Alexander Kolodin and Anthony Kern on the Importance of Strong Legislatures 57:38

Welcome to Broken Potholes with your host Sam Stone, my co-host Chuck Warren. Often sunny, humid, but well-governed Florida today. Gotta like what Ron DeSantis has been doing. He has really been, he's been killing it. You know, a lot of governors talk the talk. He's been walking the walk and he can explain it while he walks. He can walk and talk at the same time, maybe even chew gum. It's a skill that seems to be in short supply in politics.

That's the truth. Yeah, absolutely. In studio with us today, we have some very good guests lined up, but first with us, and I'm real eager to talk to him this morning. As you know, folks, Broken Potholes is recorded on a Friday. We air on Saturday, 3 p.m., 960 KKMT, The Patriot. You can find us on Substack, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, all those good places. We got a guest who's pretty relevant to the moment here, someone who's also running for office in Arizona. Yeah.

So, Alex Kolodin, am I saying it right? I want to make sure. Kolodin, but everybody butchers it, so who cares? You know, I keep thanking my parents for this one because nobody gets Sam Stone wrong. I don't know how that works, right? It's good. But hey, I like to hear the creativity and the permutations. Otherwise, it gets boring to hear your own name over and over again. So, Alex, I want you to tell us a little bit about yourself, but you have a really unique background. Yeah.

frankly, that is relevant to this moment and to the actions Joe Biden took yesterday with his vaccine mandate. You are so you're running for office. Tell us what you're running for. So I'm running for statehouse and LD 23 or what's now LD 23. They may give it another number. Scottsdale Fountain Hills, Rio Verde. Gorgeous area. Oh, it is. It is beautiful. I love it so much.

And kind of a tough area for Republicans, a little bit of a shift in there the last couple of years. There has been. You know, the margins of victory have been getting narrower and narrower. It's still considered a fairly solid conservative district and one that the Republican nominee should win. So it's very important, obviously, who that nominee is. Yeah. And folks, I mean, you know, here in Arizona or across the country, pay attention to these local legislative races.

I know the president's, you know, the president's important. Congress, U.S. Senate, those are important things. Your attorney general, valuable guy or gal. But you know what? Your statehouse is going to dictate a lot of what really happens in your life.

And I think people don't know this. I think a lot of members of the legislature don't know this, but when the founders put together our constitutional structure, when they put together our federal structure under the Constitution, they gave the most power out of any organ of government to the state legislatures, right? And increasingly, over the past decades and centuries, state legislatures have

found it convenient sometimes to say, oh, this isn't in our wheelhouse. You have to talk to the governor. You have to talk to the federal government to address these issues in your lives. We can't do it. So sorry. And dodge and deflect. But there is very little excuse for that in the statehouse because truly, we have all the power. Absolutely. So

Now, tell us a little bit more about your background, too, because you sound like you might even be a Goldwater type guy. I was. I was a Reagan fellow back at the Goldwater Institute when I was in law school. Got to work under then Clint Bullock and now Justice Bullock and learned a lot about how the law can be used to advance liberty. And been doing election and political related law since about 2014.

And actually, my very first trial was an election integrity trial. We represented a group of Republicans and Democrats down in Santa Cruz County that were concerned that the board of supervisors down there might have been accessing data on the election tabulator system when they shouldn't have been. It was one of the first cases in Arizona that established that

The data on the election machines is actually public record to which the public is authorized to have access to. That's pretty key for the current ongoing audit. Oh, it was. It was that precedent is. Yeah. And in fact, the Democrat who was our client there was John Brakey, who is the Democrats legal or is the Democrats advisor to the audit.

and one of the deputy Senate liaisons over there. So it's kind of funny how the world comes around. But we were very, very involved in the election litigation in 2020. We represented President Trump's full slate of Arizona electors in a decertification challenge. And we represented and defended the audit, have represented the AZGOP in election integrity issues. So this is an issue that is near and dear to my heart. And

So, a lot of people, they run for state legislature, they're in state legislature, and they say, "I'm a solid conservative." And a lot of them are telling you the truth. We do have a lot of really good conservatives down in the state legislature.

Here's my pitch, right? Here's my value add, is people wonder, if we've got good conservatives down at the state legislature, how come that when they try to change the law to bring about conservative principles, how come it doesn't work, right? How come we don't get what we should have with a Republican majority legislature? And that's where I come in, right? Because I understand that.

how to write a law that works. And I also understand the tools that are available to members of the state legislature. I'll give you an example. I had a lot of conversations as a private citizen, not as a lawyer, but as a private citizen with Senator Borrelli.

And I turned him on to this fact that each member of the legislature, any single one, has the power to ask the attorney general to investigate a county's alleged violation of state law. And if the attorney general concludes that the county has violated state shared law,

that the attorney general must withhold state shared funds. And I was happy to see fairly recently he wrote such a letter and the attorney general reached such a conclusion. And now the county is either going to have to hand over the routers, which they've been illegally withholding, or they're going to lose $700 million. So that brings the audit one step closer to completion. And that's a really important legal principle because it's also been used just

this week, I think, by Attorney General Brnovich in regards to Tucson's vaccine mandate. Yes, exactly right. And it's so important because people say, and look, I don't think we're going to be in the minority. I think we're going to get an expanded majority for a couple of reasons. One, I've never seen the base so fired up. Every grassroots event I go to, every group has doubled the number of membership and they're three times as angry.

And so I think we're going to expand the majority just for that reason. We're going to do better on redistricting because we can't possibly do worse than we did 10 years ago. We got gerrymandered as badly as any state in the country. Yeah. There was a member basically of the Green Party that drew the map. So we're going to have to expand the majority for that reason. But people ask.

you know, too. Well, you know, Alex, you know, that's all good. If you're right, you're in the majority. But if you're in the minority, you know, what good can you do? And I point to tools like that and I go, as a member of the legislature, you still have power, right? You still have these things that you can do. It's not as much as a majority, but there are things you can do. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. We touched on the vaccine mandate in Tucson. We had the AG, I think, early yesterday or was it the day before, send a letter to Tucson and they quickly backed down from their mandate. Then we had Joe Biden step in.

Yes. I you want to talk about mad. And I was sitting there literally gritting my teeth when I read that fury pouring through my veins. And folks, I'm vaccinated. I went and got the shot because I made that decision for myself. But no one was going to tell me to go do that or force it on me. And nobody should be forced to make a medical decision like that by the government.

What do you see in this law? I mean, is this thing going to stand? You know, I would like to say that it shouldn't stand. And I know it will be challenged. The RNC already said they're going to challenge it. I believe it won't stand. I believe those challenges will be successful. But it's just one symptom of a larger problem. Right. And this is the larger problem of the federal government deciding.

that it should have absolute authority. I mean, I have clients who have been reported to the DOJ and the FBI purely for things that they said by high-level Democrats like Katie Hobbs, right, who have said, you need to investigate it. What your client just said is a crime. And they send it, of course, to the Justice Department because they know it's run by Democrats.

And one day, you know, they are going to come down and start criminalizing pure speech. Just another example. Right. And this is why I'm a civics teacher. So I nerd out about this stuff a little bit. You'll notice I talk about it is this is why we have states. OK. The states exist for one reason. OK. And it's not to make is not to build the roads, not even to fill potholes. States exist for.

to stand between the federal government and their citizens and raise the shield of liberty to fight back and to protect their citizens and ensure that they remain free. And I can assure you in the state legislature, if the federal government does things like this, we're going to push things to the max. And again, I'm a lawyer. I know what tools to use.

There's tools like anti-commandeering, right? The federal government has very little enforcement power, right? They don't have a lot of federal police. There's no federal police force. There's the FBI or whatever. There's not that many people who work for them, right? For the federal government to enforce their laws, they need the state. We can withdraw that help. And we can say, you've made your law, Mr. Biden, now come and enforce it. And that's what I will do. I love it. Love it.

Love it. Now, I mean, that's what we need right now. You need legislatures. And you brought up another point about an all-powerful federal government. But even scarier than that, because the U.S. Congress has abdicated much of its responsibility for actually legislating, and I blame the Congress for that.

Presidents, one after another, have become more and more powerful. The executive branch has taken on greater authorities that it was never intended to have. And so, you know, you go back. One of the things that I really appreciated about Donald Trump, frankly, was that he kept sending these things back to Congress, whether it was border issues or other things. And they kept dropping the ball.

They refused to pick it up. And so everyone calling him a tyrant or a dictator, you're exactly wrong on that front. Right. And then later in his term, he did make some of those executive decisions and push it because Congress continues to fail to act. And I think there's been an element of that in our legislature here also where they've left too much to the governor. I mean, would you agree? And I like Doug Ducey. I'm not.

I disagree with him on some things. I think some things could have been done better the last couple of years. But look, I said it before. Say it again. I'll take Doug Ducey over any Democrat governor in the country every single day of the week and twice on Sunday. No question. Right. But this is something that is critically important for our legislature to be considering going forward is that we need people who are going to step up, who know the law and who are willing to fight for it.

and to assert the role of the legislature, which is the body that represents the people most directly. Am I wrong about any of that, Alex? No. And the reason that the legislature steps up and should push back against things like the way that the governor handles the pandemic is not because Governor Ducey is a good or bad guy. It's because the founders realized no person should ever be trusted with absolute power. Well, I'm going to let that go as the final word. Broken potholes is coming right back.

The political field is all about reputation, so don't let someone squash yours online. Secure your name and political future with a yourname.vote web address from godaddy.com. Your political career depends on it. Welcome back to Broken Potholes. I'm your host, Sam Stone, co-host Chuck Warren. Off and out of the office today, but in studio with us, Alex Culloden.

candidate for the Arizona State Legislature. State House, yep. State House. And doing some pretty important work, legal work right now, as a matter of fact. Yeah. So tell us a little bit about that.

So we just got America's Frontline Doctors as a client. Now, for folks who don't know, who are America's Frontline Doctors? So America's Frontline Doctors are a group of physicians that have gotten together to say, hey, look, vaccines are a question of individual liberty and conscience. And we are opposed to mandates. Right. It's very simple, but it's powerful coming from physicians. But they're also a group that has pushed treating COVID. Right.

Yes. Rather than I mean, one of the things that I I've really objected to throughout the whole pandemic has been that a lot of hospitals, a lot of medical institutions and a lot of doctors have acted like there is no treatment for covid that it's go home, wait to get sick enough to be brought to the hospital and put on a ventilator and then we'll see what happens.

But that's not actually the case. You can treat this. And America's frontline doctors were on the front lines saying you could do that, right? They were. Yes, they were. And it's one of those things where we talk about the medical science, and I always tell people it's like –

I'm a lawyer. I know a lot about the law. I don't know very much about anything else. The reason that you have a member of the legislature is not to go in there and be some all-wise subject matter expert that passes definitive judgment on the medical science. I don't know about

about what treatments work, what don't. I'm not qualified to know. And that's not a bad thing. That is humility, that the government is not assessed, is not equipped to make these determinations for individuals. It's up to doctors and patients to decide what is best for the patient. And that's where the decision about things like

How are we going to treat your illness? What vaccine are you going to take? That's where those decisions need to be made. Yeah, absolutely. Now, tell us a little bit about the lawsuit you're involved in right now or what is the legal action that is being taken?

against them and by them. Well, so the lawsuit we're involved in right now is with a related group called Health Freedom Defense Fund, right? That's the Phoenix Union mask case. But what America's Frontline Doctors is looking at, obviously, is challenges to vaccine mandates more generally. I can't go into it much more than that at this point, except to say that it is something that we're looking at closely and working on very closely.

And I'm really, really glad to know there are people like you that are fighting for them and with them because they're doctors just like you. They have their limitations and the law is probably one of them. My physician doesn't know anything about the law. He certainly knows a lot about treating patients. Right.

So it's really, really important work that you're doing right now, Alex. I want to thank you for that. You're most welcome. Where can people learn more about you and what you're doing, your campaign? So people can learn more about us on our website, www.alexforaz.com, www.alexforaz.com. You can go there. Is it F-O-R or the number four? F-O-R. So A-L-E-X-F-O-R-A-Z. Okay.

Good website, man. That is, you know, I like simplicity. I like parsimony. And so, you know, we need your help, right? We need your help to sign our nominating petition. And we need your help financially. I'm putting in a lot of my own money into this race. But the establishment is already lining up candidates, you know, and we know that Katie Hobbs,

and the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, there is nobody, nobody that they would less like to see in this seat than I am. And I can't do it all myself. So I need you to go to my website. I need you to sign my petition. I need you to sign up to volunteer. I need you, you know, if you believe that I can serve you well to cut a check for whatever you're able so that I can take the fight to our, you know, to our opponents because I will be the Democrats' worst nightmare. I need your help to get into their dreams. Right.

You know, we have we have obviously we play on the radio here in Phoenix, Arizona, on Saturdays, but we also have a lot of listeners around the country. And I think one of the things that a lot of folks don't understand is that starting back in 2004, Democrats stopped fighting each other. I mean, they really have not had competitive primaries since 2002 anywhere, unless it's like a Bernie Sanders who kind of comes out of nowhere, you know, and doesn't have any support of the Democrat establishment.

What they did was take all that money they were using to fight each other and they created something they call the blueprint. They wrote a book about it in Colorado, Colorado, which was a light red state at that time where you had a Republican governor. One of the two U.S. senators were Republican, Republican majority in Congress and state house and that sort of thing. And they wiped it out. They poured that California money, that New York money in those races. Yep. And then.

They moved on. 2012, really, 2008, 2012, they started moving real hard on Nevada. Nevada, same story, was a light red state. Now it's blue. And we're next. Arizona's next. And that's what we've seen. And so, folks, if you're out there, if you are in one of those big blue states where you cannot influence your race, when you're not going to be able to choose who your governor is and you know it, when you're not going to be able to choose your legislature and you know it,

You need to be looking at races in places like Arizona and guys like Alex that you can put some money into. Because if some folks, if we start doing what they do, we can compete. But if you look at this last cycle, Alex, our candidates were outspent, what, like three to one across the board? Yeah. And we still managed to hold on and keep the state house and the state senate by one seat. Yes. But we got buried in an avalanche of cash.

And guess what? The second wave is coming. It's coming. And I know that if the Democrats perceive that there is any opportunity that they can take this district, they will target it, right? They have targeted districts with well over a million dollars of national money. And they're going to want to take me out because they know I'm effective and they don't want that in the legislature. Strong conservatives, especially those who understand the principles of conservatism,

And understand government and how it works are their worst nightmare. They don't want you anywhere near that thing. If they want any Republican, they want to squish. Yeah, exactly. They want somebody who can be bought, somebody who can be flattered and made to vacillate from the interests of our constituents. Right.

You know, I've shown time and time again and have taken significant personal risks to bring some of our cases on behalf of the president. You know, we have the bar after us for for filing an election challenge, which we believe that we had every every right to do to represent the voice of the people and the good evidence that we believe that we have.

And we didn't back down, right? We didn't back down even though there was great personal risk. That is the same approach I will take to the state legislature. You can trust me to stand fast because I have stood fast. I actually think that's maybe one of the most important characteristics in office holders, especially on the Republican side right now, is that

You're going to get attacked. You're going to get called every name in the book. You're going to get called a racist. You're going to get called a murderer. You're going to get called everything they can think of because you believe in liberty, because you don't believe the government should dictate every element of our lives. And it takes it takes moral courage. It takes strength to stand up to that.

I mean, doesn't it? It is not easy. It is not easy, especially when you're like me. You've got a young family. You've got a little baby at home. And not just the threats to your personal career, but we've gotten death threats in our office. We've gotten calls in the middle of the night. And it's hard, but liberty is worth it.

Absolutely. Look, this is coming from a guy I've had sit downs with the Phoenix Police Department talking about the threats that have come in for us as well. Yeah. So I know what you're talking about. We understand each other very well. Yeah, absolutely. So, folks, it's a great conversation we're having. We're going to continue with Alex Culloden coming back on the next segment. Broken potholes. We'll be right back.

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Welcome back to Broken Potholes with your host Sam Stone. My co-host Chuck Warren out of the studio today and with us Alex Culloden, candidate. I'm tripping over my tongue today. Candidate for the Arizona State House. Has been a really one of the leading legal lights in Arizona fighting for justice.

the audit, fighting for freedom, fighting for, you know, this against these vaccine mandates, the mass mandates, all these things. You've stood up to defend those things. But I want to bring up one other thing that's really important for Arizona voters right now. And I think it's top of mind, the border. I mean, because this is an folks.

A lot of folks living around the country are not going to understand what it is like here in Arizona or in these border states. But this is a crisis of unbelievable proportions. It is a humanitarian crisis for the people that are being these folks, these migrants. They're being trafficked. They're being used. They're being abused. They're being raped. They're being, you know, imprisoned and sold for ransom. And somehow the Biden administration is OK with that. Alex, what do you see going on there? What can we do?

So this is another one of those areas where state legislatures have historically said...

Well, gosh, guys, we'd really like to do something. But gee whiz, you know, it's a federal issue. I don't believe that. Right. Again, I believe states exist to protect their people. And as the Biden administration has shown and as we've seen time and time again, we cannot trust the federal government to do this for us. We will not always have a Trump in office. And we need to, as a state, defend our own border. And you ask, well, Alex, how do you do that? Because haven't the courts said immigration is a federal issue?

Yeah, they have. But there's a lot of other issues that the courts have said are not federal issues. And I look at Texas and I say, look at what they've done at the border. OK, you know, we're not going to force immigration law, but we're sure as heck going to send cops down there to stop people from trespassing across private land as they illegally immigrate. And when they do that, we're going to arrest them. Right. And if our state gets a reputation as a really hard place to cross, they're going to go elsewhere. Yeah.

So for folks, I mean, drug trafficking, that's within the purview of the Arizona Department of Public Safety, right? You bet. Human trafficking. You bet. Absolutely. Okay. So they can enforce these laws. And we don't have people coming here by themselves. They're being smuggled. They're being robbed.

managed by these cartels. So we have a role in it, don't we? Yeah, sure. I mean, all sorts of things. Human trafficking, like you said, drug smuggling, RICO laws, no end to it, right? We just have to go down there and enforce it. And people say, well, the courts could still try to stop it and say, what you're really doing is immigration. And I say, one, we're going to craft the laws carefully as we can to avoid that happening. And two,

I would rather be accused of trying and then having the court stop in me than not trying at all. I'm going to try. I think we can succeed and secure our own border. And I am not afraid to give that a whirl. It's worth it to stand up and take the swing. Amen. I agree. Absolutely. Alex, we only have a couple of minutes left, but I want to ask you real quick. You win this seat. What is your number one priority when you're going in there? What's that thing you're going after to accomplish right away?

The number one priority is we have to secure our elections. I worked with Representative Bullock on a wide-ranging election bill that would put power over elections back in the hands of the legislature, that would require counties to keep track of the number of ballots, the type of ballots, a lot of other enforcement measures. But the number one thing we have to do on elections is get rid of machines.

Send me in with a conservative wave. Give us the majority that we need and we can fundamentally reform and overhaul our election system to ensure that every voter can have confidence that when they cast a ballot, that ballot is fairly and accurately counted. Oh, this is a ladies and gentlemen, this is a man after my own heart right here, because I've said for four years, you've got to get any machine that uses software out of the elections counting process, period.

Because if it has software, it can be hacked, right? Yes.

If it has software, if it can be connected to the internet, if it has a port, it can be hacked. It's just too dangerous to have them. And there are a bunch of countries that don't do that, right? They either hand count or they use analog counting machines for that reason. We used to not do that. We used to get together in our neighborhoods, we called them precincts, and count the votes with our neighbors. And we can do that again. There's no reason that if we did it in the past, we can't do it again. Right.

Absolutely correct. I have said from day one, if you want to secure elections, you do two things. You require voter ID and you get rid of the machines. Amen. Amen. Do those two things. We have a secure election, don't we? Yes, that's right. That's right. It's not rocket science, folks, but it is important.

Alex Culloden, I really want to thank you for being in studio with us today. Thank you so much for having me, Sam. This has been a fantastic interview. We would love to have you back on in the future to talk about some more of this stuff. Love to be on. I think there's some synergy here, folks. Yeah, yeah. These small L libertarian Republicans, I know that's a dirty word, but we got to stick together. Fight for your freedom. Amen, brother. Broken Potholes, coming back in just a moment.

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Lucky ducky. But on the line with us, former state representative, state of Arizona, Anthony Kern. Anthony, thank you for joining us and welcome to the program. And we are very excited because you are running for that office again, correct? Correct.

Yes, Arizona State Senate, actually, this time. So it's the other chamber. The other chamber? The higher chamber. The higher chamber. Yeah, yeah. And these are incredibly important seats, right? We have a one-vote majority in the House and the Senate. And obviously redistricting will have something to do with that. But we need to hold every one of these seats, don't we?

Yes, we do. Yeah, the numbers matter. But I think what matters even more is election integrity. And so, yeah, I know the voters out there, especially the Republican voters, are concerned about what happened in the 2020 election. So, yeah, we need every seat. Well, but, you know, Anthony, I want to, you know, focus on that a little bit, because frankly, Democrats and the mainstream media are acting like this concern is exclusive to Republican voters.

It might be exclusive to Republican voters in regards to this last election. Right. But if we go back to 2016, you had something like 70 percent of Democrats who said the election was stolen up to and including voter fraud and hacking. Right.

Exactly. And so, yeah, just to add to that, you know, you've got the Democrats in 2016 saying the same thing the Republicans are saying right now. And why we can't get on board together as Americans, I don't understand that. Because if the Democrats in 2016 had half of the evidence that we have right now, they would have been probably been able to overturn the election.

in 2016. So, you know, it's just ludicrous out there. And it's sad for our country that we can't get on board and at least look at what happened. Because if Biden won Arizona, hey, you know, I'm behind it. If Trump won, then we need to rethink what happened and how to fix it. Absolutely. I don't understand why anyone would be against election integrity, because I think if you look at this country,

Having confidence, whether you like the result or not, that the result was legitimate has to be the foundation of our republic, doesn't it? I mean, otherwise, we are essentially a banana republic.

Yeah, we're a banana republic and money will buy votes and money will change elections and, you know, it's all about money and power. Yeah, I don't understand why we can't get on the same page and just look at the evidence. I can't understand why we're fighting Republican boards and supervisors. I can't understand why the National Republican Party isn't, you know,

standing behind Karen Phan on some of these press releases and pushing for this Maricopa County audit. There's a lot of things I can't understand. I don't understand why people aren't going to jail for not turning over the routers. I don't get it.

I think they want to sweep it under the rug, just like Joe Biden's doing with the vaccine mandates right now. He's trying to get Afghanistan off the radar. I don't understand why we can't look at our country and try to fix it as opposed to stalling and these tactics that just are becoming very divisive in our country. You hit on an important point because at the end of the day, an audit

should not be a controversial thing. I mean, we should be doing regular audits of our election results, right?

We should be doing. And, you know, a lot of people say, well, we do regular audits of our election results. Well, three percent. And if I remember correctly, we did a three percent on the Arizona election in 2020. And we found out there was, I think, three or four ballots that went to Biden that should have went for Trump. So that was out of 100 ballots. So that's a three percent error rate right there. And if you take, you know, two point one million, that's quite a few. That's probably enough to overturn the election.

Here in Arizona. But nobody's willing to do a 100% forensic audit. And I really think, I don't think it's anything, sorry to interrupt, but I don't think it's anything too nefarious on the board of supervisors. And I don't think it's anything that they orchestrated or coordinated. I really think knowing government for what it is, they're lazy, they're incompetent.

And, you know, they're job secure. So I don't, I mean, knowing what I know about government, whether it be federal, state, local, most of them, you know, they go in, they, you know, play poker on,

the computer and they go home. So I think they really got caught with their hair down. Never before has a 100 percent forensic audit been done. And I just think that they don't want to answer questions that they're going to have to answer. Should we really get this audit, you know, out to them? You know, I want to add something else on that front, too, because this is one of my issues with the elections technology that we use.

I can guarantee you, because I know them, that there is not a single member of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors who knows how to code. Right. Right? I mean, I don't know how to code. Do you? No. Do not know how to code. I don't know what percentage of our American population does, but it's got to be less than 1%, right? Right. Yep. And so if you continue to use these software-based machines...

What you're saying is that there is less than 1% of this country that can ever have any confidence in our elections because unless you know how to code, you can't possibly say that you know whether a machine is counting accurately or not.

Right. I 100% agree. And that's what I mean when I say the Board of Supervisors, I don't think did anything, you know, nefarious, you know, premeditated. But the fact that they're not turning over all of the evidence, it just, it, it, it's,

You know, it just baffles me that you got, I'm sure they're all good people, but it baffles me that they're not wanting to get to the bottom of this. Even if they, if we find that they made some pretty bad mistakes, I mean, come on, let's get, let's see what really happened. Um, I don't get it. The only way we can fix it, I believe is to get to, uh,

to pay for ballots again where you go into the poll you go into the precinct and you vote you show them your id you vote and uh and that ballot stays with uh with the envelope or that ballot stays you know in the hands of whoever it stays with and uh that's the only way we're going to fix this thing i'm i don't want to see this happen again and i want to get rid of the the uh

you know, the aura of the elections were stolen, whether it be Democrat, Republican. We've got to get past this. We've got to fix this. Absolutely. You know, our previous guest, we were talking about this also. And frankly, I said and if said from the start, you really only need to do two things to secure the election and you just hit on it. One, you need to have 100 percent voter ID. Yep. Period. 100 percent voter ID. And then two, you need to take the machines out of the process.

Yep. Yep. I mean, if it's, you know, the left screams, you know, disenfranchising voters and all that. But I can guarantee you it's all it's all about priority. And, you know, if you had a million dollar check and you had to go waiting for you down at a precinct, you had to go show I.D. to get that check. You would be down there whether you have to walk or crawl or whatever. So it's all about priority. If voting is a priority for you.

Then you will go to that poll and you will show an ID and you will vote. Anthony, as you know, the work that Chuck and I do in a lot of states involves a lot of canvassing, a lot of signature gathering, these kind of things. We hire people who are otherwise unemployed, who are looking for some part-time work. These are not – I mean these are generally very poor people. Right.

I've got to tell you, obviously, because we follow the employment law, we require an ID, right? We have to have an ID that we get a copy. I have never, and I've worked in like 25 or 30 states at this point. Right. I've done these things. I have never once had anyone except in one case, and that person had just gotten out of jail. Right. Right.

And they weren't eligible to work for us anyway. So that's the only time in all these years that I've ever encountered someone who didn't have or couldn't get an ID. That's just a ridiculous argument. It's a ridiculous argument on a number of fronts. I mean, you need an ID to buy a plane ticket. You need an ID to get unemployment benefits. You need to vote. I mean, that is the number one.

you know, like you had said earlier, if we lose our elections, if we don't have trust in our elections, we are a banana republic. And if America goes, the world goes. So we've got to push this through. And voter ID, I think the polls show that, what, 70% of the voters out there support voter ID. So we've got to quit listening to the lying media, and we've got to quit listening to the, you know, the screaming socialist communist Democrats, and we've got to

Now, speaking of lying media, because you have been hit with an awful lot of lies in the media as of late, right? Yeah, no, it's a good place to be if you actually have values and principles.

You do. And you know what? Let me expand on that. But that alone, values and principles really will keep you facing the wind when that hits. And so if you're a politician out there and you don't have values and principles, if you ever get hit by the media, you're going to fall over.

Donald Trump was one guy that when I got hit, I looked at him. I said, I'm not getting hit like him. So he was kind of my, you know, my mentor, I guess. And yeah, I think I think one of his great values was he served as a guide star for a lot of Republicans and a lot of conservatives who were afraid to stand up and stand in the face of this coordinated media onslaught.

Absolutely. And we've got to overcome that fear. I get it. Nobody likes to be hit by the media because the average voter out there doesn't understand. But I think one thing Donald Trump did do is he exposed the media. He exposed a lot of this. And I think right now, I would say there's a large percentage of voters out there that

that look at the media as being politicized, and they have an agenda. And I would say that probably is 90% of them.

You know, you look at our own media. Look at Bram Resnick. Bram Resnick, he won't stand for the flag. You know, he calls Carrie Lake, who's running for governor, you know, he's after her. Why? Because she stands for principle and integrity. And I'm not supporting Carrie Lake at this time, but I am saying that, you know, when you stand for truth and principle, the lying media hate that. And that's why they hated Donald Trump so much. That's why they still hate Donald Trump.

And why they have gone after you as well. Yeah, they have. But you know what? It makes you stronger. And, you know, the first hit is kind of rough, but it makes you stronger. And after a while, it's like, bring it on. I don't care who you guys are. I got to tell you, the first time someone straight up called me a racist, my skin was crawling.

Right. Right. But I know myself just like you do. Right. You know yourself. Absolutely. And look at what's happening. You mentioned the term racism. One, I'm married to a lady from Honduras. That's one. I guess I've never been hit with racism necessarily. But look what they're doing to Larry Elder. Look at the difference between Larry Elder –

who is a black Republican running for, to recall, Governor Newsom over there in California, and that white lady with the gorilla face. Right. Where's that in the media? Oh, the LA Times ran a story about that today, and they did include the details in the body of the story, but if you looked at the headline in the photo, the photo looked like Larry was slapping some random white woman, and the headline was,

Elder confronts, I think it was something like Elder confronts hostile crowd.

Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, like, what are we talking about? Donald Trump. Oh, yeah. I mean, the bias in the media is so blatant that and they are the real reasons why you see, you know, this election integrity issue. You see it very polarized. Now, I do believe probably a lot of Democrats out there want election integrity.

And that's why we cannot look at CNN and Fox News and all that and base our opinions on what they're saying, because they have an agenda. We've got to be principled. We've got to fight this through, whether we feel we are the lone ones fighting. I can guarantee you we're not. There's a boatload of people out there, Democrats and Republicans, that believe in election integrity, believe in our nation.

You know, I mean, look at our troops, our military. They don't care if they're Democrat or Republican. If they're under assault and they're going to, you know, they're going to fight for each other. They're going to fight for our nation. So the media is the ones that polarize us and we've got to quit listening to them. You know, I've always said, Anthony, that you have 15 percent of people on either end of the spectrum who are out there. Right. Whether you're talking about the extreme left or the extreme right, you have some people who are a little nuts.

The problem is those nut jobs are our mainstream media. It's insane. And Broken Potholes, coming back with Anthony Kern in just a moment. Thank you for tuning in. It's the new year and time for a new you. You've thought about running for political office, but don't know where to start.

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And just getting better and better, although I feel like I'm getting worse at this job. I don't know how that goes. But Anthony Kern on the line with us right now. You are running for the Arizona State Senate. But you have taken a lot of heat this year because you went out to support the president on January 6th. You went to D.C. to do that.

And that has allowed the media to spawn all sorts of ridiculous conspiracy theories. Sure. I mean, they are really tinfoil hatting this thing as far as they can go. And I want to talk a little bit about that day and what, you know, why you were there, what you saw, because quite frankly, I feel like you have been one of the people who has been the most mistreated in all of this. Yeah. So you weren't there to lead an insurrection, right? No.

No. No, that term insurrection, that's ridiculous. It's a joke. That's either being used. You know, in my opinion, the real insurrectionists are the lying media. They're trying to overturn this country for whatever reason. They have their hands in the Chinese pot. So the real insurrectionists are the lying media. But that being said, January 6th was a great event. Over one and a half million people were there.

I've never been to an event where there were so many American patriots there waving American flags, waving Trump flags. And I've been to D.C. many times, and there was just a sea of people there.

I remember trying to take pictures of it on my phone, and it was just impossible to get what was really going on there as far as the crowd size. So Trump spoke, as you all know. He spoke very well, a speech at, I forget the name of the park, but he spoke, and we were in the VIP section, and we talked.

It was just an amazing day. None of us had any idea that an orchestrated event would be happening at the Capitol, but I can tell you this.

The January 6th commission is nothing but a phony, biased political commission, and they're going to give whatever they want to give and put that out in the public, and the media is going to lap it up because that's what the media does. They lap up lies and distortions and try to keep us at odds with each other. But I can tell you on that day, you

There was some real weird things going on. The biggest thing was if you have a million and a half people, and some estimates are more than that, two million, in one location, you would think that you're going to have a little bit better police security. Anthony, I want to hit on that point because I went on that day, and I talked to the police commander at the City of Phoenix, who's a liaison to our office.

And I asked him straight up, would this have happened in the city of Phoenix or would you have had the controls in place that that would not have been possible? And he didn't hesitate one second. He said, there is no way that would have happened if it was here. Period. Right. And if you remember that some of the media reports out there, which these are the good media that reported the truth, were saying that I think several police agencies in the area reported

uh, were acting if he wanted their help and they were turned down. Now, as we all know, Nancy Pelosi is in charge of that area. So this was all a rigged, uh, rigged, uh, event as far as the open the gates and let people in. And most of the people, I mean, they were opening the gate. Yeah. There were no, there were no barriers. So there were no barriers that I saw around the Capitol. Uh,

And so what happened, let me just give you kind of my timeline. So we were there the day before.

And I want to say this, too. There were moms and grandmas and dads and grandpas pushing strollers. These were Americans. These were Americans that loved our country, that loved our president. And on January 6th, we were hoping that all we wanted Pence to do was to give it back to the several states and say, OK, we have half the nation thinking this was stolen. Look at it.

and decide what you want to do, but we need to look at what happened the night in November, election night in November. That's all we wanted. That's all we were asking. As you know, Pence didn't do what I think he didn't do the right thing, and he did not give it back to the states, and therefore we have all the turmoil we have now about the election office. But back on January 6th, Trump spoke. The crowd was so massive.

After he got done, which was about 1.30, it took another hour to get from

I think it was Eclipse Park or Ellipse Park to get from there to the Capitol. Now, it was our impression that there was going to be a stage set up, that we're going to have speakers, and we're going to just call on Vice President Pence to give it back to the states, to just hold off on certifying the presidential election. I do know people...

that were at the Capitol at the very beginning. So while Trump was still speaking, I do know people that had went from the Washington Monument because they wanted a good seat. They wanted a good view. So they went to the Capitol first. And I can tell you what they tell me happened was,

There was several. It was a crowd. There was a barrier there. The barrier is about up to your stomach or your chest, just a typical little, it looked like bike racks. Well, they're the kind of barriers that we don't use to keep people out of places, but our police will use actually to funnel crowds in.

you know, into like the entrance to a, you know, a hall or whatever it is. But these are not crowd control. They're just guide posts. So I can tell you what I was told, because I wasn't there, but what I was told was that there were police at the time, I think on the third tier,

on the third tier, and there was people in black, kind of a black outfit or whatever, fully covered, that these people, once the crowd got a little bit big, there was nobody breaking down any barriers. They were all just chanting USA and Trump and all that. Nobody got out of line until the police or whoever these people were started shooting tear gas into the crowd. No reason at all.

They started shooting tear gas into the crowd, and they instigated the crowd because the crowd's like, what are you doing? We're Americans. What are you doing? Nobody's hurting anybody. The people that had told me this, there was like an 80-year-old guy next to them. He got hit with one of these canisters, and he was severely injured. And they tried helping him, and these cops kept doing that.

And that's kind of what roused the crowd up from what I was told. Again, I was not there. What happened – go ahead. Well, to me, because obviously we dealt with the rioting here in Phoenix, which was shut down pretty quickly by our Phoenix Police Department. But you look at what went on around the country. You look at the way the police treated those events where they're burning down police stations. They're attacking people in federal buildings. Right.

And really trying to kill. Right. They were trying to kill cops. They were burning down. I'm from Minnesota originally and Minneapolis. You all saw what happened there. Now they're letting these criminals go. Right. Yeah. Again, it's a two-tiered system. They're prosecuting grandmas who walked into the Capitol looking around with wonder. Right.

Right, and shooting Ashley Babbitt. And I don't know if we still don't know that cop's name. I don't know the cop's name. I haven't heard any reports of what that... And I'm a police officer. So I'm a certified law enforcement officer right now. And, you know, anytime you shoot anybody, there's got to be justification. There's going to be an investigation, and your name's going to be released. But we don't know the name of this cop that did that. And, you know, whether he or she be justified or not, you know, you have an unarmed woman.

That is dead today because of the setup, I believe it was a setup, at the Capitol. Anthony, before we go today, I want to make sure you have a chance to share your website and how people can get a hold of you, how they can follow you. And then I want to ask you one last question, which is, if you're elected to the Arizona State Senate, what is your number one priority? What are you doing day one? What are you trying to get done? Yeah.

Well, thank you. And that's a great question. I've been asked that since I got into the legislature. So my website is VoteKern.com, V-O-T-E-K-E-R-N.com. My name is Anthony Kern, and I am running in Legislative District 20 right now, and we'll see how that changes with the maps coming out.

So the number one, you know, I've been asked that for years since I've been in the legislature. What is the number one priority down there? And I really think the number one priority for me is killing, stopping bills and stopping legislation because I've never had a...

You know, I've never had, oh, this is what I want to accomplish. I want to get rid of law. I want to get government out of our pocket and give freedom back to Arizonans and to Americans. Now, I know that sounds, you know, that sounds, you know, glamorous and all that. But really, that's what I've been doing down there for the past six years. That's important work. That's important work for the government that governs best, governs least.

Right. I mean, where are the bills that repeal a lot of laws? I've tried to do that several times and got shot down by Republicans. I was rules chair for two years and I got more flack from the Republicans in the legislature than any of the Democrats.

You know, it's amazing how the Republican, and I'm a Republican, but we stand on conservatism, we stand on less government, all that, but we incrementally expand government, give power to unelected bureaucrats.

And that's what I stopped for two years. And I really believe that's probably one reason why I did lose in the 2020 election was because I was rules chair for two years. And, you know, as rules chair, an average number of bills you stop as rules chair are about 10. Well, I had up to 87 that I had stopped.

So, you know, they weren't happy with that. And I got that. But again, if you stand on principle and your convictions, who you are as a conservative, like Andy Biggs and Paul Gosar, look at these two fighters out there. You know, they stand on principle, on constitution, on philosophy, on freedom. Fighting isn't easy. Expanding government. It isn't. Right. Right.

And you're right. I mean, that's very well put. And so my goal is to, you know, push election integrity. And let me just add on to that if you've got a minute. Election integrity. I love these candidates that stand up and say, I voted for this, and yeah, we got this bill through, and yeah, I voted for this election integrity bill, blah, blah, blah. Where were you? Where are you on this fight in Maricopa County? Yeah, they're hiding. Where are you in the fight with Donald Trump if you're silent?

I don't care how many election integrity bills you voted on. If you're silent or are silent, I'm going to think twice. And that is the final word. Anthony Kern, I want to thank you so much for being on the program with us today. Really a pleasure to have you on there. Give us your website again real quick. VoteKern.com. And thank you for having me on. I appreciate the voters out there. And keep fighting, America. We're going to win this thing. Absolutely. Broken Potholes back next week.

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