Jeremiah Looney has entered his city’s corrupt interior to make a change from the inside. The Whitewright native, loving single dad, and Army veteran has overwhelmingly charmed his fellow residents and captured the key’s to his once thriving and beautiful town. Out of the three candidates vying to be the new leader, Looney scooped up 175 votes, local business owner Rock Magers reeled in 101, and the incumbent Allen West was only able to round-up a mere 34.

Looney told a local news station after his victory for change, “This means the world to me, I really want to give the voice back to our community because that’s what it seems like it has lost.” The box-packing outgoing Mayor was pretty upset, but he had aided in the municipality’s downward spiral. He took the reigns in 2014 after sitting on the city council for 13 years. Bemoaning with his arms crossed and after saying that this is likely the end of his political career, “I’m not going to run again, I ran because I thought I was needed and I ran this time because I had stuff in the works and I had very good employees I wanted to keep working with. I’ve got other interests and other things I can do, so it’s not an emotional breaker or anything like that. I’m OK with it.” West continued to pout about his defeat, “I had a lot of stuff in the works that’s probably going to go by the wayside now,” West said. “This is what they wanted, I guess, because that’s the way they voted, so all I can do is, they may have to live with it.”

Looney on the other hand felt great before and after the election due to receiving so much positive feedback around town. Looney exclaimed, “The support that I have received from the town over the last month has been amazing.” Looney’s day one agenda will be to immediately conduct a full-scale audit to see where and how the mistakes took place so he can start with his plans for repair. His vision is to meet with all of the business owners in his small town of 1600 residents to brainstorm on ways to bring in other business’s to grow the economy and collaborate to inject life back into the area. He told a local paper, “We can get more businesses in here and just try to get this town turned around so we can get the roads fixed and get back to what we used to be, I want to get all that back and really focus on community because that’s not what is being focused on right now.”

Whitewright suffered under West’s watch by losing a locally owned grocery store when a Walmart neighborhood market moved in and overthrew the 55 year run of the city’s only food market, only to see it close 9 months later leaving the residents with a 60 mile round-trip to fetch groceries. The trade days festival was ended two years ago as a result of the decision raise the rates on booths that drove vendors away. Downtown retail shops, and other small businesses have vacated the area along with the concerts and community events disappearing.

The recent discovery of personal computers at the homes of the city manager and chief of police with open access to all city records at anyone’s fingertips was a cause for concern because that is illegal. The mystery of the tardiness and unavailability of these two employees is being exposed, along with their self-served uncommonly high wages for such a low population city. Looney told me on a phone conversation that he will look into the number of anti-freedom permits and a handful of silly ordinances to see which ones if not all he can omit. Such as a $120 permit to repair your garage door, and rules that regulate parking and grass height. He also said that he wants to return the downtown area back to being vibrant, beautiful, and filled with happy business owners. He mentioned giving major tax breaks to business’s and going through the stack of unnecessary regulations with a shredder to eventually make it a no brainer to start a business in Whitewright.

Our conversation continued with Looney full of emotion about his goals to bring back the trade days and getting concerts back to the downtown area. I asked him about the idea of volunteer activities that would give back to the community and he responded with “The church that my mother attends has some adjacent land to donate that I plan to construct a large community garden on, it would be a pick and eat type for all.”

I first ran into Jeremiah at the Marijuana March in downtown Fort Worth last Saturday, he caught my attention with his short speech about his near demise after being a lab rat for the VA hospitals. The PTSD that he acquired after two tours in Iraq was treated by being bombarded with pharmaceutical drugs like Seroquel, and Methadone to just mask the pain and made him even more ill. He said he was up to 30 pills a day and admitted to almost killing himself, a friend turned him onto Cannabis for an alternative to consuming mind altering, chemically engineered, government medicine.

Looney said on the Tarrant county courthouse steps “It changed my life immensely, I’m here because I want to help bring this medicine to everyone” Proving again the dangers of pharmaceuticals that are doled out like candy by doctors looking to make a buck and to just send them through the turnstile and say “next!”. He went on to say that it saved his life and that its hard for marijuana users to gain a better perception from the public but concluded with “We use and it’s none of their business, and for all the veterans out there, A “J” a day keeps the VA away.” He had made it well-known before and during his campaign that he was a cannabis user and didn’t shy away from it. He was transparent about it to all who questioned his choice of medicine and was asked if he could remove some cannabis related items from his campaign page to be supported, in which he told me “I refused to change anything and if they didn’t like it then they didn’t have to vote for me.”

This is a perfect example of the ‘if you don’t like it then get in there and change it from within philosophy. Mayor Looney is a thorn that’s protruding the veil of corruption at one of the levels of government that we still have a chance at fixing. This is a spark to hopefully ignite a nationwide opportunity to get inside and scramble the tyranny to remission. Instilling the mindset of more Freedom and very little to no regulations in these small towns could be the Achilles Heel to abolish the roots of the problem, Money and Greed.