Stacey Abrams on Trump Pushing Our Country into Authoritarianism & Being a Black Woman in Politics

Our next guest is a force of nature. She's a voting rights champion, former Georgia house minority leader and best selling author. Her latest thriller coded justice comes out July 15th. Please welcome miss Stacey Abrams. We look like we're from the same tribe. Well, you know, I haven't done ancestry yet, but I'm sure there's some familiar. I'm pretty sure there is. Uh, thank you for being here. Uh, you've been on the show before only through zoom. Yes. Now we have you in person. I'm graduating. Okay. Yeah. I love it. I love it. Now you flew all the way in from Georgia where you served 11 years in the house of representatives. In what capacity was that? So I was a state representative for four years and then I decided to be in charge of the whole thing for our caucus. I became democratic leader in 2010 right after we lost everything and tried to work to make Georgia more meaningful state in terms of democratic and politics and democracy. Just in terms of minority, minority leader, what were your duties? What was it? So they call you, they give you leader to make you feel good. They put minority in front of it so you don't forget the limits of your power. So my job was to organize Democrats in the Georgia house of representatives. And my job was to help move their legislation to explain to them why they weren't going to get the legislation, to convince the speaker, to let us move things. And a lot of it was blocking and tackling. It was the way I said it, my job was to stop stupid or at least slow it down. Okay. Okay. Well, you know, stop stupid or slow it down. That brings me to my next question. Uh, over the weekend you went viral for lane, now 10 steps to autocracy, uh, run us through those steps. So we all know. Okay. So this happens in every nation that has become an autocracy having been a democracy. So whether we're talking about Brazil with Bolsonaro or India or Putin and Russia, the Philippines with Duarte. So start with winning an election. Usually the last one you're going to get to have for real. Uh, number two, you have an expansion of executive power. The president decides he wants more than he's supposed to have. Number three, you start to make the Congress complicit. So you weaken them and you neutralize or neuter the judiciary. Like, Oh, I don't know. The Supreme court giving you unfettered power and saying we don't have the ability to stop things. Uh, then you move on to firing all the people who know how to make government work. So you've got the civil service and you do that because you want to break democracy. So people forget the stuff that used to get done. So you can't get your social security checks. So the CDC doesn't know what diseases are anymore. Then you put in place these loyalists, people who are only responsive to you. You put them in charge of the FBI. So they go after your enemies. You put them in charge of, uh, the department of justice, the department of defense. So they can signal to their friends and tell them all about the evil plans that you have. Uh, then you make certain that you break how we communicate. So you criticize the media and you create your own echo chamber of propaganda. You call it truth, even though you know you're lying. Then you go to the next step. And I call that step seven. Step seven, you have to blame someone. You have to blame people for the broken government, for the broken promises. So you go after DEI, you go after the vulnerable, the dispossessed. You go after any community that doesn't look like what you think power should be. While you're doing that, you make certain that you, in step eight, you eliminate anybody who could help them. So you sue law firms that do pro bono cases. You go after philanthropies and accuse them of giving money to the wrong people. You go after colleges and universities that can teach people possibly what else they should know. You get to step nine and you start to private, start to encourage and incentivize private violence. You send the U S Marines into spaces they should not be. You send the national guard in, you kidnap people off of the streets and pretend that's normal because that's how you quiet dissent because you make everyone afraid that if they don't do what you want, they might be next. And once you've done those nine steps, step 10 is easy. That's when you decide there won't be new elections because everyone's either afraid, poor, broken, or complicit. Okay. Wow. While you have the ear of the people right now and on their television sets, what is it that they can do to help avoid this and make a change in this? So I want to give credit to Kim Sheffield, who is a professor at Princeton. She came up with the framework. I've adapted it and potentially editorialized it more than she did. But I also want to give credit to the Robert F. Kennedy foundation, not the Latin, the lesser successor, but the real guy. We can, we can fight back. We can remember that we do have power. They don't want dissent. So protest. They want us to forget that before we had power, we had each other. So when they break democracy, when they break the social security system, when they slash snap benefits and Medicaid, make sure you're checking on your neighbors. Make sure we're using mutual aid, but also tell the truth. Do not let the propaganda win. Too often they tell a lie. They will tell a lie so often. It sounds like the truth. We say the truth one time and when people don't applaud, we stop talking. We've got to keep telling the truth, not only to push back against them, but to remind us that we are entitled to the truth. We have to believe that freedom of assembly means it's more than just going to protest. It's the ability to be friends with people who aren't like you and we have to stop believing that we are in this alone. The most effective thing they do is isolate us. They convince us that you and I don't have any common cause and we certainly don't have common cause with someone who has a different history than we do. When we hold to our truth, we actually believe in ourselves and our people. When we believe in democracy as something that must deliver, that's when we start to fight back and that's when they lose because they win when we are too numb or too afraid to act. All right. I'd like you to talk about how difficult it is for a person of color to be in politics, in particular, a black woman, you know, the barriers that and the things that you face. Well, you have a chair, not a couch. Look, if you go back to step seven, you go after those communities that are the most likely to push back against black women, immigrants, the LGBTQ plus community. The fact that transgender children are being blamed for the demise of society is intentional. The fact that we forget that if you are truly a Christian, the Bible tells us to take care of the poor and the needy and the stranger, not to round them up and kidnap them. And so as a woman of color, as a black woman in particular, I have the affirmative responsibility to speak up on behalf of everyone else because they're coming for me first and they're coming for me next. Our responsibility then is to use every tool at our disposal, including politics. But politics isn't just about gets elected. It's what we do the next day. It's when we remind people of what government should be doing, what had just happened in Texas. The fact that they slashed the national weather service, whether or not that was the direct proximate cause of those deaths. The fact that we're having that conversation is the issue. The fact that we aren't sure is the problem. And so we need to hold to what we deserve. We should not be dissuaded, especially as black women, as women of color, as people of color, we should not be convinced that we don't have power. They are mad at us for a reason. There are enough of us that we can change the outcome of elections, but also change the outcome of power. I want to lighten it up just a little bit. You know, we've worked together, even though you were animated on, on our television show, blackish, which you were nominated for an Emmy for. Let's talk about that. How was that for you? It was amazing, but we actually have not met multiple times because you also gave me an NAACP award. Really? Did I? Yeah. During COVID I couldn't be there and you couldn't be there, but okay. But you've, you've been nice to me many times. And I will continue to be nice to you. Yes. I'll tell you one other thing. Yes. Um, so I know you talked about your stalker earlier. Um, I have known you since you first appeared as a detective on law and order SVU and I watched when they migrated you to law and order. And then I appreciated the fact that you were both Cyrus Lupo and you brought them Jeffrey Donovan, who I loved on burn notice. So I'm not a direct stalker. I'm a stalker adjacent. Yes, you are. Cause he's right there. And of course love blackish because I love telling stories. I love the way you tell stories as an actor and I love telling stories as a writer. Okay. Well let's talk about the stories you're talking about in coded justice right here. Let's talk about it for a second. Yeah. So coded justice is about my heroine, Avery Keene. She is a former Supreme court clerk. This is her third outing and she likes to figure out how they're planning to break government or break society. So this time she is hired by a firm by a tech company that's trying to do good. They're trying to help veterans with AI healthcare and then things go horribly wrong. Okay. And so part of her job is to figure out what happened. An engineer dies. So she's part detective, part lawyer and way too nosy for her own good. And she's got three best friends who help her try to figure out what's happening. And coded justice is available on bookstores near you on July 15th. Coded justice comes out July 15th. I want to thank you Stacey. We'll be right back with spirit box.