Will Westmoreland (D): ….I want people to remember until the day they die that something that robbed health care from millions of Americans, took the food out of the mouth of children, and closed schools all over this country, those horrible things happened, and all they could think to name it was ‘The Big Beautiful Bill’….

Will Westmoreland, spoke at the regular monthly meeting of the Johnson County, Missouri Democratic club lats Thursday evening in Warrensburg. There were over sixty individuals in attendance, some from neighboring counties.

Will Westmoreland (D).

Will Westmoreland (D): …I went on to social media before the last election and, uh, we have 700,000 people following BackForty Action now. And I’m gonna tell you what I think it was and you tell me if you agree. I don’t think it’s because I’m super good at this. I think people would flip across a social media channel and they’d see this fifty-something year-old white farmer with a red Cardinals hat on….and I think they thought they were gonna get one message and when they got the completely opposite message I think it rewired their brain. And maybe they said I want to hear a little bit more from this guy….

Will Westmoreland (D): “….Have any of you ever read about the Grange movement? [voice: “No.”] Do you know what it is? If you, if you don’t know don’t be embarrassed ’cause most people don’t. Raise your hand if you’ve never heard of it.

The Grange movement was a political movement in the late eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds, even before the great depression, and farmers and rural people, tell me if this sounds a little familiar, they got fed up with monopolies. They got fed up with prices for all the inputs on their farm and their businesses in rural America being set by monopolies in the big cities and in other countries.

They got fed up because their kids didn’t have school books and textbooks. Not that they weren’t up to date, they weren’t funded at all unless the local community paid for it. And when you were dealing with the economic crisis they were dealing with in the late eighteen hundreds communities didn’t have the dollars in a lot of cases to do that.

Things were bad.

It was also the largest progressive political movement in the history of our country. It was so progressive that in the late eighteen hundreds they had African-Americans and women on their leadership boards across the country.

It was the largest per capita political movement ever to exist in the United States of America. And it started on the streets of Kansas, and the streets of Missouri, and the streets of Nebraska, and the streets of Iowa. In little towns of fifty people, ten people, a hundred people.

We did it once before, we can do it again. But we gotta get fired up. And if ever there was a time to get fired up it’s right now while our way of life is under attack. And I’m not talking ‘way of life’ the way the Republicans talk about it, which is the more white people walking down the street in rural America who foster the same Christian values as us, the better off we’re gonna be.

I’m talking about our real values. The values of diversity, and when people get sick they can get care in our little rural towns, and kids regardless of where they go to school in this country get the same opportunity, and you can open a small business and employ people and be prosperous, and foster, in a small town, just like you can in a suburb or a big town.

We can do that again if we have the willpower to do it. And I think we do and I think you think we do, too. But we’ve got to start today. We don’t have the time to sit back and wait for somebody else to do it for us….

Previously:

Will Westmoreland – Lafayette County Democrats – Higginsville, Missouri – August 9, 2025 (August 11, 2025)

4th Congressional District Democrats – Truman State Park – Will Westmoreland – October 5, 2025 (October 5, 2025)

Cass County Democrats – Back to Blue Dinner – Belton, Missouri – April 25, 2026 (April 26, 2026)