Prisoners of the Right

from COVID nineteen. Looking at you, Nicki Minaj, wish that you would spend some time, maybe a little bit of time in between trying to keep your husband out of jail and maybe potentially trying to do your quote unquote research on COVID nineteen vaccines instead of spreading bullshit to twenty two million people. Right, somebody told me essentially that I needed to provide quote unquote grace for black women

that mess up. I provide grace for a lot of people, But what I don't provide grace for for people that decide to double down on their foolishness and potentially risk right having twenty two million people decide that they're not going to get vaccinated because Nicki Minaj and the barbies told them not to, right, based on some false premise that three countries had to come out and smack down. I'm just outdone by the fucking stupidity at this point.

And people quote unquote doing your own research. Meanwhile, I would love to see what your grades look like in science, you know, when you were in high school and probably skip those classes. What kind of fucking research are these people actually really doing? Are you googling? Are you going to the CDC? Are you going to the who? Are you going to Nicki Minaj's page or you know, Buster Rhymes's page or ice Cube's page to figure out what

kind of fuckery they decided to spread today. Understand, folks, at you now, you people, you Nicki Minajes and Busta Rhymes and ice Cubes have become a tool of the right. So when the likes of Tucker Carlson and Candice Owens are singing your praises and retweeting, you know that you are on the wrong fucking side of history and on the wrong fucking side of literally everything. When they decide to lift you up. You should fucking run and suspend

your own goddamn accounts. So that's that. On that here we are once again folks with the potential right to do something right around voting rights, to do something that is going to change America's slippery, slippery, sliding slope into fascism right right now. I just saw pictures on MSNBC of our capitol buildings surrounded by essentially, you know, seven foot high fences, barbed wire, all of these things, and

I wonder, is this what democracy looks like? Is this what it looks like to live free when our capital building is behind bars? Like? Is this? So recognize that we have become prisoners of the right. And I don't think that folks are really wrapping their eyes around what

has happened. Whether or not you're living in a red state, but you actually have blue sensibilities, meaning that you believe in vaccines, you believe in science, you believe in facts, and now you're being held hostage, whether it be in your home or in your school by a governor who was choosing to not follow any science, to not follow any rules, and to essentially become the executioner for the citizens of their state. And so as I look around right now at our country in shambles every which way

that you look and pick an issue, it's fucked. Right now, I think about Joe Mansion, and I think about the fact that this attention whore is the one who now we are essentially pandering to higher democracy, and the health of it is on the shoulders of a man from West Virginia who is the king of Cole, who has no black or brown constituents and could give a fuck so long as he remains the king of his small fiefdom.

I am so sick to death of hearing his fucking name and Kirsten Cinema's name, and recognizing that we have three branches of government, as somebody had said to me on Twitter, and I said, damn, you know, this is really the goddamn truth. They said. The three branches of government as they sit right now is Biden, McConnell's courts, and Joe Mansion. So essentially, three white men are controlling every direction that this country takes, and the only direction

that it's moving in right now is backwards. And Joe Mansion has signaled that he wants to move on voting rights, a bill that he has decided to endorse that. Guess what takes out every single ethics rule that was put into the other of voting rights legislation to make sure that a Trump like figure cannot emerge right and cannot take over this country. So he's removed those things. He's removed a lot of things that have to do with ethics.

And our friend who joins the show often, Ellie Mitzel, wrote this in The Atlantic, and I tell you, friends, if you have not read the piece, you should. It is both depressing but also necessary. And he said this, and I gotta tell you you know, whenever Ellie writes, I am both extremely excited and also very depressed. He says this at the end of his piece entitled Joe Mansion giveth on Voting Rights and Joe Mansion taketh Away. He says, this America isn't a democracy right now. It's

a hostage scenario. Mansion is just toying with the Democrats who insist on negotiating with him. And that is the absolute truth here, folks. You see, Joe Mansion is having the time of his fucking life. He is on everybody's lips, and he is at the center of every conversation. I've never seen an attention horror like this, other than maybe a Nicki Minaj, But I've never seen anything like this in a politician. Usually they really want to go to

the table. At least maybe in my you know, very delightful, lovely memories from back in the day when I worked on Capitol Hill and I believed in democracy and I believed in the people. Maybe it's that memory that is being conjured and that often times is proving not to have been the truth. Right, you know, folks, when you think about this, right, and I just again, we don't

need to present hypotheticals on this issue. We need only to look at the last four years under Donald Trump and the fucking grift that his entire family put together in order to square as much money away from the American people, away from agencies, away from social safety nets,

and into his fucking pocket. So how is it that a Joe Mansion, who on his own is a fucking sellout because he has more money from coal than anywhere else, right, as well as you know, the fucking Koch Brothers decides that after witnessing Donald Trump and all of his family's fucking grift over the last four years that we don't need to put in writing the things that we expect from our fucking president and vice president. How is that right?

Because here's the thing that you are essentially asking burglars to watch the fucking beck That's what we are doing right now with our politicians. Right, we can't get shit done with regard to Big Pharma and how they price their prescriptions right that they create for the American public. You know why because three of the biggest right Dems quote unquote middle of the voters take close to two

million dollars from big fucking Pharma. All of this is a goddamn sham, And I wonder how we make it through each and every week without going out of our front doors and just screaming that primal scream and waiting for something to fucking change and happen. Because what I am starting to recognize is that it does not matter who the fuck we vote for, because at some way form shaping down the road, they will turn into a grifter,

just like everybody fucking else. Right, You know, I remember there's an episode of Sex in the City that I love so much. It was very funny where Carrie Branshaw says that squirrels are essentially rats, just in better costumes. That's how the fuck I feel about the Democrats right now.

Essentially many of those centerists right are just what Republicans in different fucking clothing with different mantras, but they're doing the same type of underhanded grifting shit that Republicans just do to your face, right because they say their work is who gonna fucking check me, Ain't not a goddamn person. Because everybody is trying to get on or get off with money in their pockets, in their packs, right in their businesses or what have you, they could give a

fuck about the rest of us. And this is why I continue to say that revolution to me looks like the only direction that we are headed in, because I'm not quite sure how you continue to try and reform a system that was based on grift and racist capitalism. I don't know. Coming up next, folks, is my conversation with a really dynamic duo who put out a very thoughtful book that I think that this conversation is one

that should be happening a lot more, but doesn't. I get to talk with k Whitlocke and Nancy Heightseg who wrote the book Carcerol Khan, The Deceptive Terrain of Criminal Justice Reform, and I really enjoyed this conversation. It was about thirty five minutes of just listening to these women talk about the ways in which we've all been duped right by the prison industrial complex. That they talk about how its tentacles reach into every part of our society.

So I hope that you enjoy that conversation. Let me know what you think about the ideas around abolition, restoration, reform, and reimagining this broken system. Folks. I am so happy to be joined for the first time on Woke, a f daily with k Whitlock and Nancy Heitzegg, authors of Carcel Khan, The Deceptive Terrain of Criminal Justice Reform. Thank you to the both of you for one for your work in a topic that I think doesn't get enough attention.

When you highlight the fact that the United States has four percent of the world's population and yet twenty percent making up of those that are incarcerated, those are numbers that I think are really difficult to run from and they're really shocking. And the premise I think of your work is we have people, organizations, administrations that always want to talk about how we reform this system, and the both of you were saying, how do you reform a

system that was built on injustice? To begin with, one of many big conversations that came out of the uprisings over the summer in twenty twenty was abolished the police. Right, we had multiple very high profile and then many very low profile murders of unarmed black people by police, and the conversation got stuck on language right about abolition and

not necessarily what that means. And so tokay, I'll give this to you first, which is, you know, how important is a language here right when we're talking about we're talking about reform, or we're talking about reimagining a system, or we're talking about abolition. How important is the language that we're using versus the impact that is needed to change or shrink I should say this octopus that you're

talking about that is the prison industrial complex. Well, the language, the rhetorical devices that are used, especially to frame reform are very important in the sense that people really need to know how they're being used and misused. Abolition has a long history in this country and it comes out of a biack radical tradition, and there are many streams and currents and threats of abolitionism that have fed in

this country. When we start to see the gathering of what Nancy and I call reform inc. That is the coalescence of an emergent industry that's going to it's a public private industry that's going to manage reform, and it starts to really gain momentum in the brokering of certain kinds of agreements between governments and it's philanthropy driven and

agreements between public and private partners. And the rhetoric they use to fashion some of the responses is really kind of important because they pick rhetoric that they believe will respond to most people and that will actually blunt protest. It seems to be responsive to protest. It seems to

be responsive. You know, we have in in two thousand and nine, we have the Oscar Grant killings, we have Ferguson, We have this unending series of killings and the rising of of of protest and fury about that, and actually that starts to gain a lot of public support. Over the years, you can just chart an upward interest in in abolition things. So when we talk about the rhetoric.

We can talk about the concepts abolitionists US and how they get coopted by reformers and how they get undermined, so that uh, you know, defund the police is a slogan that comes out and it means exactly what it says, defund the police. By defunding the police, you reduce contact, the amount of contact people have in community, and that's going to matter, and you free up more resources that should be spent on human needs, on social goods, on

environmental needs, completely outside of the criminal justice system. But suddenly you have this reform that this backlash from the reform movement saying they don't really mean to fund the police. Yes we did, and yes we do. They don't. They're saying all or nothing, that that isn't a that isn't viable, that isn't viable. Then we start to see the emergence too of people who call themselves abolitionists, but say, we're abolitionists, but we believe first you have to build more humane

new jails. We're abolitionists, but you know the way to have public safety is to have smaller, better run jails, better trained police. So there's a whole red rick of reform. That's incredibly deceptive. It masquerades in such phrases as public safety, as smaller, fairer, kinder for jails, the whole reimagining rhetoric.

That's really interesting because I've been working in this particular area and considered myself an abolitionist since at least two thousand, late nineteen nineties, and a number of abolitionists who'd been in it longer than I had were already using the reimagining kind of language. Now, the VERA Institute for Justice once to quote, reimagine prisons, not permanently reduce them. Let's make them nicer, Let's make them better, Let's make them

an institution of democracy. So we don't let the co optation of rhetoric get in the way of saying what we really mean. Yes, we do really mean defund the police. Yes we do mean abolition, which is as much about creating the social and economic and ecological conditions in which both individuals and communities, especially those who have been marginalized, can thrive outside of the criminal legal system. Of lolling rhetoric.

It's going to be evidence space reform, it's going to be just They will not touch structural racism will not touch structural poverty, but dressing up reform in certain words that are so compelling that we don't often understand how effective a vehicle so called criminal legal justice, criminal justice system reform is for advancing broader processes of criminalization and an expansion of police forces literally as a substitute for

civil rights YEP, or voting rights for real justice. So it's it's a dark, little wonderland of sorts in the rhetoric. So when Nancy and I are talking, for example, we're trying to be real specific about helping people understand peel away the co optation or the or just the deception or the incompleteness that's in the rhetoric and start to think about the concepts of structural inequality. I think that that makes so much sense, right for us to move

past the rhetoric and into the concepts. But it's the rhetoric that turns into the hashtags, that turns into the protests, that turns into all of these different things. And I wonder, you know, I wonder Nancy too. We see our politicians consistently get caught up in this, right, because if we have conversations about what it means to abolish police really conceptually have conversations about what it means to abolish the

prison industrial complex. Then Democrats right, get the Moniker as being soft on crime, right, and then Republicans are able to co opt the mantra law and order. And so I'm wondering from your from your vantage point, you know, how how how do we negate those things from happening? Because it's it's where we get caught up in this vicious cycle where progress really is not made. The progress is really only made so much as we change the language and adapt to the times that we're in, it

doesn't actually change the system in and of itself. You know, I'm sitting here in Minneapolis, um, you know, when the aftermath of the you know, George Floyd murder and Donty Wright murder and many murders and many protests burned on the third Precinct, um, you know, and thinking about language, UM, and I think how important it is to for abolitionists to not compromise the language or not try to assuage um, you know, various political parties. I mean, Minneapolis is a

very democratic city, very blue city. UM. You know. One of the results UM UM of the George Floyd murder or some efforts on the part of the City Council and various activist groups like Reclaim the Block and Black Visions Collective UM now Yes from Minneapolis UM to organize and push for UM some changes to the language of the city charter UM, which mandates you know X amount of police officers have to UM you know serve here you know, And and lots of conversation you know, for

more than a year now about UM changing the charter, about creating UM a new department of Public Safety that police might be a part of UM. You know, city council was for this UM. You know, it's about potentially defunding the police and replacing some police functions like mental health crisis calls, etcetera, with with UM, you know, public health options UM. Lots of support for this UM. You know, twenty two thousand Minneapolis residents you know signed UM you

know petition to get this on the ballot. UM. The backlash has been stunning UM. You know, even in a democratic city. Backlash from the mayor you know, UM, backlash from other soul called democrat you know, former politicians, you know, the Minnesota Supreme court now is hearing UM whether or not this will even be on the ballot. So bottom line, I guess, and then this is related to everything that

case said. UM. UM. I think abolitionists should be real clear, UM we want to defund the police, who want to abolish the police, who want to abolish the prison industrial complex. UM. UM. We might be interested in and certainly supportive of forms that UM immediately mitigate the suffering UM of those in the system without expanding it. UM, But I don't know. I guess. My my view increasingly over time is that so much energy UM activist energy is spent on I'm

trying to play Kate UM elected political figures. UM. That that that we should just say what we want, say what we mean, UM, move forward, UM, work in community as as much as we can to you know, create an envision, UM, you know, another world. That's it for today's wok F Daily Podcast. To hear more from today's show, including my full interviews with Ka Whitlock and Nancy heightseg do check out my patreon at patreon dot com. Slash Woke a f Power to the people and to all

the people. Power, get woke and stay woke as fuck.