Just in time for her sold-out appearance at the Boulder Theatre tonight, Rachel Maddow is the featured guest on this week’s episode of the popular “Smartless” podcast.
On it, Maddow explains to celebrity hosts Jason Bateman, Will Arnett and Sean Hayes how she transitioned from activist rabble-rouser for causes such as prison liberties and AIDS awareness into a kind of progressive Will Rogers – a national figure millions turn to for help in interpreting unfolding world events.
“With what I’m doing now, I feel like hopefully by creating more understanding, by making what’s important about the news and current events really plain to people, it makes it possible for people to make their own decisions about either just participating or doing (their own) activism.” said Maddow, who has a doctorate in political science from Oxford University.
Maddow, host of the Emmy Award–winning “The Rachel Maddow Show” on MSNBC, and the New York Times bestselling author of “Drift” and “Blowout,” is in Colorado to talk about her new book “Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism.”
In it, Maddow charts what she calls “the rise of a wild American strain of authoritarianism that has been alive on the far-right edge of our politics for the better part of a century.”
Rachel Maddow.
As we navigate through our own disquieting times, she continues, “‘Prequel’ offers a roadmap from U.S. history, marked both with heroics to emulate and traps and pitfalls to avoid.”
She also reminds us of some uncomfortable truths about our own history – like that, in the not so-distant past, now long-fallen American heroes Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh were both leaders in the U.S. pro-fascist movement.