The Discovery Channel will be providing Ted Nugent with a platform to help him fight the “culture war” when it features him in a special this week, the controversial National Rifle Association board member and Washington Times columnist said in a recent interview.
Nugent has a lengthy history of making violent, inflammatory, and offensive remarks against women, the LGBT community, and racial and religious minorities. Earlier this year, he told attendees at the NRA's annual meeting that he would “be dead or in jail by this time next year” if Barack Obama was reelected president, which prompted scrutiny from the Secret Service.
But none of that stopped the Discovery Channel from contacting him to star in its programming, as Nugent detailed in an interview with NRA News. Discovery is promoting the October 10 special, Ted Nugent's Gun Country, as “an inside look at American gun culture through the eyes of” Nugent.
Speaking with Cam Edwards, Nugent explained how he hopes to use that platform as an opportunity to promote his position in the “culture war”:
NUGENT: Cam, you know you and I have known each other a long time, I really have always celebrated and promoted the Second Amendment, all things guns, the good, the perfection, the good over evil that guns provide, the joys, the discipline, the marksmanship discipline, and the fact that the American Dream became available because brave patriots stood up with guns and fought the Evil Empire. So what we did with the Discovery Channel, they contacted me and went, “You know, if we are going to produce gun shows shouldn't we do it with this Nugent guy?”
EDWARDS: [laughter]
NUGENT: “Because even his guitars are ballistically coefficient.” I celebrate this every day of my life. I do media literally 300-plus days a year. Even during the hunting season I'm available between 11 and 1 pm because I really believe during this culture war we have talked about many times--
EDWARDS: Mm hmm.
NUGENT: --that it's imperative that those of us who cherish and believe and demand freedom, that we use every resource we have that we can cultivate and maximize to promote and celebrate all things Second Amendment and the perfection of gun ownership. So the Discovery Channel has some really wise souls there and they contacted me and said, “How would you like to do a TV show called Ted Nugent's Gun Country?” And I went, “I'm already doing it. You might as well start recording it.”
Later in the interview, Nugent stated, “I believe if you hate the NRA, if you hate guns, if you hate Ted Nugent, then you clearly hate America. And I have never apologized, I've never defended -- there is nothing to defend -- but in this culture war we do sometimes have to explain ourselves.”
Nugent's “culture war” positions are often extremely controversial. Earlier this year Nugent wrote that he is “beginning to wonder if it would have been best had the South won the Civil War.” He has also urged his readers to "[e]xpose, isolate and eliminate liberals and their fuzzy-headed policies" and called the Democratic Party the “modern-day slave master” to low-income Americans.
In a promotional video for Ted Nugent's Gun Country, Nugent calls himself “the biggest gun nut of all” and is seen firing an assortment of high-powered weapons, including a hand-crank operated Gatling gun. According to a press release about the show, Nugent will also hunt a scimitar-horned oryx, an animal that is extinct in the wild.