We just wrapped up our fall 2023 national tour. We’ve so enjoyed taking WITHpod on the road and it’s been so good to hear feedback from so many of you. We couldn’t think of a better person to have for our tour culmination than the one and only Rachel Maddow. It was a fascinating conversation all about what we can do to save American democracy, how we got to this particular political moment and her amazing New York Times bestselling book, “Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism.” We’re thrilled to share the full recording of the event with you.
This is a rough transcript — please excuse any typos.
Chris Hayes: Hello, and welcome to “Why Is This Happening?” with me, your host, Chris Hayes.
Well, if you’ve been following our updates for WITHpod, you know that we just wrapped up our fall 2023 national tour. And we so love taking WITHpod on the road. It’s been great to get feedback from all of you.
I can’t think of a better person to have for our tour culmination, the one and only Rachel Maddow. Rachel and I have known each other a long time. I am a devoted fan of Rachel Maddow. I have to say that I kept it together pretty well for our conversation. And it was just a really magical evening. She’s brilliant, and it was fascinating and dark and sobering but also funny, and we are thrilled to share a recording of the live show. Hope you enjoy.
Doni Holloway: What’s up, New York City? I love that energy. Good evening and welcome to our live recording of “Why Is This Happening?”, the Chris Hayes podcast. I’m Doni Holloway. Yes. Thank you. I’m Doni Holloway, producer of “Why Is This Happening?” I got to say, thank you, thank you, thank you so much. You all are the best.
We have been traveling all over the country for this national tour and it is extra, extra, extra special to be right back here, right here in New York City. That’s right, yes. You’re all an amazing audience. And as we go throughout the show tonight, don’t forget you can share favorite moments from the show using the hashtag #WITHpod. You can keep the conversation going online by using the hashtag #WITHpod. You’ll also be able to get copies of the book as you head out.
We are so thrilled and I’m not going to be the thing keeping us from the start of tonight’s show, which I know we have all been looking forward to. And without further ado, we’re going to get our show started in just a few moments. Thank you.
Rachel Maddow: Hello, New York. Thank you for joining us live at Town Hall in New York City for this very special edition of “Why Is This Happening?” He is incisive, he is big-hearted, he is very smart, and admit it, he’s taller than you expected. Please give a warm welcome to my friend, my beloved colleague, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes.
Chris Hayes: What’s up, everybody? Hello. Thank you. Hey, oh stop. Stop it.
How are you? Good. Thank you. Sit down. Thank you, that’s extremely kind. I hate attention and positive feedback. That was a really hard 20 seconds for me. So, thank you for cutting it short. It’s amazing to be here in my hometown of New York City. I’ve got some family here. I met some folks before the show who came from all over. We got people here from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and from West Virginia, and from Puerto Rico. So, shout out to the people that traveled here, which was an amazing thing to do.
And I know, obviously, that the fact we sold this out in about four minutes had nothing to do with tonight’s guest. It’s weird. This sold the best of all the shows on the tour. I’m not quite sure why. So, tonight we’re going to talk about democracy. And that word, we’ve probably talked more about democracy in the last four or five years than I had in all of my time as a journalist before then, I would say. Like even that as a topic seems a little weird, we all know, like America is a democracy.
And there’s a certain kind of history that you’re taught that I think is part of American civic culture deeply, almost kind of civic religion, which roughly goes the following. The founders rebelled against the tyranny of the Crown and the injustice of monarchy. And they conceived, in liberty, a new nation founded on a government by, of, and for the people, right. That’s the Lincoln Gettysburg Address version of it. And they rejected basically the idea that there is some authority above all of us that has dominion over us. That each of us are imbued with the ability to determine our own fate collectively as a we.
And that’s a very difficult and messy process, but fundamentally, you know, in the eyes of some of the founders, that’s God-given. In the eyes of others, it’s sort of a natural truth, but that’s the idea. We all decide together what we all are going to do. And that simple, fundamental, and at the time, radical vision is what separates us here in the Western Hemisphere from the old world of Europe, where you had monarchies and kings and queens and tyrants. And then as time went on, various forms of blood and soil authoritarianism, ultimately fascism, culminating in the second World War.
And you don’t really get democracies in that part of the world, in the way we think about them until afterwards. There’s some, obviously, like there are democratic forms of government that exists before them. There’s a bunch of failed revolutions, there’s sort of these compromises that get worked out in the U.K. and in Poland and in different parts of the continent. But basically, we are the model for the world, right?
Yes. We’re the first ones. We figured it out. We slough off the yoke of tyranny and we seize our fate. Now, the other part of that story that we all know, right, is a very complicated story. As one British critic at the time said, the loudest cries of liberty come from the Americans as they whip their slaves. Which is, by the way, an important point that they saw it at the time, right? Like people understood at the time there was an incredible, ridiculous tension in American rhetoric about self-determination and democracy.
But the general story I think we have is we sort of start with an imperfect democracy and then we work towards a more perfect democracy, the more perfect union that’s in the preamble. And I think there’s something to that story. I don’t think it’s a crazy story, but it’s basically the civic religion we have. But I think there’s another way of thinking about the story of American democracy, which is that America is kind of the ongoing dynamic site of a perpetual contestation over democracy.
That it’s the site of a constant pitched battle between forces on the side of democracy and forces against them. And the forces against them are not fringe characters, and sometimes the forces against them are the most celebrated people in the country. Andrew Jackson, who is viewed as a small-d democrat because he sort of railed against the elites, right? And he founded the modern Democratic Party with his sort of populism, and he invited the people into the White House on the day of his inauguration where they all got drunk.
He was not in any recognizable sense really a Democrat in the way that we think of it today. I mean, he thought there was a caste of people who should rule over another caste of people. He was one of the major pursuers of the ethnic cleansing that made the continent what it is, right? He didn’t think that everyone had some universal, inalienable rights and that all of us collectively should rule all of us collectively. He thought that the white man should rule over slaves and over the indigenous people that populated the planet.
I’m not saying this in a like Andrew Jackson is canceled way. I mean, he should be, to be clear. I’m actually talking in a very specific way about like how would you characterize the ideological belief system of Andrew Jackson? Like is it accurate to call Andrew Jackson a small-d democrat? Is it accurate to call Andrew Jackson a believer in democracy, right? I think it’s a little tough to say it is, at least in our modern sense, right, which is the best sense.
Theodore Roosevelt who’s on Mount Rushmore, right? Like what does Theodore Roosevelt believe? Theodore Roosevelt believes and writes and says often that the white race is there to rule over the other races. He founds what becomes essentially the American empire in the Pacific where we will rule over these people. They’re not going to get the vote. They’re not going to be citizens. They’re not full and equal. They are subject to authority from on high and they are forced to be under that authority in not that different a way than the remote king back in the time.
And, again, with all of these examples I’m giving, there’s people at the time who recognize this. One of the most pitched debates that happens in American history on the floor of the Congress is about the Trail of Tears, where people come to the well to say this is, they didn’t have the term at the time, ethnic cleansing. This is totally unjust. We can’t do this. These people have inalienable rights. At the same time, when we started fighting our wars under Theodore Roosevelt and pursuing American empire, there were people at the time, Mark Twain being very prominent among them, saying we’re doing the thing that we hated the Crown for doing.
At each moment in American history where you have these fights and frictions over what the meaning of democracy actually is, there are contemporaries on each side of the debate. It’s not this neat T-lows (ph). It’s not this neat arc where we start out sort of confused and benighted and don’t understand that slavery is wrong, but then we sort of walk into the light. No, they knew. They knew the Trail of Tears was wrong. They knew that the wars in the Pacific, in the Philippines, what we were doing, they knew it was wrong.
There were people who very clearly saw what it was. And that’s true at every point. And it’s true up until the period in the run-up to World War II. Now that story, we learned, is basically the following. Because of the trauma of World War I, the U.S. is very reticent to get involved in another war on European shores, fair. And we kind of dither and FDR comes up with Lenley’s, right? This is like the basic version because he’s trying to sort of straddle, that he realizes something’s going to have to be done. But it’s very hard to get Americans into this idea of a second war in Europe in just several decades later. And then Pearl Harbor happens, and we’re in, and we defeat fascism. Right?
Go us! That’s basically the story. And that story also masks exactly the same thing that is masked in those other moments, from the country’s founding, to the Trail of Tears in Jackson, to the creation of U.S. empire in the Pacific under Theodore Roosevelt, which is contemporaneous debates in the society about what democracy is and whether it’s good. Whether what we actually do want is for all of us collectively as individuals with sovereign rights over ourselves collectively to come together to transfer that sovereignty into a collective we that decides as a democracy how we will mark our fate, how we will go forward or whether what we want is something else, dominion, ruled by some group or person.
That is an eternal debate in American politics. We’re now realizing this, I think, in a way that we didn’t appreciate until we found ourselves in this moment now where we’re debating it again every day. And it feels weird, and it feels alien, and it feels like it landed from Mars. Hadn’t we all come to a consensus on this? Didn’t we all agree that we’re a democracy? Wasn’t it the fact that in the old days we would fight along the 40 yard lines is the cliché, right? We didn’t have extremes. We weren’t actually debating. No, the debate has been there the entire time.
And one of the most useful interventions in understanding the debate being there the whole time comes by way of this up and coming talent that I spotted. I got a pretty good eye. In this really remarkable podcast called “Ultra”, that came out, I think, a year ago. You look good (ph). Totally, if you have not listened to it, go download it. Subscribe to my podcast, too, while you’re doing it but download “Ultra.” And it is the story of an attempt of basically fascist sympathizers in the U.S. prior to the war and their efforts, and the incredible lengths they went to.
And I’m not going to spoil it. We’re going to talk about it in a second, and now that subsequently has been turned part of it. But I want to urge people, because I read the book this week, because I’ve been under the gun, deadline-wise. I want to urge people who listen to “Ultra” to read the book, because this book “Prequel”, see it? There it is. It is not just the podcast in the book. It actually goes so much further. It is an incredible read and is kind of, I think, a skeleton key for this particular moment.
And so, without further ado, I would like to introduce the author of “Prequel”, my dear friend, my beloved colleague, Rachel Maddow.
Rachel Maddow: Wow. There are a lot of people in this room.
Chris Hayes: There are a lot of people. For those listening on the podcast, there’s 20,000 people in this room. I’ve never seen anything like it in my life.
Rachel Maddow: I’m wearing my reading glasses, so all of you are just little blobs. I can’t see you at all, which is helpful.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Rachel Maddow: Yes.
Chris Hayes: I want to start in your way into this material because I have to say, it is a incredible talent that you have, and this has been true on your television show for years, of sort of finding these unexplored nuggets in American history. These stories that people don’t know, and then you tell them and you’re like, what? Like really? That actually happened? And “Ultra” was an incredible example of that, where I literally, I mean, I knew who Father Coughlin was. He’s a right-wing, anti-Semitic populist preacher, so I knew that. I knew that there was, you know, there’s this American First movement, that Lindbergh.
Rachel Maddow: Right.
Chris Hayes: I read the Philip Roth novel.
Rachel Maddow: Which is great.
Chris Hayes: Which is great.
Rachel Maddow: Yes.
Chris Hayes: But that was always about, like that was kind of my canon for those things, like I knew those things. I knew nothing else that appeared in that podcast. So, I want you to start by just saying, what was your way into this material because it really is not on the surface.
Rachel Maddow: So, I never set out to tell a history story. I’m always looking for something that’s going on in current life. It’s always something that is sprung from things that are going on in the news. And the thing I get dinged for, rightly, I think, in terms of the way I do my work, is that if I want to tell you about something happening in the world today, everything has to start with, first a meteor hit the earth.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Rachel Maddow: And then the dinosaurs died.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Rachel Maddow: And when their bodies dissolved, I mean like I —
Chris Hayes: That’s good, that’s a good bit (inaudible).
Rachel Maddow: If that is not your way of thinking about the world, I can understand why that is alienating. I know I’m not everybody’s cup of tea. Oh, thank you.
I love you too. But that’s the way my brain works. And I was as unnerved as everybody, but also just kind of confused and interested that we were seeing all this alt-right, neo-Nazi, anti-Semitic, and Holocaust denial stuff around the rise of Trumpism. So, Trumpism is happening in the electoral politics space.
And then we’ve got this thing that, for a minute, we called the alt-right. I don’t think we call them that anymore. But it was seeing them rise alongside Trump and seeing them cheerleading for Trump and seeing them as sort of parallel movement, I didn’t understand why that was. And so I wanted to figure out how, not just anti-Semitism but specifically Holocaust denial has functioned in the United States —
Chris Hayes: Huh.
Rachel Maddow: — before.
Chris Hayes: That was the starting point.
Rachel Maddow: That was the starting point. If you go back far enough in terms of the origins of American Holocaust denial, which I did, you get back to like 1948. And Holocaust denial is a lot of terrible things, but one of the things is, it is weird. Like with so much evidence that it happened, how can it be that we say that it didn’t happen? Well, that’s especially true in 1948 when there are lots of people in the world who are witnesses to what happened. And so how can it be that it is a source of denial for a political movement?
Well, it is not that they earnestly believe it didn’t happen. They are using Holocaust denial for a reason, as part of a political project. And that is what I got into in the 40s, and that is how I found my defendants. And that is how I learned that they all got put on trial, and they all got off when the judge died. And I thought, you know what? I was going to tell a different story, I think I’m going to tell this one because I didn’t know any of it.
Chris Hayes: You traced in the book different strands of pro-fascist, anti-Semitic, Nazi-aligned thought and actors in the U.S. Because in some ways, it’s a little bit of a misfit toys situation, like there’s some real odd ones in there.
Rachel Maddow: Yes.
Chris Hayes: But they’re also operating in a discursive environment that is not closed off to what they’re saying.
Rachel Maddow: Correct.
Chris Hayes: Tell me about public opinion around the question of fascism and the rise of it in 1930, ‘31, ‘32, when some of the people that you document in the book are trying to, and sometimes at the behest of the German government, cultivate sympathy.
Rachel Maddow: Yes, fascism was the movement of the future. Fascism did not have the caste that we associate it now, retrospectively, with Nazi Germany. The number one selling book in America in 1941 was written by Charles Lindbergh’s wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh. And it was about how fascism was coming to America and wouldn’t that be fantastic, because we could finally get some stuff done. And it was, in fact, a lot of people who have looked into it, I can’t say this definitively, but a lot of people believe that it was ghostwritten by a guy named Lawrence Dennis, who was sort of the leading intellectual fascist of his time.
He actually wrote a book called “The coming American fascism.” He went on, one of the things that we found, was old NBC radio archives from “Town Meeting of the Air”, which was a great debate show that they used to host on one of the NBC radio networks. And in one of the very first ones that they did, they brought Lawrence Dennis on to argue for fascism against other people who were arguing against fascism, and he wiped the floor with them.
Chris Hayes: Fascism crossfire.
Rachel Maddow: Fascism crossfire, he totally won, exactly. But I mean it was a popular thing. I mean by the time you get to 1940, 83 percent of the American public is against us joining World War II. Eighty-three percent. That’s what FDR was up against. And some of that was just, we don’t want to fight another war.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Rachel Maddow: But some of that was the people who you want us to fight against, we actually think have the better idea.
Chris Hayes: How did they go about cultivating? We can talk about Dennis for a little bit.
Rachel Maddow: Yes.
Chris Hayes: Who’s worthwhile just spending a little time on.
Rachel Maddow: Oh, there’s such a good twist when it comes to him.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Rachel Maddow: Yes, okay.
Chris Hayes: But talk about him a little bit.
Rachel Maddow: So, Lawrence Dennis had been a State Department official. He’d gone to Harvard. He was a very erudite, very articulate guy. And he had kind of a substack contrariness to him.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Rachel Maddow: You couldn’t compliment him without him insulting you for complimenting him. He was that kind of guy. But he also, in his gruffness and his contrariness, made everybody fall in love with him. That he was seen, men, women, old, young, didn’t matter, everybody had a crush on Lawrence Dennis. And he slept his way through the 1930s in a way that he didn’t understand why his wife minded. So, you get a lot of interesting stuff about him.
But he was writing speeches and books for the isolationists. And the isolationists weren’t calling themselves fascists overtly, but they had the leading intellectual self-described fascist in America writing their stuff. And Dennis was a favorite of the Nazi government in Berlin, and they brought him over for the Nuremberg rallies. They brought him over to Germany and gave him access to everybody up to and including Hitler. And he used it to essentially become a very well-networked, very influential person.
He interviewed Mussolini. He interviewed Hitler. He spent time with all the most important diplomats and foreign leaders of the time. And then he came home and he wrote speeches for isolationist senators and books for isolationist wives and heroes. And he was one of the sedition trial defendants. And he was so arrogant, he not only defended himself in court, but he insisted that there should be mental examinations of his co-defendants. Which they, once they realized that was actually a way out of it, agreed. They all wanted mental examinations.
Chris Hayes: He’s sort of the leading, I mean to the extent that there’s a leading fascist American intellectual that you document. But there’s also, the seed is being planted in somewhat fertile soil for a bunch of reasons. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about why that’s the case. Like there is the fact that World War I was brutal and awful. And there’s an interesting thing that happens in both this book and “Ultra”, which is that people who totally understandably and reasonably were like, whoa, that was a disaster, being kind of prepared to be like, we’re never doing that again.
And that posture, which is not at all a crazy posture, a totally rational posture, being the kind of slippery slope by which they end up in first isolationism and then just outright fascism.
Give that, you have the depression and then you have this sense of like the brokenness of the American system slash like the messiness of democracy. All three of those things are sort of running themes in the people that are pushing for proposing or in the case of Huey Long, embodying an alternate to that.
Rachel Maddow: Yes. I think it’s easiest to see it when you look at what the Germans were secretly telling us. So, one of the things we now know, and this is in “Ultra” and it’s in the book, too, is that there was a really big, really aggressive, really well-funded secret German propaganda effort targeting the American people. And what were they trying to do? They were basically trying to do three things, probably, I guess, you could narrow it down to.
One was to support isolationism however they could. However you wanted to hear it, they would help you hear it. Any argument against the Americans joining the war, they were all for that. They also wanted to turn us against our allies by making us see fascism as preferable to every other form of government. So, they’re arguing that we shouldn’t go to war to defend our ally, Britain, because in what sense are they really our ally? They’re corrupt. They’re an empire. They’re cruel. They’re weak. The Germans, who have a much better idea, are going to run over them in a matter of weeks.
Why would we side with the failing empire that we should resent and not with the Germans who have a better idea? They’re also trying to make us believe that we are inherently weak, that we should change our own form of government, and that by having a democracy, we are opening ourselves up to be controlled by the Jews, to be controlled by international forces, to be controlled by those who would send us into the meat grinder of these wars when really we should just let Germany win and side with them.
So, they were trying to articulate all of those things through any American voices they could put their words in the mouth of. And so it’s members of Congress. It’s U.S. senators. It’s people like Lawrence Dennis who they are funding up the wazoo. It’s George Sylvester Viereck, who’s an American Nazi agent, who’s running like 12 different publications. It’s publishing houses that they’ve bought. It’s magazines. And the messages that they were trying to sell us, to me, it’s just unnerving and clarifying —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Rachel Maddow: — to see them because it is so much the story that we are still being sold by those who would prefer that we became a strongman for one government instead of a democracy today. It’s the exact same message.
Chris Hayes: What is that message? I mean what —
Rachel Maddow: Well, the message is that there are, it’s not just that there are minority groups that oog you out. These minority groups are secretly powerful and they are the hidden power behind the scenes. And you think you’re controlling the government, you think you’re voting for people, but your vote doesn’t really matter because there’s the secret cabal.
So, there’s secret cabal and that means we can’t all participate in a democracy because why would we give the secret cabal a vote? What the government needs to be able to do is protect us from those people. So, we need a government that is strong, that has authority, that can protect us from those people. To vote is cute, but it’s weak. And this is the only way that we can efficiently compete with the real countries on Earth, the real strong countries, you know, you would say today, China, Russia, Hungary —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Rachel Maddow: Right. And so that message is the same, is to turn us against each other, to make us believe that democracy doesn’t work, to align us with strongman countries in other parts of the world. The other piece of it is that there’s no knowable truth, right. So being —
Chris Hayes: Yes, this is really important.
Rachel Maddow: This is really important and I can tell right now that this sounds woo-woo, but it’s not woo-woo. It’s very specific. One of the things they do is they tell you, don’t believe journalism, don’t believe science, don’t believe experts, don’t believe history. It’s all fake, it’s all designed to bamboozle you. None of these so-called sources of expertise are real.
The only knowable truth is something that you feel in your gut and let me tell you what to feel in your gut. Separating us from the idea of knowable truth means we don’t recognize real practical problems in the world. We don’t recognize real practical solutions to those problems, which we should put our government to.
And it means that you’re very susceptible to both conspiracy theories, and you’re susceptible to suggestion from the leader who wants you to do things that you probably would not do on your own steam if you had your wits about you. And that dislocation from the truth, don’t trust the media, don’t trust science, don’t trust experts, don’t trust any political opposition, don’t trust journalism, that is part of the authoritarian project and it always has been.
Chris Hayes: More of our conversation after this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: Okay, so here’s one of the things that is so fascinating to me in reading the book. Everything you just described, when they happen now, when versions of them happen now, there is this very, I think, somewhat a historical but also understandable tendency to put them on the technology of the time.
It’s like, they’re not refereeing the disinformation on the social network, so people are believing false things. It’s like, yeah, do you read about the Salem witch trials? Like you don’t need Facebook to believe dangerously false things. And I think when I was reading about the sort of media environment, it’s like, Coughlin’s got the radio show, and we could talk about Coughlin a little, and Ford will talk about his publishing these papers, and Dennis has his pamphlets.
It’s a totally different media environment. But the media matters, right, the way they’re conveying this message. But all of the same traits that I think we try to see as an outgrowth of some technological moment here, platform moment, it’s just all there. It’s like analog versions of it and it’s —
Rachel Maddow: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — as far as I can tell like almost as effective.
Rachel Maddow: Yes, I mean the thing that has changed, I think, is the iterative nature of the media. Your ability to talk back in a social environment.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Rachel Maddow: So, what that does is, I think, it can work as an accelerant.
Chris Hayes: Yes, right.
Rachel Maddow: Right? So, somebody says a lie to you, you repeat the lie back to them. Okay, here’s a bigger lie. Okay, you repeat —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Rachel Maddow: — that back to them. Okay, here’s a bigger lie. It helps those messages be targeted better, I think, but I mean there’s a very, very famous celebrity pilot in her day. Pilots used to be like the Kardashians.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Rachel Maddow: And the Travis Kelces.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Rachel Maddow: It’s all everything all together.
Chris Hayes: Who doesn’t love a pilot?
Rachel Maddow: Exactly. They were the celebrities of their day, like you cannot believe, and after Amelia Earhart did. The most famous female aviatrix, they called her, in the country was Laura Ingalls. Wait, “Little House on the Prairie”? No, her eighth cousin.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Rachel Maddow: Laura Ingalls Wilder’s eighth cousin.
Chris Hayes: Also, don’t get it twisted because you’re about to hear —
Rachel Maddow: Exactly.
Chris Hayes: — how this Ingalls rolled.
Rachel Maddow: She flew an airplane over the White House and dropped pamphlets over the White House out of an airplane.
Yes, very impressive. Also, you don’t want to see those pamphlets.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Rachel Maddow: So, she was actually working for the Gestapo. She was an American who was on the payroll of the Nazis. She was answering to the top Gestapo agent in the United States and she was like fully getting paid, like had a monthly stipend. You know how you do Times Machine for old “New York Times” articles?
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Rachel Maddow: So if you have a New York Times subscription, you can use the Times Machine. It turns out there’s a limit to how much you can use the Times Machine.
Chris Hayes: You found it.
Rachel Maddow: I found it by spending a lot of time with Laura Ingalls. She was —
Chris Hayes: It’s like getting kicked out of the bar at 4:00 a.m.
Rachel Maddow: I was like, I actually —
Chris Hayes: That’s it, sorry.
Rachel Maddow: You’re done. You are over served on stories about Laura Ingalls, Nazi aviatrix. Like I got cut off and they called me. I was like, how does he, I don’t think you had my number. It was so weird. But she was so famous that there was an article in the newspaper, in “The New York Times” like in 1934 when she got a speeding ticket, article in The “New York Times”. By 1935, she was so famous, there was an article in “The New York Times” when she got a parking ticket. Like it was crazy how famous she was. And then she’s working for the Gestapo and dropping flyers over the White House.
There’s this amazing story from when she goes on trial. One of the witnesses against her in her trial was a surgeon who operated on her who said that after she was under the laughing gas, all she wanted to talk about was her swastika necklace. But like one of the most influential and popular celebrities in the entire country. Now, her espousing the views that she had and being such a daredevil in the way she was espousing them, like we don’t have anything like that today. That’s a different kind of —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Rachel Maddow: — power in terms of media.
Chris Hayes: And that level of mass fame —
Rachel Maddow: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — is just harder to achieve now —
Rachel Maddow: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — because of how fractured it is, which is one of the things I was thinking about was like when you start going through Father Coughlin, who people may or may not know about, and you can give like a little version for people who don’t. But when you start talking about the numbers —
Rachel Maddow: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — of Father Coughlin, it’s like there is not a single thing in America other than maybe the Super Bowl —
Rachel Maddow: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — that has the distribution that Father Coughlin’s radio show had. So at one level, it’s like the fracturing that we view as maybe part of the problem, like the level of peak mass in mass media that’s happening now means that like Father Coughlin could talk to 30, however many people he could talk to —
Rachel Maddow: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — in a way that like no one can do that right now.
Rachel Maddow: Yes, so I think and the overall point here is that, yes, the social media world and the distrust of the media landscape that we’re in now is bad. There’s lots of ways it can be bad.
Chris Hayes: Oh yes, I’m not yet ready, yes (ph).
Rachel Maddow: I mean your overall point that it’s not about the technology of media distribution is absolutely true. I’ve had a bunch of people ask me about Coughlin saying, oh, he’s the person who I can see today. He’s the person for whom there’s a direct analogy. There’s no direct analogy to him. He had 30 million weekly listeners by 1938, at a time when there were 130 million people in the country and that’s every week.
And what was he doing with that listenership? He was telling them, I take the road of fascism. Saying what we need in this country, we’re going to get the Franco way. Franco as in military dictator of Spain. And how did Franco take power? Yes, he wanted a military. He wanted a civil war that resulted in a military takeover and a fascist dictator who would be in power permanently. And he walked the walk, he did not just talk the talk. He organized his listeners into armed paramilitary cells to pursue the fascist takeover of the U.S. government.
And we know this because members of this paramilitary group that he organized, the Christian Front, went on trial for sedition in 1940 here in New York City. The FBI busted them. They thought they were seven days away from the start of their plot, which was going to kick off with the murder of 12 members of Congress and the bombing of politically sensitive sites in New York City. And, again, they were not just talking about it, they had stockpiled the bombs and they had stolen U.S. military machine guns and they had National Guardsmen and NYPD in their organization by the score. And they were put on trial for sedition in 1940 and they got off.
Chris Hayes: I’m going to not spoil the two trials.
Rachel Maddow: I just spoiled one.
Chris Hayes: Fair enough. I should have given that note before. We can roll that back. So, there’s these people in the book, and Laura Ingalls is a great example, you’ve never heard of them. They were massively famous at the time.
Rachel Maddow: Yes.
Chris Hayes: Right?
Rachel Maddow: Yes, yes.
Chris Hayes: And there’s a bunch of those that you tell —
Rachel Maddow: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — the story of. And then there’s people that are in, Father Coughlin, I learned about Father Coughlin in American history class.
Rachel Maddow: Yes.
Chris Hayes: Huey Long is another, who sort of runs the only real like modern 20th century dictatorship in the country, probably.
Rachel Maddow: It was viewed that way at the time.
Chris Hayes: At the time, again.
Rachel Maddow: And called that at the time.
Chris Hayes: To my point in the monologue, like people did see it.
Rachel Maddow: Yes.
Chris Hayes: It wasn’t like no one knew what was going on. And then there’s Henry Ford. And you know, it’s so funny because I know, again, the broad strokes of Henry Ford, brilliant industrialist. Ford Motors basically created the modern factory method of assembly line production, brought costs down in doing so, paid his workers a higher wage than others, also a raving anti-Semite. That’s like my two sentences on Ford, right?
Rachel Maddow: Yes.
Chris Hayes: The last part of that, that last sentence, like I knew it. But when you read it in your book, when you re-encounter Henry Ford on the subject of the Jews —
Rachel Maddow: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — and the lengths that he went to, I think that you need to kind of like reverse the order of that bio —
Rachel Maddow: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — in the two sentences, because it’s like this guy was wildly dangerous and bad and aligned with the worst forces basically in human history.
Rachel Maddow: And I knew about Ford’s anti-Semitism, I think, as if it were a private vice, as if it were —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Rachel Maddow: It’s a personal prejudice.
Chris Hayes: Like Grant liked to drink.
Rachel Maddow: Yes.
Chris Hayes: You know, Ulysses Grant, like we know like he was a little bit of a drunk.
Rachel Maddow: Yes.
Chris Hayes: I was like, Henry Ford was like, yeah, he did all this, and he was like not great on the Jews.
Rachel Maddow: Don’t ask him that —
Chris Hayes: Yes, right.
Rachel Maddow: — when he’s had a couple. No, he was a different thing. It was one of the things he contributed to this world. Do you want me to read that part?
Chris Hayes: I would like you to read that part.
Rachel Maddow: Do you mind if I read it?
He was one of the most successful and celebrated industrialists on the planet. His anti-Semitism was rank and it was unchecked. He spewed it freely in private tirades among friends, family, close business cohorts, newspaper reporters, or pretty much anybody within earshot, in the office, in private chats, in interviews, at dinners, even on camping trips. A close friend wrote in his diary after witnessing one late night around the campfire diatribe, Ford attributes all evil to Jews.
Ford even ordered his engineers to forego the use of any brass in his Model T automobile. He called brass a, “Jew metal.” Ford said, wherever there’s anything wrong with the country, you’ll find the Jews on the job there. He blamed a vast and inchoate Jewish conspiracy for inciting his workers and his stockholders to demand that he share a sliver more of the expansive Ford Motor Company profits with them. He blamed Jews for the gold standard and the advent of the Federal Reserve Bank. He blamed Jews for ruining motion pictures in America. He blamed Jews for ruining popular music. He blamed Jews for ruining baseball.
Ford was hardly the only radical anti-Semite in the U.S. circa 1920, but in addition to his fortune and his famous name and his iconic company, he had a megaphone your average crazy uncle theorizer lacked. He had Twitter. No, I’m kidding, sorry. Sorry. It’s X, I’m sorry, yes, sorry.
He had a newspaper. It was called “The Dearborn Independent”, which he had purchased for a song in 1918. The paper was a big money loser in the beginning, poor to middling circulation. Ford’s editorial harangues did little to draw new readers. How many attacks on the man who’d beaten Ford in the Michigan Senate race did the public really want? Oh, but Truman H. Newberry had stolen that election.
One of “The Dearborn Independent’s” editorial staffers was a veteran of the New York newspaper wars. He had an idea. He wrote to Ford’s right-hand man, find an evil to attack, let’s find some sensationalism. And lo, the answer landed unbidden, not long after, a newly translated English language edition of a book titled “The Protocols of the Meetings of the Learned Elders of Zion.” The pamphlet was the work of rabidly anti-Semitic Russian fabulists who were furious at the Bolsheviks toppling of the old tsarist aristocracy.
The tsarists portrayed the Russian revolution as not just a local affair, they portrayed it as the early innings of a plot by a cabal of all-powerful Jewish schemers to take over the world. The Protocols was billed as the product of a surreptitious note-taker at a top-secret meeting wherein these Jewish puppet masters had drawn up their strategy. Now, there was no secret meeting, obviously. There was no secret plot. There was no surreptitious note-taker. The whole thing was a work of fiction. A very considered, very deliberate lie, and a very dangerous piece of propaganda.
Ford and his newspaper bore down on it with alacrity. They started a new weekly series in “The Dearborn Independent” based on The Protocols. It would end up being a 92-part weekly series. Every week for 92 weeks, headlines like these, The International Jew, The World’s Problem, and Jewish Jazz, Moron Music, becomes our national music. And this one, the perils of baseball, too much Jew. These headlines were splashed onto the pages of Ford’s paper, which was distributed in Ford dealerships across the country.
Ford also saw to the publication of his series in book form. It was titled “The International Jew.” It ran to four volumes. Never mind that “The Protocols” was exposed as make-believe in 1921, right in the middle of Henry Ford’s 92-week series. His weekly “International Jew” essays continued without pause. And Ford motor dealers kept tossing the latest issue of “The Dearborn Independent” onto the front seat of newly purchased Model Ts all over the country.
Ford saw to it that the four volumes of the “International Jew” were translated and published worldwide in 12 international editions, including one in Germany and put a pin on that. Of all the contributions Henry Ford made to this world, one of them was this, the most prolific, most sustained published attack on Jews the world had ever known. The German edition of Ford’s book had landed in the hands of one particularly gifted propagandist.
When Adolf Hitler’s book, “Mein Kampf”, was published in 1925, the author appeared to lift not just ideas, but whole passages from Ford’s own publications. “Mein Kampf’s” first edition extolled Ford by name. Hitler wrote, it is Jews who govern the stock exchange forces of the American Union. Every year makes them more and more the controlling masters of the producers in a nation of 120 millions. Only a single great man, Ford, to their fury, still maintains full independence.
By this point, Hitler had already mulled sending German shock troops to major American cities to aid in what he hoped would be Henry Ford’s run for president in 1924. When a reporter from “The Detroit News” showed up at Nazi Party headquarters in Munich in December 1931 to interview Hitler, she had a series that was called Five Minutes with Men in Public Eye. She had her five minutes with Hitler. When she went to Hitler’s office, she was surprised to find, hanging on the wall behind Hitler’s desk, a large framed portrait of a very famous American.
Hitler explained to the newspaper woman, I regard Henry Ford as my inspiration. The Detroit reporter asked Hitler that day point blank why he was anti-Semitic. He said, without hesitation, somebody has to be blamed for our troubles. I feel like if you go back in time to then, like the worst thing that you could find, if you could time machine yourself, back to the future style, see your family or people you were interested in at that time, the worst thing that you could imagine is that they’d have a portrait of Hitler at that time. I think Hitler having a portrait of you.
Chris Hayes: Is actually worse.
Rachel Maddow: I didn’t know that was an option but that’s worse.
Chris Hayes: Here’s why I think that passage is so important and you can hear the sort of breath in the room go out, which is that to return to what I was saying earlier, I think we have a sense of like fascism is a European production.
Rachel Maddow: Yes.
Chris Hayes: Maybe some of it tried to come over here and the Germans were working assiduously to do that. And there were, as documented in your book, remarkable lengths they went to in cultivating very high profile Americans and U.S. senators and stuff. But that passage is like, did we export this? How much is it actually coming from us? And this is not the only place that’s the case. But talk a little bit about like that notion, that like anti-Semitism, which I think, everyone understands is sort of ubiquitous and universal in some senses.
It exists in many different places in many different forms. It’s not particular to one era or one place. But I do think there’s a sense that this sort of endemic European problem and that the U.S. was maybe like a little more immune from it, and that just is not —
Rachel Maddow: Not the case.
Chris Hayes: — the case.
Rachel Maddow: Yeah. And the thing that’s important, I think, about the persistence of anti-Semitism is, forgive me, what Hitler says there, that there’s a purpose for it.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Rachel Maddow: That it doesn’t actually matter if it’s your personally held prejudice. And what matters is that you are telling people that there is a disfavored minority among us that is not just bad, they are secretly powerful. And then what do you do when you are told that, someone has to be blamed for our troubles. When you are told that they are conniving and secretly controlling everything, you need a very powerful force to protect yourself and to protect your kids and protect your culture and protect your race from that conniving, all powerful thing.
That’s the reason for it and that’s the reason for its persistence. Jews aren’t earning —
Chris Hayes: Of how powerful it is.
Rachel Maddow: — anti-Semitism, right? This is about, it is a way to get people to submit themselves to the authority of strongman government, and it has always been such. But I think one of the things that is unsettling about the Henry Ford dynamic is the idea that it was a west to east conveyance. You also saw that at the University of Arkansas Law School. The Nazis sent a young, important, rising star Nazi lawyer to spend a year at the University of Arkansas lawyers doing a study of American race law because they wanted to learn about how America could be seen as a paragon of democracy and a good guy country in the world while oppressing African Americans to the degree that we were, while oppressing indigenous Americans, Native Americans to the degree that we were, and while conquering countries around the world and subjugating the people in those countries as subjects and not citizens. How is it that America looks good and their constitution says none of this is possible, but they’re still doing it? They thought that was an excellent idea.
And so they sent a Nazi lawyer, Heinrich Krieger, to the University of Arkansas to do a deep study of American racist law and the way that you can have the Fourteenth Amendment and also Jim Crow and also lynching. And they brought that, it was a Nazi government production. They brought his report back to Munich and Berlin, and they used it as the basis for discussion for writing the Nuremberg Laws, to strip Jews of their citizenship in Germany. They learned some of that from us. And if you think that it’s something in the German character that makes you susceptible to fascism, I invite you to spend time thinking about that anecdote. It’s very disturbing.
Chris Hayes: Down to one of the first Nuremberg Laws is an anti-miscegenation law.
Rachel Maddow: Yes.
Chris Hayes: Which is just almost fully taken from Jim Crow.
Rachel Maddow: Yes.
Chris Hayes: And there’s this concept in German that he talks about umvega (ph).
Rachel Maddow: Umvega (ph).
Chris Hayes: Umvega (ph). We’ll talk about a little bit, because I think it’s such a profound idea that, he’s over there and sort of trying to solve this problem. Like they’re a liberal democracy and they have a Fourteenth Amendment and this all is clearly unconstitutional under their own words. How are they doing this? How does the system actually work at an institutional level? That they can have the stuff, we can read it. That says like the Fourteenth Amendment, you can’t do this. You can’t discriminate against people on the basis of race. And they’re doing it right in front of me. And he comes up with this concept of like how American law works.
Rachel Maddow: Yes, because German law was very mechanistic. German law was, it says you do this, that’s the only thing you can do. And there’s no like sort of coloring outside the lines. And so what they were studying here in our tradition was the way that you can have words that say X and do Y. And the way that you get there is by judges and lawyers and professionals involved in the system. Understanding the intention behind the law, intention behind the actions that allowed you to do things that the Constitution say you shouldn’t be able to do.
I mean lawyers will find those concepts, I think, more interesting than everybody else. But the idea that they were able to use our racism not only against us for propaganda purposes, which they did, but they could use it as inspiration for their own efforts to define a racial nationalism, right. That’s the special sauce of Nazism versus other kinds of fascism, right? It’s a hyper-racialized nationalism. So, there is a nation that is defined by blood, that is defined by race. And you are not part of the nation unless you are defined within the sphere of what we consider to be the race. And we helped with that.
Chris Hayes: The reason that I was, and James Q. Whitman’s, Yale scholar, who wrote “Hitler’s American Model.”
Rachel Maddow: Which is brilliant.
Chris Hayes: Which is a brilliant book, and I would recommend it to anyone. It’s not even that long, who does some of the early scholarship on this. The reason that I found it so striking is that there’s been headlines in the last few days about the sort of vision being put together around people around Donald Trump, about what a second term would look like, and particularly staffing it, and particularly who the lawyers would be, and what the lawyers would do, and how the lawyers would approach their job.
And one of the things that I, and I’m lucky to be married to an incredibly brilliant lawyer who’s someone whose love of the law is just incredibly inspiring to me and very pure, one of the things that I recognized in the last days, particularly the Trump administration, is that the rule of law, which is like a grandiose and abstract term, is just as a kind of sociological fact, what the sort of acculturation of a class of lawyers will or won’t go for at a certain moment.
Rachel Maddow: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: That like, in reality, what it means is like, when it’s time to do the coup, which lawyers will be like, yes, and which will be like, no. And that’s like a sociological fact, as opposed to an abstract fact about law —
Rachel Maddow: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — because law is no.
Rachel Maddow: Yes.
Chris Hayes: You can’t. But if you got people with bad enough faith and bad enough intentions and sort of morally dubious enough and smart enough.
Rachel Maddow: Smart enough is important.
Chris Hayes: They can come up with ways to make a colorable argument that yes. And we got lucky in so far as like, there were a few, but there were many more who didn’t.
Rachel Maddow: Yes.
Chris Hayes: But that idea that like it comes down to that which it sort of shows up in that Fayetteville chapter that everyone who’s operating the system of Jim Crow in the South who are lawyers knows what they’re doing. That really haunts me.
Rachel Maddow: Yes.
Chris Hayes: Because it’s what I think about the most when I read the stories about the 2025 project about Trump’s plans and about what ultimately the guardrail is that keeps us a liberal democracy under the rule of law and not something like a dictatorship.
Rachel Maddow: Right. And to be clear, I should just say the book is called “Prequel” not because of the bad guys, but because of the good guys.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Rachel Maddow: Only Hitler is Hitler. Only Nazis are Nazis. There is no modern analogy to Germany under Hitler and the Nazis from 1933 to 1945. There isn’t one. Don’t try to make one. The prequel, people to sort of learn from here, the story that went before, that feels like the antecedent to what we are in now were the Americans who were fighting against the ultra right in this previous time. Both in the government, but also mostly outside of the government people who were trying to outflank and expose them and hold them to account.
I know it’s obvious to everybody here, I just think it’s important to say. But in terms of what’s going on in contemporary terms, thinking about this Project 2025 stuff, and I’ve realized that I’m having another one of those moments, which you know me well enough to know happens all the time, which is that everybody sees it one way, and I’m really stuck on a piece of it that I see differently and I can’t let it go. And that’s the Insurrection Act part of it.
So this reporting in “The Washington Post” that the Project 2025 plan involves invoking the Insurrection Act on the first day that he is sworn in for his next term. And that keeps getting discussed as how crazy is it that Trump wants to use the military against peaceful protestors? Well, first of all, these protests, hypothetical, we don’t know that they exist.
Also, there’s nothing in them invoking the Insurrection Act that has anything to do with protest. If you, on your first day in office, give yourself the power to use the U.S. military against U.S. civilians on U.S. soil, do you think it matters whether or not there is a protest anywhere in the country that day or any subsequent day? It is the Chekhovian bloated gun —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Rachel Maddow: — sitting on the table in the first act of the play. That will be used by the end of the play. And it is accruing power to himself in a way that it’s not like they’ll do it for 12 hours and then give it back, right? The idea of the authoritarian project is to gather all power to the leader, both inside the government and outside the governments. You’re not allowed to be a political opponent. You’re also not allowed to be a media critic. And you’re not really allowed to be civic society if that civic society entails any sort of opposition or criticism of the leader, right?
This is what fascism is. This is how it works. And there may be a form of government that includes other sources of authority when the leader takes over, but those other sources of authority within the government will be either neutered or closed down. And so the Congress will not function, the fourth estate will no longer be free, civil society will not be allowed to do anything that is critical or in opposition, political opponents will not be tolerated, ultimately disfavored minorities will be scapegoated, and then you head down and elimination is path.
I mean, this is how these things go. And to know that I will accrue all power to myself, I will unify civilian and military authority on day one, and have that be the announced plan, it just means that we’re there, right. This is it. Like, we’re not in a hypothetical confrontation with a leader who promises authoritarian rule. We are in an explicit choice.
Chris Hayes: Well, the choice part is the part that I think a lot of people had a hard time with. And it’s something that appears in the book, which is that fascism in both its Italian and German forms and differently in Spain actually, because it functions a little differently there.
Rachel Maddow: Yes.
Chris Hayes: But is a popular movement. Like —
Rachel Maddow: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — it’s not, you know, again, this is the trope or (ph) Hitler was elected, but it’s the case that like, there is mass mobilization and tons of people and millions of people who are like, yes, we want this. And there’s sort of a fascinating irony to it, which is it is a mass movement of actual grassroots supporters mobilizing in favor of what will ultimately be an authoritarian project that makes the civil society that allows for mass movements basically to go away.
Rachel Maddow: Yes.
Chris Hayes: And I think a lot of people probably in this room, probably listening to this podcast or watching this, have a hard time being like, how is this popular?
Rachel Maddow: Right.
Chris Hayes: How is this popular and why is this popular? And I’m curious if you feel like you’ve got insights that you’ve drawn from this period of historical study. Again, it’s not like a precise apples to apples.
Rachel Maddow: Yes.
Chris Hayes: But people wanting a charismatic leader who’s going to fight for them and sort of defend their purity or place.
Rachel Maddow: And embody the nation.
Chris Hayes: Embody the nation against its enemies, foreign and domestic. That has been a very popular recipe.
Rachel Maddow: Yes. And there’s different kinds of authoritarianism, right?
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Rachel Maddow: Fascism is a mass mobilization movement. That’s also complex, right? Because one of the things that happens in fascist societies, it becomes impossible not to be part of the movement.
Chris Hayes: Right, yes.
Rachel Maddow: So, you may be an enthusiast. But even if you’re not, you’re probably going to be out there wearing the badge and doing the thing because there’s no choice. I mean, you create the illusion of unitary nation who’s all subject to and a fan of the great leader about whom there is a cult of personality and who you’re not allowed to oppose.
Chris Hayes: In fact, there’s an amazing Huey Long line that you quote and Huey Long I don’t think was a fascist, but he was an authoritarian —
Rachel Maddow: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — who says, you know, you could get to a point where it looks like it’s a democracy, it’s not a democracy anymore because people are just so happy with the leader.
Rachel Maddow: Yes.
Chris Hayes: I mean, no one is complaining anymore, because you just solved everything.
Rachel Maddow: Yes.
Chris Hayes: This was his line about Louisiana under Huey Long.
Rachel Maddow: Why bother voting?
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Rachel Maddow: We all agree.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Rachel Maddow: Yes. That was kind of his line. I mean it is amazing too that Louisiana under Huey Long was routinely described as a dictatorship. And not like people were throwing that as an epithet. Like in court, it was described as a dictatorship. It was a defense actually used by people who were put on trial in federal court for having been part of his immensely corrupt graft schemes in Louisiana.
Judges would say like, well you weren’t Huey Long, so you didn’t have a choice in the matter. This is a dictatorship. You actually didn’t have free will. Therefore, yes, you took the bribes but you were kicking them up to him. It was accepted that he was a dictator and that’s why native fascists love the idea of Huey Long. And that’s confusing if you look at authoritarianism as a conservative versus liberal thing —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Rachel Maddow: — because lots of things about Huey Long kind of look liberal.
Chris Hayes: Very left-coded, yes.
Rachel Maddow: Policy does not matter. It is about accruing all power to the leader. That’s all that matters. And they’ll say and do anything in order to get all the power. But then once they’ve got it, that’s the point.
Chris Hayes: We’ll be right back after we take this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: There’s a certain kind of specific visual grammar and sort of language syntax and cadence to fascism or to broadly authoritarian movements of sort of popular leadership cults. And there’s a picture that you have in the book of Huey Long’s big portrait over a rally and you see it immediately and you’re like, oh, I know exactly what this is.
Rachel Maddow: Yes.
Chris Hayes: Like there’s the big picture of the guy over it. And I feel that way about, to bring it back to the contemporary, I feel that way about the use of the word vermin —
Rachel Maddow: By Trump’s debate (ph).
Chris Hayes: Like Trump this weekend in a speech to describe his political domestic enemies. There’s something in the same way of that, like when you see that photo, you’re like, I know what I’m looking at. It’s like when I hear a populist leader describe the other people in the political spectrum as vermin who’ve infested the nation, like I just know what that is —
Rachel Maddow: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — immediately.
Rachel Maddow: Everybody knows what that is. And I think he knows what that is.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Rachel Maddow: Yes. I mean there’s also something, there’s a little bit of, I don’t know what we should call it. I think of it as a playground thing that he does in terms of his politics. Do you remember where the idea of fake news came from, that phrase? That phrase was not Donald Trump’s —
Chris Hayes: No.
Rachel Maddow: — phrase.
Chris Hayes: It was Buzzfeed (ph).
Rachel Maddow: That term was used to describe what was happening in Russian information spaces, where they were writing legitimately fake, made-up news stories, and then siloing them into the U.S. news ecosystem through pro-Russian —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Rachel Maddow: — sort of covert sources. And it was a legitimate thing. This thing didn’t happen in Montenegro, but Russian propaganda sources wrote that this thing happened in Montenegro. And now weirdly there are right-wing news sources in America who are describing this thing that happened in Montenegro that never happened in Montenegro.
It was a real thing and it was part of what was going on with the Russian disinformation and influence and election interference efforts in 2016. And people were starting to figure it out that was one of the weird things that was happening in our information universe in that election. And then Trump adopted it and said, all news is fake news. And so then you couldn’t use that term anymore to describe this one technical thing, which we had been previously —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Rachel Maddow: — describing. And without a term to describe it, we then lost track of it. Because then it became a thing that had a meaningless name. And so then you can’t talk about that thing happening. There’s some of that, and I think that —
Chris Hayes: With what?
Rachel Maddow: With the use of the word vermin.
Chris Hayes: Okay.
Rachel Maddow: And with the way that he’s now calling his enemies fascists.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Rachel Maddow: So —
Chris Hayes: Yes, he has started doing that.
Rachel Maddow: He has started calling you and me and everybody who’s not team Trump is a fascist, that he has to save the country from the fascists. And he’s using this terminology which is overtly and obviously fascist callback language. Things like the enemy of the people, yes, okay.
Chris Hayes: Right, yes.
Rachel Maddow: But calling the internal enemy vermin that needs to be exterminated, he knows what he’s doing. And that will make everybody say, wow, that’s the most fascist thing heard, oh fascist, oh fascist, no you’re the fascist.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Rachel Maddow: And then all of his enemies are fascist. And then the word fascist doesn’t mean anything anymore. It’s just an epithet that flies around in politics and we don’t have a word anymore to describe what this thing is that he’s trying to get us to do.
So as he starts to advance what I think is a more overtly authoritarian project, watch for him to call everybody else an authoritarian.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Rachel Maddow: And a tyrant and a fascist and all this. It’s just it’s to rob those words of their function.
Chris Hayes: There are people in your book who want to be the next American Hitler —
Rachel Maddow: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — and don’t have it in them. And I don’t mean, morally, I just mean like whatever the stuff is, the charisma, whatever it is. And I guess something I was thinking about reading your book is like, what is the thing? What is the thing that makes Huey Long successful in becoming Huey Long? What is the thing that makes Trump successful? There’s a particular kind of type, like authoritarian populist demagogue. Different people have tried it —
Rachel Maddow: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — in different ways. It has a lot of commonalities in the rhetoric. And some succeed and some don’t.
Rachel Maddow: Yes.
Chris Hayes: And it feels alchemical to me at some level. I can’t tell you what it is because I can describe. I understand the basic dynamics of it. I understand of blaming some small disfavored minority for the nation’s ills and the sort of invigorating feeling of kind of communal solidarity that comes with the nation’s blood all pumped, coursing through the rally and all being directed in one place, like a bunch of solar panels aimed up at a water tower —
Rachel Maddow: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — to boil everything together and boil together. And I can get that and look at someone who’s gifted at rhetoric and has presence and charisma, which is 100 percent true about him. But in the end, it’s like if I had the NBA draft of fascists, autocrats, and I was running them through, the pace is like, I don’t know in the end what makes someone work for someone and not for someone else.
Rachel Maddow: This is a very unpopular opinion, but I do not believe that the leader matters.
Chris Hayes: This is what I sort of think too.
Rachel Maddow: The movement matters.
Chris Hayes: Yes, he backs into it at some level.
Rachel Maddow: You need a country that is looking —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Rachel Maddow: — an authoritarian solution.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Rachel Maddow: And you need people who are willing to submit themselves to the authority of the person who says they deserve it. And so you’ve got —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Rachel Maddow: — like Franco was Napoleon-sized, right?
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Rachel Maddow: Like Hitler was a dork.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Rachel Maddow: Right? Mussolini was a journalist —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Rachel Maddow: — and a socialist.
Chris Hayes: And those aren’t the worst things.
Rachel Maddow: Those aren’t the worst things in the world but like not a great LinkedIn set up for like —
Chris Hayes: Right, yes.
Rachel Maddow: — I then want to be (inaudible). You know what I mean? Like there’s nothing about these guys that is inherently, that transformed those countries against their will. Those countries were subject to an anti-democratic, pro-authoritarian movement that had skills. And the people were ready to do it. And so you end up with a Huey Long being very successful in the project that he was part of. The person who FDR most feared running against in 1936 was Huey Long. And in 1935 as Huey Long was gearing up to start his presidential campaign where he was going to run against FDR, and FDR believed if anybody could beat him, it would be Huey.
That in 1935, FDR was at the summer White House in Hyde Park, New York, and he had summoned Father Coughlin to come talk to him about the fact that Coughlin was clearly supporting Huey Long. He believed that Coughlin and Long together would absolutely bring America to a fascist dictatorship within two years. He thought it was an unstoppable force, the two of them, and he was there to try to talk Coughlin out of it. And as Coughlin was driving to FDR’s house, that day for that talk, Huey Long was assassinated. And —
Chris Hayes: Spoiler alert.
Rachel Maddow: Yes. That was 1935 and that is the way things went that way. But in terms of what Huey Long’s power was, I think what was magic about him was his unbridled appetite for power.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Rachel Maddow: I mean, the thing that he did was, yes, he paved roads and he gave away free school textbooks and he was a spellbinding orator and he wore silk outfits, and there’s all sorts of things you could say about him. But really what he was a maestro of was power, that he never met a source of authority that he could not accrue to himself. And that was the thing that you need to be able to do —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Rachel Maddow: — to be able to lead a society in that direction while telling a country, while telling a people that they need to do it, that they can only trust you and that their enemies are out to get them and that you’re the only one who can protect them from those enemies. That’s how it works.
Chris Hayes: Can I ask you —
Rachel Maddow: (Inaudible) sorry.
Chris Hayes: Well on that note, can I ask you a personal question?
Rachel Maddow: Yes.
Chris Hayes: So, I make this joke when I talk about my job where I say something along the lines of, and my staff is here, has heard this, you know, it’s now going on eight years of my one precious life, like dealing with, like thinking about this dude.
Rachel Maddow: Huey Long?
Chris Hayes: Huey Long.
Obviously like world’s smallest violin, I’m extremely lucky to do what I do, and I love what I do. But there’s an exhaustion factor to it.
You guys feel that way, too. Oh, thank you.
But there’s also like, there’s exhaustion, but there’s also just like, you got to be indefatigable because the movement on the other side seems indefatigable.
Rachel Maddow: Yes.
Chris Hayes: And like are you exhausted, too? Like I know, seriously, like how do you, because people ask me all the time, and I’m like I feel for myself. I feel very mission driven, I feel like the stakes are incredibly high. When you just said what you said before about like when we’re looking at someone talking about doing this day one, it’s like we’re in it. And I feel that way and I felt that way for much of this. That is animating, it gives me a sense of zeal, and mission, and energy. But also it’s like sometimes I’m like, I cannot, I can’t, you know.
Rachel Maddow: Yes.
Chris Hayes: And so, you know, I just balance those two, but I’m curious how you do.
Rachel Maddow: Well, I think one thing that, you and I have talked about this over beers, but one of the things that is the privilege and a pleasure of our job, maybe not a pleasure, a privilege, is that if you’re here, and if you watch MSNBC, and if you know us from, you’re thinking about this stuff all the time, right? You’re consuming the news all the time and you are thinking about our country and you are worrying about the worst people in America and what they might do next, all the time. We all are.
You then have to do all of that and then go do your jobs.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Rachel Maddow: Chris and I are doing all of that but then our jobs is processing.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Rachel Maddow: So, like it’s therapy. Like we’re all being put through the same wringer but Chris and I get to do our day jobs —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Rachel Maddow: — talking about this stuff and that is a great privilege and I feel that way.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Rachel Maddow: And to that end, part of my day job is also been writing this book and doing “Ultra” and doing other projects like that. I’m working on “Ultra” season two right now, which is very exciting. And what is energizing to me about that is, again, the good guys. Like, you think that the bad guys in this are obscure.
Most of them are, other than, you know, Coughlin and Lindbergh and Ford and those guys. Most of the bad guys are obscure, but the really obscure people are the good guys, are the Americans who, you know, the beleaguered secretary who is working for this Minnesota senator who is such a freaking creep. Every time she gets paid by the Senate, she has to hand back half of her salary to him in cash.
That’s how much power she had in the workplace, and yet she went to the FBI. And she told the FBI what her senator boss was doing with that well-known Nazi agent. Like that is a woman who did not sign up for the Marines and planned to paratroop, you know, trying to be a paratrooper somewhere. But she was somebody who was not in a powerful position at all, and she did something that was really important for her country. I am very enthused to learn her story. I’m very enthused —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Rachel Maddow: — to learn about the guy who was like this really milk toast, like normal, middle of the road guy whose field of expertise was direct mail advertising. And yet when his son came home from his first semester at college and was like, dad, I’m getting all this propaganda, this anti-Semitic, pro-German, pro-fascism propaganda at school. It’s really freaking me out. I don’t know what to do with it. And he was like, well, I do happen to have an area of expertise that relates to stuff being sent in the mail.
And he applied his random area of expertise to becoming a one-man expository journalist and investigator to find out and to literally document for the good of the country a multimillion dollar covert propaganda campaign that the Germans were running through 24 congressional offices and multiple front organizations all over the country. And he exposed it and he was an ad man. He was a random civilian who did this.
I’m so energized by stories like that because who’s going to be that secretary? Who’s going to be that admin? Who’s going to be the guy working for the ADL in Southern California running a spy ring of his fellow World War I veterans.
Chris Hayes: This guy is amazing.
Rachel Maddow: Because they noticed that German groups in Los Angeles were starting to have Hitler youth summer camps and they were worried about that. I mean, who are the heroes among us today who didn’t sign up to be heroes, but heroism is coming to their door?
Crossing references, right? So I am energized, I am energized by that. But I also I feel like for all of us, being a 250-year-old democracy is hard. There aren’t very many. And the seeds of anti-democratic projects and authoritarian projects are within the heart of every person who lives in a democracy because democracy, like you were saying at the outset, Chris, is about us all deciding something together, us as equals with our rights and our sacred lives given to us by the almighty God.
And equal before one another can decide together how we will be governed. And that is a beautiful thing, unless you think that some of the people who are in your polity with you shouldn’t get a say because they’re creeps. And who among us has not felt that way? It’s not —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Rachel Maddow: — an evil thing to think —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Rachel Maddow: — actually, I’ve got a better idea than you. You shouldn’t get a say. It’s a natural thing. But as small-d democrats, we have to be committed to the idea that this is a better system of government than all the others for all of its flaws. And the great tactical disadvantage for those of us who will fight for democracy is that fighting for democracy, you have one tool to do it. It’s democracy.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Rachel Maddow: You must use democratic means to defeat anti-democratic forces. And that can feel like fighting with one hand tied behind your back.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Rachel Maddow: But you’re either a democrat or you’re not.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Rachel Maddow: And that makes it hard. It’s hard and we got to do it.
Chris Hayes: It’s funny you say that because I often think about how, you know, when Thomas Paine writes “Common Sense” in the lead of the Revolutionary War, like he’s on the radical fringes of the people who are agitating.
Rachel Maddow: Yes.
Chris Hayes: And he was a real committed small-d Democrat, particularly compared to his cohort. And because of the way that a mature democracy like ours creates endless layers of delegation and administration necessarily, it just starts to feel attenuated.
Rachel Maddow: Yes.
Chris Hayes: You know, like if you thought about getting onto a bus with 60 people, and being like, all right, where should we go?
Rachel Maddow: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Like, that’s impossible and also like a nightmare.
Rachel Maddow: Yes.
Chris Hayes: But like, that’s it. That’s the project, that’s the project. In some ways, I think, you called it sacred. I think sublime promise of that, which is that we can do that, is very easy to lose sight of because of the necessary attenuation. We don’t want a plebiscite over which corn regulation to issue. Like we need to outsource. We have an enormous government, all these decisions, they get attenuated and they get delegated and they get outsourced in a million different ways. But at the end, that sort of fundamental reality, which is like we’re all locked in the room with each other.
Rachel Maddow: Yes.
Chris Hayes: And we all got to decide together and that includes people you really don’t like. And sometimes for very good reasons, and sometimes for really bad reasons.
Rachel Maddow: Yes.
Chris Hayes: It cuts both ways. And sometimes people in this room, I’m going to say, and I speak for myself, there are people that we don’t like for bad reasons and view in terms that our intention with our status along with them as equal citizens in this country.
Rachel Maddow: Yes.
Chris Hayes: And so that’s the other thing I think about when you talk about sort of not fighting fire with fire, but fighting fire with water. Fighting anti-democratic movements with democracy is like how to keep that spirit alive —
Rachel Maddow: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — against the tools of polarization? Because at one level polarization and negative polarization I think has been very important and useful in building a popular front in this country on behalf of democracy. That includes like Noam Chomsky and Bill Kristol and you know Cassidy Hutchinson and Rusty Bowers who is the —
Rachel Maddow: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — Arizona legislature who really moved me when he testified.
Rachel Maddow: Yes.
Chris Hayes: So, like that was like we’re all together on this side of this dividing line which is like do you want American democracy keep going or not? But I do think about like what it means to talk to you, reach out to you, bring in the people who are on the other side of that line.
Rachel Maddow: Yes. Well, you know, and let’s also be practical about it. I mean if you commit a crime, which any time you’re using violence against anybody or using violence to the threat of violence to intimidate people, you are committing a crime.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Rachel Maddow: In our democracy, the criminal justice system has a role in prosecuting fraud, you know, election subversion, intimidation, violence, all of those things are crimes. And there is a role for the Justice Department and those things, and that’s part of a democratic response. I mean, the place where I think it’s difficult is when you’ve got right-wing paramilitary groups associated with a particular political faction, which is something you can read about in lots of countries and in lots of areas, including in our own, and what they want is street brawling.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Rachel Maddow: Right, they want hand-to-hand combat on the streets, and they want that to be the way that they bring physical intimidation to bear on the political space. That’s a space where I think people who are militantly pro-democratic find it hard not to want to compete on those terms.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Rachel Maddow: And yet, who do we have to learn from in the past —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Rachel Maddow: — century in terms of moral leadership in this country and what it is to be Americans who changed our view as a polity, as a people, in terms of what it means to honor Americanism in all of the best ways that it can be, but the nonviolent, deeply spiritual civil rights movement?
And so, there is a good faith argument to have about revolutionary politics and vanguard politics and all of the array, all this other stuff that happens and that plays out at the bloody edges of the most difficult issues in our politics. But ultimately, if you are standing up for democracy, you are using democracy to do it, and it just takes a long time, and you have to talk to people who you don’t like. And I would love to see between Noam Chomsky and Bill Kristol where the bus would go.
Chris Hayes: This is the question.
Rachel Maddow: This is the question. But there’s just no other than crimes being prosecuted, it’s important that they do and it’s important that the justice system remain independent and that prosecutors shouldn’t get fired for political reasons and prosecutions shouldn’t be derailed because of political intimidation. If we can protect the independent legal system, so that crimes can be set aside, if people are not committing crimes, even if they have terrible political ideas, they are part of us as a democracy.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Rachel Maddow: And we must engage with their terrible ideas and defeat them as terrible ideas. You don’t have a magic disqualification —
Chris Hayes: That’s right.
Rachel Maddow: — spell to cast over somebody because their ideas are so bad. Even the worst ideas and the worst speech is protected by our Constitution as it should be.
Chris Hayes: I have a few questions —
Rachel Maddow: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — for folks in the audience. And that actually perfectly segues to this, which is from Angela in Stamford, Connecticut. And she says, and I like this question, and I don’t know if you have people like this in your life, but how do you handle close friends or family or others that you know who have extreme or different political views?
Asking for a friend.
Rachel Maddow: I live in rural Western Massachusetts. And living in rural Western New England, like dirt road New England has a lot of great things about it. Now we have the internet, which is new, which has really made things a lot better. But one of the things that I think, as a kid who grew up in the suburbs and who lived in cities my whole life, to now have lived in the country for the past 20 years, one of the things that it has taught me is that politics is only one thing in any one person’s life.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Rachel Maddow: And even for people who are committed news junkies and political activists or work for a political party or they’re even an elected official themselves, they also have bears getting into their trash. And they also have a lot of heartbreak about what’s happened to the Patriots. And they also have a lot of —
Chris Hayes: A lot of heartbreak.
Rachel Maddow: And they are taking care of their elderly parent who they didn’t expect to be taken care of at this point in their life. And they’ve got both kids and parents and they’re the responsible family member. And they’ve got another family member who’s in recovery who they’re so hopeful for, but also so scared for. And there is, I believe, something really important that you can do in your non-political life that will improve your political life, which is have personal relationships with people —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Rachel Maddow: — face-to-face that are about everything besides politics too and it’s hard to do. I think —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Rachel Maddow: — post-COVID, it’s even harder to do. But do you have a book club? Do you want to maybe start a book club? It can be on Zoom. Do you have a neighbor who lives alone who wants to come to Thanksgiving? Do you want to be part of a civic group that’s working on a local pipeline that’s going to come through your town?
Do you want to volunteer at the vet’s hospital? Something that connects you to the people in your immediate area that isn’t about finding consensus about what’s going to happen in the 2024 election is good for your community. It is good for your soul. And when things get very hard, being able to look at other people in the eye, recognize each other as humans, can save your life.
Chris Hayes: Yes. Great.
I’ve got another one. This is from Pat S. in Warwick, Pennsylvania. This is completely out of the blue, and I don’t think a single person in this audience has given this any thought, but I’m going to ask it anyway.
Rachel Maddow: Okay. Nice lead in. Good.
Chris Hayes: What do you think of the latest polls? Why do they show Biden and Trump neck and neck?
Rachel Maddow: I don’t know. Ask President Romney.
I don’t know. I mean, you’re actually much better at reading polls than I am. I feel like —
Chris Hayes: I —
Rachel Maddow: No, you are. You do a better job. You’re more supple with them on everything. I just look at them and go, bah. I mean I feel like polls in my adult lifetime are garbage.
Unknown: Yes.
Rachel Maddow: Except occasionally they’re right and —
Chris Hayes: Yes, right. Except when they’re not, yes.
Rachel Maddow: Except when they’re not. And so, yes, you can spend all your time worrying about the polls or you can work as hard as possible for the candidate who you want to win. And you know, sometimes there’s interesting cross-tabs information about like, you know, a specific group of people who used to think this about your chosen candidate, now thinks this about that person. Okay, that might be helpful in terms of the way you want to go work for your candidate.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Rachel Maddow: But it’s the point of them, especially for us just as a public, for people who are not, you know, political professionals —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Rachel Maddow: — is that they tell you what work needs to be done. So if you’re worried about the polls, calibrate your level of political involvement to match exactly your anxiety about the polls. If you’re freaked out about it, just do something. Again, do something with other humans. You’ll be better for it and you’ll be more resilient, again, in difficult times ahead.
Chris Hayes: All right, this one is from Debbie P. in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. I think I might have met Debbie before the show who came here from Chapel Hill to see us today.
Rachel Maddow: Wow.
Chris Hayes: I think that’s you. And this is a tradecraft question that I also have having watched you up close for years. How do you come up with such amazing topics that start out seeming totally random and drive a stake through the heart of a relevant event?
Rachel Maddow: It’s that meteor thing, like I think I have, I —
Chris Hayes: But how? Like I want you to get real brass tacks.
Rachel Maddow: Yes.
Chris Hayes: Process. Like where does the seed come of like the random anecdote, like that is the start of the thing? It’s you’re reading all the time or you follow some set of like —
Rachel Maddow: Well, in general, it’s good to read all the time.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Rachel Maddow: The one thing that I always tell people like in our business is like, if there’s one piece of advice I could impart to you, well, if you’re a female person who’s coming to this, first of all, never show your emotions. No one will understand. But otherwise, male or female —
Chris Hayes: Good talk.
Rachel Maddow: That’s exactly, still true, hello. But in general, for everybody, read beyond the assigned reading. Like whatever the assigned reading is what’s going on in the news cycle, read beyond that. Like just you never know what’s going to be relevant.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Rachel Maddow: Read stuff that interests you. That is nonfiction and that is journalism and that is history and that is academic work that interests you. You never know when it’s going to be relevant and when it’s going to be a helpful contribution, so just in general. But the way that it works on a day-to-day basis is that there’s something going on in the news that I’m interested in or confused by or want to understand better.
And then, I just keep looking stuff up about it until I find something that interests me and then I teach myself that and then I teach other people that thing. But it depends, again, like your mileage may vary. My storytelling style does not work for everybody. But if you don’t mind coming along on the journey that I am on, I really believe that over the course of one conversation, you can get to a graduate school level of complexity with anybody as long as you’re willing to start together in kindergarten.
Chris Hayes: Oh, yes.
Rachel Maddow: Like some people don’t like that I repeat things, that I will restate, and then I would loop back and restate, and then loop back and restate as we’re going through, and some people find that very frustrating. Like, I heard you the seventh time. I didn’t need it the seventeenth. But that’s because we’re starting here and we’re going here, and I need to make sure we’re all there every step of the way. And the weirder the topic or the more unfamiliar the proper nouns are, I think the more you have to just really pay attention to the way you tell the story.
So, that by the time you get to the point of it, there is a, oh, like it all comes together. I got it. And the way that I always, like my shorthand for myself is that by the time we get to the end of the story, I want you to understand it well enough that you can tell somebody else. Not just like send the clip of Rachel doing it, but you’ve got it. So, that you can tell that story. Like that’s what I’m always trying to do.
Chris Hayes: What are changes that you’ve made to your method, both in process and in final versions over the course of the long career you’ve now had doing this?
Rachel Maddow: The A block keeps getting longer. Sorry. If you represent one of our advertisers, I’m particularly sorry. It has a real consequence in that regard. Yes, I don’t know. Like I said, I do have this kind of one gear brain. And so I don’t think that I’ve changed very much in terms of the way that I think about the news. I tried for a while to pay attention to the visual elements that are on the screen while I am talking, but that didn’t work. So, I gave up on that. That was like my big try, my big effort to try to notice what’s (inaudible).
Chris Hayes: No, I feel like you’re very involved in the production elements.
Rachel Maddow: Yes, but I don’t look at them while I’m talking.
Chris Hayes: Oh yes, you can’t look at them while you’re talking.
Rachel Maddow: No. No or like that —
Chris Hayes: You’re looking at them while you’re talking?
Rachel Maddow: Well, I will choose what element —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Rachel Maddow: — I want to be there, but I don’t know when they’re on the screen.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Rachel Maddow: And I don’t speak to them, and I don’t know what you’re looking at.
Chris Hayes: But this is maybe not interesting to people, and I apologize if so. but I feel like you are, just tradecraft-wise, a thing that I’ve learned from you is to be really locked into what is showing on the screen.
Rachel Maddow: Yes.
Chris Hayes: I mean you come from radio.
Rachel Maddow: Yes.
Chris Hayes: I mean before that other thing. You come from radio, I come from writing, and it took me a very long time to figure out that television is a visual medium.
Rachel Maddow: Yes.
Chris Hayes: Like —
Rachel Maddow: I’m still like (inaudible).
Chris Hayes: My producers will tell you that like, it really took a while. And generally the division of labor is like, I’ll handle the words, you guys handle the images.
Rachel Maddow: Yes.
Chris Hayes: And I still try to stay in my lane to a certain extent because like, I don’t know if I would hire me to be a producer on my own show.
Rachel Maddow: Yes.
Chris Hayes: You are very aware of visuals. You are. You start with something, you’ll be like this photo. We’re going to build something on this photo.
Rachel Maddow: Yes.
Chris Hayes: Like this, you’ll also, another thing that you do, there’s a really important Rachel Maddow, trick. Ready for this?
Rachel Maddow: I’m desperate.
Chris Hayes: The term sound bite, you know this term, right? A bite is a small thing, right? And what ends up happening in television culture is that a bite goes around and everyone just does the bite. Twenty seconds, it’s the pull quote. And one of Rachel’s great innovations is to go back and be like, well, what was the interview? And look at that tape or the speech and play three and a half minutes. And you’ll see things. And this happens to me all the time watching Rachel’s show where I’m in the business. I will see part of a thing that I just saw the bite, right. I saw the little truncated bit. And for the first time I will see on your show three and a half minutes of it.
Rachel Maddow: Yes.
Chris Hayes: That’s good.
Rachel Maddow: Well.
Chris Hayes: Well done buddy. I’m going to ask you this one and I think this will probably be our final one.
Rachel Maddow: Okay.
Chris Hayes: I will ask you two.
Rachel Maddow: Okay. I was going to say it’s (ph) like a democratic moment. This is where the bus —
Chris Hayes: Yes, see, that’s exactly right. That’s where the buses go.
Rachel Maddow: Sorry, Noam.
Chris Hayes: I think I know part of the answer to this, and I think part of this is a little public record, but I’m curious to hear you say. Felice T. of Narberth, Pennsylvania says, how do you decompress given the critical nature of your job?
Rachel Maddow: There is a little bit of fishing.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Rachel Maddow: Since I switched to Mondays instead of being on five days a week, I know that you guys don’t, I know.
Chris Hayes: No.
Rachel Maddow: Here’s the thing, I couldn’t keep doing it. I was dying. And so I’m sorry that I’m only there on Mondays, but I am alive and so that is it.
Chris Hayes: I really can’t overemphasize how unsustainable her entire workflow is. Like it’s really great.
Rachel Maddow: It’s really bad. But the one thing that I’ve like, now I’m one day a week, so I’m not dying, so that’s good. Except, I did used to count for compartmentalization purposes on the schedule of the daily live show. And so what that meant is —
Chris Hayes: I like that (inaudible).
Rachel Maddow: — no matter how long I work during the course of the day, I am live at 9:00 p.m. Eastern and no longer live at 10:01, sorry Lawrence. And then at 10:01 I am done and I will not work the rest of the evening, unless there’s some breaking news thing and then I will do whatever I need to do in the morning before I start working and then I start working again.
There was an off switch and an on switch, a switch. And the switch is only there on Mondays. And so what’s happening is that I’m just working seven days a week and I’m working until midnight every day because I’m doing all these other things, which are fantastic. And it is, actually, it’s bad. I have to fix it.
Chris Hayes: You’re like Kate. You’re like —
Rachel Maddow: We talk (ph) all the time.
Chris Hayes: My wife, I mean she works like —
Rachel Maddow: She likes her work.
Chris Hayes: She likes her work, and she —
Rachel Maddow: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — like I’m a much more on and off switch.
Rachel Maddow: Yes, the compartmentalization is good. And I have to figure out how to do that, in part because Susan is going to kill me because she sees me less than she did when I was working five days a week.
Chris Hayes: Aw, poor Susan, that’s a —
Rachel Maddow: I know.
Chris Hayes: — tough break.
Rachel Maddow: I know because I’m chaining myself to the desk every day, because I’m so happy to do my work.
Chris Hayes: But I will say this, there’s a few things I like about “The Daily Show”, which I’m now doing four days a week, which is, I like to call it the most transparent work product in the world.
Rachel Maddow: Yes.
Chris Hayes: Like, you’re never in a meeting where someone’s like, so what do you do?
Rachel Maddow: Yes.
Chris Hayes: It’s like, you got it, you don’t like it, you don’t like it, it’s fine. But I did my job today, as you can see.
Rachel Maddow: Yes.
Chris Hayes: And also that part, you’re either doing the show or you’re not, which means if there’s a guest host and I’m on vacation, you’ll be at a place, I’ll be with my kids, and I’ll see the iconic mom or dad who’s going to take the call because a client is having a meltdown.
Rachel Maddow: Yes.
Chris Hayes: And that just feeling of work encroaching is like, I don’t have a show today. Take it over to the guest host. I don’t know what to tell you.
Rachel Maddow: I have bothered you on vacation to try to make you come back from vacation.
Chris Hayes: Yes, that’s true.
Rachel Maddow: It’s true, which I am very sorry about. Like, Chris, I need you. I am on a plane. I need you. Can you phone in? No. On days where there are stories of serious complexity that could really benefit from Chris Hayes, I have been the terrible person trying to get you on the phone. I apologize.
Chris Hayes: That’s true. All right, last question from G. Jared in Millerton, New York. What keeps you up at night?
Rachel Maddow: Wine.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Rachel Maddow: I used to do Friday night cocktail moments.
Chris Hayes: Oh, I remember, yes.
Rachel Maddow: If I’m in the same room with something that is over 80-proof right now, I’m awake for five days.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Rachel Maddow: A glass of wine and I am up at 3:00 in the morning being 50-years-old. So, that is the true story about what’s keeping me up at night. I just outgrew the ability to make cocktails. But in terms of this work, one of the reasons that I said that thing about trying to have some in-person connections with other people who live near you in your life right now, one of the reasons that I said that, and I’ve been trying to tell people that when I’ve been speaking at audiences for this book tour and stuff, is just because I do think that we’re going to have a really hard year.
And I think it’s going to be a really weird year. And if it goes very badly, it’s going to be more weird bad years after that. But regardless of how it goes a year from now, it’s going to be a really tough year. And therefore, I want us all to make ourselves as resilient as we can. And that means not having baggage trailing behind you that you don’t want to be trailing behind you. It means making up with your estranged family members. It means getting to know your neighbors.
It means if you have very serious concerns about politics, it means working in a political campaign. It means having something to do with the civic life of where you are, so that you are not alone while we have a tough year in this country. This has come for us in this generation, in this country, in this lifetime. And it does not come for every generation. It has come for us. And we need to be up to it. And it means you cannot live in your phone.
You can’t build from a position of despair and feeling powerless. And you need to have people who you can call not just because they’re on your side, but because you know them and they know you and you are Americans together in a difficult moment. And I want that kind of resilience for us all. And so, start a book club.
Chris Hayes: Rachel Maddow, ladies and gentlemen.
I love you.
Rachel Maddow: I love you, too.
Chris Hayes: Before we go, I’m going to do a few plugs. You should buy “Prequel.” You bought “Prequel”, right? You should listen to “Ultra”, if you haven’t. You should look out for “Ultra 2.” And you should subscribe to “Why Is This Happening?”, the podcast that this will appear on.
Rachel Maddow: Yes.
Chris Hayes: I saved that for last. But I just want to say thank you. This was a really special night. I feel really moved and grateful for it.
Rachel Maddow: Yes.
Chris Hayes: Have a wonderful night.
Rachel Maddow: Thank you.
Chris Hayes: Love you guys.
Rachel Maddow: Thank you guys. Thank you.
Chris Hayes: Once again, great thanks to my friend, Rachel Maddow. That was one of the best events I’ve ever been a part of, and I’m excited that we got to share it for you. It now exists for posterities and podcasts even if you were not able to be there. The next time that we do go on tour, hopefully we can come to a city where you are. I’ve heard from lots of you who want us to come to where you live so you can join in the fun.
As an added bonus, you can stream the show on Peacock now and watch the show on MSNBC starting at 7 p.m. Eastern today. Reminder, you can still send over any questions you have for us, maybe something you’ve always wanted to ask, any feedback, thoughts you have. Send those to withpod@gmail.com as we gear up for our holiday mailbag episode. We’re going to try to get as many of your comments and questions as possible.
You can always get in touch with us on X, the site formerly known as Twitter using the hashtag #WITHpod, although I find that site harder and harder to use these days. You can follow us on TikTok by searching for WITHpod. You can follow me on Threads @chrislhayes and on Bluesky.
“Why Is This Happening?” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by Doni Holloway and Brendan O’Melia. This episode was engineered by Fernando Arruda, Harry Culhane and Bob Mallory. It features music by Eddie Cooper. Aisha Turner is the executive producer of MSNBC Audio. Special thanks to all our MSNBC and NBC teams who helped to make our tour such a success. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here, by going to nbcnews.com/whyisthishappening.
“Why Is This Happening?” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by Doni Holloway and Brendan O’Melia, engineered by Bob Mallory and featuring music by Eddie Cooper. Aisha Turner is the executive producer of MSNBC Audio. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here by going to NBCNews.com/whyisthishappening?