S. deputy marshals west of the Mississippi.” This is educational stuff: Reeves worked for “Hanging Judge” Isaac Parker out of Fort Smith, Arkansas—Rooster Cogburn territory, if I’m not mistaken. Reeves liked his six-gun, Supica said, but in the clutch he preferred his Winchester, which fired an “authoritative, fight-stopping cartridge.”

Next: Dom Raso’s Media + Lab. Raso is a pumped and affable ex-seal with a rattling verbal style. “Now that I’m out,” he puffs in the show’s intro, “I get tons of people asking me all the time about their favorite TV shows and movies, what’s realistic and what isn’t. Well, there’s only one way to find out.” Excellent premise: Worn down by the queries of barstool yappers and armchair Chuck Norrises, Raso and his martial-arts bros patiently, blow for blow and clip for clip, refight and reality-test famous action moments. “That scene was completely BS,” he opines on some big blowout in The Rock. Then he turns, brightening, to a sequence from The Bourne Legacy in which Jeremy Renner nimbly immobilizes three security guards at a dodgy pharmaceutical plant in Manila. (Verdict: “It was awesome, to show you that position is everything.”)

Feeling somewhat adrift, I took in a few episodes of the first season of Defending Our America. Now, this was more like it. Sort of an NRA version of The View: a group of men—law enforcement, former intelligence—gathered around a table in somebody’s basement or bunker to discuss, in grave, late-night voices, the imminent collapse of everything and the woeful unpreparedness of everybody. Zombies go unmentioned, but gangs, predators, and “criminal elements” are gruffly pondered. “If it decides to go sideways, you have to be able to take care of yourself,” says Tom (khaki shirt and trapper’s beard). “When the shit hits the fan, I’m going with my family,” says Jerry (buzz cut and boxer’s nose). Sober noddings around the table, grimaces of assent—these are good guys, tough guys, useful guys, dads; in almost any kind of sideways-going situation, you’d want these guys around. And far be it from me to scoff at an apocalyptic intuition. You hear that thin rending note in the air, that doomsday thrill? Me too. It’s the poetry of Trump-time. The grid will fall; the router will stop blinking; the membrane of manners will dissolve. Pandemonium in the Amtrak quiet car. But come on. There’s something indulgent, even weirdly complacent, in the basement catastrophism of these dudes. This must be what the author Djuna Barnes meant when she wrote that Americans are a “fierce sadistic race crouching behind radiators.”