Editor’s Note: This is the second part of the NoC interview with Geoff Sebesta, who is the Field Director for KY 6 District Democrat candidate Geoff Young. You can read Part 1 here.
If you follow your local news, then it is likely you know three things about Geoff Young, the Democrat candidate for central Kentucky’s 6th Congressional District.
The first is, he’s crazy and in need of help. This sentiment was first amplified by Kentucky’s Democrat Governor Andy Beshear in the days after Young’s KY 6 primary victory. Beshear, widely praised for his Mr. Rogers-esqe, won’t you be my neighbor demeanor, was quite clear about the Democrat candidate about to take on Republican incumbent Andy Barr: “Geoff Young needs help. [Winning the KY 6 primary] is not going to help him.”
The second thing you are likely to know about Geoff Young is that this mentally unstable man is a perennially losing candidate with a history of veering wildly between political parties (Green, Democrat, Republican, back to Democrat) and suing a whole bunch of people along the way. You may have noted these two things that you already knew abut Geoff Young while reading the Lexington Herald Leader‘s recent lame-ass editorial decision to make no endorsements in the upcoming KY6 race.
And then there’s the third thing that we all know about Geoff Young, the foundation stone for your understanding of him as a crazy perennial loser: the long-time pro-peace and anti-corruption activist stands with Vladimir Putin, the KY 6 Democrat candidate often describing the war in Ukraine as a Russian liberation of a Nazi-controlled territory.
All these things that you know about Geoff Young are succinctly displayed in this October Twitter exchange between the KY 6 Democrat candidate and Colman Elridge, current statewide chairman of the Kentucky Democrat Party.
One of the notable things about what you know about Geoff Young and his viability and fitness for being the Democrat candidate for Congress, is how little of what you know comes from Geoff or his advocates.
We get the sensationalist tweets. Boy do we get those.
But we do not hear from Young’s Quaker church. Not a peep from the decades of local anti-war advocates who, like Young, screamed bloody imperialism in calling upon the U.S. to withdraw from the Middle East, which it (sorta) did almost two decades later when Democrat and Republican officialdom finally signed on. No sign from those among us who like Young joined in national campaigns to call attention against corruption and the growing power of giant corporations. (What we might call, now, fascism.)
Nothing from the former state-worker’s engineer-focused, highly-credentialed, early-Aughts advocacy for transition economies in Eastern Kentucky. Nor his local food squalking, Kentucky Council on Peace and Justice work, or tireless outreach support to other regional citizens getting busy with their own civil work.
Loisville’s Shameka Parrish Wright may be Geoff Young’s only endorsement from a Kentucky politician.
Most tellingly, not a single voice from the majority of voting KY 6 Democrats who elected Young. These people, Geoff’s people, let’s call them the Embarrassments or the Un-Wellers, seem no longer to be counted as Democrats.
There were around 26,000 of these Un-Wellers last May when Young won his primary. The Democrat Party seems intent on undermining their votes by supporting a write-in candidate in the general election. (Yes, the party that nationally bloviates on the sanctity of “our Democracy” and abiding by the vote….is effectively undermining the winning candidate in its own KY 6 Democrat Primary.)
Like with Geoff, these Embarrassment views mainly only get circulated as staccato bursts–vote tallies and primary wins–which local media can then employ as self-evident example of regional looniness and decline.
I am not one of the 26,000 or so Embarrassments who went Young last May. I gave up on the Democrats in 2004 when they ran the “smart war” candidate John Kerry against that war criminal and Iraq invader George Bush, Jr. As an Independent, I am barred from voting in their Democrat primaries.
But I am sure to join the UnWeller ranks early next week, when I look forward to voting Young in the general election. I will do so because I agree with Young’s big view that my country, the United States, has been the chief global purveyor of violence for many decades now. Because I agree with his immediate prescription for negotiating an end to the War in Ukraine based on the Minsk II agreements drafted in 2015. Because like him, I view the War in Ukraine as damaging our economy at home and devastating the European economy. Young understands, as I do, that American war support will compete with our capacity to devote resources for the reconstruction of places like Eastern Kentucky, northern New Mexico, suburban Cleveland, South Chicago, and all those many other homeplaces that require war-footing investments.
My views are not crazy. They arise from the quite-developed academic work on the history and costs of American Imperialism, much of which was taught to me by quite sane University of Kentucky professors nearly a quarter century ago. They arise from my memory of many tens of millions of normal people like me who, across 2003, gathered in public places around the nation (and world) to demand a stop to American Imperialism, for no more wars for oil. They arise from my memory of once-popular concepts like “blowback” and “garrisoning the globe.”
Hell, they arise from my own pedestrian knowledge of this city. You don’t have to go very far back in time to find a celebration of a whole bunch of Democrats calling for the U.S. to stop promoting war. 1970. In response to the Vietnam War (fought, so our sane leaders told us then, as a proxy war against Russia). Lexington resident and Democrat participant Guy Mendez wrote an article for North of Center about some of these anti-imperialist protests that occurred at the University of Kentucky. These were just a few of many anti-imperial protests staged across the U.S. throughout the 60s and 70s that led directly to the nuclear non-proliferation treaties of the 80s that (until recently) have saved the world from great-power Armageddon.
Kentucky idiots like Colman Elridge or Robert Kahne or Joe Gerth who are telling you what you know about Geoff Young may not remember this time in state and political history. Whether their amnesia is from mental vacuity or crass partisan hackery doesn’t matter. The rest of us should not have to go along with their erasure.
In Part II of NoC‘s interview with Geoff Sebesta, the Lexington comic artist and field director for Geoff Young’s KY 6 campaign, Sebesta enlarges upon many of those things that you already know of Geoff Young’s party-hopping, lawsuit bringing, political journey from obscure candidate to within an election-day vote tally of becoming a sitting U.S. Congressman, and the Kentucky Democrat Party that has seemingly done everything in its power these past dozen years to discourage Young’s journey from ever happening.
We’ll find out next week just how much of a voting block that Young commands. With his party in active rebellion against him, and running against an incumbent in a District that has spent a decade mostly running +20 Republican victories, Young’s running against plenty of headwinds.
But he does have a voting block. If you want a sane view of what makes Young tick, and what might be the motivations behind some of his 26,000 Un-Wellers, for God’s sake, you gotta stop listening to the Smart Set so keen on cancelling their own primary results.
If your serious about understanding this voting block, head instead to your primary sources. Like this NoC interview with Geoff Sebesta.
Danny Mayer, editor
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North of Center: In the primary, Geoff Young secured 51.7% of the vote. He won all District 6 Counties but one–his home county of Lexington-Fayette, which also happens to be the only urban county in District 6.
What is Young’s appeal to rural District 6 Democrats?
Geoff Sebesta: Kentucky likes a fighter. Young’s a fighter. The other dude in the primary, much as I like him, isn’t a fighter. Young fights. After ten years of doorstops getting mopped up by the nonentity that is Andy Barr (and yes, I’m including Amy McGrath in that, though she is both a Marine and a mom), I think local Democrats are tired of not even trying.
We don’t mind that Geoff starts trouble. We just want him to do it in Washington D. C.
NoC: Statewide, democrats have bemoaned the loss of rural support. The party’s candidate for Senate, Charles Booker, has received positive press, party support, and media endorsements for his Hood to the Holler campaign.
Does the success of the Geoff Young coalition, which seemingly skews rural, have anything to say about attracting more rural Democrats?
GS: Attracting Democrats to the fold is going to be tough; I’m writing this a week after Biden’s tiny hands Hitler speech. I’m not sure winning this election is the same thing as building the party, and I’m not sure the party can be built.
There’s been a few major accomplishments in the campaign that I’m proud of, and one of them is that we really have run a “thirteen and two halves county” campaign. There are fourteen counties and two half-counties in the 6th District right now. We’ve made a serious appearance in every single one of those counties….except Fayette.
The entirety of the campaign is directed at the counties that usually get ignored. That’s where the ads go, that’s where the mailings go, that’s where the canvassers go. Lexington is used to telling people what to do. Not us. We’re telling people what’s up, then asking them what they want to do about it. Totally different thing. The folks in the other counties are tired of being bossed around. They want to be asked. So we’re asking, and I think that’s helping.
Montgomery County isn’t someplace that we go exactly once because it’s tradition. It’s someplace we go all the time because we really want Montgomery County to agree with us.
The Montgomery County Democrats know, all too well, that we do not take them for granted. We know that what we’re doing is provoking serious disagreements inside the parties, and in a lot of cases those disagreements were long overdue.
It’s not like Young has some Mystical Insight Into the Mind of America. I’ve knocked on thousands of doors in this campaign, and I’ve heard exactly how many people are sick of war, sick of the attacks on women, sick of the lies. I’ve stood in the middle of the crowd at Court Day and told people, “Pro-peace, pro-2A, pro-pot” and seen their faces light up. I didn’t even tell them what party Young was, and they didn’t care.
NoC: It seems to be the KDP’s nominally progressive and geographically urban leadership who most openly disdain Young. Andy Beshear, the Democrat state governor known for his Mr. Rogers demeanor, has openly questioned Young’s mental stability.
Why the strong negative reaction among the Party’s taste-makers?
GS: The reason Keeneland liberals hate him is that, basically, Geoff Young doesn’t shut up and go away when they want him to. They invent all these excuses, but that’s basically it. He’s done nothing to anybody, never raised a hand of harm against anybody, has not hit on any party chairs of any gender, never even shouted anybody down.
But he did call Hillary Clinton a war criminal.
And then he called Amy McGrath a war criminal, and then he made a sign that said AMY MCGRATH IS A WAR CRIMINAL and walked around holding it.
He did sue the Young Democrats. He did say, to his face during a debate at UK, that Andy Beshear was a crook and he was going to put him in jail for election fraud. We did stand outside of party headquarters while he yelled “Democrats repent!” through a megaphone. That’s the definition of a bad look. That’s unforgivable.
So they make it about Ukraine or whatever, but that’s really never what it was about. It’s personal.
NoC: Do you see similarities to the way in which mainstream conservative Republicans reacted to the winning candidacy of Donald Trump?
GS: I see a *lot* of similarities between Trump and Young’s campaign style. Both Young and I studied Trump extensively, like everyone did, but instead of trying to come up with funny names for his hair we paid attention to how he did what he did and how we can use those powers for good instead of evil. Young and I are from the part of the Democratic Party that is tired of fucking losing, you see. So we pay attention to how other people do what they do.
Young’s propensity for insult is, I believe, a direct reaction to Trump and a recognition that being theatrically unpleasant is politically efficacious.
Electoral politics is theater, after all. I do not partake in that particular stylistic fillip — I am generally extremely complimentary and conciliatory in my personal politics — but, as always, I have a hard time arguing with success.
Trump the showman has played his wrestling character all the way into the White House. This is a guy who understands mass media appeal. He also knows that the way to get elected in a first-past-the-post voting system is to make some people like you a lot, even at the cost of a bunch of people disliking you a lot.
NoC: This seems to have been the rationale behind the Booker campaign’s use of a noose in a campaign ad, or Rand Paul’s response to that ad.
Let me tell you, I understand and have accepted the deeply toxic nature of American politics, and I know that it comes from the people. This is our fault. We get the politics we deserve. I’m trying to change it, but in order to change it I have to at least admit that it exists. There is no politician that does not deal with huge helpings of hatred from the public. The only difference is who does the hating. Like Trump, we’ve accepted that the hatred of others is unavoidable and that certain types of hatred are actually quite useful.
Keeneland liberals are going to “Trump Effect” Young into office. They can’t help themselves. I’m telling them they’re doing it, to their faces, and they still can’t stop themselves. They’re giving us more publicity than millions of dollars of TV advertising ever could, and what’s more, the media and the sorts of folks who dominate Reddit are so deeply distrusted that their hatred makes Young seem more trustworthy.
Every Reddit rant about how wicked and crazy and Russia-loving Young is will lose us no votes. Those votes are already lost. It does, however, win votes for us from people who are just so damn tired of American liberals. Those folks who weren’t going to vote for him anyway, let them go write in Amy McGrath. We don’t like this but we accept it.
NoC: The Trump Effect has been only partially replicated in the local media. Despite their clear revulsion of the Orange Man, national (and local) media love to cover Trump. Beyond circulating a few of his more provocative Tweets, the media have mostly ignored Young’s campaign–even after he surprisingly won the primary.
The little local coverage that the race has generated has mostly diminished the Democrat Young’s decades of pro-peace and anti-corruption political advocacy as irrelevant, wacko and generally out of touch with voters.
These reports all cite Young’s history of running for statewide office, his critique of the United States involvement in Ukraine, and his many lawsuits brought against the Kentucky Democrat Party, the Fayette County Democrats, KET and (to a lesser extent) the Kentucky Republican Party.
GS: So nice of them. Very much appreciated.
NoC: Let’s go through these one at a time. Can you describe your views on the nature of Young’s lawsuits against the major party organs?
GS: I think his middle-period lawsuits are the best, though some of the ones right now are interesting. My favorite is the battle against KET, which we won just days before I was going to make it a major campaign issue. The one that I was most closely involved in was about the KDP illegally barring him from meetings, which he also won.
In both these cases, even though he won what he was asking for, Young technically lost the suit and they hit him so hard for legal fees that he lost his house. That’s deeply fucked up. Dude paid a steep price. But he won the battle, and he can now attend KDP meetings and will be on KET in October. [Young appeared on October 17.]
Again, I’m a big fan of both KET and the Fayette County Democratic Party, who behaved with principle and corrected their behavior with good grace once they were forced to and they’d taken my friend’s house from him. It’s an entirely new administration over at the Fayette County Democrats and they’ve been above reproach since the change of power. In politics one must forgive much. But then, it’s not me who lost my house, so I guess it’s easier for me to forgive.
I’d also like to give a shout-out to Young’s impeachment proceedings, which were magnificently influential. I wasn’t fond of the impeachments at first; in fact, I wrote a song about it. It was called “All of My Friends are Suing Andy Beshear (But I Really Just Wish They Would Lay Off).” But as it played out, once again, it worked much better than I ever could have hoped. People didn’t watch the story from beginning to end, but Young’s impeachment petitions inspired the anti-Beshear petitions in 2020 (which is when I wrote the song), which inspired the grand jury’s attempt to impeach Daniel Cameron, which is, like, the greatest impeachment in Kentucky history.
Worth noting that I really like Daniel Cameron as a person and my opposition to him is nothing against him. He’s a very pleasant and present human being. Does not change the fact that the grand juror’s impeachment of him for mishandling the Taylor case was fucking magnificent because what the fuck, dude. You totally had that coming.
Best. Impeachment. Ever.
NoC: Local media and Democrat operatives tend to frame Young’s multi-party engagement as a negative. How do you view Young’s many runs for office under the Green Party, the Democrat Party, and the Republican Party?
GS: I think it’s fine. They’re really all different, but as a whole, who cares? The Green thing [in 2012] was his first run, when he quickly discovered that there was just no way that an independent candidate was going to win in Kentucky. The Republican thing [in 2020] was a quick scouting attempt to see how things were over there; the fact that he came straight back, again, speaks to a lot of Kentuckians.
I think switching parties for a minute helped get him votes, too. The vast majority of Kentuckians do not hate Republicans, OBVIOUSLY. There are PLENTY people in Kentucky who have switched party, and recently. When you’re talking to an electorate that is looking at both the Democratic and the Republican parties and not liking what they see in either place, then changing parties makes sense.
People are sick to the bone of people in the Democratic Party calling everyone but themselves racist fascist monsters. They aren’t getting that from Young. He isn’t looking down on them for daring to have Republican relatives and he’s actually talking about stuff that has some relationship to their lives.
NoC: Irrespective of party affiliation, Young seems an unabashed progressive. He’s pro-abortion. Pro-union. For onshoring of green industry. For marijuana legalization, Medicare-for-all, and taxing billionaires and millionaires. He has a history of pushing climate change policies that date back to my UK grad school days during the Bush administration.
But Young’s most vocal political positions are being anti-war and anti-imperialism. How do you see this anti-war, abolish the CIA strategy working in the general election with Republican voters and Independents (like me)?
GS: I think Republicans and Independents are going to fucking love it. I’m not sure if we’ll win or not — that will be decided by Kentucky’s attitude to current events that have not occurred yet — but we’ll be the first campaign in modern history to make any inroads among Republicans or Independents at all.
NoC: At the same time, Young’s anti-war stance seems to render him unacceptable to the future leaders of the Kentucky Democrat party. From District 3 Congressional candidate Morgan McGarvey to the University of Kentucky College Democrats, statewide leaders of the party cite Young’s vocal position against U.S. involvement in Ukraine as the main reason for not endorsing him.
GS: Well, they’re lying. Ukraine’s a convenient excuse; they were never going to forgive him. That was never on the table. Ukraine’s just the reason they picked because it was on the top of the pile when they needed an excuse.
I’m a bit sorry about that, because any time there’s a conflict it calcifies resistance. The need to disagree with Young about everything is pushing people into making some awful assumptions about what’s going on in Ukraine. You could see this happen in real time during the primary, as Young’s opponent, who does not and never has cared about foreign policy, reflexively adopted oppositional positions that put him in one hell of a moral quandary.
It’s good for the campaign, because the truth is in our corner and unless the Azov Battalion are suddenly revealed to be the world’s best Nazis things are just not going to go well for the people who enabled the Ukrainian junta. But it’s bad for other people, it’s bad for the discourse, it’s bad for America and it’s bad for the world.
NoC: Do Lexington, Frankfort, Berea, and other urban-focused Democrat voters in KY’s Sixth have enough political flexibility to support a pro-peace Democrat with a long history of agreeing with them on nearly every issue they value (and some they valued when Bush Jr. was President)?
GS: Individuals are flexible in ways that large groups aren’t. Whatever brings an individual around is an internal process and their own particular personal responsibilities, and a certain percentage of them will never, ever change their minds. We aren’t appealing to them.
We are talking to the Democrats in the surrounding counties, to the Democrats in Fayette who have felt oppressed by the establishment, to the libertarians, the socialists, the independents, and yes, even those scary Republicans. Young is the only candidate for this seat in the last decade with any appeal whatsoever outside the KDP faithful, and the more they attack him, the more they make him appealing to everybody else.
Because Geoff’s not crazy, he’s not evil and he’s not working for the Russians. He’s a Kentuckian who’s brave enough to stand up against something he knows is wrong, and tough enough to keep at it even when everyone was against him. He’s not pretending to be anything other than what he is: an old man who wants to prevent nuclear war. If that means telling Americans they were wrong, well, that’s the price of our empire. They’re going to find out pretty soon anyway.
NoC: Currently, party leadership seems to have chosen self-sabotage by pushing a write-in candidate. This tactic, to put it mildly, seems strange.
GS: If people don’t want to vote for him, that’s fine; he’s definitely not for everybody. Some people like war. They’re never going to be fond of Young. He doesn’t represent them. Maybe under ranked-choice voting we’ll have a more representative democracy, but at the moment only one political point of view can occupy an office at a time, so if you want war then you will find, with Young in office, that you have less representation than you’re used to. I wouldn’t expect somebody who really wanted to fund Ukrainian Nazis to vote for Geoff. They can vote for Andy Barr, he represents them just fine. The beauty of our system, I guess.
However, one thing people have to start recognizing is that when Young appears on KET and talks plain sense for 18 minutes straight, you got to be careful about calling him “crazy.” Because we can all see him now.
We can all see that there’s nothing crazy about him — he’s a progressive. Huge parts of Kentucky agree with exactly what he’s saying. Are they calling all of us crazy too? Because at this point we’re talking about literally hundreds of thousands of voters. Do Democrats really want to do that?
NoC: So, another another own-goal from the state’s smart set?
GS: Young, Eldridge, Beshear, Bevin, and the mailman all agree that things are not well with the KDP. Young winning the primary is a sign of deep division and malfunction. There’s universal agreement there.
It boggles the mind that the KDP can take the vote of nearly half this state for granted and still can’t muster enough to hold more than a quarter of the legislature. Something’s really wrong. The people who want to save the KDP are in direct opposition to those who could save the KDP.
Not everybody can win in this situation. Somebody’s gonna have to go. I always assumed it would be us but it’s starting to look like it might be them. The voters will tell us what they want, I guess. All we have to do is stay visible enough to be plausible, and who knows. This time next year Geoff Young could be suing people in Washington D. C.
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