Greetings, Lowdowners—Deanna here!

Last week we gave you the pesticide hearing story — Willie Nelson, Barbara Jordan, and a fight Hightower and his team won by building a movement before he ever needed the movie stars. This week, we’re going back further. All the way back to where the whole populist tradition in this country actually started.

Here’s Hightower telling it: in the 1870s, four farmers in Lampasas, Texas, were getting squeezed out of existence. Railroads gouging them on getting crops to market. Bankers gouging them on their mortgages. So they did the only thing they could — they sat down around a kitchen table and started talking about it.

That conversation didn’t stay in Lampasas. It spread to neighboring counties, then across Texas, then into 43 states. It elected U.S. senators and members of Congress. It built cooperative banks and grain storage so farmers didn’t have to sell at the bottom of the market just to survive. Historians call it the Populist Movement. Hightower calls it people figuring out they had to organize or get run over.

We’re telling you this story right now for a reason. Tonight, Hightower’s on the main stage at the Texas Democratic Convention, introducing a candidate he’s worked with for years: Clayton Tucker, who’s running for the same office Hightower once held — Texas Agriculture Commissioner.

Clayton’s from Lampasas.

No one planned that. Texas just keeps producing people who grow up with that kitchen table in their blood and decide to do something about the Powers That Be. Clayton’s campaign is built around the same basic fight those four farmers were having: rural Texans getting run over by power they have no say in. Corporate data centers draining water and electricity from small towns that never got a say. Federal regulators sitting on tools Texas ranchers need right now to fight the New World Screwworm, leaving the state to fight it understaffed and underequipped while the threat spreads. Different villains, same basic math — somebody with more power than you, making decisions about your land and your livelihood from somewhere else.

Almost a hundred and fifty years on, same county, new fights, same fight.

This is the kind of connection-the-dots storytelling our paid subscribers get from us regularly — the history that explains the present, not just the outrage of the week. If you’ve been thinking about upgrading, this is a good week for it.

Thanks for being in the fight with us, as always!

Jim Hightower's Lowdown is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jimhightower.substack.com/subscribe