Friday Signpost: Rebuilding Texas, One County at a Time

Hightower sits down with Texas Democratic Party Chair, Kendall Scudder

Note from DZ: We’ve become great admirers of Kendall Scudder, who has been the Texas Democratic Party chair since early 2025. He’s been a fearless fighter for the progressive populist resurgence in Texas, and now he’s rebooting his podcast, Pod Bless Texas. For the reboot, he invited Hightower to join him for his first episode. Enjoy! Go to podblesstexas.com to subscribe to the podcast on all your favorite platforms.

Transcript

(unedited rush transcript)

Kendall: Welcome to Pod Bless Texas. I’m Kendall Scudder here at the Pod Bless Texas world headquarters in Dallas, Texas. It’s great to be back, friends. Long time no see. I know I tried to bring it back for a little while. It didn’t work out, but we’re back again. And this time, I think it’s going to account for something. I really appreciate y’all tuning in. Lots changed since the last time we chatted. In case you haven’t heard, I’m a dad now. I’m the chairman of the state party. Got a lot going on. And just trying to kind of calibrate Texas as we move towards this kind of more perfect vision of unfucking it all. It’s what a journey. So here’s what I’m thinking. Let me know feedback.

Would love to hear what you think. But I feel like I’m kind of entering into this new season of my life. Maybe it’s the kid. I don’t know.

It’s a little bit less cheeky, a little bit more inquisitive. And as I’m going around the state doing the party building work to try to flip the state, I’m becoming more and more fascinated with the people that are doing the work, like not necessarily the politicians, not necessarily the ones that are holding elected office. They’re great, too. Most of them.

But some of them. A couple of them they’re good too, but it’s more about like the activists and the regular people who aren’t really a part of that power structure but have just been slogging for years and it feels like this could be the year if we do it all right that all that pays off. So my thought was let’s bring back Pod Bless Texas. Let’s not make it another podcast where every week we get on and we just rehash the news that you’ve already heard about and you get to hear our hot take on it and then we bring on a guest and you get to hear their hot take on it.

Instead, I’m a little bit more interested in hearing kind of who those people are and what they do and what drives them and what’s the work they’re doing looking like. We’ll get into news sometimes. And I can’t help myself. I’m sure I’ll bring a bunch of politicians on here, but my goal of this, I think, is to try to spotlight and work to highlight everything that folks are doing in every corner of the state because it’s pretty remarkable.

The last year, I’ve done events in 87 counties around Texas. And every one of those counties, I end up coming back home and talking to our old pal Lillian, who used to co-host Pod Bless Texas with me, and I’ll just say, “You will not believe these activists out in Jefferson County or in Webb County or, Brooks County or wherever I go.” And I just want you to be able to know who those people are, too, and to be a part of that journey with me a little bit. Because it’s a really exhausting thing to do. Running the state party.

And so I kind of think that this can be a fun outlet for all of us to get more acquainted with each other and know what we’re doing around the state. That’s my goal. I’m sure it’ll evolve. Let me know what you think.

But this will be the first episode bringing it back. And every week we’re going to try to bring you a new person in Texas that’s helping to make the dream work. And some of them you’ll like and some of them you may not and that’s okay. It’s a really weird coalition that we’re forming here to try to move this state forward.

At the end of the day, what I’m finding is that there’s this real shared moral thread in all of us that are doing this progressive political work. And it’s just that we think that every person should have an opportunity to do well. Every person should have that same chance at succeeding. And we might have different visions on how to get there, as in this party.

I’ve got people, from Henry Cuellar to Greg Casar and everybody in between, but all of them are understanding this shared vision and the importance of this moment that we’re in. And I just want to be a part of this journey with you. So, I’m bringing Pod Bless Texas back and I hope that it’s something worth listening to and something you’ll enjoy. And hopefully when we wake up after the election November, it’ll be a fun little documentation of all the people in Texas that have been slogging forward in this great journey that finally reached success.

And I’m looking forward to being in it with you. Our first guest today is a living legend that every time I’m talking to him, I’m just shocked that I even have the opportunity to sit and chat with him. And I thought he’d be a really good person to kick the show off. Commissioner Jim Hightower, who I’ll bring on in just a second.

If you aren’t familiar with Jim Hightower, I think a lot of people that are familiar with him know him because he of his activism in the Bernie Sanders campaign and Our revolution. He’s been involved much longer before then, starting as a legislative aid for Ralph Yarborough, legendary senator from Texas. And he also kind of became notable for his Doug Jones scale, not the senator from Alabama, but every time that people are trying to figure out if the economy is good or bad, they check the Dow Jones. And Jim Hightower says, “Why check the Dow Jones when you should be checking the Doug Jones and making sure that their wages are going up, that they’re able to feed their families, put a roof over their head, and if they are, then I think the economy is doing pretty well.

And if they’re not, then I think the economy is not.” And he’s a real great progressive populist that just does a great job of centering people on the issues that are important to him. So, I thought that he would be a really good person to kick off this venture. And so without any further ado, here’s my interview with Commissioner Jim Hightower. You know him because you’ve heard him on the radio.

You’ve seen him on television. You’ve seen him campaigning across this country for decades. He is everyone’s favorite populist Texan. Jim Hightower, welcome to the show, Jim.

Hightower: Hello. Great to be with you.

Kendall: Happy to be here. This is not your first time on Pod Bless Texas.

We got to hang out once with Elizabeth Warren at South by Southwest back in when we first kicked it off. Huh.

Hightower: Right. Yeah. That was fun. And it always is fun to be talking real politics. By which I mean not just the issues but the presence and the activism and the vibrancy of people taking action to as I say not take America back or take Texas back. We’ve already been shoved back by the Republicans to about 1858.

So let’s not go any further back. Let’s pull America forward. That’s the idea that I have.

Kendall: Yeah, that’s great.

And so before we get too political, I want to talk a little bit about who Jim Hightower is. I think you’re always doing these things and I don’t feel like anybody ever talks to you about who Jim Hightower is. They always talk to you about issues. Now you’re a guy from Denison, Texas, right?

Hightower: Yeah. How was that? Well, it was a real kind from I’m from a grassroots family of small business people dirt farmers. My father came off a harder than hard scrabble farm over in Kaufman County.

And built a little business with my mother that sustained my two brothers and myself in a fundamental way. I saw somebody the other day talk about well you know that to get rich you have to really be intense. You got to be focused on money, etc. Etc. No, what you got to have is Medicare.

What you have to have is social security. What you have to have is a good public education system. And I had all of that. So that was so I had a solid start as a kiddo.

And then had a good parents. Got to beware of Texans telling daddy stories but I had a pretty good one. And he was called high by everybody. That’ll give you some idea of who he was.

A fun guy. And they taught me basic values including you’re not any better than anybody else and nobody’s better than you. And that they taught me about the golden rule, which is still about as good a political philosophy as you could possibly have. And by the way, that is the fight we’re still making.

Can we implement the golden rule as a social norm again so had all of that, but also, grew up playing little league baseball. Batted 517 in my last year in little league. It’s been downhill since then, I’ll tell you. But I haven’t matched that again.

Kendall: I bet you could beat a bunch of little leaguers again.

Hightower: I was scrappy, as my coach used to say. Not terribly good, not fast, not big, but scrappy.

So, I carried that into my political career as well. And just and again had the advantage of a really good public school and then learned something else as a kiddo, which is that I was doubly privileged because of course I was white and male in a culture that discriminated against others. Let’s just put it like that. Now it’s not just black or Mexican-American, it’s others.

Anybody different is to be discriminated against. Well, that’s not the way I was taught and that’s not the way I think most Texans feel as well as being taught. But that we’re trying to build a society that really reflects our fundamental values which I think Kendall will come down to economic fairness, social justice, equal opportunity for all people. That’s pretty much it.

And that’s how I’ve tried to focus my politics but also just my life and it’s a fundamental belief and I think most people in our state and most people around the country I believe feel that way and we’ve got to put that back into politics. But not just into politics being elections like you’re trying to do with the podcast here. Let’s get out and meet people.

As I say, let’s put the party back in politics. We ought to have I don’t have political events unless they have music and have beer and have some food and some kind of lively just fun stuff going on. Politics ought not to be about committee meetings, and tedious, boring stuff, but ought to be about who we are, what we love, what we like to do, and rub up against each other a little bit, get to know each other. And that is a real politics, I think. And it was the founding by the way of the populist movement in our country which actually began in our state right up the road in Lampasas, Texas with four farmers sitting around a kitchen table saying we’re being screwed by the bankers and being screwed by the railroads and we got to do something cuz we’re going broke.

And that led to a massive political movement all across our country. That had solid progressive values throughout and that those values became the values of the Democratic party that we have today at base. But we’ve not been practicing that enough again putting the party back into politics putting the personal back in to it. I’ll tell you a quick story.

I went I was in Chicago a few years ago and was working out of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union, a old union hall. It was a four-story building on the in Chicago. And it was very interesting just to be in that building because first thing you know when you walked in there was like a bank teller desk set up there and that was because there was no unemployment compensation at the time. So the union provided a stipen for people who were laid off or hadn’t found work yet and etc.

So the union was active in people’s economic life taking having concern for how they were doing and doing something about it. Then you went up a floor and there was a library because they had to teach English to a lot of the people who were in the union and that those people needed access to books and that thing and the union provided that. Then you go up another flight and there was a dance hall a big ballroom that had beautiful murals painted all around that dance hall. They had three dances a week in that union hall and people loved it.

So the union was not it was not just a legal operation, a legal entity. It was a part of their lives and helped them to organize their lives and relate to other people. So that’s what I think that politics really is.

Kendall: It almost feels like we’ve just sanitized all interpersonal relationships out of the political space, right?

Hightower: Yeah. And you know the internet doesn’t help that either because it separates you even more. So I believe a lot in personal contact actually physical contact in politics that you ought to have a lot of functions that you can dream up yourself.

The best campaigns I’ve ever been in or seen are well like un not unlike what Bernie Sanders did. You know that I was very active in that campaign and we didn’t have bumper stickers at the start of that campaign. Didn’t have a lot of printed campaign material. So we said to our supporters, do it yourself.

Make your own bumper sticker. And so we had thousands of different bumper stickers that were very personal and very lively. People had a lot of fun with it. And so and that fun emanates, it spreads.

So if you’re into something that is fun, other people might want to join it, and if you had an organization that as a friend of mine put it once, he said it was invited by the that the Maryland Democratic Party kept in saying, “Come to our meetings. You need to come to our meetings.” And finally, he said, “if you’d pour a little red wine every now and then, I might come to one of your meetings.” so that has to be our attitude, I think.

Kendall: Yeah. So, let’s talk about how you kind of dove into politics.

Okay. We’ve never talked about this before. But you started as a legislative aid for Senator Ralph Yarborough. Is that accurate?

Hightower: Yes. Yes.

Kendall: How does a boy from Denison become a legislative aid for a legend like my wall behind me? How does become a legislative aid for a legend like Ralph Yar?

Hightower: A lot an accident. I went to as when I graduated from college at North Texas, University of North Texas. Went to Washington. Went to go to law school and I lasted there for a week and a half.

My legal career amounted to that. But was able to because of a friend of mine from the North Texas State I was able to get a job at the Library of Congress. She worked there in the Congressional Research Service and so I was able to go in there. So, I had amazing opportunity just fell into my lap of being able to work in one of the preeminent legislative offices that exist in America doing research for members of Congress.

Some of it was, mundane stuff like, what is the capital of Texas? That thing. Usually asked by member of Congress in Texas, what is her? So, that taught me a little bit right there, you know.

And they all gave you a different answer depending on what city they represented. So, but because I had that background and was developing, the research skills that were useful in a legislative office Yarborough had an opening in that office for a legislative aid. And I stepped forward and stepped forward with a couple of other people.

Henry B. Gonzalez was a member of Congress at that time. I believe the first Mexican-American to go to Congress from Texas. And he was interested in the same thing.

So just that opportunity was there. And I just I fell in naturally with those two particular members of Congress and the Senate because they had the same values that I did. They had the same perspective on what government ought to be and what a political party ought to be. So we were symbotico on the work that needed to be done but more importantly the attitude that need to be brought to that work.

Being a legislative aid, you think, well, by here I am at I’m at my desk now, and I and one of the jobs of a legislative aid was on you were in charge of certain issues that the center was involved in. And so you would get the mail from constituents that were inquiring about that issue. And so my first day on the job, here comes a little stack of mail and I pop up this letter and I think, wonderful. Isn’t this something?

This is democracy in action. A citizen wants to inquire with his member of the Senate on a topic of importance. And so I open the letter and it says, “Dear Peckerwood, so that was my introduction to democracy at its best.”

Kendall: See, we used to have legends like Yarborough and Henry B and you I mean you were the elected commissioner of agriculture for the better part of the 80s. We talk a lot about how to like how to solve the problem. What created it? How did we get here?

Like how did we go from that to this where you have just electeds who clearly don’t give two shits about the people that they’re representing? It’s all about donors and owners and you know pushing their that agenda through. And Texas have just kind of let it happen for 30 years. How what caused that?

How did we get here?

Hightower: Money happened. When I was elected in ‘ 82 one we ran unity campaigns in 1982. Ann Richards was running for treasurer, Jimmy Mattox for attorney general, Garry Mauro for land commissioner and me for agriculture commissioner and we ran together.

We campaigned together. Not always side by side together, but we meshed our schedules. So if I was going to be in McAllen, somebody was going to be in Marshall. And we could talk about each other.

So I didn’t just talk about me, but that’s also the importance of having a unity campaign is you could go to voters and say don’t just elect Hightower as wonderful and magnificent as he is going to be in office, but elect a ticket, elect four people at least in that case who are going to work together. So you’re going to be electing a government, not just an office holder. And we were people who did not believe in holding office. We believed in putting office to work.

To hold an office means you’re part of the problem. You’re just hanging on, you know. But put that office to work for the people that you appeal to elect you. And that make that makes a political appeal legitimate rather than just an ego trip.

So we did that and then we were able to govern together. I’ll just give you one little example. As agriculture commissioner I got a call one day from a group in Houston that represented Cambodian immigrants who had been able to come over to our country on a humanitarian kind of program because Cambodia was a mess at that time. And these people were in Houston trying to get a job.

And they were farmers. That’s what they did in Cambodia. That’s what they grew up with. That’s what they knew how to do.

But there they were in Houston, you know. And so I called Gary Mauro, who was a land commissioner, and said, “Do you have any land in Houston?” And it turns out he did. He being the state of Texas did, they own plots of land around that to come through various ways into the state government. And so they had a parcel of land in downtown Houston that was available.

And then I talked to Jim Mattox, the attorney general, and said, “Let’s look at the legality of this and what needs to be done.” And so we set up a co-op for these farmers to control their own little piece of property there. And then we worked with Ann Richards at the Treasury Department for her to be able to arrange some production financing just very small loans for those Cambodian farmers. And then we did the marketing. We went to Kroger and supermarkets.

And then we had also established a farmers market program so they could have a market for their product. So the four of us working together actually created a little grassroots little D democratic economy for those people. And you do that again and again. So it’s not just the grand program.

It’s often just the little thing you know that you can do with a group of people that really want to make something of themselves. And as I put it those kind of efforts were because there was criticism of course that well that’s just government getting involved in business. Government has no business in business. Well as I put it the free the word free in free enterprise is not an adjective.

It’s a verb. You have to free up the enterprise of people who are locked out of the marketplace or locked out of the ability to get capital or to get land or to get a start. And so that’s the purpose of government is not to own it or to run it, but to free up the natural enterprise that people have in them.

So in that ‘82 coordinated, which I kind of think is the last real successful coordinated we’ve had as Democrats in Texas. We’ve won some elections since then, but it wasn’t really a big coordinated effort where, this year we’re trying to bring it back and have an effort like that.

You credit kind of the coordination of your scheduling stuff on the successes of that. What kind of what did data look like then?

What like in 1982 when y’all running your campaign? What did it mean to have like did y’all have a voter file or something that you were able to

Hightower: it was handwritten on little cards, and put in a file box. So it was and the you know the instead of an internet you had the memoraph machine which was a mess lit to try to mess with one of those things. But so it was you know it was a little bit you know going all the way back to the pamphlete period you know that you did what you had to do and what was available to you and so that but it led to a harmony because it’s not just that we coordinated schedules but we coordinated our message that I wouldn’t do an event without saying, “And by the way, Jimmy Madison is going to be a hell of an attorney general, and maybe Ann Richards, her daughter Cecile, might be there at the event, and I would have her speak, you know.” So, it was that it was kind of a sharing of the campaign opening and process.

And so that’s not that easy in politics because you’re own little fiefdom, I’m running for this office and I’ve raised some money and I’ve got supporters and why do I want to give my list to this person over here, you know? Well, because they might make something of it that would add to the list and then you’ve got a bigger thing. So it takes a some instruction and sharing to the candidates themselves. But the party people the county chairs and precinct chairs all across the state the activists in those communities, not all of whom are Democrat, but they’re progressive activists on issues.

They all appreciate that. They appreciate the sense that it’s bigger than one person. Because it’s a lot of work to do a political campaign as you know so well. But if you do it together then it’s more fun too.

I think of a there was a little hardware store near my home here in Austin called Harold’s Hardware. It wasn’t one of these chains. It was just a little operation, but it was a great place. You could go in and they say, “What are you trying to do?” “Well, I’m going to build this desk.

Well, let’s pencil it out here and see what you need.” And then they would, if you needed one nail, you could buy a nail. You didn’t have to buy the whole box at Harold’s Hardware. And they had a slogan. The best one I ever heard.

It said, “ we can do it yourself. And that is the nature of my politics is that together we can do it yourself.

Kendall: I like that. That’s great. So we’re I know we’re kind of getting close on time and there’s a couple things I still want to talk to you about. We talk a lot, but every time we talk it’s always party business stuff. We don’t ever get to talk about the fun stuff. Yeah.

Kendall: I’m a big fan of the I think it’s the most recent book you’ve written, that 2008 book, Swim Against the Current. Was that your most recent book? So, I’m a big fan of it and I actually refer people to it quite a bit.

And so, Jim did not come on here to promote his book from 12 years ago, I promise. But, I or that’s more than 12 years ago. That would have been almost 20 years ago. But I’m a big fan of it because you don’t hear people in the progressive space very often talking about the importance of business, particularly small business, and what it means to have a small business.

And I’m just interested in like what your impetus was in creating that book and writing it. And like have you found that people often use that book as a resource in their progressive small business advocacy work?

Hightower: Yes they do because of the stories that I tell in it, the stories of people and so it’s it really is a story book and of how of real life economics and politics without the any of the academic complications that come with that but of people just trying to make a go of it. And again, I grew up in a in exactly that kind of a family.

The my folks ran the main street news stand in Denison, Texas. Sold school supplies, magazines, books, had candy bars, and cigarettes in those days. And, and, soft drinks, soda pop. My father bragged that he had the coldest Coca-Cola in the greater Denison area.

Such a great pride in having cold drinks. So, so but that’s a on a in a smaller town like Denison. You’re people on Main Street know each other. The community does.

For example, there’s a guy in a department store just three blocks down the down Main Street from my father’s store. And about every I think it’s about every 18 months, maybe two years, he would bring a pair of shoes up to my father and say here and my father would pay him. So he just had shoes delivered, because the guy brought them, he didn’t ask for them, but therefore he didn’t have to go down and try on shoes. The guy knew his size and knew the style he liked and just brought them up.

I mean, so it was kind of a community thing, in a lot of ways. And yet that community was constantly besieged by bankers who charged too high of an interest rate on the loans they had to have to stay in business. They were deceased by lobbyists in the Texas legislature and in the city hall that passed laws that well more frequently they did not pass laws that those people needed but listen to a handful of people and they had to deal with the monopoly power the Walmarts eventually coming in and driving small business and killing Main Street in the process. So those are real lives and real people and real families and real communities come out of that.

My father was a helped start the little league schools, not school system teams in our town. They’d found he and two or three other main street business people found a piece of property that they could get for nothing. It had been a dump actually. And so myself and other boys my age were first thing we did to play baseball was to clear the rocks off of the field.

So total community effort. Then my father coached the team. He ran the root beer stand after for the games, sometimes was the announcer on the PA system, so people were just involved, and again that had to be opened up so that black people in my town of Denison, Texas, I went all the way through school in segregated schools. And, that was an awakening cuz then I went to the University of North Texas to college, and sat next to black kids from my hometown whom I had never met cuz North Texas integrated early on, in Texas. So it’s a developing process, and that’s the importance of politics. If you want your society to be better, you want your life with your neighbors to be better, you can do it. But you’ve got to get together to do that to make that happen. So it’s my when I was then in office that I that again I didn’t want to just hold office I wanted to do something with it and I knew who I wanted to help.

You hear politician say well I stand for all the people of the state. No you don’t. You stand for the people who give you money. If you’re just a working stiff, you can’t get an appointment to see your sorry hide.

So, so you got to decide why am I in office? What am I trying to do? And in terms of let’s just assume you actually want to help people, then what people do you want to help? Well, the people who actually need it.

And that’s working people. It’s dirt farmers. It’s consumers, it’s people who have been left out of the system you know etc. And then you ask the question, what can I do that would actually help them?

And that’s a question you have to ask them. You we go to experts too often and say, let’s have the experts tell us what those people need, rather than asking the people what they need. They might have a pretty good idea. And yeah, and so get with them.

And so that you so we started a farmers market system, for example. Well, there were no farmers markets in Texas in the 19 early 1980s. There had been in the old days, but they’ve been driven out by the supermarkets. So, we hired a small staff and turned them loose on the state said, “Go see if anybody wants to create a farmers market that we will provide expertise, organizing and etc to help them do it.”, and it turns out everybody wanted it.

We had a hundred farmers markets with within a year through this program. We didn’t own them. We didn’t run them but we helped the people again turn loose their enterprise and set it up and it has made the those markets still exists and of course expanded I think we’ve got about 15 here in Austin alone and is because it’s neat it’s wanted the Dallas news when I was first running was a very right-wing editorial page at that and said, “Well, there’s Hightower again trying to use big government to intrude into the free enterprise system by setting up these farmers markets.” The people wanted farmers markets. The free enterprise system would have created farmers markets.

Never mind that the free enterprise system at that time were supermarkets who were shutting down farmers markets. So, so anyway, so we got together and we did it. And those still exist. I talked to a farmer at one of the local markets here in Austin.

And he said, “I really I know that you helped get this whole thing going and I want you to know I really do appreciate it.” And I said, “Well, how’s it working out for you?” And he kind of backed up and thought for a second and then said, “Well, I’m still poor, but I’m poor on my own terms.” And that’s a big difference, right there. So,

Kendall: It is a big difference. I mean, like that’s the piece of that book that just kind of really hit me. I mean, I knew it.

I just it wasn’t a lane I’d really spent a lot of time thinking about, but it was the concept of, you don’t start a business because you want to become stupid rich. You start a business because you want to sustain yourself and survive on your own terms, right? With that kind of independence and autonomy and you know we it feels like

Kendall: as a progressive movement being reconnected with that idea is really important because it’s not necessarily you know we hear the word business and suddenly it has negative connotations to it but the reality is these small businesses are you know people’s ability to not be cogs in this system anymore you know.

Hightower: Yeah. And to have a life that is not only economically sustainable but that is of a community that is larger than whatever your individual business is. And yeah that’s I mostly find that’s what people want. I personally never wanted never sought riches. I have spent a lifetime trying to avoid real work, but I’m perfectly happy to have a modest income in part because my modest income is then supported by social security and Medicare basics that too many people don’t have now and too many are losing again. So, so we have to stay focused on those essentials, but also the common good as my father put it. I guess I’m talking a lot about my father, but again, he was a pretty good one. And he didn’t know he had a political philosophy, he we he was he would he and my mother would vote.

They paid attention. They read the newspaper, that thing. But they weren’t active people. They were Democrats.

But he did have a profound political philosophy which he expressed to me in these few words. Everybody does better when everybody does better. And that’s what we’ve gotten away from in this country. Is the notion that a few billionaires can do extremely well and everybody else can just take the I mean it’s that’s all that the system is these days. Yeah.

Kendall: Okay. So, moving forward, we’re on the precipice of probably I know every year is the most important election of our lifetimes, right?

So, I mean, but we’re on the precipice of a really important one and Texas looks like it has lots of opportunity for. What is the advice you give first to a candidate that’s running in this cycle and second for an activist that is, slogging away to try to turn out voters around the state?

Hightower: Well, back to basics. Know why you’re so you have a clarity of message so it’s not something somebody wrote for you or AI wrote it for you but you actually believe in something and then stand up for it you know the John Mellencamp’s song, if you don’t stand for something you’ll fall for anything, you know is true so know why you’re running know who you’re running to help and then enlist people to come up with solutions for that. Your job is not to come up with all the answers, not to come up with all the proposals. It is to be a facilitator and a catalyst an avenue for people to be able to channel their interests and their ideas in into action.

And then that gets to the activists which is those are the people you to be organized and they’re not just the obvious ones. That we are not a right-wing state. We’re not a left-wing state. You know Woody Guthrie said right-wing, leftwing, chicken wing.

It’s all the same to me. You know that I care about, ordinary people being able to make a go of it. So, so I think that’s where most people are and then build a politics that has fun built into it in into your campaign. And that enlists people around fun.

Again, if you ask people just to come to committee meetings or just to do get out the vote actions, then that gets boring pretty quickly. But to make politics itself a community event, your own and others you can enlist and don’t be don’t take people for granted. There’s a story I tell that has a naughty word in it. But I’m going to tell it

Kendall: I’ll allow it.

Hightower: Campaigning in Tyler. And part of my campaign routine was I would go to courthouses to meet the local officials who would then let introduce me around to their staff. And these were people particularly a long way out from an election who paid attention to politics. Most people on the street were not paying any attention and didn’t want to.

But the courthouse did. So I went to this courthouse in Tyler, Texas. Beautiful old Smith County granite or red not brick is granite I think. Anyway, >> they got a lot of really pretty courthouses out there.

Kendall: Yeah. Court on courthouses in Texas for sure.

Hightower: So but it was lunchtime and so nobody was there. So but the a guy a lawyer was taking me around to meet some of the office holders. And he said, “Well, there’s this old judge up on the fifth floor. Let’s go up there and we he’ll be in and we’ll see him.

Said, “But don’t dump your whole load on him cuz he’s pretty conservative.” and so one of the issues I was running on was the high prices of natural gas that were just skyrocketing at the time. And by the way, that’s happening again, but that’s another story. So we go up there and here’s this judge. He’s cranked back on his feet are up on his desk and got his hat on and everything and listen to this punk kid come in and tell him why I should why he should vote for me.

And so I started so I’m telling my story and then I get to the punchline. I said, “Well, your honor, seems to me that a number of these gas utilities, they’re just not being quite fair to our consumers.” And his feet came off of the desk, hit the floor with a bang. And he leaned into me and right just almost nose to nose and he said, “Hi, Tower. In your private moments, wouldn’t you say they’re fucking us?” I said, “Well, sir, I would.” And I have, and I will some more.

And he said, “Well, then I’m going to support you.” So, he’s the conservative. Everybody said he’s the conservative. And so, people are not they’re people are not in Texas are not ideological. They have strong views but they’re generally populist progressive views.

You just have to bring that out in them and give that permission to step forward because most people don’t hate immigrants. They don’t even know immigrants or they do know immigrants as somebody that they work with and they don’t hate them. So a lot of this hatred is just manufactured politics, it’s not real life. And you’ve got to go beyond that hatred and talk about what is real life, to people whether they call themselves conservatives or liberals.

Kendall: You’re a former commissioner of agriculture. We have a guy running for commissioner of agriculture Tucker. What do you think about him?

Hightower: I think he is splendid as FDR would say. He’s terrific. He’s the real thing. He’s a farmer out of Lampasas, Texas. Solid progressive.

He was the organizer of the progressive caucus in the Democratic party, which is now the largest caucus in that party. Done the old-fashioned way, just going out and talking to people about common sense and issues that they care about and just, using your ears more than your mouth in talking to people. Clayton is very good at that. And so he knows the issues.

He’s taking on this major issue that crosses all kinds of political lines of the data centers that are being we have in about a 200 mile strip along I35 from basically Waco down to San Antonio. We have 70 data centers going in. It’s just massive consumption of water. They don’t know where the water is going to come from.

So they’re going to take it from us. They massive consumption of electric power that’s going to raise utility rates for regular people and also a massive assault on political power because they have so much money and they establish these huge data centers. So those become major political players in each one of those counties. So we have a lot at risk the state and we got to have candidates like Clayton who dig into this issue, understand it instinctively and then are able to talk to people about it and getting a lot of support from Republicans around the state who are offended by these invasions.

Kendall: Yeah. Well, Jim Hightower, I appreciate you taking time out of your day to chat. I appreciate you lifetime of service to the populist movement. We certainly appreciate you and we’re trying to pick up your torch and run with it to the best of our ability.

Hightower: Glad to work with you.

Kendall: If people wanted to follow you, the work you’re doing, you’re I know you’re still in Substack. You’re still going around.

Where would they go to do that?

Hightower: well, jimhightower.com is the website and the Substack if you… I didn’t know what a Substack was a year ago and now I am one. But it is jimhightower.substack.com.

Kendall: There you go. Jimhightower.com. It’s where you can go to track the current tom foolery that Jim Hightower is getting into. Appreciate you joining us today.