Editor’s Note: a guest post from the ever-peripatetic Louisiana conservative activist Jensen Young…

Like many Louisianans who are in career transition I spent a majority of the week in the Dallas Fort Worth metroplex. I’m glad to be in Shreveport and headed farther south later today, I had some thoughts from my trip and last weekend to share…

• Our free market and libertarian minded generally bigger city Republicans need to spend more time talking to our faithful rural church going protestants in the woods and vice versa. The fact is putting a 2^nd Amendment that is even perceived to threaten either the church, traditional marriage or guns will be defeated in the woods every time. I’m going to try not to violate Reagan’s 11^th Commandment like some might be tempted to do here, we don’t need to return to the days of electing Democrats in Louisiana. We do need to realize the members of the Republican voting coalition family in our state can be very different in Metairie than in Monterey.
• Given above, the next “Amendment 2” that is put on the ballot needs to somehow further protect gun rights, help us bring in an ammo plant or manufacture guns. I don’t know exactly which angle on this our legislature wants to geaux to, but it needs to happen.
• While I’d rather justify/defend going to DC Mardi Gras amongst my Southern Baptist colleagues the rest of my life than deal with Dallas Ft. Worth traffic daily, they do a much better job on career transition than we do. A church once a month hosts a deal called FriscoConnect to “empower your job search” on the First Tuesday of the month that I went to was which was very helpful. While I had other meetings and didn’t make it, another church in Plano hosts a PIT Crew (practice interview teams) every Wednesday. Another church I did make it over to held a Southlake for a Southlake Focus group that was focused on networking and career transition. At the two events I mentioned they told me about resume help that was available on Fridays. Maybe the first project that our chambers of commerce and economic conservative friends and churches can work on jointly is making these kinds of resources available at willing church hosts in Louisiana. The two events I went to were at faith-based venues, which was one of the reasons I felt more comfortable going over there and checking them out.
• I saw President Trump is working on tariffs. If we are going to go down this road maybe somebody should try to get RFK Jr and some others in the Trump administration to explain that a Big Mac is healthier than Chinese Crawfish and tariff them appropriately. It might be a little too fast to put together a Gulf of America seafood boil on the White House lawn for Good Friday for Lent, but somebody should work on that so we can sell more Louisiana Seafood products to our friends across the country.

I hope this finds you well and hopefully these suggestions can help our state and country.