Geoff Young

What Must Change in Washington
Before the U.S. Can Join the Belt and Road Initiative

This is the edited transcript of the presentation of Geoff Young to Panel 2, “Runaway Inflation or Glass-Steagall?” of the Schiller Institute’s June 18-19 Conference, “There Can Be No Peace Without the Bankruptcy Reorganization of the Dying Trans-Atlantic Financial System.” Mr. Young is the Democratic Party’s nominee for U.S. Congress from Kentucky’s 6th Congressional District. Subheads have been added.

Hi! My name is Geoff Young, and unlike my Republican opponent in November, Andy Barr, I will never vote to send weapons to Nazis.

Decade of Campaigning, Crisis Brings a Win

I’ve been running for various offices since 2012, but on May 17 of this year, I finally won the Democratic primary for the U.S. House of Representatives in Kentucky’s 6th Congressional District. Please hold your applause until the end.

Fifteen years ago, I never thought I would run for any office. From 2009 until 2013, I was a member of the very small Kentucky Green Party. The first campaign I really worked on was the independent campaign of Gatewood Galbraith for Governor in 2011. Gatewood was ahead of his time: He supported the legalization of marijuana for many years before that, and wrote a very readable book called The Last Free Man in America Meets the Synthetic Subversion. Tragically, he died of natural causes shortly after his last campaign in 2011.

In 2012, I ran for the first time for any office, for the Kentucky state House of Representatives in my section of Lexington. I was still a Green, and I lost, but I learned how elections work in Kentucky.

In 2013, I decided to run for U.S. House of Representatives against Republican Andy Barr, who was in his first term at that time. The Greens didn’t approve of my aggressive attacking campaigning style, so I switched back to my lifelong party, and ran as a Democrat. I had one establishment opponent, who spent all her time on the phone raising money. I spent about $27,000 of my own money in the primary, compared to [Elizabeth] Jensen’s quarter-million dollars, but I got 39% of the vote. I think that scared the Democratic Party establishment in Kentucky to death. She won the primary, but lost to Andy Barr.

I ran for governor of Kentucky in the 2015 Democratic primary against Jack Conway, who had several million dollars saved up, and was the Attorney General of Kentucky. I attacked him for having supported the Cheney-Bush illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003. The party establishment blatantly rigged the primary, gave all kinds of in-kind resources to Jack Conway, so I filed a ballot challenge against him before the primary, and another one before the general election. I’m not a lawyer, but I learned more about the law with every lawsuit I filed. So far, all of them have been thrown out before the discovery phase, by corrupt Kentucky judges.

I ran for the U.S. House in 2016 and 2018, for governor again in 2019, and for the U.S. House in 2020 as a Republican. I switched back to the Democratic Party and finally won the Democratic primary this year by a narrow margin of 52% to 48% on May 17.

I think two things contributed to my win: One: I rented a billboard five months before the primary that said “Abolish the CIA,” which got a lot of attention. Two: I mailed out a postcard to 22,000 Democrats just before the primary that said on the front, “Vote for Geoff Young, the Peace Candidate,” and my motto, “Unlike Andy Barr, I will never vote to send weapons to Nazis.” On the other side, it had a bunch of pictures from mainstream media articles from 2014-2021, showing pictures of Ukrainian Nazis and warning the public, and warning Congress, I suppose, that the Federal government was actually sending weapons and training and sending money to Ukrainian Nazi groups in order to fight against Russians—ethnic Russians in Ukraine, and eventually, the country of Russia.

I said, there’s no way that Andy Barr can deny that he knew about this. He’s known about it for the last seven or eight years and he’s never objected, and he therefore, supports sending weapons to Nazis. And he’s actually urging or demanding that President Biden send even more weapons than the $40 billion that Congress just approved. Now that’s not enough for Andy Barr, my Republican opponent.

So, I think those two things contributed to my narrow win this year.

Join the Belt and Road Initiative

The other point I want to address, is: How can we bring the United States into this newly emerging, multipolar world, where we cooperate with the Belt and Road Initiative, and help two or three billion more people in the world rise out of extreme poverty? My main answer is that, before the empire loosely centralized in Washington, D.C., can even think about joining China, Russia, India, and the Belt and Road countries, we first have to stop trying to destroy them. There’s no way we can join if we’re overthrowing their governments, playing war games directly on the borders of Russia and in the South China Sea, and acting in an unbelievably hostile way.

So, how can America change virtually all of our foreign policies, 180 degrees? I have some ideas of first steps and I will try to launch them if I win in November and go to the U.S. House.

The first step would be to fire all the neocons. Neocons are people who believe the United States has the right to attack or invade any country in the world, overthrow their government if they’ve been named as an official “enemy.” And there are plenty of neocons in the Democratic Party as well as the Republican Party—a totally bipartisan foreign policy, really, since the end of World War II in 1945. So, our whole foreign policy, bipartisan, has to be reversed.

Two, we should start turning the Democratic Party into a peace party again. It has gone along with the neocons and with the military-industrial-intelligence-media complex, and is now kind of a “me too” party for imperialism, which the Republicans have always supported just kind of reflexively.

We have to abolish the CIA. Ever since it was founded in 1947, it has been in the business of assassinating people, torturing people, overthrowing governments hostile to the empire. And we have 16 other intelligence agencies, so let’s get rid of the worst one and save some money.

Speaking of saving money, we need to cut the so-called “defense budget” by 70% and the number of our troops by 70%. We have to end all of our economic sanctions against all countries and against all individuals, especially Russia, because those sanctions are backfiring and destroying our own economy, not harming Russia very much at all.

We should quit NATO, first, and then quit all of our other military alliances.

We need to train the State Department on how to do diplomacy, instead of issuing ultimatums and fighting proxy wars.

We have to break up the five huge mainstream media corporations and the biggest social media corporations, because they do nothing but propagandize us now, 24/7/365. All of the propaganda favors war and empire.

So that’s some initial ideas and I’d be happy to answer some questions that may come in.