On Monday night’s broadcast of MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show, Maddow declared in a twelve-minute-long rant, “We do now live in a country that has an authoritarian leader in charge. We have a consolidating dictatorship in our country,” and later warned of masked secret police “breaking people’s car windows and snatching people off the streets … taking them away with no charges, no notice, no paperwork.”
She urged her viewers to imagine a dystopian dictatorship:
“Secret police … act in ways designed to instill maximum fear,” she began her fantasy, adding that conservatives were “scapegoating immigrants as an internal enemy,” and fantasizing about feeding them to alligators. She cannot imagine that Trump aims to discourage illegal immigration, suggesting it would not be successful. But Maddow stoked fear, encouraged action, and presented a baseless narrative which targets conservatives as a perceived enemy.
Maddow insisted that, in this new fantasized dictatorship, the “media must be intimidated into saying and doing what the leader wants … or they must be shut down,” to enforce what she called the “new truth.” She did not elaborate on what the “new truth” was, but she was surely nodding to the recent NPR and PBS funding cuts.
If Maddow was referring to NPR and PBS losing their federal funding, they weren’t “shut down” for going against what the “leader” wanted. They lost their taxpayer funds because they were incredibly biased – pushing liberal agendas on hard‑working conservatives’ dimes. The push to cut federal funding for PBS and NPR existed long before President Trump and has been a conservative policy push for multiple decades.
The irony in Maddow’s rant is that for years, liberals have dominated the culture, even to the point of ending careers and ruining reputations of those who publicly align themselves with conservative beliefs.
Or, in some cases, even seek out information on whether a person is conservative to vilify them. Actress Sydney Sweeney was recently doxxed by Reddit users who dug up her voting registration information and found that she was a registered Republican. In light of her recent ad for American Eagle jeans, this was enough for left-wingers to attempt to sacrifice her on the altar of woke-ism.
This double standard reveals a deeper hypocrisy: Democrats lavishly denounce Trump for imagined authoritarianism, yet spearhead a de facto cultural enforcement mechanism that vilifies mainstream conservative expression.
The irony does not stop there, however. Maddow called for her viewers to take action against this alleged dictatorship (click “expand”):
We are not heading toward something like this. We are there. It is here. It is the environment in which we are now living. And so, given that you now live in a country with an authoritarian leader, the question is what can you do for your country? The question is no longer how to prepare for this risk or how to try to avert it, but rather how to fight it now that it is here and in effect.
That call to action was as dangerous as it was absurd. In 2017, an avid watcher of The Rachel Maddow Show was so proselytized by the host’s never-ending political fearmongering, that he opened fire on a Republican congressional baseball practice. The man had a long history of praising Maddow’s show online, even calling it “one of his favorite TV shows.” Maddow acknowledged his viewership, but denied that it was a politically motivated shooting that targeted Republican lawmakers.
Shows like Maddow’s, which serve only to stoke the flames of unrest and fear, have not done her viewers the justice of impartial reporting. At best, her monologue incited public anxiety over an imagined dictatorship that does not exist. At worst, it encouraged violence. Both of which have been proven outcomes of the type of rhetoric Maddow spews
The entire transcript is below, click "expand" to read.
MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show
August 4, 2025
9:16:05 PM ET(...)
RACHEL MADDOW: Life has not stopped and none of our personal lives have stopped. But also at the same time, life in the United States is profoundly changing. It's profoundly different than it was even six months ago, because we do now live in a country that has an authoritarian leader in charge. We have a consolidating dictatorship in our country. And it sounds melodramatic to say it, I know, but just go with that for a minute, right?
Think– think in melodramatic terms. Think in cinematic terms. Imagine the cartoon level caricature of what you think a dictatorship looks like. I mean, it's secret police, right? A massive anonymous unbadged, literally masked, totally unaccountable internal police force that apparently has infinite funding but no identifiable leadership. And they act in ways designed to instill maximum fear and use maximum force.
I mean, when you imagine an authoritarian country, right, what you imagine is masked secret police breaking people's car windows and snatching people off the streets and out of church parking lots and courtroom hallways and taking them away with no charges, no notice, no paperwork, no explanation, not letting them see lawyers, and then moving them secretly to what are effectively black site prisons where they won't tell you who's there and where no one is allowed in to see what's going on. Right?
In that kind of a cartoon caricature of an authoritarian country, the one you might have imagined in melodramatic, in cinematic terms ever before we got here. You would expect, right, that you'd have a scapegoated minority group blamed for all things, in our case, immigrants. Right? And the new extraordinary powers and shows of force by the secret police, among other things, all these extraordinary powers and shows of force will be framed as necessary to stop this terrible internal enemy right. Frame everything as immigration enforcement, because for immigration enforcement, not only is all force justified, but maximum force is preferred.
And they're trying to make it into a national entertainment to threaten to feed immigrants to alligators in south Florida.
(...)
9:18:54 PM ET
MADDOW: In a cartoon caricature of an authoritarian country. Displays of military might are not just for the country's external enemies. They're for the country's own people. Right? Because in an authoritarian country, you turn military force inward toward the people of that country. And so, now we've got these large and expanding military zones in multiple states where they have extended the legal boundaries of nearby military bases to include hundreds and hundreds of miles of nearby land so they can give active duty us troops the power to arrest and search people on us soil. They are now doing that over hundreds of miles of territory in multiple states.
(…)
9:21:06 PM ET
MADDOW: Media must be intimidated into saying and doing what the leader wants, or they must be shut down, or both. Universities must be intimidated into saying and doing what the leader wants, or they must be shut down, or both. Law firms must be intimidated into not opposing him and saying and doing what he wants, or they must be shut down. And for an– institutions like that, it's not just the boldest or most strident critics of the president who must be shut down. It's the most mainstream, right? It's the most prestigious, the most credible, because that's what's so dangerous about them. There can't be any source of authority. There can't be any source of authoritative statements of fact that compete with what the leader insists must be the new truth.
(...)
9:22:32 PM ET
MADDOW: And anybody who points out that Russia tried to help him win the one before that should be criminally charged for saying that, even though it's true.
We are not heading toward something like this. We are there. It is here. It is the environment in which we are now living. And so, given that you now live in a country with an authoritarian leader, the question is what can you do for your country? The question is no longer how to prepare for this risk or how to try to avert it, but rather how to fight it now that it is here and in effect.
And you know we're awake now, it's clear we're all living here. It's very obvious that this is not going to get better on its own. This is not going to fix itself. An authoritarian just seeks more and more and more power throughout– not just politics– but through all of society, systematically trying to eliminate any effective means of opposing him. This is a one way ratchet if we leave it up to him. But that at least does give us some clarity for Americans who don't– do not want to leave it up to him, right? We're beyond waiting and seeing. Now it is clear what is going on.
It is clear now that the small-D democratic tools that we've got right now as a country, these are as good as it is going to get. We are never going to have more resources to fight for our country than we do right now.
(…)
