thank you for joining us live at a town hall in new york city for this very, very special addition of why is this happening. he is incisive, he is big hearted, he is very, very, 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. [applause] well, thank you! hey! oh, stop! stop it! [applause] how are you? good! making. thank you, thank you, thank you. thank you, sit down, sit down. thank you. that s extremely kind. i hate attention and positive feedback. [laughter] that was a really, really hard to 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. so, tonight, we re gonna talk about democracy. and that we re in, we ve probably talked more about democracy in the last, you know, for five years than i had in all of my time as a journalist before that, i would say. like, even that is a topic seems a littl
that is tonight s hello, new york. thank you for joining us at townhall for this very special edition of why is this happening. he is talk, he is smart, please give a warm welcome to my colleague, msnbc s chris hayes. thank you. hey, oh, stop. how are you? good. thank you. thank you. sit down, sit down. thank you. that is extremely kind. i hate attention and positive feedback. that was a really hard 20 seconds for me, so thank you. it is amazing to be here in my hometown of new york city. i ve got some family here. so, tonight we are going to talk about democracy, and that word, we have probably talk more about democracy in the last four or five years that and all of my time as a journalist before that. even that as a topic seems a little weird. america is the democracy and there is a certain kind of history your talk that is a certain part of american civic culture, deeply, almost kind of civic religion which roughly goes to the following. the founders rebelled against t
fascists. and he s using this terminology which is overtly and obviously fascist callback language. things like the enemy of the people, yes, okay. 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 thin heard, oh, fascist, no, you re the fascist. 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 that. it s to rob those words of his function. there are a people in your book who want be the next american hitler. yes. and don t have it in them and i don t mean morally, i just
he went to, i really don t think that we i think we need to kind of, like, reverse the order of that bio. in the two sentences. because it s like, this guy was wildly dangerous and bad, and aligned with the worst voices basically in the united states. and i knew about voids antisemitism, i think, as if it were a private vice. now, he was a different thing. it was one of the things he contributed to this world. you want me to read that part? i would like to be that price. do you guys mind if i read that? [applause] [applause] their experts replaced my windshield and recalibrated my car s advanced safety system. acoustic rock music woman: safelite is the one i trust. they focus on safety so i can focus on this view. singers: safelite repair, safelite replace.
louisiana under huey long. why bother voting. yes. we all agree. yes. 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 this 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 long. so you didn t have a choice in the party. this is a dictatorship you actually didn t have free will. therefore, yes, you took the bribes that you were kicking them up to him. it was that he was a dictator and that s why native fascists love the idea of long. and that s confusing if you look at authoritarianism as a conservative versus liberal thing. because lots of things about long kind of look liberal.