J Ranen Bechthold has filed to enter the Republican Primary for Missouri House District 15 covering Gladstone in Clay County. Bechthold is running to advance ideas of maximizing individual freedoms and eliminating the influences cultural and corporate elites have over the lives of middle and lower income Missourians.
“We are facing an environmental catastrophe of great proportions. We suffered from the longest and one of the worst sustained recessions in our national history. The ills we suffer have come upon us over several decades. They will not go away shortly, but they will go away. They will go away because we will do whatever it takes to preserve our freedoms and securities.
The political, cultural and corporate elites distort our economic decisions, penalize thrift and crush the struggling young and the fixed-income elderly alike. They mock and disdain our faith and values, daring to call us things like “deplorables”. They threaten to shatter the lives of millions of our people cutting the services we paid for with our hard-earned tax dollars and taking away the means to free express and defend ourselves.
Idle industries across Missouri have thrown workers into unemployment, human misery and personal indignity. Those who do work are denied a fair return for their labor, their success penalized, and full productivity hindered. Our government has piled deficits, mortgaging our future and our children for the present.
To continue this long trend is to guarantee tremendous upheavals. I am running make sure that poor and middle-class Missourians are no longer cheated by corporate interests and ensure that they can live lives that are safe and secure. We must act to preserve the future. And let there be no misunderstanding—we’re going to act, beginning today.”
J Ranen Bechthold is a former military intelligence analyst and combat veteran of Afghanistan. He grew up in Clay County and earned a Bachelor’s of Political Science from UMKC before serving in the US Army from 2009-2016. He is a proud married father of four daughters.
