Dana Loesch - Flyover Nation: You Cant Run a Country Youve Never Been To

I n the summer of 2004, as I was juggling a baby and freelancing on the side, President George W. Bush was barreling toward reelection. Democrats were beside themselves that Teresa Heinz Kerrys uncharismatic housewife, John Kerry, couldnt run away in the polls against a man they hated with every ounce of their withered, coexist-bumper-stickered souls. Not only were conservatives still popular, but President Bushs wartime brand of God-fearing Midwestern conservatism gathered applause at every campaign stop (though the big spending and expansion of government would later tarnish his legacy due to Tea Party criticisms).

Thats why they pushed a near nobody named Thomas Frank onto the best-seller list and kept him there for nearly five months with a book called Whats the Matter with Kansas? Frank had traveled around his familys home state trying to discover why liberals were not popular in a state where Democrats had ruled a century before. His book got some things right, like the disconnect between many Republicans in Congress and the citizens they claimed to represent. He got bigger things wrong, however, like his thesis that those citizens would eventually realize their opinions were all wrong and would turn into progressives exactly like him.

Whats remarkable about the book, though, isnt where he ended up; its where he started. The coastal city dwellers knew so little about people in a state like Kansas that they were eager to read the ramblings of anyone willing to go there and translate. They were as curious and ignorant as Columbus sailing for the New World, and those coastals turned a book about malls and cornfields and cities too small for Minor League Baseball fields into a best seller.

This book is just one example of a media strategy weve seen employed countless times before and since: Send a reporter out to Murica and see if he can explain what the heck these people do without Cuban-Indonesian fusion restaurants, appletinis, juice bars, and SoulCycle.

This would all be funny if the coastal elite didnt run this country.

Whenever coastal snobs lecture the rest of America about a problem that requires social engineering, that problem resembles what the rest of us call real life.

Growing up, I never viewed church as some sociological, political force, some graceless entity that required containment, something that extended beyond a simple moral code that every successful society needs to achieve success. Church was the place we heard the preacher tell us that despite our imperfections, we were still loved. It was the place that dispatched a shepherd of God to hold my grandmothers hand when she was too proud to weep and make it right with Jesus in front of her family on her deathbed. It was the place where people came together after my grandmother died and cooked hot meals for my family, who were too distraught to think of much else. When the patriarch of our family finally fell away, it was church people, the congregation, who surrounded us, comforted us, made the day-to-day functions of living a little more tolerable in a sea of grief. It was where baby showers were held for the preachers daughter and for the daughter of the congregation who became pregnant out of wedlock. It was the parking lot where the turtle races were held during the summer festival.

I also never viewed guns as an epidemic. They were what brought venison sausage to my familys table. They were what protected my life and the life of my family members one late-summer night as I slept in Grandma and Grandpas bed. A mile away my aunts estranged husband tried to kill her and threatened to follow her to my grandparents house as she raced through the dark woods in nothing but a nightshirt to escape. It was the silhouette of my navy-veteran grandfather and his shotgun on the moonlit porch that ended the threat a full twenty minutes before the law arrived. Guns were what gave me safety and peace of mind while raising two babies in St. Louis when my neighbors and I discovered that a drug den had opened down the street.

The military is what one of my cousins admirably did after high school graduation, not some ridiculous topic of imperialism that hipster-suited coastals debate sans experience with authority at cocktail parties in our nations capital. The summer before my sixth-grade year our family threw him a party on the riverbank, replete with a huge bonfire. Every night I watched the news about George H. W. Bushs campaign in Iraq because it felt like we were tracking my cousins movements on TV. My grandfather had been a gunner on the USS Alabama and with some prodding would tell fascinating tales about his time at sea. There isnt a family in Flyover Nation without military associations.

Caring for the environment is what my grandpa and family did every day, tending to cows, preventing overgrazing, growing crops, and controlling the predator population so that the population of each woodland denizen was at a healthy level. Mismanaging the land might mean your family went hungry for a season or you didnt have meat in your freezer. Thats true conservation, not the religion of recycling preached by coastals whove never had to live off the land in the way that Flyover has for generations. People in Flyover develop a reverence for the land and wildlife in their care. Even now I can say without a doubt that southern Missouri is one of the most beautiful places on earth, if not the most beautiful. My childhood memories are of running through fields during the golden hour as the sun set, eating fresh watercress from the spring, catching tadpoles and crawfish in the Black River, going to bed with a belly full of venison and the smell of a wood fire in the air. You ask me to describe heaven and thats what Id tell you. Its miles away from the freakish image coastal elites have concocted of Flyover.

When people in Flyover identify a problem, its usually a problem theyve seen up close. So we create workable solutions. What we consider problems and what coastal elites consider problems are vastly different things. Ive noticed on the East and West Coasts, whenever a problem is identified the solution is always to appeal to government, and the more the solution costs, the better the solution. Not to mention that these solutions always include some limitation of the rights of others. A criminal illegally obtained and used a firearm to commit a crime? Certainly we must pass more restrictive gun laws for the law abiding to follow and the criminals to ignore! When the subject of gun homicide arises, the solution from the coasts is to always penalize the only people who actually go and get background checks and dont unlawfully carry. It never includes waging a campaign against the corrupt judge who reduced a felons unlawful-carry gun charge to mere probation, which let him back on the street to reoffend, or disbarment of the judge who reduced a ten-year prison sentence for a straw purchaser to 180 days house arrest. Increasing background checks on private, in-state transfers isnt going to impact criminal possession when criminals are barred from carrying anyway, much less purchasing. Not to mention that the message is contradictory: Everytown, a Michael Bloombergfunded antiSecond Amendment group claims its about saving kids, yet its political director, Matt Burgess, is also the political director for Planned Parenthood. Some reasoning Olympics must be involved to justify that contradiction. Perhaps the goal is to achieve fewer victims of gun violence by ensuring fewer of them make it out of the womb. But just do something, they implore.