UBC Lind Initiative 2026: Rachel Maddow (Transcript)

Read the full transcript of journalist Rachel Maddow’s keynote lecture at UBC Phil Lind Initiative, as part of #LIND26 series “America First, America Alone? Global Politics in an Age of Uncertainty.”

Editor’s Note: In this compelling keynote lecture for the UBC Phil Lind Initiative, renowned journalist Rachel Maddow explores the current state of American democracy and the vital importance of historical perspective during times of political instability. Drawing from her extensive experience covering complex political developments, she highlights the quiet but significant efforts of citizens across the United States who are documenting and preserving history in the face of widespread attempts at erasure. Through these anecdotes, Maddow argues that such grassroots resistance offers a crucial glimmer of hope, demonstrating that the American public remains “ungovernable” by those seeking to undermine democratic institutions. (March 9, 2026)

Rachel Maddow’s Opening Remarks

RACHEL MADDOW: Wow, what a beautiful hall. This is stunning. Do you guys come here for all sorts of stuff? This is amazing. I don’t understand how anybody comes to Vancouver and then leaves.

I also feel like if I moved here, I’d live forever. Everybody’s so healthy and friendly and the food is fantastic, and I just — don’t tell Massachusetts I said this. I’m just super happy to be here. I’m really, really nervous to see all your faces. So thank you.

What I’m going to do is I’m going to talk a little bit, and then a very fancy professor is going to talk to me. I’m also nervous in a different way about talking to her. And then she’s going to field some of your questions, and I’m just really happy to be here and honored. All right. And honored. All right.

The Smithsonian: A Story of Preservation

RACHEL MADDOW: In 1846 — you knew I was going to start with something like that, right? In 1846, a man named James Smithson made a bequest to the United States. He was not American, he was English. And in 1846, the United States was only 70 years old as a country, and James Smithson had never been to the United States. Nobody quite knew why this rich man’s son from England had decided to give all of his money, his entire estate, to a country he had never been to. Still today, nobody knows why he did it, nobody knows what he was thinking.

But it was a lot of money. It was a half million dollars at a time when the whole budget of the United States was only about $30 million. It was a boatload. And upon learning of this giant, inexplicable bequest from this man, James Smithson, the totally feckless US government at the time basically froze. They dithered for almost a decade before they figured out how to accept the bequest and make use of it.

They did finally figure it out. Congress used that bequest to create the Smithsonian Institution. And the Smithsonian has been around since then for 180 years. It is known mostly for its quite good museums in Washington. They’re alright.

But it’s actually more than that and bigger. Technically, the Smithsonian is now the world’s largest museum education and research complex. It’s 21 museums, nine research facilities, and also, oddly, the National Zoo. I have not been to the National Zoo. I’m sort of more of a bait shop person than a zoo person. But as zoos go, I hear that it’s quite nice. So if you’re into zoos, you should go.

I mean, not now. Obviously. No American in good conscience can advise anybody outside the United States to go to the United States right now. It pains me to say, but we all know exactly what the reasons are. I have to tell you though, when we do get through this, when we do come out the other side of this psychotic self-immolation that my country is in the middle of right now, maybe put the National Zoo on your list. Go see our alpacas, our Allen’s swamp monkeys, and our shy, shy golden plovers. I’m assuming they’ll still be there. We won’t have had to eat them. I don’t think we’re heading somewhere that dark, but we’ll see.

Citizen Historians for the Smithsonian

RACHEL MADDOW: Last summer, a grad student and two historians from Georgetown University in Washington formed a group called Citizen Historians for the Smithsonian. And they started recruiting volunteers for a single urgent seven-week-long project. They recruited hundreds of people. It started in the late summer. It was seven weeks only. It was over by the early fall. It was just a blitz.

And what they did, these hundreds of volunteers, is that they went out and they systematically and minutely photographed every inch of the Smithsonian. All publicly viewable information — every piece of art, every installation, every object, every artifact, every piece of preserved ephemera. They took legible photos of every word, every piece of signage, every piece of explanatory text, every caption, every single thing posted on every wall in every room of every building in the Smithsonian, which again, is the largest museum education and research complex in the world. So it was a big undertaking. And don’t forget the zoo.

These volunteers photographed every single animal in the zoo, at least the ones that weren’t too shy to show themselves. And they photographed every piece of explanatory text posted anywhere at the zoo. It took them seven weeks. They didn’t exactly do it in secret, but they did it surreptitiously. They did not announce what they were doing.

And it took hundreds of people, and it ended up being hundreds of thousands of photographs, curated and whittled down to tens of thousands of photographs, which are mapped out, archived, backed up, and preserved. They made a backup. They made a record — essentially a private archive, documented, dated, mapped proof of everything the Smithsonian used to be allowed to say.

The Purging of the Smithsonian

RACHEL MADDOW: After President Trump returned to the White House for his second term last year, the Smithsonian was ordered to remove the placard on the wall next to Trump’s portrait in the National Portrait Gallery.

That placard had included the true and historically significant detail that he was the first US president to be impeached twice, and that his second impeachment was about how his term in office ended — which of course was his supporters violently attacking the US Capitol to try to overthrow the US government and keep him in power by force.

So they took that placard down in the National Portrait Gallery. So now next to his portrait, there’s no mention of the two impeachments, there’s no mention of the violent attack on the Capitol.

But of course, there were those volunteers, the Citizen Historians for the Smithsonian, and they had proof of what had been there. They had photographed it, legibly. They had saved it, they had kept a record. And so one of the Citizen Historians for the Smithsonian looked up the photo of what had been there before. He typed it back up, he made copies, he made printouts of that text, and he went to the National Portrait Gallery and he stood next to Donald Trump’s portrait and he handed out those printouts to all the people visiting the exhibit.

And the museum — or somebody; you’re not allowed to know what federal agency does what anymore in my country — somebody sent in a hodgepodge of armed guards, people with guns, from various federal agencies in response to this man’s actions. And the armed guards cleared the gallery and they made everybody leave the room containing Trump’s portrait and they closed the exhibit.

There has now, since then, been a formal directive from the Trump administration that the Smithsonian should be purged of, quote, “improper ideology.” There has also now been a Trump order that all national museums, national monuments, and national parks should be liberated from any, quote, “divisive narratives.” No more divisive narratives. Nothing that, quote, “disparages Americans” or does anything other than focus on the nation’s “beauty, abundance, or grandeur.” Those are your choices.

Save Our Signs and the Broader Preservation Movement

RACHEL MADDOW: So how does this work in practice? It’s hard to know, for example, how this might work at the National Memorial at Manzanar. Manzanar is in California, where I’m from. It’s a prison camp where we held Japanese American men, women, and children behind barbed wire for years, purely on the basis of their race. It is hard to understand how the signage at the National Memorial at Manzanar might be reconfigured to be more about grandeur, right? Let alone abundance.

In response to that national park order, another group of volunteers formed, a group that called itself Save Our Signs — S-O-S. And they too wrangled regular people from all over the United States to photograph the signage and the exhibits at American national park sites all around the country. And like the guerrilla citizen historians at the Smithsonian, the Save Our Signs folks have also made an archive, a backup, a record — indexed and organized into a database of what America’s national parks and monuments used to be allowed to say.

The Washington Post recently profiled those volunteer efforts and also a bunch more like it. The History Archives and Records Preservation Project, which is people — volunteers — documenting and saving what’s in government archives before they too are purged. The Data Rescue Project, which is volunteers archiving and preserving scientific and other public-facing data sets in fields like public health or basic research or anything else that might be suspiciously improper or divisive.

The Post noted in its profile that what these efforts essentially boil down to is a refusal to pretend that what’s happening in the American government right now is normal. It is a refusal to accept that however long we end up having to endure this thing, this catastrophic authoritarian adventure, it will never become our country’s new normal.

A Record Against Erasure

RACHEL MADDOW: And — yeah. Yeah. I appreciate the encouragement. Because I mean, obviously, efforts like these that I’m describing, they tug at my heartstrings, I have to say.

But efforts like those of the Citizen Historians for the Smithsonian, they have not been able to stop the purge even just of the Smithsonian, right? They have not been able to stop him from Chairman Mao-ing that place. But at that one institution, which just happens to be the one institution those particular Americans picked to defend, hundreds of people did surreptitiously spend seven and a half weeks at least making a record of what we had, of what preceded him, of what he wants to erase and what he will erase.

In making that record, I think there is a case to be made that those Americans have effectively rescued what he has tried to kill. Because having a record of it means it can be replaced. It can be replaced, and honestly, it will be replaced when he is dead or when he is gone, whichever comes first.

And there is — the reason I wanted to talk about this here today in Vancouver, it’s not — I know this is not a rah-rah topic, and this is not a rah-rah moment.

The Smallest Green Shoot of Hope

But there is a subtle idea here that I think is helping me think about the question of this series, America first, America alone? Well, some of that depends on what counts as America right now, and how much of the wholeness of the American people can be translated to the rest of the world while we are in this very trying time.

And I want to tell you about this very low-profile work, and maybe low-impact work by some of my fellow Americans, because I think there is an idea at the heart of that kind of work, at the center of it, that for me, it feels like the smallest, tiny little green shoot of hope. It’s something that makes me think that we as a people might be more indigestible than this monster was counting on when he decided to swallow us up, that we might be pricklier and more instinctively ungovernable than this would-be dictator was expecting. And I hope, therefore, that this lands as cautious good news for you, for our friends here in Canada, at least a little glimmer of a possibility of hope.

Cataloging the Bananas

I recently interviewed a retiree from the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. And the reason I interviewed him is because he has made basically an interactive online atlas of what he and his colleagues call “unusual, novel, or expansive applications of federal criminal law during the Trump administration.” Unusual refers to charging decisions, enforcement theories, or prosecutorial tactics that mark a departure from past norms. It’s basically a granular, every document, every docket entry record of the absolutely bananas stuff they are doing for Donald Trump at the US Justice Department.

And the basic idea is that if you’re caught up in one of these crazy cases or you become aware of one of these crazy cases, you can submit the court documents, the legal documents about this case to this online case tracker.

And when you do that, you have to check a box to say what kind of crazy this is. And the list of boxes you can check is like, I had to walk away. Threats of violence by government agents, court findings of government misconduct, rarely charged misdemeanors, prosecutorial vindictiveness, political retaliation, illegal entry by government act. I mean, it just goes on and on, but it’s just a clean checkbox based catalog of what the legal system in the United States has been turned into under despotism. And this is good.

This is a resource for lawyers who may have clients who are caught up in this sort of thing, but it’s also something bigger. It is a categorical way of thinking about what Americans are going through right now that I find very helpful. And I feel like once I started realizing that’s what I was looking at, I started seeing it everywhere.

Rejecting the Authoritarian Mindset

Because an authoritarian wants you to think that he is the only one with agency. He is the only one who can make decisions that matter. Everyone else is helpless before him. At best, his subjects can only react to the things that he does and the decisions that he makes, because really the whole world is him. There’s no use in thinking about any other way to do things.

There’s no use in thinking about making decisions yourself because he’s the only one who gets to make the decisions or even really do anything. And so, everybody else should give up because he is inevitable and he is forever. Dictators need you to think that way. And I reject that, and I know you do, too. But I am also finding it in my own mind.

I’m finding that it is getting easier and easier to reject that mindset every day, as I get to report every day on what America is right now besides our government. And I want to be clear. I reject the inevitability and the supposed indefinite rule of Trump and Trumpism, not because I believe that the cheeseburgers will ultimately win.

I mean, it’s not just that he is the oldest person ever elected to the presidency, and he is obese, and he has gigantically swollen ankles, and he drags his leg, and he now puts more makeup on his hands than even what he puts on his face, and he puts so much on his face that on a good day he looks like he’s been well embalmed. He also on top of that now has a gnarly new bright red lumpy neck rash on the right side of his neck which makes it look like he was attacked by a particularly lusty sea lamprey that someone ripped off of him too fast after it had sunk hundreds of its gritty, dull, dirty little teeth into the wrinkly, fleshy plane just below his right ear.

It really is. It’s bloody bright red and crumbly. And it has holes in it. It looks like clumpy spaghetti sauce burned onto a baking sheet. It’s not good.

But… I’m sorry. But it is not his health that makes me convinced that this radical and awful time in American governance will end. It’s nothing about him at all.

The American People Are Pushing Back

It’s about the American people. It’s about unnamed, regular people all over the country who are turning out to have good instincts, who of their own accord and without being told to do it are just insisting in very practical ways that what is happening right now is discontinuous, that it is a rupture and not a transition, that it is not just the next stuff that we started doing inevitably in our history, the next point in the number line.

What is happening right now is aberrant and wrong. And it will be treated not as if it’s some sort of wrong turn. It will be treated as a giant meteor strike. What he’s doing will not only be opposed, it will be cataloged and labeled and kept track of so it can be fundamentally reversed.

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The world will change because of this disaster that is still unfolding in my country. And your country will be one of the nations that leads the free world that we have now abandoned and turned against. Canada has never been more critical. In the rules-based international order, and as my country has torn up what was left of the old one, Canada will be absolutely central to establishing a new one, a better one. This despot that has taken over my country’s government will not have the last word.

Trump and the people he leads will not be the ones who get to tell this story of what happened in our country in this time. Not even if they have to do it from prison.

Granules of Good News

So I’m here tonight not to apologize for what the United States has become, for this disaster that we’ve gotten ourselves into and that we have now foisted on you and on the world. An apology for me wouldn’t mean much, I know. But what I can do and what I am doing is bringing you the tiniest little granules of good news about what else America is right now besides our government, because I know that one year, four months, and one long day ago, we voted to put him back in office, and that is on us.

But one year, and four months, and one day into it, statistically speaking, if you gave the average American a choice right now between Trump and all of their loved ones contracting whatever that thing is on Trump’s neck, most Americans would take the neck thing. You just buy everybody a scarf and hope for the best.

The number of people in America who tell pollsters they strongly support Donald Trump right now has fallen into the teens. It is below 20%. And that was a poll taken before he started this disastrous war in Iran, which the people of the United States oppose in overwhelming numbers.

And numbers like that, it’s interesting for the politics and the momentum of this moment. It tells you a little bit, I think, about why he and his party are so desperate that we should not have free and fair elections in November, because they know they are going to get pasted if that happens. But what’s inside those numbers is not just opposition, but commitment to stop him. And I want you to know that that’s real, and it’s happening every day even if you don’t see it in the headlines.

Shielding People from the Harm

To stop him, to mitigate the harm that he is causing. We know that even if you can replace what he’s stealing, even if you can put back up the placards and the art, what he’s doing to people cannot be erased, and so you see Americans, unnamed, uncelebrated Americans stepping up to try to shield people too.

With this whole immigrant targeting secret police operation, Trump has been trying effectively to keep that whole thing out of the courts. But people have been forcing it into the courts. People who Trump’s agents are taking and locking up, they’re filing writs of habeas corpus, the Great Writ, which allows a federal judge to make the government justify that person’s continued imprisonment or release them if they cannot.

And in part, because of this remarkable and totally unprecedented flood of habeas petitions, every night in Minneapolis, Minnesota, regular people who live in that city wait outside the ICE jail there, at the gates, in the cold, just in case somebody’s going to be let out.

Because what they do is when ICE is going to let somebody out, they just dump them on the street. They just dump them at the gates of this jail, usually in the middle of the night, usually with nothing in their pockets. And so people from Minneapolis every night wait at the gates. They don’t know who is inside. They don’t know who might be released.

But just in case, they wait there with blankets and coats and cell phones and cars with the heat turned on and drivers ready to give people rides.

Ordinary People Taking Extraordinary Action

In Roxbury, New Jersey, people there are trying to stop the Trump administration from turning a warehouse there into one of these huge new Trump prison camps to hold thousands of people without trial. People in Roxbury put out a call for help to Dallas, Texas, because the company that owns that warehouse in their town is headquartered in Dallas. It’s actually headed by a Canadian guy from Montreal. But they’re headquartered in Dallas.

It’s a company called DALFEN, D-A-L-F-E-N, just in case you want to look them up. In Dallas, when people there saw this little town in Roxbury, New Jersey, put up their hand from 1500 miles away to ask for help, regular people in Dallas, clergy in Dallas, responded by showing up outside the Dallas headquarters of this company, Dalfen, to give them absolute hell. They’ve erected huge signs out in front of that company’s headquarters in Dallas that say, “Concentration Camp Dalfen, coming soon to Roxbury, New Jersey.”

Some of the good people of British Columbia made your own ruckus recently, with your billionaire Jim Patterson? That stopped another one of these massive Trump prison camps from going up in the state of Virginia. And that was a really big deal. It was a big deal in itself, but it was also a big deal because it was one of the earliest ones.

And what you did here in British Columbia put a spotlight on the fact that these things, again, are not inevitable. They are temporally specific decisions made by human beings, and you can tap on their conscience to see if it still works. Because some of them do still have shame, but even the ones that don’t have shame still have interests. And you can use your knowledge of their interests to change their plans.

Prosecutors Who Refused to Comply

When the Trump administration told a U.S. Attorney’s Office, Federal Prosecutor’s Office in Tennessee that they needed to conjure up a baloney bogus criminal charge against a man named Kilmar Abrego Garcia because they wanted to retroactively justify their abominable treatment of him and their illegal deportation of him, a senior official at that prosecutor’s office not only refused to bring those bogus charges against Kilmar Abrego Garcia, he resigned from the prosecutor’s office and then he joined the criminal defense team representing Kilmar Abrego Garcia.

At another federal prosecutor’s office, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Minnesota, the second in command there resigned in disgust over how Trump’s federal agents were brutalizing and killing protesters in the streets and then insisting on charging and overcharging those same protesters. That senior prosecutor not only left that prosecutor’s office, but then he, too, immediately joined the defense team, in his case, for former CNN anchor Don Lemon, who was one of the people facing trumped-up federal charges in that city.

Committed That This Thing Will End

One of the things Americans are right now is committed that this thing will end. And if you are willing to look, you can see these nameless movements, nameless sort of instinctual actions everywhere.

People instinctually committed that these guys are not going to have an easy time on what they’re trying to do, that there will be a record of everything they are trying to erase and every crime they committed. And that this isn’t going to be 1942 again, when Americans lined up and just watched while their Japanese-American neighbors were taken away to the camps.

This era will end one way or another. And I’m not saying that to minimize how bad it is right now. We know how bad it is, and I know that you know.

But I have a cautious little wounded bit of optimism that Americans are determined that the actions of this president and this government will be demarcated in our history as abnormal, as aberrant, that what they are doing now will be forever asterisked and bracketed, that it will never be precedent, that it will never become the new way our country just does things. We are trying. We really, really, really are.

So, none of us, I think, are naive enough to believe that any of the things I have described here tonight are going to stop him. No one of these myriad individual things happening all over my country right now will be enough to stop him.

Closing Remarks and Audience Q&A

But mark my words, all of them will. And then we will set about making it up to you and to the world and to each other. I’m grateful to the Linden Initiative for the invitation to be here. I’m grateful to UBC’s School of Public Policy and Global Affairs. I’m grateful to the Chan Center for the Performing Arts, and I’m grateful to all of you for being here tonight.

I look forward to this conversation and to your questions. Thank you so much.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: I’m the one who dropped my piece of paper. You can stop being nervous now. I swatted it out of your hand.

RACHEL MADDOW: I’m very sorry.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Rachel, we’re grateful to have you with us. We already have over 100 questions, so I apologize in advance. I will not get to all of the Slido questions, but they’re going to help me structure our conversation today so the audience is really part of it.

The Future of Media and Press Freedom

So I’m going to start right away with the most popular audience question, which really wants to ask you about the media. So obviously, we know this is something you’ve described as a Victor Orban-style assault on the press. And we could name everything from cuts to jobs at newspapers through to takeovers of various companies through to various departments no longer allowing journalists into press conferences, etc., etc. So the question is really where you see the future of this going, this type of media censorship.

RACHEL MADDOW: It’s, I think, there are a few different horizons on which to look at that. One thing to watch for in the very near future, literally within the next few weeks, is whether or not CNN is about to get nuked. The President has embarked on, I think he’s effectively using Victor Orban’s plan for not only attacking and weakening the media and weakening respect for the media, but specifically attacking news organizations in ways that are meant to financially cripple them, thus making it easier in both a regulatory and a financial way for his oligarchic friends to take them over and to turn them into state TV.

And with what we’ve seen happen so quickly, just in one year from being back in office, we’ve seen the Washington Post, we’ve seen CBS News, we’ve seen the LA Times. Obviously the takeover of Twitter is a whole different kettle of fish, but same idea.

But we’re about to be, depending on what happens with CNN, we’re about to be in an unusual situation, which I think shows how much corruption perverts economic incentives. Because if you just take cable news, what you’re about to end up with is on one side, the sort of state TV pro-Trump line is going to be Fox News, Newsmax, One America News, News Nation, presumably CNN as well, once they get nuked, all crowded into the same quadrant of the ideological country, and then us on the other side, which is just not a good idea in business terms for anybody, but it might be good for us in the short term.

The business model in American media and in media globally has always been tough. You’ve written about how it’s hard to make profit at news, and the times when it has been profitable have been more the exception than the rule. But we’re in a time of authoritarian takeover of the biggest media market in the world, and those of us who are outside those pressures right now need to get as big as possible and stay as sustainable as possible and shame the hell out of all of our colleagues who capitulate.

The Personal Toll of Journalism in the Trump Era

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: So you’ve mentioned the business, but then people are also wondering about you personally as a journalist. You’re reporting obviously in these really difficult times, and wondering how do you, A, keep going and B, maybe you can tell us a little bit about whether your thinking about your role as a journalist has changed over the last 10 years since Trump won began.

RACHEL MADDOW: Oh, that’s interesting. I don’t think, I mean, I’ve definitely become more decrepit physically. I have the spine of a 111-year-old. So I’m falling apart, but in terms of my job, the thing that has changed in the Trump era is, for me, I stopped being able to book government officials to talk about government policy, because I have this sort of implicit, if not explicit, agreement with my audience that if I’m putting somebody on TV, it’s because they have something to say that I think you should listen to. That’s why I only put on one person at a time, and I try not to interrupt them.

But it also means that if you’ve ever lied to me, you’re never coming back. And so when the Trump administration started putting Trump administration officials on the air with me, the first time around, it lasted like a week. And then I was like, I actually in good conscience cannot do this anymore.

And so we’ve had to learn that we sort of have this mantra on my show to watch what they do, not what they say. You can’t take government… I mean, all government pronouncements should always be viewed with skepticism. But in our case, what’s happened in the last 10 years is that any government pronouncement by the Trump administration is by definition a lie unless proved otherwise.

And so you have to treat it that way, which means you have to think about the facts and the provability of your assertions in ways that just aren’t what any of us learned back in the day in terms of how these things are supposed to work.

History as a Tool for Understanding the Present

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: So I want to make sure that we really dive into what you said was, in a way, a paean to the activists, right? And in a way, as a trained historian, I took it as it was the paean to the historian, to that tiny work that we do of documenting in different kinds of ways. So let’s delve in a little bit into your love of history, which is so clear both from Prequel as a book, but also even the podcast series you do, so the most recent one, Burn Order, which is looking at the incarceration of Japanese Americans, but also the 40-year history thereafter and the eventual apology. So I’d just love to know what makes history so important to you? Why do you keep delving into it?

RACHEL MADDOW: I think because Americans, because we’re so arrogant, sorry. Because we’re so arrogant. Sorry. It’s really hard for us to see anything that we’re doing as having any analogy ever. It’s hard for us to recognize patterns that apply to the whole world as applying to us. We’re just such fat heads in that way.

One of the ways you can trick an American audience into seeing outside it’s… Instead of looking at your feet, actually looking at the horizon and seeing yourself in context, is to look at other eras of American history. It’s a way to get people outside their immediate framework to try to learn from other people’s experience.

And so I think in a lot of cases, I’ll try to make analogies to something that’s going on contemporaneously in another country, and sometimes that works for some of the audience. More often, if I need to make some sort of analogy or draw people’s… try to draw lessons from some other experience of something like this elsewhere on Earth, it helps to be just talking about a different timeframe. For some reason, it helps get people outside themselves.

Americans right now are really abusing the word “unprecedented.” We keep talking about everything that’s happening to us as unprecedented. Sometimes it is. But in most cases, it is not. I mean, we’ve had fascist movements before. We’ve had partisan times before. We’ve had a frickin’ civil war. We’ve had people beaten to death nearly on the floor of the United States Senate. I mean, we’ve had some stuff, but we tend to think only about ourselves and in this moment and think of ourselves as at some apogee of experience that nobody else can touch. So I’m just trying to make people see themselves through different eyes.

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Heroes and Villains: Resisting Injustice

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: And I think part of what you try to do, I interpret from Burn Order, or at least, is you’re also trying to highlight the sometimes rare people who resist. So, for example, the Colorado governor, Ralph Carr, who actually resists imprisoning Japanese Americans, but then, of course, his political career is over, though now he is very much venerated for what he did in the past. So maybe, can you tell us a little bit more about how you think about finding those stories, why you choose to highlight them alongside the general view of history as an analogy?

RACHEL MADDOW: In Prequel, for example, I wrote about the fascist movement that existed in the United States in the lead up to World War II, and what I found was that neither the heroes nor the villains of that story were famous, had been remembered by history, and then I realized, oh, that’s because nobody has an interest in telling this story, with one exception. The only contemporary accounts that I could find, some of my bad guys from Prequel were written by modern day neo-Nazis because they were looking back at that history and thinking, “Wow, this is a real high watermark for us. We sure did great.”

But everybody else looking back at that history sort of had a reason to not… Americans like to think of ourselves as having fought the great fight against fascism and having been the heroes of the free world in joining World War II and what we did. And the Americans who were part of those fascist movements that preceded our involvement in World War II, they don’t necessarily want to admit that that’s what they were.

There was a congressman who was caught up in that named Hamilton Fish, one of the great names in all of American politics, and I got a ration of… from the descendants of Hamilton Fish, who did not want me talking about what their ancestor had done in that time.

And so I’m trying to resurrect some of the villains and also some of the heroes from eras in which there’s been a lot of reason for people not to want to hear those things. And with Japanese American incarceration, even though Americans, I think, are conscious of the fact that we think of them as internment camps, which is not what they were. They were basically prison camps. But even though we’re sort of aware that that happened, nobody’s really sure who did it.

So I wanted to focus in on, you know what, there are identifiable bad guys who did it. And it was so bad, and it was so wrong, that during their lifetimes they started lying and denying that they had had anything to do with it. And I’d like to remind you who they were, and when I tell you who they were, they’ll remind you of some people who are in the news today.

And similarly with the heroes, Ralph Carr acted heroically in Colorado in the midst of that crisis and was punished for it in his day and is celebrated for it today. And I want people who are thinking about doing something brave today to know that it may not pay off in this lifetime, but your kids and grandkids will get to visit statues of you someday when we get this right.

Why the 1940s Is the Most Useful Historical Analogy

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: I’m going to ask you one more historical question, then we’re going to move on to some other audience interests. The final one is, everything we’ve been talking about is analogy to mainly the 1940s. So I’d love to hear from you why you think the 1940s is the best analogy. Why not say the late 19th century? You mentioned all the other times where the US has been in turmoil. What for you makes the 1940s the best comparison?

RACHEL MADDOW: It’s been helpful to me in this moment because I think there still is, it’s under pressure, but there still is in the American public a general common wisdom that “Nazis bad.” I say, it’s under pressure. “Nazis bad, fighting Nazis good.” Again, it’s not a universally held belief anymore, but there’s enough there that if… I feel like if you can start a story there and then ask people to think about making decisions in the moment, in the midst of that fight when it wasn’t clear who was going to win and every decision was contingent, can make people start to think about the better angels of their nature and make people think about the long arc of justice, where on the long arc of justice they’re going to see their lives. It helps, I think, to more people in right and wrong, as self-righteous as that sounds. That’s sort of where I start those stories from.

Preserving History: Citizen Archivists and the Fight Against Erasure

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: And maybe some of those people who are trying to save the Smithsonian signs are thinking in many ways, like the woman you talk about, Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga, who spends years in the archives, she’s my kind of woman, she spends years in the archives and finds a crucial document — you will have to listen to the podcast to learn what that crucial document is — and it really unfolds everything. So I wonder if you can just say a little more, and this is from an audience question, about how you think these citizen historians and the groups you were describing, how can they actually preserve what they’re doing?

RACHEL MADDOW: One of the things that moved me about those groups that I described is how low tech and simple it is. It’s just people with their cell phone cameras being assigned a number of rooms or a number of exhibit halls at different places and go do it and upload them to this Dropbox or whatever other system that we’ve got, and then somebody’s building a database and they bought space to store it and that’s all it is. And obviously, when things are destroyed, they have to be rebuilt, but when words are erased, they can be retyped.

The Appeal of Authoritarianism

RACHEL MADDOW: And to simply… To make a record of what’s been taken down allows you to recreate it and put it back up, but it also creates an indelible record of what they thought was so wrong, of what they tried to erase, of what seemed so dangerous to them. And that has power too. So there isn’t anything more… There isn’t another phase to it, it’s simply documenting that it’s real.

I’ve been thinking about the Bamiyan Buddhas and about the really very moving projects that have been done to try to allow people to picture what they were like again, even though they were destroyed. I think that we’ve got an instinctive sort of pull toward preserving these things, toward being able to reestablish them maybe someday, but also just to document the crime that’s being done to knowledge and history by taking them down.

Why People Still Support Trump

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Yeah, thank you. So there’s a lot of people who want to know about the other side of the coin, namely the people who are still avid Trump supporters and would love your insights into why you think that group still are avid Trump supporters and how you read that moving into the future.

RACHEL MADDOW: Yeah, not the person to ask. I mean, I can say… I mean, the strongman pitch is attractive in some ways, right? The strong man says, listen, this Democracy that you have, super cute, but all the rules are about process. That is what democracy is, right?

It’s about the process will be fair, and through a fair process, the people will make their own decisions. And so the strong man comes along and says, “Process, okay, cute, everything takes forever. Sometimes people make the wrong decisions. And this is a fundamentally weak and slow and bureaucratic way of dealing with things, and particularly when we’ve got really big challenges, like for example, from this demonic group that I’ve just defined for you and blamed everything on, or we’ve got real challenges, we’re in a real crisis, or I’ve created a crisis. Wouldn’t it be better to have decisive action that can be fast and efficient and we all know it needs to be done, and I will just do it, and you will be so proud, and look at the way that I embody the national spirit and the national ethos, and look at me, I’ll take care of it.”

We know how to decode that sort of stuff. We know what that is, but there is an appeal to it. And authoritarian movements, fascist movements in particular, always emerge from democracies. I mean, fascist leaders are almost always legitimately elected or legitimately appointed, and then once they’re there, they use the techniques of autocratic breakthrough to make sure they can never be ousted. But they get there out of a system that allows political parties to grow and develop and flourish. And one of the political parties that we had in our country turned into a fascist revolutionary movement.

But that’s where movements like this come from. It’s very rarely a military junta or some sort of invasion from abroad. It comes from within. And so are the powers of a democracy and the rules of a democracy, which allow movements like this to form themselves and to make their pitch and to attract adherence, are democracies then also capable of defending themselves against people who would use democratic forces, use democratic powers to gain power, but then destroy democracy and stay forever?

Can democracies do both? We are finding out. But the appeal of the authoritarian has never been very mysterious to me. I also don’t feel like it’s very particular to any one country. I feel like they all speak the same language. They all take their shirts off and, you know. Or have somebody airbrush a chest onto their suit jacket, whatever.

Lessons from Other Democracies Under Duress

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: And I think that speaks to something you’ve talked about before, which is Trump just following an authoritarian playbook that in many ways doesn’t surprise you. So let’s go back to the other side of the coin, right? What about the activists and those who are trying to do other things? Do you think there’s something that they can learn from other democracies under duress or those who have come out of dictatorship, we think of everything from Eastern Europe in the 1980s through to Latin America, et cetera, et cetera. What do you think maybe those Americans could take away?

RACHEL MADDOW: Yes, yes, this is the… Yes, exactly. Yes. Can I take you home with me? Yes. Yes, we have so much to learn from so many people and so many other times and places who have been through these things. And one of them is, like I said, with the citizen historians for the Smithsonian, pick an institution and defend it, right? Which is one of the… Actually, one of the lessons from Tim Snyder’s On Tyranny, 20 lessons from the 20th century. Pick an institution and defend it. Yes, that’s very helpful.

Also, make professional organizations and professional ethics matter. You’re starting to see this right now in fits and starts in the American legal system, where American lawyers have lots of very smug, very high self-regarding institutions where they pat themselves on the back a lot for how important they are to our democracy. Well, those institutions, including things like bar associations, are now being called upon to police their own members. The Florida Bar Association now has Lindsay Halligan under investigation and may disbar her for her actions as Trump’s bogus appointed US attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia. I know that is in the weeds, but it’s a big deal.

Similarly, you’re seeing actually still in the legal world, you’re seeing the law firms that capitulated to Trump and did deals with Trump starting to be shamed by the law firms that did not do deals with Trump and stood up to him and beat him. Making professional ethics and professional associations count.

Taking a popular front approach to anti-fascist organizing. There are a lot of people who I think Democrats might rightfully and with sound strategy, might vote for right now that they might not vote for in better times. But honestly right now, if you’re an anti-fascist, nice to meet you. You’re on my team. And it’s a big team.

Popular Front politics are always by nature temporally specific, they don’t last forever. But in a crisis, when you are in… We are in the middle of a revolution in my country. And when you are mounting a counter-revolutionary effort to try to retain your constitutional republic, you have to figure out who else can help you protect the Constitution. And it may be weirdos and people who you don’t otherwise like. But that’s what popular fronts are. And you’re not getting married, you’re dating.

And those sort of lessons, I think, from other countries, from other times, there’s a million of them, but there’s just some. And I’m desperately every day working to try to figure out ways to convey these lessons to my audience.

The War on Iran and American Foreign Policy

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Yeah, thank you. So there are many, many questions about foreign policy. And of course, we could not have a discussion tonight without talking about the war being waged on Iran and the tremendous chaos in so many parts of the Middle East. So maybe you can just, the questions are quite broad, but I think maybe you could just start by giving us your sense of how you’re seeing this unfold and how you fit it into this longer history of American interventions into the Middle East over the last 25 years.

RACHEL MADDOW: It is hard for me to put into words my feelings on this. There is no reason that the administration can articulate that makes any sense of what they have done. Yesterday, Trump started saying it was because they were going to have a nuclear bomb in two weeks. You mean from the nuclear program that you obliterated? And we know the sites that you’ve bombed in Iran since you started this war. You’re not bombing any nuclear sites. So if the point was that you had to set them back in terms of their development of a nuclear bomb, then why aren’t you even targeting the nuclear sites? It’s not nuclear.

On ballistic missiles, oh, they were soon going to have intercontinental ballistic missiles. Even the administration itself admits that it’s completely made up. They were nowhere near any sort of ballistic missile threat of the type that they had described. Oh, it was to defend the protesters, the pro-democracy or anti-regime protesters in Iran. Right. Because Trump’s heart bleeds for the protesters. He wants to stand up for their right to free speech, right? To protest against their government without facing violence. It’s really important to him.

It’s because he wants to install a new regime from among the Iranian people, really. You could have done any one single thing for the Iranian people ever, including maybe turning back on their internet. There is no explanation that the United States government has even tried to give that makes… That gets anywhere near a true explanation for what they have done.

And so then we all get to surmise why they have done it. Regardless of the real reasons why they have done it, now they have. They have started a war that already has engulfed the Middle East and is knocking on the door of Europe. And there is no plan. There are no objectives. And the people who are running the United States government, and in particular, the most crucial hard power national security elements of the United States government are people who you would not allow to run a children’s birthday party. And it is bad. And I don’t have anything to… I don’t have any shine to put on it at all.

The only thing that I can say that is at least somewhat heartening to me is how unpopular it is already among even Republicans, and particularly independents. The fact that this is, at least for now, technically still an election year, may matter to them. This president is not just despotic. He’s dangerous to everybody in my country, he’s dangerous to your country, and he’s dangerous to the entire world. And it will be up to the American people to see an end to what he is trying to do, and we’re just trying to get there as fast as we can. I’m sorry, I don’t have anything better to say.

ALSO READ: Jeffrey Sachs: New European Military Bloc for War Against Russia (Transcript)

Trump’s New Imperialism

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Today on a phone call to Axios, Trump said about a new leader in Iran, “I have to be involved in the appointment like with Delci in Venezuela,” referring to Delci Rodriguez who, after Maduro was extradited, became the new acting president. When Yale historian Greg Grandin has been discussing this, he’s been talking about what Trump is doing as a new kind of imperialism, right? Greenland, et cetera, et cetera. And what Grandin has called it is techno-vassal imperialism, by which he means the US is installing a leader, extracting funds and revenues, which are going to be placed somewhere else, et cetera. So I wonder how you feel about calling what’s happening abroad a form of imperialism. Is that helpful?

RACHEL MADDOW: Oh, yeah, I don’t even think you need a modifier. I think it’s just imperialism. I mean, I think if you asked Trump if he thinks America is or should be an empire, and he therefore is or should be an emperor, he would just flatly say yes. I don’t think he’s hiding his light under a bushel. He believes that the United States is the de facto ruler of the Western hemisphere, and it’s just… I mean, that was what the whole 51st State was about, right? It was not about trying to convince Canada to do a thing. He was trying to say, like, oh, acknowledge that it’s already true. Right? In his mind, this is true, right? In his mind, Mexico is South Texas.

And this is a mindset for him that I think is almost guttural in a way. I don’t know that he knows the difference between a president and a prime minister. I don’t think that he understands why border wars don’t happen as much anymore. I don’t think that matters to him. I think he just thinks it’s like toddler cheerios. Grr. And so putting a lot of syllables before imperialism, I think it’s very simple.

He says, in addition to calling Delci by her first name, first of all, in part because I’m sure he has no idea what her last name is, he thinks that he runs Venezuela. He says that he’s running Venezuela. He thinks that he should run everything or that he does run everything. He thinks that he runs American television. He thinks that he runs everything.

And so when you have somebody in a position of power, when you have somebody with that much military power who has that kind of a mindset, all you can do is stop him. There’s no… I don’t think there’s any reasoning with him about it. I think his feelings about it are too visceral and guttural to talk him out of.

American Imperialism in Historical Context

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: And I’m wondering then just to round off this discussion of imperialism, how you, just as you’ve put the kind of fascist discussion in its longer history, how do you put this moment of American imperialism into that longer history, whether it was American occupation of the Philippines or even in World War II when America does also briefly occupy Greenland actually for a few years. So how do you see this moment in that bit of American history?

RACHEL MADDOW: I do see us in a moment that is more meteors strike than wrong turn. And that is not to say that America doesn’t have a long history of some atrocious things. There’s a reason that I called my last book Prequel, right? Talking about previous experiences with American fascist movements, including those who wanted to overthrow the US government the way that this one has. But I think where we are right now is that… And I feel like… I don’t know if people don’t want to believe me or maybe I’m just saying it too bluntly and it just doesn’t sound good to people. But we really…

The Threat to American Democracy

RACHEL MADDOW: We’ve got a guy who’s not going to leave office. And we are maybe 50-50 going to have real elections this year. And they have dissolved the U.S. Government to the point where they’ve…

You know, when you see the masked secret police guys in the street, they’ve all got different badges on that all have different acronyms on them and you don’t really know what any of them stand for and it seems like they’re all doing the same thing. That’s because they’ve effectively dissolved distinctions between all US government agencies so that all US government agencies just work as hired guns for Trump, and there’s no other function of the US government.

The US Justice Department is gone. The job of the US Justice Department is to make sure that the protections of the US Constitution are made real, that the things that are written down in our Constitution are actually things that people can avail themselves of in real life. The Justice Department is gone.

The military has been told to think of US cities as training grounds for what he wants to do around the world and taking over other countries. He sees himself as a king and an emperor. This is not a mild evolution of our worst past.

He will end the Constitutional Republic if he can, and he is trying, and he will try to do it this year. America first, America alone, our government alone, please, our people alone, please not. We have a really hard task ahead of us, and we know that if our country goes this way, goes the way that he wants it to, if we become a full blown dictatorship with the kind of military that he’s got, no place in the world is going to be safe. And so we need your help.

I need you to know that the people of my country are trying in all sorts of interesting, nuanced, instinctually sound strategic ways. And I would like you to have your eyes open to it and to encourage us when you can and to help us. And we need your country to lead while we can’t.

Canada, Family, and Identity

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Thank you, Rachel. We have a few minutes left, and so I cannot resist. We now, of course, have to turn to talking about Canada because we are in Canada, but also because your mother is Canadian.

RACHEL MADDOW: Indeed.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: My mom is from Torbay in Newfoundland. So tell us, how do you think if at all having a Canadian mother affects how you see American politics, how you do your work? Anything along those lines?

RACHEL MADDOW: I’ve never been anything other than my mother’s daughter, and so I don’t know how I would be different if I were not. But I will say that having a parent who chose to become American, my mom became a US citizen just before she had my older brother, that has always really meant something to me because she didn’t want to… At the time, she had to give up her Canadian citizenship in order to become an American. She’s since gotten it back, so it’s all good, but yeah. Yay, mom.

But for her, coming to the United States when she did was something that was not easy at all for her, and it was a deliberate decision and a hard decision and one that she feels really earnestly and she takes her citizenship really seriously. And it is, I think, made me somebody who just doesn’t ever take that for granted. And also, I like hard bread.

Audience Questions: What Can Canadians Do?

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: So we have another audience question, just asking you to say a little bit more about what you think and hope Canadians can do to support Americans pushing back against this regime.

RACHEL MADDOW: You know, the thing with the Pattison thing, that was handy. We are interconnected countries and interconnected economies and there will be things like that where it matters what you guys do here at home and it means a lot to us when you do that. So there’s that.

I would also say that we don’t know what Trump is going to do with this huge network of prison camps that he’s building. It’s been very interesting. One of the things I’ve been covering intensively is all the resistance to all the different places he’s trying to build these things. The resistance from Republicans and conservatives and liberals and people all over has been really fascinating and really scrappy. And it’s in these sort of interesting liminal places. A lot of these camps, they’re putting near airports for obvious reasons, and places near airports tend to be sort of liminal and ideologically mixed and in transit kind of communities, and those places are finding real community there and organizing and turning against them.

But if he’s able to build this network of prison camps, he’s talking capacity for over 100,000 people to be held indefinitely without trial in camps that… The largest federal prison right now in the United States holds like 4,000 people. They want to build these facilities for 8, 10, 14, 16,000 people. And if he’s going to do that, obviously they’re building them for immigrants is what they say. We all know that what they do at the border is then what they do in the country and what they do to immigrants, they then do to citizens. It’s just the way in to be allowed to build these things.

But if things go that dark, Americans are going to flee here. And I don’t know what you guys are going to think about that. But it’s worth thinking about now, on your own terms, without us bugging you about it, because it’s going to come up. I mean, you’re already seeing some high profile academics and others come to Canada. If he continues to prosecute, literally try to prosecute opposition politicians and former government officials, if that becomes less and less legal, if that just becomes more persecution than prosecution, you may see high profile people coming to this country.

And we are in no position to ask you for anything, but you guys should think about how you want to handle that in a way that is best for you. And that, again, I think keeps open the idea that the relationship between us as people is something that is bigger and more important than the relationship between your government and my government or what my government is trying to do to everybody else.

APPLAUSE

Mark Carney and Canada’s Role on the World Stage

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Final Canada question from the audience, which is looking at the higher, more diplomatic level. How are you assessing post-Mark Carney’s Davos speech, which I will say for many of us was the first time we’ve ever been texted by people abroad about a Canadian Prime Minister’s speech. It was amazing.

RACHEL MADDOW: It was electrifying in the United States, I have to say.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Which is fantastic because you do know decades ago, the New Republic ran a competition, most boring headline ever. Do you know what won?

RACHEL MADDOW: What?

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: “Worthwhile Canadian Initiative.”

RACHEL MADDOW: Just kidding. Not anymore. So how do you rate Carney’s chances, his worthwhile Canadian initiative? It has chances in terms of effectuating the sort of thing that he was talking about?

I mean, the field is cleared in terms of intellectual competition. I mean, if this is a debate, such as it were, you do have a man in a suit writing beautiful sentences in paragraphs that have structures and points and thought behind them against the whole Cheerios rash. I mean, yeah. What he described as the rupture, I mean, what’s there is a vacuum.

And again, I am committed, because I must be. I am committed to the idea that what is going on in the United States right now has an end, and this is not what we are going to be from here on out. But it is going to take some stuff to get us there. We are going to go through a really hard period in my country, and I don’t know how long it’s going to last. And I don’t know what happens in the short or the medium term.

I have faith in what happens in the long term. But in the meantime, the United Nations exists and lots of competent other countries around the world exist and NATO theoretically still exists, and these alliances and these trade arranged trading organizations, and these interlaced economic mutual contingencies, like smart, responsible people need to take up that space. And the fact that he can both articulate it and do it at the same time is really nice.

I’m not telling you who to vote for. I’m not taking a position in Canadian politics, but in terms of Canada’s role on the world stage, I mean it. You’ve never been more important and you are not going back. The way that Canada is stepping into the breach here will put Canada in an international position for the indefinite future that is a bigger deal than you’ve been in the last century. And we need it, the world needs it. And so we’re grateful that you guys have your sh together.

Did you guys scoff at me? When I said, was there scoffing? If you were scoffing, I don’t mind hearing it. No, okay. I love you too. I didn’t know if I had just like stepped in it on some Canadian history thing. Okay.

What Gives You Hope?

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Rachel, this is the last question from the audience. It’s a positive and beautiful question. What gives you hope in these times?

RACHEL MADDOW: Fishing gives me hope. Fishing never changes. I’m not getting any better. I did buy a snowmobile for the first time this year, which means that I am hopeful that we’ll still have winter in years ahead.

I am hopeful, and this goes back to my initial comments, there’s nothing about American political leadership on any part of the American political spectrum that makes me hopeful. I am hopeful because the people of the United States, as measured in public opinion polling, but also as measured in protests and in creative defiant action, have shown themselves to be ungovernable by a despot, have proven themselves to be indigestible for this golem that would swallow us. And that to me is something that inspires me at a human level, but it also makes me more hopeful about our politicians and about our eventual political solution to this problem, because we will save our democracy through democratic means. We will have to use the tools of democracy to save our democracy. It’s the only way you can do it.

And I am hopeful that the people showing such sharp and creative and no-nonsense leadership will lead the politicians to the right way to oppose him. And in this very inchoate moment for the Democratic Party, with a lot of different swirling, boring things going on inside Democratic Party politics, the one sort of true north that is emerging in my country that Democratic politicians can absolutely line up beneath is the people’s defiance of this, instinctual defiance of it. And I did not know that that would happen.

But watch on March 28th. On March 28th, watch that next No Kings protest. It’s going to be probably the largest protest in American history, and it is going to be nonviolent, and it is going to be everywhere, and every Democratic politician in the country, and some of the Republicans are going to figure that out, and they’re going to get behind it, and they’re going to let the people lead them to a political response to this that is going to be eventually the way out.

Closing Remarks

RACHEL MADDOW: Thank you.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Let me extend my tremendous thanks as well to the Lind family on behalf of UBC. We thank you for your generosity in making this series possible and helping us bring Rachel here tonight. Thank you to all of you for being here for your wonderful questions, for really being part of the conversation. You shaped what we could talk about. And we hope to see many of you back here on March 26th. It’s the final event of the season with Carlos Lozada. And finally, last but not least, Rachel, thank you so much. Thank you for coming to us with grace, humor, and wit. Thank you very much.