Welcome to the beat, I'm Ari Melver, and we have a new legal breakdown of Trump's smoking

gun audio tape, the one obtained by Jack Smith now out in public.

That's coming up later.

Well, we begin now with major news on these rising anti-democratic forces in America.

From the voting rights crackdowns and assorted government plots to the big lie attacks on

election results that can stoke actual insurrections.

Now, we know the US has faced many different types of crises before.

But this era has been a perfect storm of right-wing demagogues, weaponized propaganda

from the internet to the Fox News defamation we covered, and this is key.

The perfect storm includes a high-powered elite-driven effort to mainstream attacks on democracy

and try to write them into our rules.

And that part of the effort is not, let's be clear, criminal activity like January

6th.

It's not something people are going to go to jail for.

It is what at least lawyers and others call arguably legal attacks that are still designed

to hijack democracy from within.

And this is our top story right now tonight because this brings us to efforts to bend or

break current laws and rules to try to foster more anti-democratic outcomes that would be

technically legal if these people get their way.

I'm talking about a world where politicians pick their voters instead of the other way

around.

And I want to be clear.

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