About The OmniAmerican Society

John Randolph Wood Jr. is a former nominee for congress, former vice-chairman of the Los Angeles GOP, opinion writer for USA Today, radio show host for KBLA 1580 in Los Angeles, former national ambassador for Braver Angels (America's largest grassroots, cross-partisan organization dedicated to political depolarization), and founder and president of The OmniAmerican Society: a media enterprise dedicated to transcending the culture wars by re-weaving the American identity. An advisor and contributor to multiple scholarly and civic initiatives, and a recognized authority on race relations and philosophical nonviolence in the tradition of Martin Luther King, Wood is a widely acclaimed speaker, public intellectual and civic activist who is considered a leading figure in the movement to bridge the divide. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and three children..

Jacob Roundtree is an experienced political theorist and communicator. He is currently an assistant editor at the interdisciplinary journal Critical Review, where he has helped organize special issues on themes in the field of intellectual history, as well as a postdoctoral fellow in the Johns Hopkins Center for Economy and Society. Jacob earned his PhD at Harvard in political theory, and primarily writes on political epistemology and modern intellectual history. In addition to his primary research on the history of social theory’s encounter with the problem of social complexity, Roundtree is especially concerned with the contemporary problems of public ignorance, ideology, propaganda, elite dogmatism, and political polarization. He views these phenomena as the great obstacles to achieving a rational democratic society. Jacob is especially passionate in regards to dealienating the people from academic and research institutions, and argues that the benefits of research must be more accessible and utilizable by the public. He has taught courses on democracy, the politics of truth, Marxism, German Idealism, Conservatism, race and politics, and the politics of technology.

Founder and editor of Root Quarterly magazine. An experienced defender of free speech with the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism.

Joshua Eckstein is an anti-human trafficking organizer and investigative journalist. His primary journalistic focuses are in labor exploitation, political dysfunction and corruption, and how partisan media and disinformation obfuscate ground-level human harms. He also writes a series called Self-Told Stories, aiming to give an unfiltered platform of advocacy and nuanced personal narrative to individuals in demographics which political leaders of priviliege often speak on behalf of. He comes out of the grassroots direct aid world, his principle background coming in the anti-human trafficking field. He got his start working with survivors of trafficking to build more effective prevention resources on public transit. He then worked internationally, building large scale, grant-free hybrid projects in nomadic East African communities for climate resilience, trafficking prevention, and economic self-determination through transdisciplinary programs in partnership with the Ugandan government and international climate resilience corporations. He's now in the midst of building GrowBlock in Baltimore. The GrowBlock model repurposes abandoned rowhomes as profitable urban farms to generate grant-independent financing for community-based, survivor-led, block by block survivor support and anti-trafficking programs. It uses the forced appreciation of said homes to create alternative high interest banking services for those without access to traditional banking. He's recently been named to the inaugural Next Gen group of the U.S. Alliance To End Human Trafficking, a cutting-edge work group of U.S.-based anti-trafficking advocates aged 18-35, as well as the Baltimore City Human Trafficking Collaborative. He's spoken on several podcasts and shows regarding creative social innovation and the anti-trafficking field before joining the OAS. Eckstein grew up in small town New Hope PA, with a background in farming, backcountry survival instruction, and restaurant work. He's now living in Baltimore full time while attending Johns Hopkins University en route to a B.A. in moral and political economy along with a B.S. in environmental science.