New Oregon: My Vision for the Future of the Pacific Northwest

Editor’s Note: This is a very early, pre-announcement vision for New Oregon. I’m exploring a run only if there’s real support: I need funding first and then 23,000 signatures. If you want me to run, have ideas, or can help gather signatures and dollars, please reach out—let’s see if this is worth doing together. Check back soon and be sure to subscribe to our email newsletter — this page will update as the weeks go by!

1: Government Reform and Civic Engagement

I’m done with mono-party control. We all want the same things—cleanliness, order, conservation, clean air and water, a good future for our children—so I’m building a broad, independent path that invites everyone in. We need to modernize our State Constitution. We also need to prioritize difficult conversations: I value first principles, humility, and challenging our own assumptions. New Oregon should welcome respectful disagreement, real data, and the courage to change course.

2: Families First: Family law reform

We need to modernize Oregon’s family law system, which incentivizes litigation, and, in practice, is both anti-child and anti-family. We need to move fit parents out of adversarial courts and into child-centered reviews with coordinators, evaluators, and therapists, affirming parental rights as fundamental. To that end, I’m pushing a child-centered model that treats fit parents as fundamentally equal.

3: Homelessness (and economics)

The starting point is simple: most people without stable homes are decent human beings. Our approach is compassion, simplicity, and patience, plus practical steps for safety, IDs, jobs, and staying on track over weeks and months.

4: Religious Revival

New Oregon must be a bastion for religious freedom and a government without a sanctioned religion. I’ll speak openly about the moral roots of policy—compassion, truth, simplicity, love—while refusing the habit of judging each other’s beliefs. From the 2024 Presidential campaign, there’s a video about the importance of religions here, and an essay on the topic of religious leaders’ endorsements of political candidates.

5: Compassionate justice (and Science)

I reject the false choice between compassion and justice. We can seek accountability and still remain compassionate, renewing our criminal justice system with that harmony at the center.

6: Responsible Drug Laws

Drugs are complicated — from caffeine to cocaine — and they aren’t going away. We’ve been using drugs for all of human history. A neighbor of mine put it best: “we need more regulated drugs, less prescribed drugs”, and I don’t think I could summarize my vision better than that. The legally prescribed drugs from the pharmaceutical industry (by and through the “medical” community) need to be prescribed far less; whereas the ancient drugs this nation made illegal with the Controlled Substances Act need to be regulated heavily, but not outlawed and shamed. A longer essay is forthcoming.

7: Environmental Stewardship (and economics)

Healing our planet was the third of three fundamental pillars of my national platform. Here in the Pacific Northwest, we literally live in a rainforest, so let’s be better stewards! I want practical incentives that reduce pollution and clean up past damage while growing real jobs—experiments that make economic sense or get retired quickly.