Larry Pratt, the executive director of Gun Owners of America, perhaps more than any other activist on the Right provides a direct bridge between the Republican establishment and the chain-email conspiracy theories festering on the right-wing internet.
This was perfectly illustrated this weekend when, just one day after Sen. Ted Cruz announced that GOA’s chairman and Pratt’s boss Tim Macy would head up his presidential campaign’s “Second Amendment Coalition,” Pratt took to his “Gun Owners News Hour” radio program to discuss how President Obama is secretly building up a private army that can only be defeated if patriotic members of the military turn against him.
Pratt’s guest on Saturday’s program was Lawrence C. Mackin, the author of a new novel called “The Police Revolt of 2016,” which imagines a ragtag group of police officers and military personnel who must organize a revolution when “a group of radical Islamists allied with Obama’s private internal army composed of units from the Department of Homeland Security and FEMA, are planning to establish an Islamic dictatorship within the United States,” a premise that Pratt said was “not too fictional.”
Mackin came prepared with a great number of conspiracy theories that he had found on the internet, telling Pratt that Obama signed a deal with Russia “to bring Soviet troops into this country in the event that we needed extra security, such as a Super Bowl event, for example” as part of his “plan to build up his private internal army within the United States.”
Also manning Obama’s private army, Mackin said, would be undocumented immigrants and “all the illegal aliens from the Middle East that he’s bringing into this country right now,” who are “all men.”
Mackin also informed Pratt that former DHS secretary Janet Napolitano “stated that she wanted to buy an AR-15 rifle — that’s a personal defense weapon — for every federal employee” so that they could also join “Obama’s private army.”
His book, he told Pratt, is not that “far-fetched” because all of these things are already happening in the Obama administration.
Pratt agreed that the premise was entirely realistic because “as much as the president has tried to cull the military of senior officers who are known to be pro-American … he certainly hasn’t gotten them all, so if it ever did come down the rubber meeting the road, the president really couldn’t be sure that he would be giving an order that would be followed.”
If the president’s plan to build a private army continues, Pratt said, “at some point the guys and gals would say, that’s it, he’s gone too far, today’s the day, let’s go, let’s roll.”
I think we’re at that point right now,” Mackin said, “but again, we’re just looking for a leader.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Pratt brought up the debunked rumor that the nuclear deal with Iran included a mutual defense agreement that would require the U.S. to attack Israel if Israel attacked Iran, which Mackin said was just more proof that Obama is a “radical Muslim.”
