From WNYC Studios. I'm Brian Lerer. This is my daily politics podcast. It's Friday, February 27th.

Defund science, distort culture, mock education. That's the title of a podcast episode, Distort Culture. Mock Education.

That's the title of a podcast episode from Atlantic Magazine staff writer Ann Applebaum

in her series Autocracy in America.

It's related to the themes in Anne's latest book, Autocracy Inc.

The Dictators Who Want to Run the World.

Anne will join us in a minute.

Another episode of her podcast was called How Autocrats Meddle with Elections. It tells the story,

for example, of Dawn Baldwin Gibson, a pastor in New Bern, North Carolina, who had her vote

in the 2024 elections challenged for no apparent

reason.

I'm going to play a few clips here of Pastor Gibson.

Here's the beginning of how they cite her in the podcast.

For more than 35 years, I have been a registered voter and I have been casting my vote. To this day,

months later, I still don't know why my vote was being challenged. And she continues.

One of the races on the ballot was for the North Carolina Supreme Court. The election was between Allison Riggs and Jefferson Griffin.

I actually went to vote as an early voter. And this is something that for many years I have done with my family, showed my ID, went in, cast my vote, and really

thought nothing else about it until a couple of weeks went by. I started hearing about this

Jefferson Griffin list. So did the North Carolina State Board of Elections challenge her vote?

The authority in North Carolina is the State Board of Elections.

They were not challenging my vote.

They were showing that I had done everything that I was supposed to have done for my vote to count. But Jefferson

...