March 9, 2021, is when it really all began. That was the night that in excess of 400 people gathered in Valentine, Nebraska, to get more information about the federal government’s 30×30 plan.
We are coming up on one year later and I can tell you that the fact that President Joe Biden signed Executive Order 14008 on Jan. 27, 2021, did more to wake people up than anything I have personally witnessed in my life. In fact, in 2021, I spoke in 41 states to groups including rural, urban, Black, white, brown, young, and old and it has spurred interest in who owns and controls the land that produces our nation’s food supply.
Shortly after the success of that first meeting, I got a call from Valley County, Nebraska, and Heather Osentowski-Janulewicz said she wanted to kick off the Valley County GOP meeting about 30×30. For a number of reasons, we could not get it organized before May. When I saw her again in September, we decided to pick a date and make it happen. The Valley County GOP Grassroots Gala on Jan. 8, 2022, was the perfect way to kick off the year with 500 people in attendance who want to take back control of their country.
Osentowski-Janulewicz clearly was the champion of the cause but it quickly became a community endeavor. Orrin Petska and Mark Hackel led, as the co-chairmen of the event, and literally dozens of others from the community filled in the gaps to make it a tremendous success.
The structure of the event was put together quite well. We currently have seven GOP candidates for Nebraska governor. I might add I think this is a huge deal because it goes without saying that Gov. Pete Ricketts has been a tremendous leader in keeping the power in the hands of the people.
Candidates running for state office were given the opportunity to quickly explain why they were the right choice in the May primary. But quite honestly, the fact that they showed up, mingled with everyday citizens, listened to concerns and praises, to me, exemplifies the very model of the representative republic that our founding fathers put forth.
Kash Patel from Washington, D.C., former chief of staff for the Department of Defense under the Trump administration, walked through the progress made in removing foreign threats to our national security during President Donald Trump’s term. He shared about Fight With Kash, a nongovernmental organization he created to provide legal assistance to anyone who has been defamed or treated wrongly. I share his concern that in today’s world folks at every level are being defamed for political gain and, in my opinion, we need much more accountability by those who are getting away with doing or saying anything they want for their own personal benefit.
At the end of the night, the energy and the solution-minded attitudes were most impressive. I suggest that this community building model needs to be replicated in every state in the nation. We need to get local communities back to the forefront and remind people in a very loud way what in some cases they never even knew: Domestic food production is a means of national security and it is being stolen right out from under our noses.
The Valley County GOP is stronger now than ever because local folks said, “Enough already; no more of the status quo!”
Editor’s note: The views expressed here are the author’s own and do not represent the views of High Plains Journal. Trent Loos is a sixth generation United States farmer, host of the daily radio show, Loos Tales, and founder of Faces of Agriculture, a non-profit organization putting the human element back into the production of food. Get more information at www.LoosTales.com, or email Trent at [email protected].