Hey, everybody. I got one that doesn't insult your intelligence, you know, for a change.

My guest is David Pepper, former chair of the Ohio State Democratic Party, and he's written a book,

Laboratories of Autocracy, which I read a few weeks ago.

And it's contributed to a change of my thinking about where we are in terms of our democracy.

I have thought for some time that we are very close to a tipping point where we will descend

into some kind of autocracy.

But of late, I've been coming to the belief that we've already had the tipping point

and that the tipping point is actually isn't an actual point, but rather the accumulation

of a number of events that have undermined our democracy.

The first one is Citizens United, the 2010-5-4 Scotus decision,

which unleashed limitless dark money in our politics.

And it is insane now, just how much dark money there is.

Now, we really have very little idea of exactly where and from whom it is coming.

Next tipping point, the 2010 midterms.

That was a wave election in which Republicans flipped the house, picking up 63 seats.

We were still deep in the Great Recession,

and Republicans ran against the Affordable Care Act,

which we had passed that year,

and which Republicans were constantly lying about.

You may remember Chuck Grassley saying that they were going to have death panels

and with a government-run program to pull the plug on grandma.

But not only had Republicans flip the house in 2010, they flipped a whole bunch of state legislatures. And in states like Ohio

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