Fiery conservative Dana Loesch gave a speech to the Conservative Political Action Convention today, in which she warned Democrats that unless they embraced the legions of blue collar gun owners in “flyover country” they would continue to lose Presidential elections.
Mrs. Loesch, who was recently appointed to be NRA jefe Wayne LaPierre’s point person on public communications, asserted that working class voters in Appalachia and the Midwest (“flyover country,” as she called it,) delivered the 2016 presidential election to the GOP because they were tired of being lectured to and ridiculed by Dems who had taken this once-significant segment of their coalition for granted.
She decried “one-percenters who want to outsource to firearms to someone else because they think it’s…virtuous to be a victim….” She continued: “Do you know why Democrats lost in November? Because these [working class] voters were worried about how to put food on the table. How to pay premiums. How to keep the lights on, how to keep jobs…. They got lectured to about who could use whose bathroom. Lectured about everything that has nothing to do with vital necessities of day-to-day life. That is why Democrats lost.”
As a nod to her new employer, Mrs. Loesch touted the National Rifle Association as the nation’s original civil rights organization, dedicated to protecting the constitutionally protected natural rights of Americans. She stressed the organization’s diversity, noting her own Native American heritage and describing Maj Toure, the founder of the gun rights organization Black Guns Matter, and the predominantly LGBT gun rights group Pink Pistols as “the face of the NRA.”
She returned to the working class theme repeatedly, at one point mocking an article in the New York Times that urged Democrats to run further to the left in future elections. “Only way they’ll win is if they figure out how to run Jim Webb!” she declared, referencing Ronald Reagan’s former Secretary of the Navy, who represented Virginia in the Senate as a Democrat, and briefly challenged Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016. She also recounted a very personal story about how her grandfather protected her aunt with his shotgun after she was attacked by a violent ex-boyfriend.