The Rachel Maddow Show

Rewriting events from the recent past requires a different kind of audacity and ambition.

At issue are events most Americans saw and remember. These aren't subjects of debate for historical symposiums or obscure developments that an average person might have a superficial understanding of.

Rather, at issue are events from the last few years that people lived through and experienced firsthand.

Republicans have nevertheless taken on the bold challenge of convincing people that their eyes have deceived them, their memories are wrong, independent sources of information are not to be trusted, and partisan changes to the recent past deserve to be embraced without question.

The stakes couldn't be much higher. The foundation of democracy rests in large part on a shared understanding of current events. When that understanding is deliberately corrupted by brazen partisans, the consequences can be dire.

We are in a truly frightening moment. Election deniers are laying the tracks to set aside the 2024 election. And the Supreme Court has, for the first time in history, reversed precedent in order to take away freedom rather than expand it.

I don't believe women sleep through revengeous backsliding any easier than they sleep through colic. We hear things. We see things. We are awake.

Midnight in Washington has just come out in paperback.

The Storyteller is a novel about the Holocaust. It chronicles the growth of anti-Semitism and fascism in Nazi Germany.

It was a strange irony that a parent wanted this particular book removed because it felt a bit like history repeating itself.

When Bill Barr came in basically to try to protect Trump at the U.S. Justice Department, did that effectively set in motion the chain of events and the timeline that led to this indictment today?

It did. It's partly this crazy theory that sitting presidents cannot be indicted.

The insidious power of a Pegasus infection was that it was completely invisible to the victim. You'd have no way to know the baddies were reading your texts and emails and listening in on your calls and even your in-person meetings until they used their ability to track your exact location to send the men with guns to meet you.

For the Pegasus project to succeed in exposing the scale of the scandal, the journalists knew they would need to be able to diagnose an infection or an attempted infection on an individual phone.

Claudio and Danca figured out how to do it. Working quite literally alone, these two took on a multibillion-dollar corporation that employed 550 well-paid cyber specialists, many with the highest levels of military cyber warfare training.

To best that Goliath, these two Davids had to fashion their own slingshot. They had to invent the methods and tools of their forensics on the fly.

That they succeeded in that is as improbable as it is important, for all of our sakes.

If you want to learn more about any of this stuff, I highly commend to you a couple of really good, fairly recent books that tell the whole story.

A book by Laura Rosenzweig called Hollywood's Spies, and another book by Stephen J. Ross that's called Hitler in Los Angeles.

Both of these books are great, very highly recommended by me even if you don't usually read that kind of history.

And I went back to Andrew Weissman's book today, where he has an entire chapter on just this, to read about that decision and just how disappointed Andrew Weissman was that they did not go for a subpoena, that Robert Mueller decided not to.

And Andrew Weissman's argument, which I believe he will make again at 10 p.m. tonight on my show--his argument was, we must do this at minimum for history and for any future prosecutors who are in this position in relationship to a president of the United States.

The President cannot retroactively declassify something from when he was president.

If the argument is, well, I declassified these while I was president and I just didn't tell anyone, that does not hold up.

Plus when that happens, those documents no longer have those huge markings on them. Those are crossed out and there's a declassification stamp put on the actual document so that there will be no confusion about it whatsoever.

It states when it was declassified so that it can be seen publicly.

It's not just the president waving a magic wand when he feels like it and suddenly secrets aren't secrets anymore. It doesn't work that way.

And you know, another thing that happened today was they released the title and the cover of this book that's going to be coming out on November 15th.

And the publisher apparently is counting on him to actually talk about January 6th, yet he himself has not.

When people object to the book and try to ban the book, they're kind of caught because there's no explicit sex or violence. And so they take out of context small things that they think they might find objectionable.

on July 21st, 2024, when Joe Biden announced that he was dropping out of the presidential race and endorsing Kamala Harris, the dream of seeing a woman in the office was suddenly back within reach.

it wouldn't be me, but it could be Kamala. History beckoned, but a whole lot of bigotry, fear and disinformation, not to mention the Electoral College, stood in the way.

I'm going to need your help.

we'll do whatever you need.

I don't want to sugarcoat what we're up against, especially at a moment when all of us need to be ready to fight back, not just for Kamala but for our better selves and an optimistic, generous vision of our future.

In historian Tim Snyder's essential little handbook On Tyranny, 20 Lessons from the 20th Century, lesson number five of the 20 is this.

When political leaders set a negative example, professional commitments to just practice become more important.

It's hard to subvert a rule of law state without lawyers or to hold show trials without judges.

I worry that we speak of freedom without considering what it is.

Americans often have in mind the absence of something, occupation, oppression or even government.

Freedom from is a conceptual trap. It's also a political trap in that it involves self-deception. It contains no program for its own realization. It offers opportunities to tyrants.

Freedom is positive. It is about holding virtues in mind and having some power to realize them.