Media Matters

National Rifle Association board member Ted Nugent published a column on birther website WND alleging that if a Republican president had the same drone policy as the Obama administration, "Jesse Jackson and Al Not-So-Sharpton would be lisping their ebonic mumbo-jumbo that the policy and the president are racist and bigoted." 

Nugent recently became "an exclusive WND columnist," and told Media Matters that he was attracted to the website's audience of "bold, straight truth-logic celebrants with whom I share honest American common sense."

Among other predictions made by Nugent in his column:

The "99-percenter" crowd of intentionally unemployed Americans would move into Lafayette Park across the street from the White House, where they would pitch their tents and refrigerator boxes, ingest massive amounts of mind-altering chemicals and then try to storm the gates of the White House.

[...]

The residents of East St. Louis, Detroit, Chicago and other cities would burn their own neighborhoods in protest.

[...]

Representatives from NARAL, the pro-abortion group, would say had they known the Republican president was going to issue such an order, they would have wished their parents had aborted them.

Despite Nugent's history of making inflammatory comments, often in the context of race, he has been treated by mainstream media as a credible source of information in the gun policy debate.

In previewing a segment on Nugent's views on firearms on February 1, CNN reporter Deb Feyerick claimed that he had "a very deep connection with the facts and the facts that he needs to make his argument." During the Feburary 4 segment on CNN's Erin Burnett OutFront, Feyerick and host Erin Burnett gave serious treatment to Nugent's conspiracy theory that Obama wishes to confiscate firearms, even discussing what would happen if the government attempted to "take all the guns away tomorrow." Nugent's opposition to gun violence prevention proposals was also praised by Fox News host Bill O'Reilly, who stated on the February 5 edition of The O'Reilly Factor, "Now that kind of straight talk is what the Republican Party needs."

During a January 9 interview with WND, Nugent suggested, "there will come a time when the gun owners of America, the law-abiding gun owners of America, will be the Rosa Parks and we will sit down on the front seat of the bus, case closed."  Civil rights leaders condemned Nugent for his comparison between gun owners and civil rights activist Rosa Parks. Later that month, Nugent told WND that having Vice President Joe Biden and Attorney General Eric Holder head a gun safety task force is "like hiring [serial killer and cannibal] Jeffrey Dahmer to tell us how to take care of our children."