Welcome back to the Lincoln Project. I'm your host, Reed Gailan. Today I'm joined by David

Pepper, the former chairman of the Ohio Democratic Party. Before that he served as a member of the

Hamilton County Ohio Board of Commissioners and as a councilman for the City of Cincinnati.

David is the author of the new book, Laboratories of Autocracy, a wake-up call from behind the lines

which you can find at your fine bookstore or Amazon. David Pepper, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me. So David, today I want to talk about what's next for places like Texas and

Florida as well as look ahead to 2022 and 2024. But first I want to hear about your book,

Laboratories of Autocracy, which obviously is a take on Justice Brand, I say I believe, right,

so that the states are Laboratories of Democracy and obviously this has been turned on its head.

So let's talk a little bit about it. So the book is really about what's going on at the state level,

gubernatorial statewide races, legislative races, maybe sometimes ballot measures, although I don't

know if you really get into that. And that the real threat to our democracy is not Marjorie Taylor,

Green or Gates or Bober or Jordan or even the big lie. It's this sort of under the radar,

anonymous sort of Alec funding of conservative candidates, you know, for probably decades, right,

at the local state level, which has enabled so much policy change and we'll talk about as they

said, Texas and Florida in a minute. But take us through a little bit about how you wrote the book

and, you know, what you want some of our listeners to really get out of it.

If you had told me in January that I was going to actually write a book, I would have said,

no, I'm not doing that. But by the spring, I just continue to watch our country ignore what I

believe is the deepest threat to our democracy that is taking place every day. And is more of a

threat as we said that Marjorie Taylor, Green, I said on a prior interview, how many laws

is Marjorie Taylor, Green past zero? She's not even on a committee. Exactly. And we should watch her,

...