I sat down with Geoff Young in late April for what turned out to be a wide-ranging discussion on current U.S. wars, campaigning with Gatewood Galbraith, and why I’ll never ever be a Democrat in Fayette County.
Young is one of two Democrats, along with Jared Randall, running in the Kentucky House District 3 primary against the incumbent, Congressman Morgan McGarvey. (District 3 is centered around Louisville. Young does not live in District 3, living 50 miles down I-64 in Lexington. Kentucky law allows him to run out of district, and Young states that if elected, he will move to Louisville.)
As viewers will soon see, my interview skills are sorely in need of improvement. Too many uhms and hems and haws and hijacking of threads for me to produce a neat 15 minute interview. I ended up with over 2 hours of content, and, spoiler alert, you’ll see below that I’m also a greenhorn video editor. Thankfully, Geoff is a patient and kind soul who pleasantly put up with my faults. And he’s an interesting political figure, so you should put up with them, too.
As a way to parcel out the long interview, I’ve divided it into smaller clips that appear on my youtube page, and which I’ll link to over the course of two separate articles. This first article focuses on Young’s background and previous political races, and his campaign platform for the current 2024 race for Kentucky’s 3rd Congressional District. Snippets of the interview should appear in clips inside the text below. This is all a grand experiment. Comments and suggestions on my use of text & video welcomed in the comments below.
Geoff Young Biography
Since first running for office in 2013 as a Green Party candidate for Kentucky Congressional District 5, Geoff Young has proven to be one of the more interesting Kentuckians to run for political office in the Commonwealth. Geoff is in many ways a political successor to Gatewood Galbraith, the libertarian-leaning, gun-toting, legalize-weed advocate who mounted numerous unsuccessful independent candidacies over a thirty year political career, and who since his death in 2012 has achieved folkloric status among Commonwealth politicos of all ages and across all parties.
Young’s first taste of electoral politics, in fact, came through his volunteer work on Gatewood’s final 2011 campaign for governor.
Unlike Gatewood, a lawyer by trade and widely loved by the media (even if rarely taken seriously by it while living), Geoff Young comes from an often-invoked, rarely-elected-to-office, often-maligned, body of workers: state employees who are not teachers. This work occupation explains part of Young’s un-Gatewood reception by area media, who, in addition to rarely taking him seriously, often display a strong revulsion to his frequent participation in electoral politics.
I’ll focus on that revulsion in a second piece—it’s a sort of hobby of mine. But as Geoff’s biography here demonstrates, this negative reception does a disservice to both the man and the state.
Young first came to Kentucky as an MIT student in the 1970s, volunteering to work for Lexington solar pioneer Dick Levine on his house nearby Raven Run. He arrived to the Commonwealth for good in the early 1980s as an environmental engineer working in the Kentucky Division of Energy. Uniquely, this work placed him at the forefront of the now vitally relevant and also bi-partisan movement for developing energy efficiency across all sectors of the Kentucky economy. As a state worker, Young worked on solar energy, biomass power, wind power, hydro-power, natural gas power, and coal power, all as a way to help the state save money and burn less carbon.
Geoff Young platform: boilerplate & anti-imperial
This deep background in energy efficiency, along with decades of volunteer work with organizations like Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, mark Young in many ways as a trendsetting progressive Democrat, presenting since 2013 consistently forward-thinking candidate platforms that may now seem boiler-plate as the rest of the party has slowly caught up to him.
The former state engineer identifies as a Bernie Sanders Democrat, with three core points of focus aligning with the Senator from Vermont:
- Tax the rich
- Support pro-union policies
- Restore Roe v. Wade protections for abortion access
Most likely, you know Geoff Young as a radically uncompromising peace activist and fierce critic of American imperialism. This primary focus of Young’s political life has long placed him at odds with both major parties in the United States, and increasingly so within his current Democrat Party home base.
I’ll have more on Young’s pariah status as an anti-war candidate in the next article—it also helps explain the media’s punching bag treatment of him. But in the meantime, take a listen to his anti-war views and thoughts on the growing hot wars in Ukraine and Palestine. He’s been vocalizing these views for decades now and, so far as I know, the first geo-politically astute person in this state to publicly recognize the folly of thinking Ukraine could defeat Russia militarily.
With campus protest recently centered on the ongoing hostilities in Palestine and Israel, a few more of Young’s long-held beliefs may be slowly coming back into party fashion—or at least a respectability that can lead to honest debate. If they do, it’ll be yet another example of the uncompromising Young running several furloughs ahead of his party’s leadership, people who, for some insane reason, have always only considered punching down at him.
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