Jeremy Kuzmarov

Covert Action Magazine
Geoff Young came of age politically as a student at MIT in the mid 1970s where he took political science courses with Noam Chomsky and Louis Kampf that opened his eyes to the evils of U.S. imperialism and to the U.S. government’s contempt for international law.

Now, decades later, Young stands a real chance of being elected to Congress in Kentucky on a platform of abolishing the CIA.

On May 17, Young defeated Chris Preece with 52% of the vote to win the Democratic primary in Kentucky’s 6^th Congressional District, which contains the cities of Lexington, Richmond and Frankfort, the state capital.

Young moved to Kentucky in 1982 to work in state government in the field of renewable energy, and first ran for public office in 2012 as a Green Party candidate.

In the November general election, he will face Republican incumbent Andy Barr, who has pushed for expanding FBI surveillance operations against Chinese academics in the U.S. under the neo-McCarthyite China Initiative and according to Young, criticized President Joe Biden for not sending enough weapons to Ukraine.

In an exclusive interview with CovertAction Magazine on May 25, Young said that he believes he won the primary in part because of a mailing in which he proclaimed that, unlike Andy Barr, he would never send weapons to Nazis in Ukraine.

Young also placed a billboard calling for abolishing the CIA.

These latter positions have become popular because of the blowback resulting from disastrous foreign policy interventions.

Young told CAM that, besides taking courses with Chomsky and Kampf at MIT in 1976, he read almost every book written by Chomsky, who taught him about the “horrible things that the U.S. government did in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Central America and elsewhere,” and how “U.S. media corporations lie and cover up all the atrocitiea.

During the Cold War, “the CIA gained influence over the big media corporations under Operation Mockingbird,” and has “never stopped deceiving the American public through PSYOPs [psychological operations] which are illegal [inside the U.S.] under the CIA’s own charter.”

“[Unfortunately], they’ve only gotten better at [PSYOPs] today,” Young said. “As an example, under the ownership of Jeff Bezos, the CIA exerts full editorial control over The Washington Post, [which] is not how it’s supposed to be.”

Young faces an uphill climb in his quest to defeat Barr not only because of his lack of support from corporate donors, but also because the Democratic Party establishment in Kentucky refuses to support him.

[…]

Via https://covertactionmagazine.com/2022/06/01/geoff-young-peace-candidate-who-wants-to-abolish-the-cia-wins-democratic-primary-in-kentucky/