×

The video cuts from Dana Loesch—in a dark-red top, dramatically backlit against a dark-blue backdrop—to black-and-white footage that suggests the placid ’50s and the unrest of the ’60s. “They use their media to assassinate real news,” she begins, not bothering to explain who “they” are. “They use their schools to teach children that their president is another Hitler.” Each word is punctuated with derision. “All to make them march. Make them protest. Make them scream racism and sexism and xenophobia and homophobia… The only way we save our country and our freedom is to fight this violence of lies with the clenched fist of truth. I’m the National Rifle Association of America, and I’m freedom’s safest place.”

As a girl, Lori-Ann Planthold had sleepovers with Dana. When she catches a glimpse of her sweet junior high friend as the new spokeswoman for the NRA, she can barely recognize her, has to dig out a yearbook to be sure. The super-curly hair is now glossy and straight, and her thin lips are plumped; even her mannerisms are different.

Jason Granger flips on his radio, hears a woman’s voice, and does a double-take. Is that Dana Eaton? From the Meramec college newspaper? It sounds an awful lot like her…except that this woman is raging against ideas the Dana he knew cherished. He listens to more sound bites, then shrugs: “I don’t fault people for their beliefs—but I do fault them for propagating hate and anger.”

Many of us change our political views, but it’s usually by increments, over decades. At the start of her twenties, Dana Eaton Loesch did an abrupt and dramatic 180 and shot forward.

She’s had quite a trajectory.

A plain, skinny little girl with a mop of untamable curls, Dana Eaton feels invisible, and she hates it. She takes it personally when the bus driver misses her stop because he doesn’t see her. At playtime, she swings, because it’s something she can do alone. When she was 5 years old, her mother summoned the courage to kick her father out, and now it’s just the two of them, and it’s really quiet. No more drama or chaos—but no company, either. Her mom’s working two, sometimes three jobs to avoid going on welfare. Dana’s in therapy, and writing out her feelings helps her sort through the muddle.

On weekends, they drive to visit her mom’s family, the Scaggses, in Annapolis, Missouri. A town of fewer than 400 people, it’s set at the foot of the St. Francois Mountains, fed by clear streams and surrounded by woods. Dana has a swarm of cousins there, fifth-generation Scaggses, and they all play together, crowd around the table for family dinners, watch one another’s backs. Envy jabs her like a straight pin.

Dana’s lonely but not shy; her thin body burns with energy. As a toddler, she cracked up her uncle Jim Scaggs by grabbing a hairbrush and using it as a mic. In the evenings, Dana’s grandpa pulls her into the recliner with him, sensing that she needs a friend. His rules for life are simple: You work hard, you get up every morning with a smile on your face, and you take care of your family. He was raised during the Depression, and in World War II, he saw other Marines whose bodies had been chopped into pieces. A God-fearing Southern Democrat, he’s raised 10 kids on not much money, pulling logs out of the woods with Missouri mules. Dana worships him.

Sunday nights, she hates going back to the city. By junior high, though, she has a few friends. She and Lori-Ann spend hours doing cartwheels on the lawn outside Dana’s smallish brick ranch house in Imperial. Dana’s definitely not popular—most of the kids think she acts like a know-it-all. Their teasing doesn’t faze her; she must have really thick skin, Lori-Ann decides. Dana always seems happy, always gets the highest grade on the test, always does the right thing—never drinks or goes to parties—and she’s really nice, not a mean girl at all.

Dana's high school yearbook photo

At Fox Senior High School, in Arnold, Dana moves closer to coolness. Gymnastics, track, and ballet have given her muscle, transforming her from skinny to lean. In her senior class photo, the wild curls are pulled back and her forehead is covered with a wide curve of bangs. Her smile seems a little forced, like she’s hating this whole thing, but she’s strikingly pretty nonetheless. Girls who don’t bother with the popular group assume that she’s in it. One classmate finds her “snotty and self-absorbed,” with an aura that says she’s better than you and doesn’t have to bother saying hello. Is it poise, or aloofness? the classmate wonders. Dana’s definitely more mature than the rest of them. She’s got a serious boyfriend, and they’re always together.

By the time she reaches St. Louis Community College–Meramec, she’s honed her social skills. Forging a “second family” with the college newspaper staff, she rapidly climbs to editor-in-chief, and the Montage wins multiple awards.

In the newspaper office, Dana dresses for comfort: jeans and T-shirts, nothing flaunted. Staffer Jason Granger finds her humor “somewhat sarcastic but not bitingly so—if you leave an opening, she’ll take it, but not a mean sense of humor by any stretch.” As an editor, she’s fair, never ripping someone’s work to shreds or trying to embarrass anyone. The only big argument erupts when the sports editor opens mail addressed to The Editor.

Dana takes her role seriously.

In her parting column, she writes, “I can not fathom the idea of not speaking in plural form. I would never omit my staff.” She uses “my staff” five times in that column, never “our staff” or “we,” and she ends grandiloquently, “When I close the door behind me on Friday, another chapter in the history of the Montage will close too.”

By then, she’s used her platform thoroughly. In the paper, she vents her fury at the notion that good drivers should pull over to avoid someone’s road rage: “I’m sick of letting the bad guy get by.” She finds the distribution of Gideon Bibles offensive: “I feel my choice has been taken away.” She defends same-sex relationships: “Who are we to judge what is ‘normal’ or not? Who are we to impose our own beliefs onto perfect strangers?”

Later, when she writes Flyover Nation, she’ll say her support for Bill Clinton ended in her freshman year of high school, when Paula Jones filed her sexual harassment lawsuit. But Dana’s still writing editorials in support of Clinton in college. “I don’t trust anyone enough to take their word for it,” she states early in the Monica Lewinsky scandal. “I don’t think Clinton did it. I think Lewinsky is a vixen.” Half a year later, she rails about how “Kenneth ‘no-life-Republican-conspirator’ Starr has wasted Lord knows how many trees to write 445 pages of absolute crap.” Bruised into cynicism, she tells readers to stop whining about morals: “Don’t you know that there ARE NO MORALS in politics?” Even after acknowledging that Clinton’s “a damn good liar,” she concludes, “You can hate me all you want to, but yes, I support a man who has protected my college funding and increased it, increased protective services for battered and abused women, supported funding for the arts, given tax breaks to middle and lower class families, signed the Brady Bill,” which established a waiting period before firearm purchases.

To speak at the 2018 Conservative Political Action Conference, Dana chooses a frilly lace blouse and black jacket and slacks instead of the previous year’s tight leather dress. Looking toward the press section, she says, raising her volume, “Many in legacy media love mass shootings. You guys love it. I’m not saying that you love the tragedy, but I am saying that you love the ratings. Crying white mothers are ratings gold.” The next morning on CNN, Alisyn Camerota asks how she could possibly say such a thing. Dana responds coolly, “Because it’s true.”

×

By 1998, when Dana reaches Webster University on a journalism scholarship, she’s chopped her hair to a pixie and pierced her nose. No longer editor-in-chief, she leaves little impression on journalism professor Don Corrigan, who sees none of the idealistic passion that fueled her fiery opinion pieces at Meramec.

Music, though, she’s still passionate about. Nine Inch Nails, Black Sabbath, Ministry, The Cure... At Meramec, she dated the newspaper’s handsome photo editor, lead guitarist in a band called Arsenic Orange, all the while strenuously insisting that she was a feminist, hated men, treated them badly, and never wanted to marry. Now she volunteers to interview a guy called Chris Loesch, lead singer of Full System Purge.

Seven years older than Dana, Chris is what a previous generation called “a ladies’ man.” He even has a famous pickup story about a nightmarish experience in which he just might have turned into a werewolf. His business partner, musician Doug Firley, has no idea why this works, but it does. When Chris shows up at their recording studio in Soulard with a lovely young reporter in tow, Firley invites her back the next morning for a Mardi Gras party. She demurs, says she’ll be hanging out with her boyfriend. But sure enough, on Saturday morning she shows up with Chris, and by Sunday she’s broken up with the boyfriend. Three months later, Chris and Dana are engaged, their ring fingers tattooed with each other’s Gaelic initials, and Dana drops out of college.

Both a little offbeat yet eager for the world’s attention, they’re the kind of couple who fall so hard for each other, they create their own ecosystem. They clash only over politics: Chris is a devout conservative, and Dana, though disenchanted, still clings to pacifism and a few other liberal ideals. With the birth of their child, though, a fierce protectiveness wells up in her, and many of Chris’ conservative ideas start to make more sense. The final turning point is 9/11, an attack on her homeland. “Thank God Bush is president,” she blurts.

She’s also returned to religion. Her warm, gregarious father-in-law gives off the vibe of a hearty outdoorsman, but he’s a revered pastor in the evangelical Church of Christ. Dana grew up more religious than her left-leaning mother, always looking up churches they could attend, but she distanced herself in her late teens. Now that gap snaps shut; she pronounces herself and Chris “nondenominational Jesus freaks.”

They have a big country wedding, and a musician friend, Craig Wagner, videotapes it, grinning when they play “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” at the reception and all the guys and girls line up on opposite sides. Friends from this time see Dana as sweet and accepting, Chris as forceful and edgy, spoiling for a fight: She bakes pies for family gatherings and swoons when Chris punches a guy after a concert because he won’t move out of their way.

Early on, they live out in the country, and Dana’s often home alone with their baby son. She complains often, and Wagner realizes that she’s “fearful, almost paranoid, about an army of robbers that’s going to come and attack her home.”

They move to the city, and Chris takes a job as production manager for the magazine you’re reading now. The sales reps can’t quite figure him out: He clearly wants to be a rock star, wears guyliner and black nail polish and chains, but his politics don’t match that world. As a former colleague puts it, he’s “more emo than all the women in the office put together.”

Firley concedes his business partner’s musical talent but gets tired of Chris’ evangelizing—“not only about religion but about politics, everything. Any idea he has is a calling, and he has to convince everybody else that he’s right.”

Dana likes to be right, too, but at this point, she’s softer about it. She freelances a few fluff pieces for St. Louis Magazine: travel to Vienna, a celeb lookalike, good picks for a Mother’s Day brunch—but in just one year, she’s styling herself D.E. Loesch and writing investigative pieces about a child kicked off a transplant list and an unsolved murder in East St. Louis. In a history of anarchists, she marvels at 19th-century strikers who managed “the shutdown of every branch of industry in a single day.” (Years later, she will rant about the fast food workers’ strike and make a point of ordering fast food to support their bosses.)

Dana’s editor, Elaine X. Grant, threatens dire consequences if she doesn’t meet her damned deadlines; she’s always late, with some weird bad-luck excuse. She’s a good writer, dogged in pursuit of a story, “smart—but not very thoughtful,” Grant says. “Her apparent need to foment controversy many times overcame her ability to separate the truth from the merely sensational. Once she believed something, she was like a dog with a bone; she ignored all contradictory evidence.”

Somehow Dana’s stories for SLM also wind up on her anonymous website, Anti-Radar, where she uses the pseudonyms Cat (for catalyst) and Momus (for the god of blame and ridicule) to test her new conservative outlook. “The internet felt like the Wild West,” she says later. “I could give as good as I got. I loved it.”

“While being a mother isn’t easy and I definitely have my Calgon moments,” Dana writes, “I ultimately think that the moms who talk about how they feel victimized by motherhood give other women a false impression of parenting. Yes, it’s tough. Did you seriously think that something which began by RAMMING ITS WAY OUT OF YOUR VAGINA was going to be a cakewalk?”

After the Loesches’ second son is born, Dana shifts gears, creating Mamalogues.com, an award-winning mommy blog that’s since been erased from the web. In it, she takes motherhood to heart but not in a cloying way; her husband, kids, and relatives are comic foils, and she’s frank about how annoying they can be. She admits pretending to be gassy to avoid sex with Chris and announces that they’ve taken up spanking because their 1-year-old was deliberately defying her by messing with the Christmas tree lights.

In 2006, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, eager to be hip, makes her a columnist. Her pieces—a little too blunt, a little too pat—make the paper nervous, so she’s consigned to cyberspace. In 2008, after a column on keeping firearms in the home, the Post ends the relationship altogether. She must have made the “little old blue-haired liberals” uncomfortable, she decides. But so what? Chris had urged her from the start to be more political; he told the Riverfront Times it would “grow the audience quicker.”

At a conference in San Francisco a few months later, chewing gum with blithe confidence, Dana tells a reporter about the reach of her blog: “I’ve gotten a radio show with it.”

The show is on KFTK (97.1 FM), and though she tells the RFT she’s always had terrible stage fright and “never in a million years thought I’d be doing radio,” program director Jeff Allen remembers her eager to do a show, insisting that she’s ready. He grins when she shows up with stacks of paper, backup facts for every point she wants to make. Soon she’s down to two or three pages. Listeners love The Dana Show so much, KFTK gives her a bigger day slot, bumping Sean Hannity later to make room. Allen teaches Dana to cut through the noise, get “a really good sense of what listeners care about, pick out two or three things that are worth talking about, and make it entertaining.” Ratings shoot up. She’s even surprising herself, he suspects, at how good she is at this. She poses for a publicity shot in a black rock ’n’ roll T-shirt and safety goggles, pointing what looks like an AR-15 straight up and sticking out her tongue.

The attitude works for her—most of the time. “She can get really passionate about something, to a fault,” Allen says, “and she’ll go places where she knows she’s going to get heat, and on the management side, you’re saying, ‘It probably would have been better not to go there.’” Also, she’s not exactly convivial. On-air personality J.C. Corcoran (now at KBDZ, 93.1 FM) works across the hall from her for almost five years, and he keeps trying to say hello, engage her in conversation. She just looks at him like he’s nuts. He gets so exasperated that one day he yells, “Hello, Dana!” through a megaphone.

Rather than bond with co-workers, she brings Chris everywhere; she’s always loved his chatty ease with strangers. “Station get-togethers where we had no spouses included—there was Chris,” says Carl Middleman of KSHE (94.7 FM). “She said she didn’t like traveling alone.”

(Dana declined to be interviewed for this story. After publication, she wrote, “I adopted the 'Graham rule' and requested to travel with my husband so people couldn't make up rumors about salacious infidelities, as they like to do. Perhaps some want to interpret my protecting my reputation as weakness, but considering how easy it is to spin a yarn about people, I'm frequently reminded why my choice is a good one.” She added, “I would always say hello to colleagues.”)

Wagner donates his services as web-master for Dana’s blogs because he knows that the Loesches “don’t have dough.” What he can’t understand is why they’re so defensive about being broke—and about their kids. One day, discussing the economy, Wagner says something like, “Look, we’re all struggling now. You have kids; that’s something you have to focus on”—and Dana slams back, telling him not to talk about her kids. It happens on another occasion: One mention of her kids and everything shuts down. He’s bemused: “We were just having a pleasant conversation!’” (After publication, Dana responded, “Mr. Wagner was always offered pay. He always declined. Not sure why he felt the need to omit this or exaggerate finances.”)

By 2008, there’s not much chance left for a pleasant conversation. Insisting that Barack Obama is a socialist and therefore a Nazi, Chris calls his supporters libtards and brownshirts. “You’re calling me a Nazi,” Wagner says wearily. Oddly, he and Dana never get into it like this, but he can tell she and Chris are “becoming the same person. It was a weird thing to be there for the evolution of it.”

Years later, long after Chris has left Shock City Studios, people are still talking about Dana’s transformation. “Over time, she put herself in a state of being mad all the time,” says Firley, “and it became permanent. The outrage got stuck, and she just scowled all the time. For a while, you thought, ‘If this is an act, I get it. You’re monetizing it.’ I would have respected her a lot more if she stayed normal and just said, ‘I play a bitch on air.’ That was always the question: Is this real? And we began to figure out ‘No, this is real.’”

After the mass shooting in the Capital Gazette newsroom, writer Shaun King tweets an old article in which the accused shooter said he wanted to smash the face of a reporter into concrete. King also tweets an old clip of Dana talking about mass media on NRATV: “I’m happy, just frankly, to see them curb-stomped… They are the rat bastards of the Earth.” He asks if she now sees why “it is disturbing that you said you want to smash the faces of journalists into concrete.” Dana says she was referring to reports being curb-stomped, not people. Then she says, “I condemn the recklessness and violence you encourage.”

In 2009, Dana uses The Dana Show to announce that she’s co-founding the St. Louis Tea Party. She and Bill Hennessy stand beneath the Arch and throw teabags into the Mississippi, protesting increased taxation and big government. (Two years later, they’ll argue and split, and Chris will take back his blue teapot logo.)

Now a strident talk radio celeb, Dana provokes extreme responses—sexual, worshipful, hateful. When someone implicitly threatens her kids, she buys herself a handgun, learns Krav Maga, decommissions her blog, and announces that she just might quit altogether. Word vibrates through the web, and Andrew Breitbart calls Dana personally, insisting that the safest place for her is in the spotlight and offering himself as an ally: “We will get through this.”

That fall, he makes her editor-in-chief of Big Journalism on Breitbart.com. He exults to the RFT that she’s “a stay-at-home mom who homeschools her kids; she’s beautiful; she’s smart; she’s fearless. She’s a pure rising star.” Introducing herself on the site, she says she no longer believes in journalistic objectivity; there is only “bias for agenda and bias for truth.”

In 2011, CNN offers Dana an additional gig as political commentator. But in January 2012, the network’s thrown into temporary shock, keeping her off the air for several weeks, after she speaks up on The Dana Show for the U.S. Marines who urinated on the corpses of Taliban soldiers. “I’d drop trou and do it, too,” she says. “That’s me, though. I want a million cool points for these guys.” (She dismisses the appalled reports of her comments as “disingenuous.”)

That March, Andrew Breitbart dies of heart disease. His successor, Steve Bannon, is less enamored of Dana. In December, she files a contract dispute in U.S. District Court here in St. Louis, accusing Breitbart LLC of sabotaging her career by binding her to “what amounts to indentured servitude in limbo.” She seeks freedom from her contractual obligations and “at least $75,000 in damages.” (The suit will be dismissed with no monetary settlement.)

No longer editing or blogging (she says her boys are old enough to deserve privacy), Dana does more and more guest speaking. At a Colorado gun show and rally in 2013, she delivers her own version of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech: “I too have a dream! I dream that one day our lawmakers will leave us alone! Let us do what we want! Stay out of my gun case! Stay out of my bank account!” (She later says the point of her speech was to illustrate that King’s permit to carry a concealed firearm was denied in 1956. “Gun rights are civil rights.”)

In 2014, Glenn Beck’s TheBlaze TV offers Dana a show, and the Loesches move to Dallas. KFTK continues to run The Dana Show in syndication until 2016, when its ratings begin to plummet. But the gossip Corcoran hears is that the St. Louis station “can’t wait to get rid of her” personally. This mystifies him: “She’s doing exactly what you want to do on air, and she’s—not a rising star, a shooting star! But they were having trouble getting her to cooperate with promotions and activities outside her three-hour air show.”

Early friends of the Loesches are definitely glad to see them go: “She espoused so much hate and vitriol and was such a controversial figure that the fact that Chris was still involved in Shock City—even though he wasn’t doing anything—was a problem,” says Firley. “The St. Louis music scene wanted nothing to do with him; they’d go record in Nashville rather than use us.”

Dana continues to construct her personal narrative, saying on multiple occasions, “I was a broke, unwed student from a single-parent household.” She rails against Whoopi Goldberg for trying to make a single-parent household seem OK and says it sucked; she talks about how noble her mom was for working three jobs and never taking food stamps, and how she, Dana, was “a statistic.”

In April 2014, Dana confronts her mirror image: Shannon Watts, a Mizzou grad and ordinary mom who founded Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America after the Sandy Hook school shooting. (“They couldn’t pick a name that didn’t sound like a porno title?” Dana asks on Twitter.) “Do you claim to speak for all moms?” she calls as she hurries after Watts, who’s holding a rally outside the NRA convention. “Would you like to correct the record when you accused me of being employed by the NRA?” Watts refuses to answer the barrage of questions, so Dana turns to her audience and shrugs: “I’m just one mom, and I was wanting to talk to another mom… She seemed like a lonely woman who sits in her driveway drinking boxed wine.”

×

Dana loves being a mother. She’s long had a fierce desire for the security of family—and for male protection. Her narrative is that she hated and distrusted men, but she always had a boyfriend, and she married at 20. She’s been guided along the way by a male history teacher in high school, a male newspaper moderator at Meramec, Andrew Breitbart, Glenn Beck, and, now, Wayne LaPierre.

With women, she refuses to indulge in automatic solidarity. “Take a Midol,” she tells critics. In her book Hands Off My Gun: Defeating the Plot to Disarm America, she writes that when Piers Morgan got fed up and threw a wad of paper at her, she “didn’t take it personally because he threw like a girl.” When a feminist author admits being uncomfortable with the assumptions of chivalry, Dana snaps, “I think it’s a luxury of third-wave feminism to complain about people holding doors open for people where her country, Nigeria, it ranks top in the world for female genital mutilation.” The Fox TV hosts all stammer at once, nobody quite sure how to follow that leap.

×

Dana is highly critical of women who play up their appearance, yet she does it herself, sometimes in black leather, sometimes in demure schoolgirl collars or lace. She politicizes her role as mother, weaving it into her public persona, then goes ballistic when anyone talks about her family. She likes traditional roles, tells her husband he has to call the repair guy because he is a man and that is his job. Fluidity seems to annoy her.

Early on, she defended gay rights. She now writes that marriage is “a covenant between a man, woman, and God before God on His terms,” a religious civil liberty reserved for those who share certain beliefs.

Of Chelsea Manning she tweets, “Bradley Manning is a male. No amount of overreaction from triggered progressive men will force me, a woman, to redefine my gender for him.” On NRATV, she adds, “Just because you get some boobs, and you put some red lipstick on, poorly applied, and a very poor smoky eye bad dye job, that don’t make you a chick.”

According to examples gathered by the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, Dana has categorized being transgender as a mental illness, “mocked transgender protections as creating a ‘crazy world’ and compared being a transgender youth to her own childhood wish to be a flower.”

When Dana is invited to be a guest host on The View, February 3, 2014, she opens up about her political conversion, saying that she realized she didn’t agree with big government and that 9/11 changed her mind about pacifism: “I had always thought, ‘Well, no one’s ever going to come over to the United States.’” She also tacks on, a little incoherently, “It’s the problem of what happens when people forget they should be kind.” Brow furrowing, Whoopi Goldberg asks: “Doesn’t that mean that the discourse we have about the things that freak various people out, whether it’s guns or abortion, should be held with a respect for each other’s views?” Dana agrees but adds a verbal shrug: “People want to see a show.”

×

Part of that “show” is stormy anger, torrents of it. The First Amendment is almost as sacred to Dana as the Second, and she’ll even extend its protections to the “godless left.” She defends the journalists at Charlie Hebdo; a farmer who wonders aloud whether African-Americans were “better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life”; a teenager who says gay people sicken him; a politician who insists that it’s rare for a victim of “legitimate rape” to become pregnant; a billboard comparing Obama to Hitler (although once Donald Trump is president, she’ll excoriate liberals for parallel rhetoric).

Her first book, Hands Off My Gun, comes out in 2014. “My family is from the kind of rural town on which lemonade commercials are based,” she writes. “Kids catch tadpoles and crawdads on gravelly river banks; they skip down the holler and run barefoot into the Qwik Mart with gifted change.” She’s moving toward a larger point—“People had [guns] in gun racks in their pickups, without any fear that a child might grab one”—and the lyrical prose is a perfect setup. But it’s quite a contrast to her offhand remarks in her twenties, when she emailed friends about her “hoosier family from the Ozarks (Gawd I love them)” and blogged about her aunt’s “giant yellow hillbilly teeth” and the town’s “alcohol problem” and her “kuntry family reunion…in the armpit of the Ozarks. Really though, it’s beautiful country out there, so long as you overlook a few lilly-white rednecks and my Aunt Paula’s hair lip.” (All this sounds mean until you find out that she compared her beloved grandfather to a cockroach because he just wouldn’t die. This is not a woman who softens her words.)

What’s consistent in the book is Dana’s trademark sarcasm and class resentment: She characterizes the “anti2A” lobby as wearing designer suits and having “catered rallies and New York-plated, chauffeured SUVs.” She calls “assault weapons” a “made-up kittens-and-dandelions term used by people who have no understanding of firearms. ‘Assault weapon’ has come to define any long gun that is black with lots of ‘stuff’ stuck on it. Handguns are not included, although once you affix a silencer on a gun, grabbers think it makes it ‘shootier’ and then you get into ‘assault-y’ territory.”

Media Matters for America points out multiple instances in which she quotes the Founding Fathers’ remarks about state militias’ being adequately armed and prepared for war—but applies them to every individual in peacetime.

The book is credited with turning the tide against gun control.

In 2016, she comes out with her second book, Flyover Nation: You Can’t Run a Country You’ve Never Been To. The cover shows Dana, pistol slung low on her hip, holding a cowboy hat on with one hand, hair blowing across her face as she stares up at a stormy sky. This book is credited with predicting the coastal–flyover divide that decides the presidential election.

Dana endorses Ted Cruz and even provides a bullet list of reasons she refuses to endorse Trump, but she quickly expresses loyalty to the new president.

As she’s preparing to assume more responsibilities with the NRA, TheBlaze TV cancels her show and rumors fly, so on the goodbye episode, Beck lets her don his Darth Vader helmet (she and Chris are huge Star Wars fans). “I know there’s some people in the media that are talkin’,” she says after the helmet shtick. “You and I are good friends.” Beck leans toward her, his cheek resting on his hand, and smiles: “We’re really good friends. I’m really glad that you’re a friend and you’re on our side. You’re super, super smart. I tell this to everybody here: Look, don’t ever fight with Dana. She will win. And with what we’re facing, the NRA is more important than ever.” She retains her cool poise; he gets a little teary. He ends by saying, “The future of everything, everything, is at stake.”

They show highlights of earlier episodes: Dana posing with a gun, saying that the goal for self-defense is “to make a mess for the medic” and winking. Dana playing a staffer at The Terrorist Guild, wearing a hijab and chewing gum as she tells a client, “It says here that you blew up a bus, but no one was killed, and your claim has been denied.”

In one of her Twitter volleys, Dana keeps demanding that comedian Michael Ian Black explain his dead-serious charge that the NRA is a terrorist organization. “Maybe you could ask the question in a different way,” Black suggests, “because I’ve tried answering in as many ways as I can think to answer. Your terrorist organization, the NRA, is dedicated to increasing access to the weaponry they know will be abused. That is your job. That is what you do.”

Early in 2017, the NRA promotes Dana from special adviser on women’s policy to special assistant to the executive vice president for public communication.

She’s been preparing for this role for a long time, rhapsodizing about the smell of a new gun and urging Americans to take responsibility for protecting themselves. In Hands Off My Gun, she says gun control lobbyists “go on MSNBC and flash whitened smiles and explain how more women should be left to the devices of brutes who would ravage them.”

In April 2017, she does the famous “clenched fist of truth” video and tells Fox News that the reaction to the video is “insane. Apparently me condemning violence is what’s inciting and dividing America.” She also takes on The New York Times, calling the paper “an old gray hag…that has subsisted on the welfare of mediocrity.”

×

In October, she opens another video by saying, “We are witnesses to the most ruthless attack on a president, and the people who voted for him, and the free system that allowed it to happen, in American history.” She says those who oppose Trump’s presidency, “slashing away with their leaks and sneers, their phony accusations and gagging sanctimony, drive their daggers through the heart of our future, poisoning our belief that honest custody of our institutions will ever again be possible.” But never fear: They will “perish in the political flames of their own fires.”

×

After bringing a New York Times reporter with her to a firing range, Dana confides, “Looking back, I think I always wanted to know that I was safe.” The Loesches’ world view has always had an us-versus-them quality, with Chris in the role of Dana’s protector. “Chris attacks anyone from her previous life who speaks out about what she was like,” says one observer. When a woman remarks on Facebook that Dana is nothing like she used to be, Chris goes after her with an army of Dana’s supporters. Pretty soon, the post vanishes. On another occasion, after he is briefly ejected from Twitter—ostensibly for defending Dana so hotly—Chris posts, “I will never stop defending my wife’s honor from lies and liars. It’s called being a man, a husband and a partner in life.”

Though Dana was, as she often says, “born for the storm,” she’s fierce about protecting her family from the gale winds her remarks whip up. You get the image of her galloping bareback amid thunder and lightning, Chris riding alongside to goad her stallion forward—and the boys safe and dry in the carriage with the family’s adored French bulldogs.

Clearly, Dana feels under siege—from enemies online, from marauding criminals, from the devil himself. “The first greatest lie ever told is that the devil doesn’t exist,” she’s said. “Evil is real.” She’s accused CNN of calling her a child murderer, Piers Morgan of attacking her family.

In October 2017—some months after her lucrative NRA promotion—she announces on Twitter that a man has called, threatening to shoot her in her backyard, and that another has threatened to rape her to death. She posts a photo of stuffed trash bags: “Spent my weekend preparing to move due to repeated threats from gun control advocates.” She adds a #MeToo hashtag, because she, too, feels threatened. “Some people on the left have tolerated sexism toward conservative women,” she tells Fox News.

There’s an outpouring of outraged support, even from Chelsea Clinton (whom Dana regularly mocks as the face of “white privilege”).

“Dana—this is all awful & unacceptable,” Clinton posts. “Those of us who disagree with you the strongest have a particular responsible to strongly condemn.”

× Dana - this is all awful & unacceptable. Those of us who disagree with you the strongest have a particular responsible to strongly condemn. https://t.co/jJXk9VB54p — Chelsea Clinton (@ChelseaClinton) October 16, 2017

Two months later, the Loesches move from a $750,000 home to one that lists for $1.9 million in a gated community of the same Dallas/Fort Worth suburb (one of the wealthiest in the U.S.).

In February 2018, Paul Guyot, a St. Louis–based screenwriter and producer known for his work on Geostorm and NCIS: New Orleans, tweets, “Dana Loesch came to me 10yrs ago pitching a sitcom starring herself: “A hot young mom who does far right radio show.” Said her age & looks would make 1 side hate her & 1 love her so everyone would watch. Was obsessed w the potential fame & money. I turned her down.” Bill Maher picks up the tweet and runs with it.

× Dana Loesch came to me 10yrs ago pitching a sitcom starring herself: “A hot young mom who does far right radio show.” Said her age & looks would make 1 side hate her & 1 love her so everyone would watch. Was obsessed w the potential fame & money. I turned her down. — Paul Guyot (@Fizzhogg) February 22, 2018

“I once received an unsolicited offer of unwanted assistance from someone in California we did not know, my agent did not know, that wasn’t of interest to us and wasn’t pursued,” Dana tweets in response to Guyot. Chris tweets: “That story is a lie. He pitched a reality show to us based on mamalogues. We had no idea who he was. We told him no and he still tried to be friends.”

He may have; Dana produces a LinkedIn invite that says, “Though I failed at making you a TV star, I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn. – Paul.” But in an email to Wagner on September 9, 2006, she wrote, “Also (please keep it on the downlow) Mamalogues may be a primetime sitcom by spring. Nothing’s certain yet, we’re still in the meeting phase. DUDE!” On December 27, 2006, she writes, “We’ve also had good news on the sitcom front: VERY positive feedback and a lot of people are wanting to attach themselves to the project.”

A different offer, perhaps?

At any rate, she pronounces Guyot a “Weinstein-wannabe skeeze”—which, for Dana, is mild. She describes Amy Schumer’s “Michelin Man rolls spilling over the top of her underpants” and U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein, now in her eighties, as taking on “the posture of a cocktail shrimp.” Neil Young sounds “like a bloated cow farting and dying all at once.” After the San Bernardino shooting, she tires of “tragedy dry-humping whores.” Listening to Democratic Socialist candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez reply to a question is, Dana says, “like trying to watch someone put word magnets in order on the fridge.”

She’s always been fearful, never timid. Dana comes out full force and doesn’t waver.

She shows no curiosity about other perspectives, only scorn. In a 2008 blog post, she explains: “When my emotions run high I have to work very hard not to verbally eviscerate people, even if they have nothing to do with my problems.”

There are examples.

After Kayleigh McEnany (now spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee) announces in 2016 that you can’t be a true conservative unless you support Trump (at the time, Dana most definitely doesn’t), Dana says on The Dana Show [about three minutes into the clip]: “Babycakes, this [election is] more than going on television and flashing them pearly whites and your flat-chested, red-dressed, over-sprayed bleach blonde hair while you sit here and you preach all this stuff about who is or isn’t a conservative.”

×

When Dana is informed that McEnany has chosen to undergo a preventive double mastectomy, she doesn’t flinch or apologize, just brings out her own bona fides, saying she’s watched every woman in her family die a horrible death from cancer. “I’m sorry for the struggles she had,” Dana writes to The Daily Caller, “but perhaps being the ‘victim’ of my words can give her an insight into the kind of harm Trump’s words inflicts on others.” On air, Dana says, “I’m just doing it the Trump way: You come at me, I’ll come back at you three times as hard. You like it now? Because I can go harder.”

You wouldn’t hold the “flat-chested” slip against most people, because it would be a single stray, horrible mistake. But Dana insults people so freely, and in such playground-taunt style, that it was a mistake waiting to happen.

In 2009, she tweets, “Meghan McCain’s idiocy offends me. Someone throw her a bottle of bleach and lip gloss to shut her up.”

×

In 2014, when actress Kristen Bell reminds women on Twitter that they own their ovaries, Dana responds, “If Bell were to go into politics Megan McCain would be the smarter blonde. Let that simmer.” Stung, McCain asks why the “mean girl” remark.

× If Bell were to go into politics Megan McCain would be the smarter blonde. Let that simmer. — Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) March 20, 2014

“It was the closest I could get to a compliment,” Dana slams back. And when McCain calls it “intentional and some kind of snide hit at my intelligence,” Dana replies, “Yes, it was. I’m impressed you picked up on it @MeghanMcCain. Did you search your last name?”

You can’t make too much of these public spats, though; over time, they start to feel like World Wrestling Entertainment. In 2017, when McCain leaves The View, Dana mourns her departure online, calling her an “incredibly sweet and genuine person,” and McCain responds, “Thank you so much for the kind words Dana! And thank you so much for you and @ChrisLoesch’s constant support and friendship.” She even adds a heart emoji.

× Thank you so much for the kind words Dana! And thank you so much for you and @ChrisLoesch's constant support and friendship. ❤️ https://t.co/UgvDNSPvdY — Meghan McCain (@MeghanMcCain) September 22, 2017

Dana’s spat with Piers Morgan starts when a British soldier is hacked to death with knives in broad daylight. “Was the guy with the machete a member of the NRA?” she tweets. “Asking for a friend.”

“There is a time to shut up with stupid political wisecracks,” Morgan replies, “and this is one of those times. Show some bloody respect.”

Morgan eventually unfollows her and bans her from his show. “Classic. @piersmorgan bans me from a show no one watches,” she tweets.

When people say they don’t mind being shunned by Dana, she insists that they do. Or, she insists that she doesn’t mind being shunned, then makes up later and says, as she will to Morgan 236 days later (when he finally takes her back on Piers Morgan Live because their producers are friends), “I knew you couldn’t quit me, Piers.”

She will argue any point, but she cannot stand to be wrong or contradicted or ignored. “Bring it, coward,” she’ll tweet. “Don’t block me, coward.” People who dare end a protracted exchange by saying they’re “bored” are corrected instantly: They’re “owned.”

With friends, Dana is nothing like this. Leigh Wambsganss and her husband watch Fourth of July fireworks with the Loesches, grinning at the giant unicorn that takes up as much of their pool as the giant duck in the Wambsgansses’ pool. Dana’s fun, Wambsganss says, “not a prima donna at all. She’s a lot more down to earth than a lot of people who aren’t on national television. And she’s one of the most sweet-hearted people in the world: When I was in the hospital last year, she said, ‘What can we do?’ If I have a problem, she’s one of the first people I talk to.”

Dana’s advice, Wambsganss adds, “is always godly; it comes from a biblical perspective, and it’s steered by kindness and love and strength. That makes it all the more infuriating when she’s treated horribly in the public sphere. What makes me maddest is when people accuse her of not caring about children. Dana would do anything for anyone’s child. The anti–Second Amendment people that are so far out of the mental sphere are just—they’re just evil. It makes me want to dive in for her, because she’s standing in the line of fire.”

Luckily, she’s strong, Wambsganss adds: “She’s not a woman who cares about being popular.”

And yet she is.

When Wambsganss visits the NRA convention, she sees “a lot of stars there, a lot of the people we love, but the longest line was for Dana. People who know the truth love her.”

On Fox & Friends this June, Dana announces that the incivility in this country comes from “individuals on the far left who have no better way to respond to policy disputes than with violence, than with incendiary rhetoric.” She says it’s Democrats who “whip up emotion when they can’t offer anything real in terms of policy. While Trump and Republicans were talking about jobs and trade and health care, these individuals were out there telling people what bathrooms to use, and screaming about Russia and everything else, none of which has come to fruition, by the way.”

Dana’s is an unusual combination of high emotion and cold sarcasm; thick hide and defensiveness; scrappy provocation and dismissiveness. She tweets a regular reminder: “I read all hate mail & Tweets in a sponsored segment on my nationally syndicated radio show and use the profits to purchase more range ammo, (got a new Sig with it, too) and put in the plate for Jesus on Sunday. Let your hate work for me. Thank you. #DanaRadio.”

“When she knows she has just upset someone, she will laugh,” Ben Howe, a friend and former colleague, tells The New York Times.

She can write sentences like “When a policy debate begins with personal attack, it lacks any potential to be a serious, thoughtful discussion.” But she slides fast into personal attack. She’s capable of nuance, but she’ll abandon it in a heartbeat to present, in stark black and white, what people love as endangered and what they fear as encroaching.

Is it money that drives her? Couldn’t have been, initially. Who would expect to make millions starting out as a conservative mommy blogger, even a rock ’n’ roll one? These days, though…. “Just last week, I was up at 3 a.m.,” says Corcoran, “and I flipped to some station, and there was Dana doing a beet juice infomercial, half an hour long. I watched the whole thing, kept thinking she’d show some sense of irony. Nope. Serious as a heart attack.”

She’s even more serious about her political views, which seem every bit as heartfelt as the liberal rants of her youth. Maybe she’s simply found, like comedian Lewis Black, that genuine anger and frustration presented in a public forum can be profitable.

Pinning the opinions of a woman this independent on her husband, Bill Clinton, and 9/11 seems a little, to use one of Dana’s favorite words, disingenuous. But in the context of her hunger for home, security, belonging, and inviolable truths, the opinions make sense. And her temperament’s always tipped toward sarcasm. Her uncle Jim Scaggs still can’t figure out where all that anger came from: “The things that fuel Dana are probably things that happened later in life,” he says, “not in our neck of the woods. Dad wasn’t like that. None of the siblings were like that.”

She takes aim at other conservatives, too. (She was thoroughly disgusted by those who fell for Sacha Baron Cohen’s Who Is America? pranks.) But she’s hewing pretty close to the NRA’s party line these days. She’s breezy about the release of blueprints for 3-D–printed guns, referring to “what Democrats call ‘ghost guns’ and the rest of us simply call freedom and innovation.” After the August shooting in Jacksonville, her response is to call for an end to gun-free zones.

In moments that count, Dana stops jousting and gathers the likeminded close. At the 2018 NRA meeting, she addresses the crowd warmly, saying, “You know what, family?”

She’s found that sense of belonging again, the feeling she had with her cousins, at the college newspaper office, mothering her children, being mentored…

“They don’t hate guns; they just don’t want you to have them, because they think they’re better than you,” she continues. “I’m proud to own a buttload of guns. I’m proud to be carryin’.” Gun owners delivered the presidential election, she says, and the job’s not done yet. “The fight isn’t at the federal level anymore. It is in your backyard.

“There’s a storm comin’. But you all are the thunder.”

×

Sources for this profile include Dana Loesch’s books, radio shows, TV shows and guest appearances, colleagues, relatives, and friends. After multiple attempts to contact the Loesches, we sent a letter by old-fashioned post, using the address on public record. Many weeks later, Dana’s executive producer emailed to say that she would not be cooperating and pointed out that the letter had been mailed “to her new home, which we feel puts her family at risk.”

Update: This article has been updated to reflect Dana's response after publication. "I was a terrible liberal once upon a time, and in the beginning of things, quite harsh," she emailed. "Age, the wisdom that comes with it, and watching kids grow changes a person."