Rachel Maddow on What Her New Podcast Has to Do With Trump

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It’s a jarring moment of optimism in a conversation that focuses on a dark period in American history that isn’t so far in the past. As one of progressive media’s most influential voices and the greatest talent on the bench of MSNBC’s rebranded, now known as MS Now, Rachel Maddow sums up her latest project for me today—which focuses on the U.S. internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, she weathers predictable disappointments with the same freedom with which she sat on the stage at former Vice President Dick Cheney’s funeral last month.

“Doing the right thing doesn’t always pay off in the short term, but ultimately your country will get it right,” she tells TIME. “Good people will be rewarded and bad people will be punished or forgotten. Having faith in these kinds of moral outcomes is a really good guiding light in such dark times.”

And this time, for students of the race-motivated oppression of the 1940s, feels all too familiar, especially with Maddo’s podcast-as-a-history-lesson, burn orderGovernment surrounded by paranoia, There is a growing suspicion that one group in particular is to blame for the domestic anger spreading across wider society, Temporary detention facilities in remote locations are meant to avoid scrutiny, A person like Rasputin is working in the background without any accountability, And it seems the public is intent on looking the other way,

It’s impossible not to draw comparisons to what the government is doing today with immigrants suspected of crime. Maddow’s reporting includes details of a shocking government memo, a copy of which was discovered in 1982, despite orders to destroy every last copy of it by fire. As burn order explains, it provides a blueprint that explains how things went very, very wrong.

“When you understand that this isn’t the first time it’s happened, you want to learn about the second time it’s happened to see if it can inform the way you should respond,” Maddow says.

TIME spoke with Madow by phone from his home in western Massachusetts last week about his latest project, the MSNBC reboot, and how history can inform — but not save — resistance.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

TIME: When did you know you wanted to tackle Japanese internment as a podcast project? Is this a product of Trump 2.0?

Maddow: This story was burning a hole in my pocket for a few years. When we saw people being snatched off the streets and prison camps being hastily built in deliberately remote areas across the country. Its resonance made it over the top for us. Felt like it was time to do it.

This history certainly seems predictable. john devittThe four-star general overseeing the detention program in particular appears to be a harbinger of some of America’s worst errors, paranoia, sins. What similarities did you see in it?

Sometimes when the country does terrible things, when the government does really terrible things, it feels like we could never do this before. This is definitely not true. These things don’t happen on their own. They are not on autopilot. There is nothing inevitable about them. Individual people – the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time – are responsible for such terrible policy outcomes. And so it’s really worth being specific about who’s actually causing it, who’s driving it, who could potentially be targeted, or focused on, in terms of trying to stop or change it.

Heroes are less famous than villains. In this case, I actually think the villains aren’t known at all. I mean, I’m not sure anyone knows who Carl Bendtsen is. You may have heard of Fred Korematsu. You may also have heard of Mitsuye Ando. I’m not sure 99% of people are familiar with the actual historical truth of how this happened.

ken ringel When you look like a familiar profile sat He was also accompanied by John Dean, Daniel Ellsworth, Eugene Vindman. But Ringle’s fate also sounds tragically familiar. His report He arrived at the White House two days too late, saying that Japanese Americans posed no security threat. Moving on to the present, why shouldn’t people like him just give up today?

I think what we’ve learned from the worst things our government has done, from the worst things our country has done, is that there is no single hope that can solve these problems. After all, it’s unpredictable what will be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. It is not necessary that these heroes receive their rewards during their lifetime. This happens later. One of the heroes of this story is Ken Ringle. His heroic efforts in this regard provide no benefit to his Naval career, but history and his own family will tell you that the heroism of what he did, and the truth of what he did, is something that will be his lasting multi-generational legacy.

Another hero is Ralph Carr, who was the governor of Colorado, who had a huge presence and then an ideological bet he made really destroyed his political career. But right now, all over Colorado, there are statues of Ralph Carr and plaques and highways and buildings named after him. This may have been cold comfort to Ralph Carr at the moment he lost his election in 1942. But in the long run, he is at the forefront in terms of what we think of as American heroism among elected officials.

The same is true of the young Japanese Americans who challenged this thing. Hirabayashi, Korematsu and Yasui, they all lost their cases and went to jail. Then all of them also received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Doing the right thing doesn’t always pay off in the short term, but eventually your country will get it right. Good people will be rewarded and bad people will be punished or forgotten. Having faith in these kinds of ethical outcomes is a really good guiding light in such dark times.

Staying in the dark for a minute seems like we will do what is against our self-interest again and again. Ringle was a cultural anthropologist without a title, and he was warning that Japanese-Americans were not a threat, but an asset to American interests. We chose the expediency of labeling the entire population as other. Is this a uniquely American specialty?

I don’t think it’s uniquely American. James Rowe, (FDR’s Assistant to the Attorney General) says at one point in this oral history interview that this is something we do over and over again. It is in our blood and every time we do it, we feel ashamed of ourselves for it. That observation of his decades ago is something that has stuck with me. I don’t think this is particularly American, but I also think it’s fair to be really specific about how this decision was made. In this case, there was a Stephen Miller-type person who was not the person in charge, who was an employee of the person in charge.

He was considered a security guard.

John (DeWitt) was really smart and had his own ideas about what should happen. Bendtsen had to clean things up in this dirty, important office he was assigned to, but he got in there and laid the groundwork for what he did. And it was completely race based and – contrary to all evidence to the contrary – that it was a military requirement. Sometimes you can find a person – a capable, smart, and I think distorted person – with his hands on the levers of government in a place who can force an entire country to do something they will be embarrassed about for decades.

The country does not go mad suddenly. One man leads us in a bad direction, and then we all pay the price. And we need to know how the people who fixed this, exposed this, and stopped this policy and ultimately apologized to the country for it, did their job because Americans need to do that job somewhere around what we are doing now.

Your previous projects have raised warnings about how bad actors can do bad things, or at least give us really bad consequences. Why didn’t the Democrats read the history books to explain this to voters?

They have a little bit. Governor (JB) Pritzker in Illinois has given a few speeches this year in which he has been very outspoken about seeing the historical parallels with the way President Trump is governing the country. People like Congressman Jamie Raskin have expressed some of these historical parallels. It’s helpful, but I don’t know how effective history is as a political tool. You hear some Democrats talking like this. In some cases it is unavoidable. We are actually building massive prison camps, essentially black boxes, non-constitutional detention centers. We’ve done that before in this country and we should build those relationships.

Where does a progressive voice like yours fit in this moment? I mean, we certainly have a much freer media environment to tell these stories than we did in 1930s Europe or 1940s America or even in Western capitals at the height of the Cold War. How does your platform fit into such moments historically?

I’m so glad MS Now exists. I’m very happy to be working there, especially as we are seeing many of the real hallmarks of state capture of the media that we have seen in other authoritarian takeovers in other countries. (Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor) Orban would be embarrassed to hear that some of the media companies in this country are trying to please Trump and ultimately hand over ownership of the media to oligarchs who are happy to serve the regime. It’s like Hungary on meth.

But at the same time, our First Amendment survives. Our freedom of the press in particular life. And we plan to use it. It’s an honor and exciting to be in a place where we can really cover what we want, the way we want, without any fear or favor.

There is almost a consensus among actual working journalists in this country that we cannot become a country where there is only state TV. What it takes to do this is stand out and become a successful, resonant, raunchy, aggressive, non-state TV competitor. And MS Now has that in spades.

How has your thinking about your specific role in the media environment changed since Trump 1.0? Has it changed?

I was raising a lot of warning flags in Trump 1.0 about what could happen and how we should look at the risks of the kind of government Trump was trying to impose.

Now, we are there. There is no use in warning now. We have masked, completely unaccountable secret police who are kicking women out of daycare and creating prison camps everywhere. In less than a year, the President has lined his and his family’s pockets with billions of dollars. They have literally destroyed the White House. We are no longer at the point where we need warnings about what is to come. We are now at a point where we need to understand what is going on, know what our options are in terms of preserving our democracy, to make sure that we are not going to be the generation that lost the republic.