Everyone, it's read. Before you hear my conversation with Lincoln Project Senior Advisor Stuart Stevens and his new book,

in the hours after that talk, Mike Johnson, a hard-right evangelical, quote-unquote, constitutional attorney was elected Speaker of the United States House of Representatives.

I hope that you'll listen to this conversation with that knowledge

in the context that the things that Stewart and I are talking about are happening in real time

before our eyes, everyone. I hope you enjoy the conversation. Thanks as always for listening.

And now on with the show. Welcome back to the Lincoln Project.

I'm your host, Reed Galey.

Today, I'm joined by Stuart Stevens, senior advisor to the Lincoln Project, author of It Was All a Lie, and now the author of The Conspiracy to End America, Five Ways My Old Party is Driving Our Democracy to Autocracy, which is newly released and available now wherever fine books are sold.

Stuart, welcome back and congrats on the book.

Thanks, Ray. Great to be here, man.

All right, so it's hard to believe this, Stuart, but you were the first real ad guy ever met in

1998.

I was working for a guy named Tony Garza, and he was running for railroad commissioner.

Wonderful guy would go on to become ambassador to Mexico and to George W. Bush.

And if I may just tell a story, we were looking for places to shoot and we stopped. You said, I'm hungry. And we said, okay, what would you like? He's like, well, I'm in Austin. So how about barbecue? So we stopped in a place called Green Mesquite Barbecue. And you buy two whole smoked chickens. You put them in the back seat. And then you say, I'm tired, I'm going to take a nap,

and you curled up on the backseat of this guy's Ford Explorer until we got to where we were

shooting the spot. And I was sort of like, what the hell it's happening here?

Who is this freak? Right. Yes, exactly. But it's hard to believe, however many years on,

here we are, Stuart. And, you know, you've been with us since 2020 at the Lincoln Project. And this book that you're talking about now is one that feels like second nature to me, but I feel like has a lot of necessity. Because I think, you know, as you always say, the problem with the lack of imagination is, you know, how big an imagination do you need?

But here are the five building blocks of autocracies and we can get into it.

One is the propagandists, no shortage there.

Two is the support of a major party, certainly there.

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