Brian Cannon has been pursuing a singular goal for five and a half years as executive director of One Virginia, growing its roster of supporters from 3,500 to more than 100,000. And in November the people of Virginia look ready to reward his work: Approval looks likely for a ballot measure creating an independent commission to draw Virginia's legislative and congressional boundaries — joining 13 other states in taking such work away from politicians who would otherwise be able to pick their own voters. Cannon came to the work after winning a statewide redistricting contest in law school, although after graduating he spent a few years as a startup business consultant. His answers have been edited for clarity and length.
What's the tweet-length description of your organization?
@1VA2021 is a trans-partisan good govt org focused on ending gerrymandering in Virginia. We believe that voting districts belong to Virginians, not to any party or politician.
Describe your very first civic engagement.
When I was an undergraduate at William & Mary, there was a huge bond referendum on the 2002 ballot that would benefit higher ed in Virginia. A few friends and I saw that the only people advocating for it were college presidents and lobbyists — not any college students. We decided to change that and formed the first student-run political action committee in the country. It taught me there's a seat at the table for young voters if they do their policy homework, show up and honestly engage. Shortly thereafter we began working on textbook prices and the lack of competitive pay for our professors.
The Students PAC morphed into a wonderful advocacy organization called Virginia21 dedicated to giving young Virginians a chance to engage in state politics and policy-making.
What was your biggest professional triumph?
I hope it's ahead of me, because I am working every day to give us a chance at fair maps in Virginia in 2021. So far, the list is topped by getting the redistricting reform proposal through the General Assembly and on to the November ballot. It was the culmination in March of intense grassroots lobbying building up over several years. Approval of this reform would be historic for Virginia, for the South and for the growing movement for fair maps around the country. It will take redistricting out of the smoky backroom, put citizens with an equal say at the table, add transparency, and enshrine minority voter protections in our state constitution.
And your most disappointing setback?
There are so many little losses from which I've learned, but perhaps the most disappointing was in 2018. Like asking a thief to return the jewels, a federal court told legislators to redraw 11 state House districts it said were racially gerrymandered. Both parties came up with new maps that were still racial gerrymanders — but which served the electoral needs of Democrats and Republicans alike. It was clear to all of us watching that this wasn't how it should work, yet it happened anyway.
What was disappointing was that we had a chance to do it better. We had worked for years to persuade a number of legislators to commit to an open and transparent process with citizen engagement — but some of our best allies decided that wasn't worth doing at that point.
How does your identity influence the way you go about your work?
I'm a Democrat but view myself as a reformer first. There are so many things broken in our system: campaign finance laws, first-past-the-post voting, redistricting. I don't have answers for the big problems with our tax structure, health care system or climate — but I do know we'll never get them without honest, inclusive conversations in our representative bodies. Right now, the system is rigged to make these conversations unproductive, if not impossible.
What's the best advice you've ever been given?
College convocation speeches usually go in one ear and out the other of an 18-year-old the first week on campus, but the address when I arrived has stayed with me. Timothy Sullivan, our college president, contrasted President Kennedy's pro-government inaugural address in 1961 ("Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country") with President Reagan's anti-government inaugural address in 1981 ("Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem"). And he said our task as students in 2000 would be finding the synthesis between these two seemingly incompatible ideas. It's a charge I've taken to heart.
Create a new flavor for Ben & Jerry's.
Somehow, it would capture the spirit of Dave Daley's "UnRigged: How Americans are Battling Back to Save Democracy." He's a vegan, so it would need to respect that. There would have to be purple to represent bipartisanship. And nuts, because we're all a bit nuts to be in this reform space advocating for things most consider long-shots. After consulting an ice cream maker friend: vanilla oat milk ice cream swirled with a blueberry and fresh mint compote with a healthy dose of hazelnut cookie crumble.
What's your favorite political movie or TV show?
HBO's "Veep," because Julia Louis-Dreyfus and her castmates nail political satire so well that it's uncomfortable. I'm also, obviously, a "West Wing" fan, but that's nowhere near what real life is. Still, like "Veep," it gives those operating in a political sphere a lingua franca for our experiences.
What's the last thing you do on your phone at night?
I'm a big fan of Audible, so usually I'm listening to a book to wind down. The last one was about Churchill, Erik Larson's "The Splendid and the Vile." If I'm between books, though, I'll scroll Pinterest and think about all the gardening, cooking, exercising, and DIY hacks I could do.
What is your deepest, darkest secret?
I'm a grown, married man with two children. I cook meals for my family that are generally healthy and balanced. But if I'm alone for the evening, I'll often hit up the Taco Bell drive-thru for a Cheesy Gordita Crunch, a soft shell taco, a bean burrito — and those delicious cinnamon twists!
Eric Trump, the newly appointed ALT5 board director of World Liberty Financial, walks outside of the NASDAQ in Times Square as they mark the $1.5- billion partnership between World Liberty Financial and ALT5 Sigma with the ringing of the NASDAQ opening bell, on Aug. 13, 2025, in New York City.
Why does the Trump family always get a pass?
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche joined ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday to defend or explain a lot of controversies for the Trump administration: the Epstein files release, the events in Minneapolis, etc. He was also asked about possible conflicts of interest between President Trump’s family business and his job. Specifically, Blanche was asked about a very sketchy deal Trump’s son Eric signed with the UAE’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon.
Shortly before Trump was inaugurated in early 2025, Tahnoon invested $500 million in the Trump-owned World Liberty, a then newly launched cryptocurrency outfit. A few months later, UAE was granted permission to purchase sensitive American AI chips. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, “the deal marks something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company.”
“How do you respond to those who say this is a serious conflict of interest?” ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked.
“I love it when these papers talk about something being unprecedented or never happening before,” Blanche replied, “as if the Biden family and the Biden administration didn’t do exactly the same thing, and they were just in office.”
Blanche went on to boast about how the president is utterly transparent regarding his questionable business practices: “I don’t have a comment on it beyond Trump has been completely transparent when his family travels for business reasons. They don’t do so in secret. We don’t learn about it when we find a laptop a few years later. We learn about it when it’s happening.”
Sadly, Stephanopoulos didn’t offer the obvious response, which may have gone something like this: “OK, but the president and countless leading Republicans insisted that President Biden was the head of what they dubbed ‘the Biden Crime family’ and insisted his business dealings were corrupt, and indeed that his corruption merited impeachment. So how is being ‘transparent’ about similar corruption a defense?”
Now, I should be clear that I do think the Biden family’s business dealings were corrupt, whether or not laws were broken. Others disagree. I also think Trump’s business dealings appear to be worse in many ways than even what Biden was alleged to have done. But none of that is relevant. The standard set by Trump and Republicans is the relevant political standard, and by the deputy attorney general’s own account, the Trump administration is doing “exactly the same thing,” just more openly.
Since when is being more transparent about wrongdoing a defense? Try telling a cop or judge, “Yes, I robbed that bank. I’ve been completely transparent about that. So, what’s the big deal?”
This is just a small example of the broader dysfunction in the way we talk about politics.
Americans have a special hatred for hypocrisy. I think it goes back to the founding era. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in “Democracy In America,” the old world had a different way of dealing with the moral shortcomings of leaders. Rank had its privileges. Nobles, never mind kings, were entitled to behave in ways that were forbidden to the little people.
In America, titles of nobility were banned in the Constitution and in our democratic culture. In a society built on notions of equality (the obvious exceptions of Black people, women, Native Americans notwithstanding) no one has access to special carve-outs or exemptions as to what is right and wrong. Claiming them, particularly in secret, feels like a betrayal against the whole idea of equality.
The problem in the modern era is that elites — of all ideological stripes — have violated that bargain. The result isn’t that we’ve abandoned any notion of right and wrong. Instead, by elevating hypocrisy to the greatest of sins, we end up weaponizing the principles, using them as a cudgel against the other side but not against our own.
Pick an issue: violent rhetoric by politicians, sexual misconduct, corruption and so on. With every revelation, almost immediately the debate becomes a riot of whataboutism. Team A says that Team B has no right to criticize because they did the same thing. Team B points out that Team A has switched positions. Everyone has a point. And everyone is missing the point.
Sure, hypocrisy is a moral failing, and partisan inconsistency is an intellectual one. But neither changes the objective facts. This is something you’re supposed to learn as a child: It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing or saying, wrong is wrong. It’s also something lawyers like Mr. Blanche are supposed to know. Telling a judge that the hypocrisy of the prosecutor — or your client’s transparency — means your client did nothing wrong would earn you nothing but a laugh.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.