Join Hightower live on Friday at Farm Aid's Farmer Forum

Since its inception in the 1980s, Farm Aid has always been much more than just a spectacular festival with incredible performers—it’s been a hub of farmer and rural advocacy. Each year before the concert, they host an annual Farmer Forum to convene everyday people and rural advocates in one place to take on the challenges that face us all. The year, Hightower and Deanna will be co-emceeing the afternoon session on Friday, Sept. 20th.

The whole program runs from 9am - 5pm on Friday, and we’re looking forward to seeing friends new and old! Right before our sessions on rebuilding rural coalitions and rebuilding rural/local news, we’ll hear from the wonderful Maurice Mitchell, National Director of the Working Families Party (check out our interview with him in 2021 here, where he talks about despair as a project of the right, amen). You can come back here on Friday and click the video above to watch.

Speaking of rural news…

Our friends over at Barn Raiser have launched an essential newsletter that will cover the election and rural issues— subscribe to it here!

Just a few of the great stories they have coming down the pike include:

• A look at the dark money behind Moms for Liberty and other “parents’ rights” groups that want to abolish public education;

• How Project 2025 threatens the existence of public lands and would open Alaska and national monuments to plunder by oil and mining companies;

• An exposé of the Pentecostal sect that Donald Trump turns to for spiritual guidance.

Finally…

We’ve got a bunch more to share about the election and rural folks when we get back from Farm Aid! Lots of great stuff coming from the Harris/Walz campaign, who’ve named our friend Matt Hildreth of RuralOrganizing.org their national director of rural outreach. Matt’s bonafides give us a lot of hope that people in more mainstream parts of Democratic politics might actually be listening to the needs of rural people.

If you want to be part of the rural contingent that shows up for the campaign, we have loved collaborating with the Rural Americans for Harris folks—join their movement here.

Tonight!

Remember all of those different affinity group Zooms and calls for the Harris campaign, kicked off by #WinWithBlackWomen? Well, all the groups are getting together tonight, Thursday, 9/19, for one big unity gathering hosted by… Oprah Winfrey! And the rural contingents have been invited to represent as well, so we’d love to see as many of you there as possible to help show the campaign the strength of our numbers. Register here.