In the wake of Childish Gambino's historic achievements at the 61st Grammy Awards, NRA TV host Grant Stinchfield attempted to downplay the significance and success of Gambino's "This Is America," comparing its video to Islamic State militant group (ISIS) propaganda and suggesting the record isn't even popular.
Created by Donald Glover (aka Childish Gambino), "This Is America"picked up Grammys for record and song of the year, becoming the first rap song to win in either category. The track also won best rap/sung performance and best music video.
Discussing the song on his show on NRA TV, Stinchfield suggested that the reason Childish Gambino is being praised is because entertainers are celebrated for being anti-gun and "they give you awards for ridiculous songs."
After playing a clip of the Hiro Murai–directed video, Stinchfield said, "It's not America. That is not America. In fact, that looks more like an ISIS video in a Syrian warehouse than anywhere in America," according to a clip obtained by Media Matters.
Stinchfield went on to suggest that the song, which debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, has nearly half a billion views on YouTube and more than 280 million streams on Spotify, is not even a hit record.
"In my humble opinion, the song isn't that good," Stinchfield said. "And my son forces me to listen to Top 40 stations, and I could recite far too many of those songs word for word. I've never heard of 'This is America.' Which means the Grammy folks like it, the people didn't. If the people loved it, the radio stations would play it every 10 minutes. Trust me, I know.
"The millennials in my studio, of course, tell me I'm wrong in all of this and that I missed the point of the video," Stinchfield added.
Discussing the messages in the video, which alludes to the 2015 Charleston, South Carolina, church shooting, police brutality and Jim Crow laws, among other things, Stinchfield claimed the video's anti-gun stance is not focusing on the nation's real problems.
"It's not mass shootings [that] are killing children in overwhelming numbers. It's black on black crime. Hispanic on Hispanic crime. The stark reality is, it's minorities killing minorities that has become an epidemic that gun control zealots appear not to care a damn thing about.
"White kids shot in school, that's wall-to-wall coverage. Not that it doesn't deserve that coverage, it does. Not that I don't want to stop all mass shootings, I do. But on some weekends, more kids are killed in Chicago than in Parkland or Santa Fe, and that gets no coverage, and that's wrong."
In 2017, nearly 40,000 people were killed by guns in the U.S., the highest number of firearm-related deaths in four decades, according to a CNN analysis of data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's WONDER database. According to the figures, 39,773 were killed by a gun in 2017, an increase of more than 10,000 when compared with 1999, CNN said.
According to a study published by The American Journal of Medicine in February 2016, people in the U.S. are 10 times more likely to be killed by guns than in any other developed nation, according to CBS News.
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About the writer
Ewan Palmer is a Newsweek News Reporter based in London, U.K. His focus is reporting on US politics, domestic policy ... Read more
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