Rachel Maddow wasn’t sure if she was awake.
“I’ve only seen this many librarians in my dreams!” she exclaimed. “The fact that there are 3,000 of you in the room really does feel like I’m dead!”
The award-winning host of The Rachel Maddow Show on MSNOW and creator of the narrative podcast series Burn Order took the stage as Opening General Session speaker at the American Library Association’s (ALA) 2026 Annual Conference and Exhibition in Chicago on June 26. In a half-hour conversation with ALA President Sam Helmick, she discussed her forthcoming book, her “crush” on librarians and archivists, and her hopes for the resiliency of our public institutions.
Maddow said that writing her latest title, Department of Fate (Penguin Random House, November), an examination of how the US Department of Justice has been compromised and corrupted throughout history, got her thinking about what it takes for democracy to survive.
“[We’re] in the midst of what I think is a constitutional overthrow of our republic,” Maddow said. “You cannot make rational decisions in your own self-interest about what’s the right democratic choice for you if you don’t know what’s real…. When you lose access to knowledge, you can’t make decisions as a citizen or voter.”
Stemming the tide of authoritarianism won’t be easy, Maddow admitted, but there are a few things that give her hope.
“We have an incredible set of moral cornerstones that we have to build on in this country,” she said, citing the Reconstruction period and civil rights movement as examples. “I believe that inheritance is nourishment for us now. We have a lot of stories to remember and learn from.”
Some of that inheritance is discussed in Department of Fate and Burn Order, a look at Japanese American incarceration during World War II. Both projects came together with help from “the weirdest libraries and archives you could imagine,” Maddow said. She credited librarians with helping her access physical materials, such as private papers of white supremacists, to support her research.
“We found [items] thanks to archivists and librarians being so much smarter than everyone else,” she said.
Maddow also noted that libraries, in their function as third spaces and community connectors, have a big role to play in unraveling fascism.
“You provide an eye-contact environment,” Maddow said. “That is one of the best antidotes that I can imagine for short-circuiting some of those processes authoritarians need.” She said she regularly encourages people to “join something”—whether it’s a go-kart club, recipe swap, or book club—as a means to meet and humanize others.
Her parting advice for keeping libraries funded and the constituency educated?
“You can’t win if you don’t play. And that is true about fighting for the values of our country and institutions,” Maddow said. “You will not win every fight, but you will lose every fight you do not wage.”
