About Brian

Brian grew up in a suburb of New York City called Weston, Connecticut, and attended the Canterbury School in New Milford, CT, where he especially developed his leadership and teamwork skills.  In particular, he honed his mental toughness as a wrestler, cross-country runner, and as a leader in the student government.

As an undergraduate at Washington and Lee University, he engaged in a rigorous double major program of Politics and History.  His main abroad experience in college was in Japan, but he also had other experiences in Cuba and Europe.  The summer of his junior year he held an internship at the Massachusetts State House while holding down two other jobs.  Upon graduation, he volunteered for several political campaigns in Boston, including the 2004 Democratic National Convention, where a chance meeting with then-Senator Joseph R. Biden, Jr., and his Chief of Staff eventually led to an internship in the Senator's Washington, DC, office in late 2006.

After doing substantive work in the United States Senate while just an intern, and after some time in the private sector, he began his graduate studies at George Mason University's School of Public Policy. While also working part-time, he completed his Master of Science (M.S.) in Peace Operations, with his program defining a peace operation “as an intervention into a complex contingency [due to conflict and/or natural disaster] for the purpose of maintaining or restoring peace.”  The completion of his degree included studying abroad in Liberia—evaluating the United Nations Mission in Liberia (UNMIL)—and also included studying abroad in Israel and the West Bank, examining the conflict there.

Since a temporary research position with Edelman Berland, the research division of Edelman, which is the world's largest public relations firm, he has been freelance writing and consulting, roles in which he has had roughly 200 articles published since late 2013 by a wide variety of outlets.  As an example of his ability to generate readership and engagement, his two top-performing articles from among those he self-posted on LinkedIn Pulse generated well over 110,000 unique visitors between them.

As part of these efforts, beginning in July, 2016, Brian produced meticulously researched analysis of the historic Trump-Russia scandal that was far deeper and far ahead of the analysis produced by mainstream media outlets and analysts.  Apart from his work as a freelance writer, one of his contracts was for a major USAID project in Jordan and another was for a Jordanian NGO.  In addition, he has assisted a variety of clients on anything from editing and applications to creating corporate policy manuals and website content.  Brian has even been in a number of film and television projects as he continues to expand and deepen his range as a professional.  After spending close to five-and-a-half years in the Middle East (mainly Jordan) as a freelance journalist and independent consultant in a variety of capacities from 2014-2019, Brian is back in the U.S. pursuing various new projects in his home country, including contracts supporting U.S. Department of Justice and U.S. Department of Education projects.  He currently brings well over two decades of academic and professional expertise to bear on any project in which he is engaged, including his candidacy for the U.S. Senate for Maryland.

Over the more than two decades of his academic and professional experience, Brian has gone in-depth on a wide variety of issues, including but not limited to:

• The special issues faced by women in America and abroad including the assaults on bodily and reproductive autonomy, sexual assault and domestic violence, human trafficking, and (sexual) slavery.  Feminism is for everyone and as Hillary Clinton has said, "Women's rights are human rights"
• Racial justice addressing systemic racism, including the history of abolition and Reconstruction and Jim Crow, criminal justice reform, including police shootings and prison and sentencing reform, and affirmative action
• Medicaid expansion, the Zika virus response, and coronavirus pandemic preparedness and response when it comes to healthcare
• Counterterrorism at home (including domestic terrorism and bioterrorism preparedness and response) and counterinsurgency and international development abroad and the need to stand up for refugees everywhere
• The need for development to fight poverty and hopelessness at home
• The psychology of enthonationalist racism and need to fight hate in all its forms, including racism, anti-Semitism, sexism, Islamophobia, homophobia, transphobia, and xenophobia
• Gun reform, including the proper understanding of the Second Amendment that easily allows for gun regulation (regarding which I was featured by USA Today)
• The need to curb money laundering of the nature demonstrated by Trump
• The problems of misinformation and disinformation, including the right-wing information sphere allied with Russian cyberwarfare, demonstrating the need to strengthen our cyberdefense (for which I have been cited twice by NATO) and internet literacy, as well as understanding the threats posed by irresponsible Big Tech social media companies to our children and our politics
• The dire nature of our news media coverage that lacks context or perspective
• The nature of democracy and fascism and how to defend the former against the latter, and, thus, he need to combat the ongoing Trumpist insurrection coup attempts and to call out Trump's brand of fascism openly, clearly, and constantly in the manner of George Orwell
• How to defend the practical and results-oriented Democratic Party from far-left extremists that want to hijack it and put all that has been accomplished at risk
• The importance of human rights at home and abroad
• The vital importance of infrastructure
• The need to change how we talk about immigration in this country to be in line with reality
• The need to stand up for democracy abroad, especially today in Ukraine against a fascist, genocidal onslaught from Vladimir Putin's Russia