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 of the things that Stuart 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 Gayle. 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 for a great to be here, man.

Alright, 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, you know, you're 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 back seat 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 is happening here?

Who is this free?

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 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. Three financiers always plenty of money on these people.

Four legal theories to legitimize actions. We've seen that. And last but certainly not least is shock troops.

So take us through, you know, you're thinking on the book and, you know, a little bit about each of these things, which I think again to us a second nature, but to the listeners,

you know, they might need to hear a little bit more about.

You know, this falls in the category like it was all a lot of a book I never could have imagined writing. And now at this point can't imagine not writing.

What really struck me about this is you and I both are, as you say, history nerds and the study of how democracy's fallen to autocracy is not a subject and there's incredible books on it.

And when you read these wonderful things like by, you know, Ruth Ben Giat or Jean Merser, they seem to be a recurring pattern that there were these five elements that were always present when a democracy size into autocracy.

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