I want to share some insights from my experience running our family soapmaking company as an activist engine for progressive social change for almost three decades, on some of the pressing issues our country is grappling with. We have deep experience engaging on issues ranging from advocating for psychedelic medicines and drug policy reform, to raising the minimum wage and supporting LBGTQ+ rights.
We value our ability to work with unusual allies across the political spectrum, and to begin I wanted to share this Instagram post from my friend Marcus Capone, former Navy Seal and cofounder with his wife Amber Capone of Veterans Exploring Treatment Solutions (VETS), that is working to bring life-saving psychedelic therapy to our nation’s highly traumatized veteran population: Common Ground! This epitomizes what our country is supposed to be.
David Bronner is an activist around drug policy reform, sustainable ag, and a host of other issues that are truly important to him.
Amber is a conservative Christian from the Midwest who is equally as passionate about issues that are important to her.
They may not agree on everything or have passion for the same things, but honestly, when it comes down to it, these two love and respect one another.
David is my bro, and we disagree on stuff and we agree on other things. Should we go to war over it? Should we hate each other? What happened to listening, learning and understanding other points of view. I’m tired of the divide in this nation. I would give David the shirt off my back, my house if he was in need of shelter, and I would go to war for him if it came down to it. We don’t have to agree on everything, but we can still continue to work together and be respectful despite our differences.
Let’s focus more on what brings us together instead of what drives us apart. Our nation will be better because of it 👊🏼
In this generous spirit that we are one nation under God, I wanted to offer my perspective on various issues and the recent election. As a supporter of Bernie Sanders and Cory Booker, I understand the revolutionary energy that swept the democratic establishment out of power and brought Trump back, as it’s been beyond frustrating to see the inertia and failure to act on a number of fronts by the Biden administration. While I have deep concerns about another Trump presidency and am bracing for negative impact on a number of fronts, there may also be some opportunities this time around. He’s not up for reelection and not particularly beholden to the Republican party. In particular, I want to address here the following issues: psychedelic healing and cannabis prohibition, the Equal Rights Amendment, minimum wage and affordable housing, immigration reform, LBGTQ and trans rights, regenerative agriculture and climate change, supply chain integrity of large multi-national companies, DEI programs, and ranked choice voting.
Psychedelic Healing and Cannabis Policy Reform
This issue is probably nearest and dearest to my heart. At a crisis point in my life soon after graduating college, I had a profound life-changing experience of ego-death and being embraced by the Love and Light at the heart of existence, including a powerful vision of Jesus’s compassion, grace and example in the world, mediated by LSD and MDMA. Instantly I realized that’s it! That’s what we’re here to do!!! To serve and help alleviate the suffering in the world, end the oppression and violence we rain down on each other, and help each other thrive and be our own most beautiful liberated soulful selves! I also instantly understood my granddad Dr. Bronner’s passion in life to show that all the world’s faith traditions at their highest vibration were pointing beyond themselves to this deepest realest truth of Source and Being, somehow true in the midst of and beyond all the suffering, beauty, and absurdity of the world’s life-death-rebirth reality process.
I then dedicated my life to integrating psychedelic medicines into American and global culture, and our family company has been a major funder of various organizations and efforts to legalize access, including the state ballot campaigns in Oregon, Colorado and Massachusetts, as well as federal level efforts to move MDMA-assisted therapy through FDA approval process for treatment-resistant PTSD. We support organizations like VETS, Heroic Hearts Project, the Indigenous Medicine Conservation Fund, and others, and could not be more excited by the moment we’re in now. Psychedelic medicines have profound power to heal, helping people process deep-seated trauma, depression, addictive behaviors and self-destructive thought patterns. Veterans, survivors of sexual assault and other violence, incarcerated folks, and other highly traumatized populations experience life-saving relief from debilitating symptoms and can regain their lives, to the benefit of their families and communities as well as themselves.
I’ve been especially gratified recently by allies on the right on this issue, including former Governor Rick Perry and Joe Rogan among others, who have pressed and raised the profile of this issue in the election’s close and its aftermath. Joe Rogan’s recent interview with Governor Perry and Bryan Hubbard, the champion of ibogaine access in Kentucky, is one of the most articulate and powerful I’ve ever heard on the subject. [1]
I’ve been disappointed by the democratic establishment’s failure in both California and at the federal level to provide access in recent years, with three measures failing in California that we were involved in, including a veto by Governor Newsom, alongside the FDA’s refusal to approve MDMA therapy this past August. I was personally arrested while participating in an act of Civil Disobedience at the headquarters of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) with colleagues a couple of years ago because of President Biden’s DEA blocking terminally ill people from accessing psilocybin therapy under the Right to Try Act that was signed into law by President Trump in 2018. Both Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Elon Musk are public about their healing experiences with psychedelic medicines, and I hope that there can be a “Warp Speed 2” at the FDA legalizing psychedelic therapy across the board before too many more veteran suicides happen. More veterans have died by their own hand than have died in active combat in either Iraq or Afghanistan.
I and Dr. Bronner’s have also advocated and fought to end the disaster of cannabis prohibition, helping fund a number of state campaigns, and I do not understand how cannabis prohibition is still intact at the federal level. Way too many lives have been shredded, disproportionately people of color, and it’s past time to stop the insanity. I hope the Trump administration will make this a priority in a way that the Biden administration did not. Having a Republican president be the one to end cannabis prohibition and legalize access to psychedelic healing, may well destigmatize the culture much more than otherwise, and give permission to many who can most benefit from these medicines. My hope is that psychedelic medicine and therapy will much more rapidly permeate our culture, and open and soften our hearts and minds to grapple with the many huge issues we are confronting.
Equal Rights Amendment
I’m writing here now on my flight back from Washington, D.C., where my wife Mia Bronner joined Equal Means Equal activists dressed as Bene Gesserit (the powerful Jedi order of women from the movie Dune) in a direct action at the National Archives building, which houses the U.S. Constitution, swapping in a banner calling on Biden to immediately publish the ERA that will enshrine equality regardless of sex in the Constitution. The ERA would enshrine gender equality in the U.S. Constitution, ensuring that “equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” The ERA will outlaw discrimination on the basis of sex and provide strong constitutional protection against barriers that women or any person regardless of gender often face. The ERA would end gender-based pay gaps, improve workplace protections, and protect against discriminatory laws and barriers to sexual and reproductive care.
I was personally surprised to learn that women’s rights aren’t enshrined and protected in the Constitution. And despite the requisite 38 states ratifying this amendment to do so, with a strong push in recent years growing out of the Me Too movement, President Trump blocked it from being published in 2020, and then Republican Congressional leaders did the same in Congress this past year. However, President Biden has had and still has the power to order the National Archivist to simply publish the ERA, who insofar as she is stonewalling, should be fired immediately and replaced with someone who will.
Mia and five others were arrested but released the next day, facing charges of unlawful entry and second-degree theft, despite the National Archives door at issue being 600 tons and not in use, and no one tried to enter the building, and the original banner was not taken from the property and was reinstalled after the action. The Archivist of the U.S., Colleen Shogun, issued a nonsensical statement about this being unlawful criminal activity, rather than celebrating that this is precisely the kind of peaceful political expression that the U.S. Constitution protects. It is the control of police power and the right of citizenry to peaceful protest that distinguishes the U.S. from tyrannical governments across the globe.
While I have slim hope that Trump will act on this if Biden doesn’t, it sure would be an incredible olive branch if he did, and there are allies on the right pushing hard on this as well as on the left.
And late breaking as of publishing this Friday morning, Biden is stating that the ERA is the law of the land while not actually compelling the Archivist to publish, and thus admitting it’s just symbolic… super disappointing.
Federal Minimum Wage, Affordable Housing and Universal Basic Income
The federal minimum wage is stuck at an abysmally low $7.25. Dr. Bronner’s has funded in the past a number of state-level campaigns to raise the minimum wage and have been gratified to see California recently implement a sector-specific $20 minimum wage for fast-food chains with more than sixty locations. The fast-food lobby in particular has been a huge force blocking reasonable raises to the minimum wage for decades, but now ironically is leading the way showing that this can be done in a way that does not harm business and raises prices only a few percent for customers, with minimal job losses amounting to less than 1% in the sector due to automation. It’s unethical for large corporations to pay substandard wages to employees, who then have to utilize food stamps and housing assistance programs to make ends meet; this is “corporate welfare” and a huge stain on our country’s values.
I was disheartened by the larger minimum wage coalition going for a $15 federal minimum wage in 2016 under Obama, at a time when only California and New York had done so, which are relatively high cost of living states, and thus the effort to reform the minimum wage at the federal level faltered. I and other allies were pushing for an approach where the federal minimum wage should index to local cost of living, at the county or state level, so that low cost of living states like Wyoming and West Virginia would have a lower minimum wage reflective of lower cost of living, and higher cost of living states would have higher (see my Huffpo blog here). I believe this would have been much more politically feasible to implement and potentially an approach a Trump administration could consider and take, however remote that might be.
Affordable housing and the houseless population is another massive problem, where a bipartisan approach could be a powerful way to address. It’s just gotten worse under Newsom and Biden, and while I don’t appreciate Trump using the fires to go after Newsom versus focusing on policies that will mitigate the main underlying problem of climate change, I also am disheartened to see Newsom, only now that rich people are houseless, proposing to suspend environmental and Nimby regulations that make approving affordable housing projects so difficult in the state. My brother and company president Mike Bronner noted that private sector approaches are much more efficient than the government’s, and shared this with regards to affordable housing efforts here in the North San Diego area:
The project we were initially exploring was a private equity deal… They are getting a 5% return on the land, but I believe they could be getting 7% but are choosing not to. Plus they have the land asset. They are breaking ground in April and will consist of over 200 units, 105 being low and middle income. Private dollars make this venture a lot more cost efficient and quick than those that rely on government tax credits, which are burdened by too much bureaucracy and red tape. The former costs $430k per unit and can be online in 2.5 years, while the latter takes 5-6 years and costs $1 million per unit. Terrible how the government programs that are supposed to make these projects more affordable do the opposite.
Another avenue is Community Capital Management (CCM) … an impact investment group whose fixed income portfolio for affordable housing is 75%. We are going to speak with them to get an understanding of their model and how they conduct their impact investments, and where they can possibly direct some of those investments to projects up here in North County. Investing directly with them is probably the easiest way to have impact in this space, as they do all the heavy lifting.
Then there is another model that works with church properties to develop affordable housing on under-utilized land like parking lots and open spaces. In San Diego there is over 4,500 acres with development potential, and working with them can bring affordable housing costs down to as low as $200k per unit for a modular one-bedroom unit. The group is called Yigby which stands for Yes in God’s Back Yard (a play on and counter to NIMBY). Contrary to how it sounds it is not a religious entity itself, but was established in 2019 by Funders Together to End Homelessness San Diego (FTEHSD), an alliance of philanthropists and private grant-makers dedicated to addressing homelessness in the region.
It’s kind of like SpaceX versus NASA. With the huge amount of capped return impact investing out there in the private sector accepting a lower return of 5% to 7%, why not deploy and fund a massive increase in affordable housing across the country? This seems like another area that a Trump administration could lead an unusual bipartisan coalition on. And speaking of SpaceX and Elon Musk—champion bar none of decarbonizing and electrifying our economy—hopefully Trump’s approach will continue to accelerate this, with Elon as a close advisor. But we’re also on the precipice of a massive shift to self-driving vehicles and robotic solutions for many other jobs in the economy, that can potentially be incredibly disruptive if millions of jobs become obsolete, but where a serious investigation of how a Universal Basic Income and job skill retraining could address.
Immigration Reform
Dr. Bronner’s is located in North County San Diego, and it’s clear to me that immigrants are what makes America great, including my grandfather who emigrated from Germany in 1929 and is a real example of the American Dream. But I also understand that borders and boundaries and an orderly immigration process is essential. I really hope this is the last election where this issue is weaponized in such a coarse and ugly way. When we say grace at the table thanking all the hands that grew and harvested our food, we are thanking a largely immigrant workforce who does this incredibly hard work few native-born Americans are willing to do. Farm workers are exempt from the federal minimum wage and overtime rules, and we basically have an apartheid farm labor system in our country; although I’m gratified that California under democratic control has addressed this (along with Colorado, Washington and Oregon), and hope to see similar reform soon at the federal level.
I pray that the overheated overblown rhetoric in the election doesn’t translate into threatened huge draconian deportations, which incidentally would cause our farming sector to collapse. Dr. Bronner’s VP of Engagement, Bertine Kabellis, is a Haitian immigrant, and was approached by three white ladies at her gym in mid-September and asked if she liked cats, who then walked away snickering. The dog whistling, race-baiting playbook of too many Republican campaigns is really disappointing and sad, stoking the worst in American society and psyche. Various organizations that we fund who advocate for immigrant communities are bracing for impact. I hope that Trump’s focus can be on deterrence of further illegal immigration, and streamlining and expanding legal immigration to feed our full employment economy, rather than going after those already here fleeing desperate circumstances in their home countries. [2]
LBGTQ and Trans Rights
My huge spirit world initiation experience I noted above, where I experienced ego death and was embraced by God/dess’s Love and had a powerful vision of Jesus stepping in to heal our broken world, was in a gay trance club in Amsterdam. In that experience and in medicine experiences later, I’ve seen how the divine love and energy at the heart of Creation vibrates beyond all gender and orientations, encompassing and celebrating all. And realized in myself how messed up I was by the shaming of boys in our culture to not be “gay or girlie,” and was ashamed of feminine queer dynamics in my own soul and being. And compensated by aggressive insecure policing of myself and others, as so many others do. There’s a huge global rising and de-repression of the feminine, playing out in us individually and collectively, and the healing that veterans are experiencing with the medicine, as their inner healer activates, in some ways can be seen as their inner divine feminine coming into right relationship and balance, and the healing and release that brings.
But we still very much live in a straight man’s world, and in much of our country and world, it’s still really hard to be LBGTQ+ identified and to love and accept and celebrate yourself, and feel safe to do so publicly. George Bush famously said that he didn’t want to “kick gays” to appeal to evangelicals as part of his election strategy. This past election cycle, trans and gender non-conforming folks were very much the new “gays” getting kicked hard as part of Trump’s winning strategy. Hopefully he and other allies can evolve, learn, and grow on this issue, and this will be the last election cycle where that happens. I wanted to share my experience here in that hope, as well as the the sad story of a trans friend of mine.
He was born intersex, which means he was born with both male and female genitalia. As is customary in such situations, a choice was made by his parents and doctors, and he was surgically operated on and assigned female. But he did not identify as female and as an adult transitioned to his true deeply felt gender identity, and was a proud trans man. But he struggled with mental health issues exasperated by being trans and the social stigma and hate he had to navigate, and took his life six months into the crazy Covid times. I share this because I think everyone across the political spectrum can understand that in the case of being born intersex and then assigned the wrong gender, that such a person, in consultation with their parents and doctors, should be allowed to access gender affirming care before puberty. And hopefully with that in mind, we can be more empathic and understanding that genitalia and gender identity do not always line up, and gender and sexuality exist on a spectrum. Kids with severe gender dysphoria can be deeply distressed and depressed being forced to conform to a gender they do not resonate with at all. And to be clear, such a weighty decision can only ever be done in close consultation and approval with both doctors and parents: there’s widespread misinformation out there that in some states in the U.S., a minor can choose to engage with gender affirming care without parental consent until a child is adult. It is the case the adolescent mind can be impulsive where gender-affirming care is not the solution to their problems. But I think parents in such circumstances, as hard as it can be, have to closely attend and listen to their kids and their doctors, in figuring out the right course. And the government, just like with reproductive choice for women, has no business inserting itself.
Ultimately, it’s about what makes our kids happy and able to live full and productive lives, and if they’re much happier as nonbinary or transgender, and severely distressed and depressed otherwise, then I think it’s clear we should affirm the right to access gender-affirming care in close consultation with and sign off from their doctors and parents. Incidentally, the TV show RuPaul’s drag race is truly excellent, and I suggest season 14 is a great one to watch, where the winning queen, Willow Pill, struggled with both physical and mental health issues, but found great healing with psilocybin and credited it with helping her love and be her most awesome and fabulous self.
I’m also sharing this as I remember as a kid, listening to rhetoric around immigrants and gays on the radio in I forget which campaign in the 80’s (either Reagan’s re-election or Bush Sr.), wondering out loud to my dad why we didn’t just round up and put all the immigrants and gay people on an island somewhere… let’s remove the contagion in our body politic! He was a strong Reagan supporter—as I was then, but shared that there was a great man in the Navy when he served in the late ‘50s early ‘60s that he and others looked up to (my dad attained the highest enlisted rank of Chief Petty Officer), that was kicked out for being gay, and he always thought that was really sad and wrong. I’m concerned that kids like me hearing all the trans and immigrant bashing of this past election cycle will draw wrong and hateful conclusions like I did, and may not have a parent like my dad correct their thinking. [3]
Finally I’ll note this Gallup survey from last year showing the percentage of the population identifying as LBGTQ+, broken down by age and generation. This shows a clear trend towards a much more fluid and accepting future, where now more than 1 in 5 people in the Gen Z generation identify as LBGTQ+. Similar to how the acceptance of mixed race marriage, gay marriage, and other historical and current civil rights issues has increased over time, the arc of history is long but bends towards ever more freedom and justice.
Climate Change and Regenerative Agriculture
The fires raging in Los Angeles right now are obvious signs, along with Hurricane Helene and the multiple extreme weather events across the globe, that climate change is accelerating and posing an existential threat to life on Earth in its current form. Humanity is causing the sixth great extinction, with ecosystems worldwide in collapse or severely strained and degraded. Industrial agriculture and factory farming of animals in particular are key drivers, and ethical and ecological disasters. RFK Jr. has been an outspoken advocate of regenerative agriculture, and hopefully he can exert some influence on this issue. We need to reduce our consumption of animal products, stop factory farming, and integrate livestock back into regenerative mixed pasture cropping systems, where they can help boost fertility and lower and eventually eliminate the need for synthetic inputs.
However, in the latter regard, its concerning to see the big ag-chemical companies like Bayer-Monsanto co-opt the regenerative movement and advance the idea that blasting huge amounts of the herbicides they sell on no-till feed crops genetically engineered to withstand their weed killers, while still also using synthetic nitrogen for fertility, is somehow regenerative. True regenerative agriculture reduces and eventually eliminates the need for synthetic fertility and pesticide inputs over time and can sequester huge amounts of atmospheric carbon in soil in the form of long-term recalcitrant humus. Dr. Bronner’s is a co-founder of the Regenerative Organic Certified standard along with our allies at Patagonia and Rodale, that brings together high-bar soil health, animal welfare, and fair labor / fair trade criteria into a single consumer facing standard. We hope to see regenerative agriculture at global scale over time fulfill its promise as a key strategy to mitigate climate change, along with decarbonizing our global economy. We’ll see how this plays out in a Trump administration, and hope that RFK Jr. can prevail over the massive corporate interests invested in blasting ever more chemicals on American and global farmland.
Eco-social Supply Chain Integrity of Large Multinational CPG Companies
The EU “Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDD)” was enacted last year and applies to companies with greater then 1,000 employees and 450 million Euros in annual revenue. CSDD is a set of rules that require European companies to conduct due diligence throughout their entire supply chain, ensuring compliance with human rights and environmental standards, essentially holding them accountable for abuses occurring within their supplier networks across the globe; this means companies must identify, assess, and mitigate potential risks related to human rights and environmental impacts within their supply chains and take necessary actions to address them.
Insofar as this will effectively force such companies to internalize costs they had been externalizing, this will make domestic production and the American workforce more competitive. This lines up with the interest of a significant part of Trump’s base, and it would sure be awesome to see this become required in the U.S. as well. This also resonates in significant part to the 17 Sustainable Development Goals of the UN’s Department of Economic and Social Affairs.
For large CPG companies, the scale of impact in terms of agricultural and ecosystem land area, and number of farmers and workers involved in the farming and processing of raw materials, generally dwarfs that of their operations in the countries they are headquartered in. Systemic labor and human rights abuses are all too common, as are environmentally destructive farming, mining, and manufacturing practices. At Dr. Bronner’s, we take high bar third party eco-social certification of our major supply chains seriously, which are certified both fair trade under the Fair for Life program, as well as Regenerative Organic Certified.
DEI Programs
There’s a big pushback against DEI programs occurring in the culture at-large right now, with many companies rolling back or renaming them to focus on “Belonging and Culture,” although big companies like Target and Costco have reasserted their commitments to DEI. At Dr. Bronner’s, we’re proud of the diversity of our All-One family and our efforts to increase the breadth and diversity of our applicant pool for new positions. We host ongoing DEI programming that is entirely optional to attend, with a goal to educate, inform and bring people together, including cultural celebrations, speakers and trainings. To help those across the political spectrum feel welcome, I make sure to also affirm our conservative allies on various issues, while noting that my dad was the central moral inspiration in my life and a proud Republican. I think it is important that we learn about and take to heart the historical inequality and oppression that has led to huge generational wealth disparity and collective inter-generational trauma in our country, as well as ongoing racist policies like how the drug war is primarily prosecuted in communities of color. However, over the years, our DEI programming has naturally evolved from centering education on the historical and ongoing oppression and struggle of BIPOC, LBGTQ and other communities in America, to creating spaces to celebrate the cultural traditions of our staff members. Later this month for example, the All One family is looking forwards to a presentation about and celebration of the Korean Lunar New Year, and eating delicious Korean food!
Understanding our stance on certain issues is easier for some than others. I strive to think about how members of our All-One family who identify as conservative can also feel included in our work to advance social justice and understanding in the workplace and in the world. I made a point recently of appreciating our family, staff members, and other conservative identified allies at our holiday party, including my dad, the Capones, and former Governor Rick Perry. We’ve thought a lot about how we can change the language we use to be less triggering, which DEI as a term has become, and whether that term serves us at all. I imagine that at least some of the companies who are dropping “DEI” are keeping various programs formerly labeled as DEI but are calling them something else, like those who have renamed their DEI work to Belonging and Culture. Fostering belonging is the main point of DEI work anyway: helping everyone to feel appreciated and understood. At Dr. Bronner’s, the comfort and sense of belonging of BIPOC and LGBTQ people in our company ultimately is more important to us than any discomfort the term DEI may trigger. Although the term and even the concept may be falling out of favor in corporate culture, my brother and I think “DEI & Belonging” has a nice ring. We are proud to keep our DEI initiatives going because social and racial justice is incredibly important to our mission. They make us a better company and a better place to work. And it’s how we make everyone feel like they belong.
Palestine and Israel
I’ve written previously about our family history and relationship to these two great peoples living on shared ancestral lands. Summarizing briefly, Dr. Bronner himself came from an orthodox German Jewish soapmaking family, and his parents were murdered in the Holocaust, which was the dark inspiration for his All-One-Love mission in the world. He emigrated to the U.S. in 1929, and his younger sister Lotte emigrated from Nazi Germany to a kibbutz in then Palestine now Israel in 1936, and we have family and friends in Israel. We source the majority of our olive oil from West Bank Palestinian farmers via Canaan Fair Trade, and have formed a powerful friend and partnership with founder Nasser Abufarha; we source the balance from the Israeli side, half from Yoshra, a Jewish family farm who turns out is related to us, and half from Sindyanna co-founded by Jews and Arab-Israeli Palestinians that sources olive oil from Arab-Israeli Palestinian farmers in the Nazareth region.
We value both Israel and Palestine’s right to security and sovereignty, and are extremely upset by ascendant fascist forces in Israeli society seeking to annex Palestinian land to Israel and deny them their homeland, while also appreciating Israel’s need to address the existential threat of Iran and its proxies. We very much support ending the war in Gaza leading to a two-state solution, based on the 1967 borders with good faith negotiated land swaps. Trump’s proposed two-state solution from his last term lopsidedly favors Israel, and would benefit greatly from real dialog and input from Palestinian allies. However, if any American president can bring Israel and Netanyahu to heel, it’s President Trump and I hope beyond hope that a viable Palestinian state emerges from the tragedy of recent events, and the ongoing cycles of violence and oppression cease.
Electoral Reform and Ranked Choice Voting
This past election cycle we supported the successful ranked choice voting campaign in DC, where our DC based Social Action team headed up by Adam Eidinger helped out; they also legalized cannabis there in 2014, raised the minimum wage in 2016, and decriminalized plant and fungal medicines in 2020 with our support. Now they are championing ranked choice voting, which like psychedelic policy reform, is a bipartisan issue although hated wherever one or another party machine has a lock on local politics, which means the Democratic party in DC. Ranked choice voting allows us to vote for third party candidates without fear of throwing away our votes. If no candidate wins a majority in initial voting, the bottom candidate drops out and voters who picked them first get their second-choice votes assigned to the remaining candidates. This process continues until there is a majority, and this recent excellent op-ed in Washington Post breaks it down beautifully. For example, we could vote for RFK Jr. as our first choice, and then either Trump or Biden as our second; insofar as RFK was third and neither Trump or Biden won a majority, then second place votes for those who voted for RFK first, would be reassigned. So, there would be no concern that your vote was wasted voting for a third party candidate. This reform could well pave the way to one or another third party candidate prevailing in our future!
We are working closely with the veteran community in this cause as well, where my cousin Eric Bronner is founder and Chief Operating Officer of Veterans for All Voters. Eric actually relayed the following incredibly hypocritical fact: both the Republican and Democratic parties utilize ranked choice voting when picking their own leadership positions in the House and Senate. But both parties oppose ranked choice voting otherwise for the American electorate. [4]
To conclude, I have a lot of concern in this moment, but focusing only on the shadows can get in the way of powerful bi-partisan thinking and solutions to the big issues we’re collectively facing. I wanted to take the time and space here to share my perspective with allies on the real, and hope this is taken in the generous spirit it’s offered, from one American patriot to another. Trump doesn’t have to worry about reelection and I hope that he breaks the mold on more than one issue, and doesn’t double down on his worst tendencies and proposals. But I’m not pollyannaish here either, and regardless we will stand strong.
Onwards!!!
[1] After I listened, I excitedly posted about the One Love vibration these guys were laying down so beautifully towards the end:
I think what Bryan was saying indirectly is that every faith tradition’s highest vibration is love, compassion and empathy, I’ll add when they aren’t making idols out of their beliefs and demonizing each other. Even atheistic humanism at its highest vibration is Love motivated by compassion for human suffering. Love is the one true religion that cuts across whatever ideas we have about ultimate reality, and I appreciate how emotionally and spiritually fluent and articulate these veterans are who have gone through the Ibogaine, 5-MeO-DMT protocol are. The highest gift of these medicines is the experience of divine Love at the heart of existence, and what happens to humanity globally when we all have the opportunity to experience this? That’s the all one dream of heaven on Earth… and the medicines aren’t sufficient in themselves to for example solve the affordable housing crisis that is such a blight on our country. But as people experience their divine oneness with each other and our Source Love, hopefully they’ll care a lot more about solving these and the other mega problems we are facing. All-One!!!
[2] I also want to call out how ridiculous it was for the Trump team and allies to play the card / canard in the election’s close that there was some kind of Democratic deep state conspiracy to fly illegal immigrants into swing states: here’s a map (scroll down) of where immigrants have settled in the past ten years from the Washington Post, published in June, before this particular conspiracy was being pushed hard in the close of the election, so there’s no incentive to cook the numbers. As can be seen, most immigrants are settling in California, Texas and Florida, and scanning the major swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and others, there clearly isn’t any major immigrant population, except North Carolina. And if they are here illegally they can’t vote and by definition in a swing state there isn’t a viable path to do so. This is the same kind of sloppy conspiratorial thinking behind 9/11 being an inside job on the left so we could invade Iraq; the scale, competence and scope of what it would take to pull off in either case doesn’t make any sense. I was also concerned that the Trump campaign and allies were laying groundwork and rationale to aggressively and falsely dispute the election result if he lost, via interviews on Joe Rogan, posts on X and otherwise.
[3] Incidentally I felt the call to serve myself and got into West Point early but for various reasons ended up on a different path with a different mission in life; but now stoked to work with veteran allies to heal their trauma with psychedelic therapy.
[4] And just today I read this graphically compelling breakdown about proportional ranked choice voting in the NYTimes, “How to Fix America’s Two Party Problem” and then perused the issue more at the nonpartisan FairVote website, in particular the Fair Representation Act – FairVote. This may well be a bridge too far after a bridge too far, but would basically split a state’s representation in the House by exactly the proportion of votes cast for the major parties (and minor third parties if they reach a certain threshold), rather than having 100% (or much more of a majority then the actual proportion of the vote in the state for the parties) be red or blue based on gerrymandered districts. And while we’re at it, let’s shift how we elect our President to the actual national vote, not the electoral college system. This seems like another area that if any president could take on fundamental electoral reform on this level, that Trump could do it, however remote that he prioritizes doing so.