Hi there, I'm Lale Arikoglu, and this podcast is brought to you by Wilderness, a conservation-driven

hospitality company that offers intimate world life encounters in extraordinary remote landscapes.

Last year, I embarked on two separate solo adventures with Wilderness, one to Botswana and the other

to Namibia, where the expert guides delivered a truly once-in-a-lifetime

experience. I promise you, whatever you watch and see before you go won't prepare you for the thrill

of a wilderness adventure. eBay, it's a place to fall in love with new pre-loved vintage and rare

fashion over and over again.

Your favorite designers, expertly authenticated.

Yeah, eBay. Things people love.

This is the political scene, and I'm David Remnick.

This year's midterm elections ended with a sigh of relief for defenders of democracy.

There seems to have been no violence and relatively few races that were challenged by the losers.

Extremism fared poorly.

But a significant number of election deniers did win seats in the House of Representatives,

and states are still chipping away at voting rights.

And Donald Trump will continue to do everything he can to undermine faith in the process.

So we're going to take a look at where we stand now in the wake of that election. And in our next episode, I'll be talking with the authors

of the cheerfully named bestseller How Democracies Die. And we'll start today with J. Michael Ludick,

a retired judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals.

Lutig is quite a prominent figure in legal circles. He's close to everyone from Clarence Thomas to William Barr, and he was mentioned as a Supreme Court pick during the George W. Bush

administration. But Lutig finds himself at odds now with the Republican Party. And in his testimony to the January 6th

committee, he harshly condemned all efforts to cast doubt on the 2020 election. Donald Trump and his

...