Dec 8, 2023
Jess Piper is a former teacher and candidate for state representative in Missouri and she is real bad ass.
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A career educator turned dogged but unsuccessful 2022 political candidate, Piper is still putting out her message, now by podcast.
The first episode of “Dirt Road Democrat” came out today. Piper focuses on the public education funding crisis in Missouri, but the challenges she takes on — teacher pay, vouchers, a war on the poor — resonant here, too. With the title “The GOP Attack on Public Education & The Grifter Economy,” you might expect it to be meaner. But this University of Arkansas at Fort Smith alum who taught in public schools in Arkansas and Missouri for decades lives on a farm and cracks jokes about dead chickens. No elitism here. Alas, her parents voted for Trump.
Piper, 44, is the card-carrying, door-knocking type of Democrat who hasn’t supported a Republican presidential candidate since the first George Bush, when she was still stuck to the ideology she was taught growing up. Raised in a conservative household and brought up in Fundamentalist Baptist churches scattered across the South, Piper has emerged as an unlikely voice in an unlikely place.
From Louisiana to Mississippi to Arkansas, Piper has lived in the most conservative corners of some of the country’s reddest states, and now she’s helping man the progressive front of a nationwide culture war in rural Nodaway County, where row crop is king and where conservatives win in landslides and where Piper raises cattle and chickens and children and fights for what she believes in every chance she gets.