100 Days of Rachel Maddow
Cheerleader for the resistance
For the past 100 days, the Rachel Maddow show has been appointment television in our house. We even had the robot record her show for any time we couldn’t make it home in time.
Many great voices have emerged since January, and I could doomscroll my brain into oblivion, but Maddow’s take on Trump 2 — and particularly the opposition to Trump 2 — has been my touchstone.
Maddow has opened many shows with multiple videos of protests all around the country. If you were ever on the fence about what to do, she sent you marching. Maddow showed people “clapping out” US-AID employees who were leaving their offices with boxes, parks employees raising an upside-down American flag on El Capitan in Yosemite, Tesla Takedowns, empty-chair town halls and the throngs that came out on April 5 and Aptil 19. And lately, she’s emphasized the rapid-response protests in towns where people have been disappeared by ICE, crediting the friends and neighbors of Mohsen Mahdawi for his release yesterday.
While soberly reporting on the administration’s trampling of the Constitution, Maddow has also gleefully shown their incompetence and even more gleefully pointed out how they’ve reversed themselves on policies after widespread public backlash — like the closing of Social Security field offices.
While Maddow will continue to show up on Mondays, last night marked the end of her five-night-a-week commitment. Nine o’clock won’t be same. I hope that, without her cheerleading, I can still summon the stamina to fight for the next 1359 days.
I listened to the entire podcast "Ultra". It's outstanding but also exhausting, since it shows how everything Joe McCarthy did is so closely mimicked by this admin. I will miss watching Rachel every night. I like Alex Wagner. She does a good job. But Rachel is something altogether different. Who here remembers listening to Rachel with Lizz Winstead and Chuck D of Public Enemy waaay back in the first days of Air America? It was heavenly. Jeanine Garafalo guesting with Marc Maron, portraying the spacey Supreme Court Justice of Florida, who pushed GWB over the finish line when the Brooks Brothers Riot stopped the recount. Al Franken had a show and it was great. Sam Cedar and Garafolo had a show too. It helped me survive. I actually woke up 40 minutes earlier than I needed to just to listen to Marc Maron every morning. So, yeah. I agree with you about Rachel Maddow. As we sink under this abject, pustulent evisceration of our Democracy, Rachel was a piece of driftwood we could cling to every night. And for that one hour, we could imagine a world where Democracy might not fall down the townhouse stairs and end up buried next to Ivana.
Yes!