Codifying Conspiracies

Rights Act of nineteen sixty five. A focal point for this struggle is in the state of Georgia, where leaders like Stacy Abrahams have been working tirelessly to activate more voters and attain proper representation in government. Last month, Georgia's state representative part Cannon was arrested and charged with two felony counts simply for doing her job and knocking on the door of the illegitimate governor, Brian Kemp and demanding

he not signed away Georgian's rights behind closed doors. Representative Canon join me this week on woke af Daily to tell her story and talk about the gains that activists have made on the ground in Georgia and the many

obstacles that had yet to be overcome. You can hear our full half hour conversation about her experience being arrested and charged, why more marginalized people need to be running for office in local communities and more by supporting me on Patreon at patreon dot com slash woke af for right Now. Here's my question to Georgia's state representative part Cannon on why and how Georgia became a centerpiece in

the fight for voting rights in America. What is really interesting and maybe this is something that obviously, because you've been working in Georgia for a quite some time now, that you've seen coming but the rest of the country did not. Right, Georgia has become a lightning rod in so many different ways because of the hard and tireless work of extraordinary activists and politicians like yourself that have been due the work to elevate the voices of black

and brown people that are in that state. You know, this piece of legislation that was signed into law by Governor Kemp is based on a lie, right, just like the over two hundred pieces of legislation that are now in over forty states in this country based on a lie. And I want to know, where do you think that we head now, knowing that we are just, you know, months shy of beginning midterm elections in this country where

there are elections that are happening all the time. We know that Governor Kemp is being sued right again for the actions that he has taken. But where do you see Georgia moving now? As it pertains to voting rights. Georgia is already voting in record numbers and voters have actually gone through whatever coping mechanisms that they need to access the ballot. When we talk about Georgians turning the state blue, many times it's talked about as this idea

happened overnight. It really didn't. Years and years of trauma informed practices by voting rights groups saying, Wow, you're having some issue with transportation to get to the polling place. We will help you with that. Geez, you're thirsty or hungry from standing in this six hour line, will provide you with some refreshments. Oh wow, you are experiencing COVID nineteen and you're trying to figure how to get your ballot to you and back in. Who can sign for you?

Who can help you? Will help you with a hotline. So Georgians have already been working towards stopping what they have done the GOP, which is caught defying conspiracies. When you spotify a conspiracy and you turn it into state law, you enact so many different officers who believe that they are the protector of the vote to do things that will disempower people from voting. There are two pieces of Senate Bill two O two that I really want Georgians

to take in consideration and have a strategy for. The first one is now any old person in Georgia can put in an unlimited number of petitions to people's voter registrations. We saw this in twenty eighteen. We wrote a whole movie about it, documentary and screened it. It's called Suppressed

with Brave New Films. And what we explained there was there was this gentleman who lived in a rural community and he felt like people with these different last names with hyphens in their last names, that they weren't real people. So he would go up to the elections boards meetings that really no one else attended, and he would submit the number of petitions he could submit for that day and next month he would go back and do it again.

Now that same person is going to have the power to be the voter registrations are And you don't even know us, you don't know who we are, but we know strategy is. So that's the first issue. The second is the human rights violations that are codified by criminality. You can face a misdemeanor now for helping someone get food or water in line. What So, we are trying as Georgians to help the country understand that these factions and these bills and policies didn't just happen overnight. They

have been working on these four years. So we want other states to go ahead and sure up voter rights, even if it's in a small subsection, the criminality section, the mail in ballot, the in person voting, the absentee, whatever it is, sure up voting rights before conspiracies become codified, I'm telling you. And if there is anything that the Republican Party has become the master of, it is codifying conspiracies.

Right now in Arizona, they are doing yet another audit on the twenty twenty election that is being overseen by oa N News, you know, the Trump News channel. As if that is bipartisan or non party. I feel like we are living in a parallel universe. One of the other things. You know, you started off saying that you were the youngest representative to be elected in Georgia, and I think that that is extraordinary. I remember when you

were first running, we were also excited. I mean, as a black queer woman like I was just let go, girl go. You know, whatever can be done should be done. You've written a book entitled The Universal Guide for Running for Office at the State level. Why do you still believe that folks like us should be running for office given all that we're up against. Should we be in the streets, should we be in the c suites? Should we be in state office? Why do you think it's

important that we run? All of it? But what I will say about this message of running for office is the most important piece of it is recognizing that you are going to run as you are. So if you are a CEO already or you've been working in McDonald's, you're going to need to run as you are. You're going to have to go back through those photo albums and ask your family members, why were we living there, what were we doing, who was working where and how do we get to this place where half of our

family didn't vote in this one specific election. There's going to have to be a really deep dive that people do, and I use the Universal Guide to Running for Office to explore that, to help people break it down and

to make it actionable. I have a whole mess at the end of it of affirmation pages where I have you and then you affirm yourselves, and you keep that going so that as you're out there on the campaign trail, you're able to say, I understand legislating uber and lyft because I take uber and lyft more differently than maybe some of my seventy eight eighty year old colleagues. So

I am a subject matter expert in this conversation. Or if you've been working at McDonald's, you understand food safety guidelines, you understand osha, you understand all of these different micro situations that make you the perfect to run for office, that actually help you see your power in the place. Everyone can talk about balancing the state budget, maybe they want money for their hospitals, But if you're a black woman and you're a healthcare worker in Georgia, you should

be running for office. You were the number one type of person in the clinical settings contracting COVID nineteen during this pandemic. So you are a subject matter expert on the issues related to COVID nineteen and hospital financing and funding. So even though sometimes people get concerned that they might not have all the money to finance pain, we talk about all the different types of organizations that can help you when you're considering running for office, and that at

a certain point, money doesn't always do it. You know, even if you spend five hundred dollars on yard signs, yard signs don't vote. They might get your information out to a block of voters, but they're not going to go to the polls to cast their ballot for you, or do that from home. So running for office in this digital space, in a highly polarized moment like now, we have to use our own stories and just run as we are, even if it doesn't pay much as

it relate to a salary. I always help young people understand this, How different would it be if you graduated from high school you had no sex education Because we are of course a absent and only state, and you ran for school board and one you would be able to change your comprehensive sexual education policies, therefore helping teenage pregnancy,

therefore helping community resources all kinds of things. So we have to just think differently about who makes up those seats and not feel as though they're going to challenge us right when it happens. People want to hear the truth right now, when people run for office, and the season is happening. Qualifying in Georgia is in August, which is just three months away, And if I can be of help to anyone, please reach out directly. Codifying conspiracies

has increasingly become the norm in American politics. Just as false, racialized accusations of voter fraud increased in the Trump era, there was also an increase in scaremongering around immigration, especially at the southern border. But this othering of immigrants was not new under Trump. It started decades earlier, fed into

and encouraged by popular white nationalism. This is how a man like Joe R. Pio ended up being elected sheriff of Maricopa County in Arizona back in nineteen ninety two and keeping that position until finally being voted out in twenty sixteen. If you remember R. Pio was also Donald Trump's first presidential pardon after his policies and programs became

the subject of legal scrutiny. I invited Jude Joffey Block, associated Press reporter and co author of the new book Driving While Brown Sheriff Joe Arpile Versus the Latino Resistance onto Woke af Daily this week to take a deep dive into how he gained power, the abuses he carried out with that power, and what led to the reckoning

and ultimate pardon under the Trump presidency. You can hear her full breakdown of Arpio's twisted legacy right now on my Patreon at patreon dot com slash woke a f. I also asked Jude how the wave that finally voted out Sheriff Joe ties into Arizona going blue for the first time in over a half century. Take a listen. Arizona became a really a kind of interesting place right in twenty twenty, much in the same way as Georgia.

Arizona for the first time went blue. How do you make sense of how something like that could happen in twenty twenty, but they produce a man like Joe are a pie? I mean I guess it's the same question of how can this country both give us Barack Obama and Donald Trump. I have no idea is the great paradox of our times, but humor me, how did how did Arizona get to this place? They're actually really connected.

So the grassroots organizing that starts happening in Arizona, it's not just our Pile, but our Pile is a big part of it. It's also Arizona's laws that are aimed at criminalizing immigrants and that many Latinos also feel like cause them to fall under suspicion as well. People will remember Senate Bill ten seventy that Arizona passed in twenty ten that was mostly gutted by courts, but still some

parts of art in effect today. So these laws and our pio's tactics and rhetoric created a backlash, and so there was organizing on the ground that started getting young people to register people to vote, canvassing neighborhoods. There's a whole generation of people in their twenties who have been knocking on doors registering voters since like two, ten, eleven, twelve, and now you know, there seasoned adults and they they're

pretty savvy at running political campaigns. So what we see is this building clout among Latino voters, voters of color, voters who didn't used to be engaged, rising each cycle after Joe our Pile was defeated because this movement really rallied in twenty sixteen to defeat our Pile. Hump was elected that cycle and he won in Maricopa County, but our Pile lost by thirteen points in Maricopa County that year in twenty sixteen, after you know, being in office

for twenty four years. So the same folks who were organizing on the ground continued in twenty eighteen, and they continued in twenty twenty, and we've seen a shift, and it's there are other factors as well. There was a lot of engagement among the indigenous vote in Arizona. There were sewn McCain style Republicans who were just attacted with Trump. There were suburban women who turned against Trump. And then there were California implant transplants who had moved to Arizona

and started to vote in a more democratic way. But this movement and the engagement of young people, the engagement of more voters of color, and the kind of on the ground work what you hear from people who were involved in that. They say, once people saw we could defeat Joe Arpaio in twenty sixteen, that opened their eyes that their vote mattered, that elections matter, and that they

could actually defeat Trump. And so there is a direct connection between this whole saga of what everyone lived through under Maricopa County under Joe our pile, with the politics of Arizona today. Where do you think that we go from here? This is a huge, nightmarish legacy that our pile has. We have, you know, children that still need to be united with their families. We have detention centers across this country that are still overflowing with undocumented people.

We have an immigration crisis where we can't seem to no administration, Obama, not Bush, not Clinton, has been able to not Trump has been able to do anything about how we create a humane right immigration system. Where do you think that we go from here? And what do you think this administration, the Biden Harris team will do in the coming months and coming years. Yeah, I mean

it's a great question. I think. I mean, what we hope to do in the book is lay the groundwork, so that if somebody wanted to be caught up on k where the immigration reform debate started in sort of modern history in the last few decades, where it started and where it is today. We tried to give that context in the book to catch people up to this moment.

And we have President Biden who's made a campaign promise to tackle immigration reform, which is something that has been really impossible for anyone to do for quite some time. And I think what I see in Arizona is that there are newly engaged voters and people who have been involved in the political process and have been inspired to be involved, and are have been on the side of

helping Democrats get elected. If Democrats continue to not be able to deliver on immigration reform, I do wonder what's going to happen, you know, to the same political factors that are a play right now. If this goal of immigration reform seems like it's never going to happen, it could kind of change the calculus of how the politics

are working out on the ground. And so I think that's something that will be interesting to watch because certainly what's happening at the border does make it politically a lot more complicated for the Biden administration to move forward. And I think that we're seeing already how the issue of what's happening at the border is being politicized. That there's rhetoric around a lot of rhetoric around fear and criminality and threats to Americans as part of the larger

conversation that we're seeing about what's going on. And that same rhetoric kind of was something we saw in Arizona at the height of that enforcement. The equation of immigrants with criminality has deep consequences for the kinds of politics and policies that step forward from that. The myriad of problems that we are facing today go back decades to the right wing, white nationalist conspiracies that have been codified

into law. We need to call out these policies for what they are, racist laws created by and for racist Americans. We can do better, and we need to do better, or else America's lost to the worst among us. I tell you every week that it is important not to give up hope, but hope is not enough without a fight. Wherever you are in this vascination, get connected with your community and get to work organizing for a better tomorrow.

The more of us there are, the harder it is for them to say no, to say things can't change, to say that this is the way it has always been, it hasn't and it doesn't have to be. As always, follow me on Patreon to get the latest from me every single weekday at patreon dot com slash woke AF Until next time, Power to the people and to all the people. Power, get woke and stay woke as fuck.