Former Florida congressman and failed Texas gubernatorial candidate Allen West has announced that he wants to take the place of Wayne LaPierre as Executive Vice President of the NRA.
Allen West, the former Republican Party of Texas chairman who recently ran in the Republican primary election against Gov. Greg Abbott, announced Monday that he would accept a nomination to be the executive vice president (EVP) of the National Rifle Association (NRA) at an upcoming meeting in Houston.
“As now known, several individuals came to me via email last week requesting I consider allowing them to nominate me for EVP of the NRA,” West told The Texan. “I have humbly consented because the progressive socialist left seeks to eradicate our Second Amendment right.”
Yeah, I’m sure that was an out-of-the-blue request that West himself had nothing to do with ginning up. Let’s face it: Humble is not his brand.
Last week, a current and several former NRA board members announced a draft campaign to nominate West to lead the Second Amendment advocacy organization in light of the legal challenges currently plaguing the group and its current EVP, Wayne LaPierre.
West served on the NRA board from 2016 to 2021.
The NRA was chartered in New York and is currently headquartered in Virginia, but the organization has expressed interest in reincorporating and moving its headquarters to Texas.
But those possibilities have stymied as the group has been embroiled in a legal challenge from New York Attorney General Letitia James, who has been pushing for the organization’s dissolution.
“After watching the NRA’s Bankruptcy hearings, reviewing the evidence presented and New York law, I have concluded that the likelihood of [James] winning her lawsuit against Wayne LaPierre and the other defendants is very high,” said Phillip Journey, the current NRA board member who is leading the campaign to give the helm to West.
West’s name has been floated as a replacement for LaPierre before. Obviously Journey won’t stop believing…
“If she wins, they will be prohibited from serving in any NY non-profit. Wayne will be removed from office by court order,” said Journey. “As an NRA member and a member of its Board of Directors, I have a duty to plan for that contingency.”
“I know Col. Allen West will make a great Executive Vice President of the NRA. Col. West is a nationally recognized advocate for the Second Amendment. He has extensive political experience and a record of speaking out on the NRA Board of Directors for the reform and the restoration of the National Rifle Association.”
The NRA board will hold an election for its leadership positions later this month during a meeting in Houston.
LaPierre’s tenure started out as leading one of the most influential organizations in the country and ended as a corrupt disaster. Wayne has to go (and the NRA won’t get a single dime from me until he’s gone), but West is the wrong man to replace him. West came to Texas to run the National Center for Policy Analysis in 2016. It closed its doors in 2017.
West is being sued by Dallas-based National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA), which claims that his brief tenure as CEO was marked by bad decisions and mismanagement that alienated donors and financially crippled the once-thriving organization. Codefendants have recently sought to settle their related claims.
Under Mr. West’s leadership, the NCPA hired a chief financial officer who was already on probation for embezzlement and who then dismantled the organization’s fiscal controls. The CFO (who is now in prison) embezzled more than $600,000 from the NCPA.
The lawsuit charges that Mr. West and other board members misspent more than $1 million in restricted grant money on operations – including salaries, expenses and bonuses – and hid that information from the rest of the board and donors.
West’s brief tenure as head of the Texas Republican Party was similarly fractious, even if I might have agreed with him on many of the issues under contention. Neither organization he led seemed better for his leadership.
LaPierre needs to go, but West would not be an improvement. To my mind, it would be far better to draft former NRA-ILA head Chris Cox, who resigned from the board under pressure from LaPierre, as the next Executive Vice President, assuming he’d be willing to take the position.
Tags: Allen West, Chris Cox, Guns, NRA, Phillip Journey, Republican Party of Texas, Wayne LaPierre
Congressman from Florida
Chairman of the Texas GOP (For 2 years) until he decided to resign and run for governor – which he failed at.
Now he wants to run the NRA.
Is it just me, or does it seem like he’s a guy looking for power?
I agree Chris Cox would be the best choice. At this point, anybody BUT Wayne would seem to be an improvement.
Allan West is a perfect example of why affirmative action is such a disaster. He’s never, ever been assessed honestly since the first day he joined the Army ROTC program, and it shows.
Anyone other than a black officer would have been court-martialed for what he did in Iraq, rather than “allowed to retire” after that incident with the interrogation. The fact that he wasn’t? Black skin gives you an automatic “get out of jail free” card, because there isn’t anyone with enough integrity to hold blacks accountable for blatant misconduct. The race card would get thrown down, and you’d lose your case.
West doesn’t know he’s incompetent. Every experience he has shows him that he succeeds at whatever he tries to do, because “black”. The man is like a lot of senior black officers that “fail upward”, because at no point along the line were they ever assessed or treated like anyone else in the system. There’s always a percentage of black officers in the military that simply don’t “get” the fact that they were carried, and that they’re actually incapable of doing the jobs they’re promoted into because “black”. Affirmative action is a pernicious vice inside any theoretically merit-based hierarchy, because it replaces competence and experience with skin color. West was never judged on anything other than his skin color and the need to fill a racial quota–And, he doesn’t realize that. He likely thought all he needed to do in Texas was show up, be black, and he’d automatically succeed. In the Army, other people carried his load, to include other, actually competent blacks. So long as he was in the Army, he was likely only ever a poster-boy, a black face to show how enlightened the system was. In actual fact, he was never held accountable for anything, and always succeeded because “black”, and thus he never learned that a.) he was essentially only a skin tone, and b.) nobody ever told him that he was a dumbass. West probably never got honest feedback in his entire career, because everyone was afraid to tell him the truth about his actual performance. Which is how you get what you have in his case–Institutionally, he’s the prototypical black senior military leader, carried along and promoted solely due to his skin color. He’s not a “former Lieutenant Colonel” in the Army, he’s a living example of the Peter Principle expressed via affirmative action. He’s never once gotten honest feedback, and every time he’s screwed up, he’s been excused from accountability because “black”. That’s why he thought he could do what he did in Iraq, just like several other senior black officers I personally witnessed doing things that would have put a white officer into Fort Leavenworth for decades. Hell, we had a battalion commander who panicked and blew away an entire Iraqi family during a convoy operation. Nothing was done about it–They just eased him out of command early, and stopped him from going outside the wire.
It’s not West’s fault, per se… He doesn’t know he’s incompetent. He has simply been conditioned to think that all he has to do is show up, and everything will happen, because he’s Allen the Magic Negro. That’s the real legacy of affirmative action, right there. The tragedy of it all is seen with another black officer I worked with who was actually one of the most competent people I’d ever been around, but who presented as this daffy frat-boy (I think as a defense mechanism, so people wouldn’t accuse him of “acting white”…) to the point that other black officers who were also competent had trouble believing he could do his assigned job at all. It was surreal having a guy I knew from previous assignments come up to me and ask “Hey, who should I really be talking to on this…?”, and having to argue with another black officer to convince him that this Captain was really more than capable of doing the damn job he was in…
Affirmative action is a cancer. They really need to stop it, because it fixes nothing over the long run. All it does is convince everyone that all blacks, everywhere, are basically post turtles, sitting somewhere not because they got there themselves, but because someone put them there to make everything look “fair”.
Seems the half life for integrity once in the swamp is measured in months.
https://nexttobagend.blogspot.com/2022/05/one-time-hero-now-past-his-use-by-date.html
None of these guys should ever be taken at face value. Watch what they actually do, not what they say or where they’ve been.
I’m a veteran, myself. I’m gonna say something utterly heretical: Being a veteran doesn’t automatically infer virtue or moral character. There were a lot of people I served with who I wouldn’t hesitate to go into combat with, but who I also wouldn’t let cross the threshold of my home, either. The virtues of a soldier are not the virtues of a statesman or someone you necessarily want running a damn thing of import, outside the context of “military”. Hell, a lot of those guys really shouldn’t have been in the military, either. I’m not quite sure where you put amoral sociopaths, other than someplace their sociopathy can be made a net gain for society.
You come to me saying “Yeah, that guy’s a veteran, you can trust him…”, and that’s all you know about him? You just self-identified as a damn fool and a credulous one, at that. Military service does not automatically confer moral virtue; indeed, it sometimes tears it down. I regard the fact that someone served as no more than a clue; I still look to their actual conduct and actions. Count no man worthy merely because he served; he may have been an utter poltroon, hated by all he served beside.
I’d also point out that the ideal soldier and leader in war likely isn’t the guy you want running things in civil life. Especially combat veterans. Some of us are a little too used to solving “people problems” with violence, and are entirely too likely to go to inappropriate extremes.
[…] Lawrence Peterson, over at his Battleswarm Blog agrees that WLP needs to go, but West might not be the best person to clean house. […]