Hailey Lynch-Bastion wants to be the next mayor of Grand Rapids, and “they” have some interesting ideas for changing the dynamic in Michigan’s second-largest city.

The blue-haired Grand Rapids native and employee at the city’s downtown Founders Brewing Company recently sat down with WOOD to discuss the mayor’s race as part of a series on 2024 mayoral candidates that also includes Steve Owens, David LaGrand and Senita Lenear.

It’s doubtful the other three candidates have composed campaign songs for their respective mayoral runs. But Lynch-Bastion has (some offensive language):

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The four are competing in a primary set for Aug. 6, with the top-two vote winners moving on to the November general election.

Lynch-Bastion, who self-describes as “a person who focuses on philosophical and psychoanalytical work, largely speaking,” told the news site that while he has seriously contemplated running for mayor for over six years because “everything is terrible all the time,” he’s “not trying to get me elected.”

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Instead, he noted: “I’m trying to get the people in a place where a voice for the people is at least a little bit louder than it usually would.”

His top priorities include “homelessness and food,” but Lynch-Bastion also has thoughts about relations between Grand Rapids Police and the community, and the department’s approach to fighting crime.

“I don’t think they’re using the officers they have appropriately,” Lynch-Bastion said in response to concerns about officer shortages. “I don’t think they need more, I think they need to relax. I think they need to be stripped of some of their …. I don’t like they have guns.”

WOOD noted lingering “pain in the community” following the death of Patrick Lyoya, who was shot and killed by a Grand Rapids Police officer during an April 2022 traffic stop struggle, and questioned how Lynch-Bastion could help “bridge the divide between part of the community and the police department.”

“To try and say how do we bridge this gap without making any changes in the structure of the police department itself is to try and in a sense victim-blame. It’s like saying, ‘Hey community, we notice you’re having a hard time with the police killing you, how do you want to act differently?’ Or at best, it’s like a cop played a game of basketball with a kid. That’s the community outreach. I’m tired of that,” Lynch-Bastion said.  “Community outreach for me looks like let’s take away their guns. If you keep killing people by accident, take away the thing that kills people.”

The 33-year-old father’s campaign website, part of which is written in Hebrew, lays out Lynch-Bastion’s “philosophy & plans,” and includes, music, writings, and an inventory of his “well-curated library” featuring dozens of books from Aleister Crowley. There’s also his thought-provoking “Mayoral Contemplations” blog.

Lynch-Bastion’s “about” page reads:

Hailey Lynch-Bastion was born in Grand Rapids on January 18th, 1991 at 7:06 am.

An auto-didact and high school dropout (with a GED through Heartside Ministries), they have been a member of the magickal order A.’.A.’. – founded by Aleister Crowley in 1907 – since 2018, having privately studied philosophy for a decade and being briefly instructed in Kabbalah under a rabbi. Their main lines of political research engage in play informed by such philosophers and descendants of post-’68 France as Deleuze-Guattari, CCRU, Laboria Cuboniks, & Foucault; queer cyborg & post-ironic esoteric cyberculture; comparative religion, and the ongoing evolution of the Western Hermetic Tradition. 

A neurotic Capricorn, they spend what few leisure moments they have pretending to be a robot and fearing Roko’s Basilisk. 

Lynch-Bastion told WOOD his main concern is helping the city’s less fortunate with housing and food, noting his own living conditions aren’t the best.

“I personally live in a one-bedroom currently that’s filled with bugs and there’s lead in the paint,” he said. “Despite my best efforts to deter these pest issues, it’s the state of a lot of housing, not just in Grand Rapids but nationally and internationally.”

“We have so many resources,” Lynch-Bastion said. “We act like there’s a scarcity and allow our brothers and sisters to literally starve on the streets, melt to death. It is abhorrent to me.”

The solution, he said, is countering society’s focus on success and shifting resources to folks who haven’t found it.

“I think not only is this work-yourself-to-death-faster-and-faster sort of viewpoint something that needs to be seriously addressed both by the community and by the people in charge, but also just the whole paradigm we’re currently existing under I find a little sad,” Lynch-Bastion told WOOD.

“What if people did not have to worry about being housed and fed. What if it was a given? We have the resources. I think we should switch the conversation from making committees to deal with the homeless or the hungry to taking care of this now because they are dying right now. That’s important to me.”

Unlike other Grand Rapids mayoral candidates, Lynch-Bastion has little interest in raising revenues for the city through a proposed 3% hotel tax on the August ballot, or plans for an amphitheater, proposed soccer stadium, or possible aquarium for the city.

Instead, he believes in a “trickle-up society” and plans to donate his mayoral salary “to the public in some manner,” according to Lynch-Bastion’s “philosophy & plans.”

Others include leveraging the “horror of Late Capitalism” to divert food leftovers from restaurants to shelters for the homeless, and “converting available lots of land & portions of our parks into community gardens” and incentivizing home gardens to “reduce the rising cost of groceries for us all, as well as improve our diets while encouraging outdoor play and social engagement.”