Filmmakers Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern, previously behind The Devil Came on Horseback, lay out ten warning signs that historians and political theorists associate with democracies sliding into authoritarian rule: manufactured external threats, secret prisons, surveillance of ordinary citizens, and the erosion of due process among them. The film matches each step to footage and testimony pulled from the Bush administration's post-9/11 policies, arguing that practices like indefinite detention and warrantless wiretapping fit the same pattern seen in Weimar Germany, Pinochet's Chile, and other regimes that moved from open society to dictatorship. Interviews with legal scholars, journalists, and former officials build the case point by point rather than through a single narrator's argument. The film is openly partisan in its target, aiming its critique squarely at one administration's record, which makes it as much a document of a specific political moment as a general warning. Its case rests on the claim that these ten steps, taken individually, look survivable, and taken together, do not.