hanna means the named storms are already up to the letter "h." this is the earliest that has ever happened during hurricane season. we are obviously wishing the folks on the texas coast the very best as we head into this weekend. that is our broadcast for this friday night and for this week. thank you so very much for spending some of your time with us here. have a good and safe weekend if you can. on behalf of all of my colleagues at the networks of nbc news, good night. happy to have you here on a friday night. it is friday for sure. i triple checked. that's good. the headlines, however, still not good about which i am sorry. this, for example, was a hard one to wake up to today. at "the washington post," their main headline today, u.s. passes 4 million coronavirus cases as pace of new infections roughly

doubles. that is terrible, and that's where we are. in politics news, the major headline today, what will actually, i think, go down in the books in terms of presidential politics history is the fact that the president last night did just abruptly announce the cancellation of the republican national convention next month to renominate him to run for a second term. one day after that surprise announcement from the president, we're about 24 hours after that announcement now, it's still unclear as to whether there will be anything that looks like a republican convention at all next month. i mean in american presidential campaign history, there have been good conventions. there have been bad conventions and boring ones and scary ones. in modern times, though, there's never been one they just couldn't get it together to actually do, and it seems like that is a real risk here. we'll see what they pull off,

but the republicans and the white house being in denial about the coronavirus, first in north carolina where they initially canceled, then in florida where they tried to move it to before they had to cancel there as well -- i mean that's just a historic thing, and their misconceptions about the coronavirus don't seem to be getting any more realistic. and so, you know, we've got this chaos of them making all these rash, last-minute decisions, which is their own fault, and we don't know how it's going to resolve. i mean other people could see that there was a problem with the jacksonville, florida, plan. a poll of florida voters just out yesterday showed that 62% of florida voters thought that holding the republican convention in jacksonville would be unsafe. yeah, duh. everybody could see this except apparently the white house and the republican party until they smacked into that reality a month before this thing is supposed to go live. florida just hit a new daily death record for the virus. florida test results, which is a

key metric -- yflorida test results have been over 10% positive solidly for more than a month now. for several days this week, they were considerably over 10%. in jacksonville specifically, the city where the rnc was going to be held until yesterday when they canceled it, teachers in jacksonville are now listing that city's republican mayor as their personal health care proxy on their living wills as a way of trying to get his attention for how much they do not want to be forced back into in-person classroom instruction next month while florida's epidemic is still raging out of control, while, you know, icus are at 130% capacity in the state's most populous county. but i mean the republicans' decision here, the white house sudden decision to cancel the republican convention, it does put a fine point on this as a matter of policy, right? i mean how can it not be safe

enough to host the republican convention in florida right now, but florida's republican governor meanwhile says it is safe to force open every single school in the state, which is his current position? i mean this was actually the lede at the politico playbook today. quote, all caps, wait a second. how can the white house push schools across the country to open, vowing that it's safe to gather while at the same time they're canceling the republican convention in jacksonville, florida, saying it's not safe to gather? right. like i said, putting a fine point on this as a matter of policy. but both florida and the great state of tennessee have just hit record daily death rates. the u.s. death rate overall is up over 1,100 deaths a day now steadily this week. it hasn't been that high in months. a whole bunch of states had a record number of new infections reported in the past 24 hours. alabama had a new record again. they have been setting new records all week.

also hawaii. also indiana. also missouri. also new mexico. meanwhile, policy decisions that we made as a country, we made federally to try to mitigate what we thought would be a short-term crisis here, those mitigating policies, those policies designed to ease the burden on americans while we went through what we hoped was a short-term crisis, those policies are now coming to an end with the crisis not being over at all, with the crisis being bigger than ever, 4 million cases and the pace of new infections doubling in less than a month. the federal ban on evictions expires tonight. that puts 12 million americans who rent their homes at risk of being thrown out by their landlords as of midnight tonight. the federal boost to unemployment benefits, that is effectively ending right now too. legally it expires at the end of next week, but with congress not having acted about i now to extend it -- and they haven't. they've now gone home. the way the timing works for

unemployment eligibility, their failure to act already in congress this week means that effectively many americans have now received their last check of these boosted benefits. and, you know, these things were supposed to be temporary. these things wouldn't have had to be extended again had we been past this by now, had we beat down the epidemic, had we controlled the virus the way basically all of our allies around the world have handily done. i mean the graph showing u.s. cases versus cases in the european union over time, look at us and look at them. i mean it's still the best diagram we've got of what it means to have leadership or not, what it means to have real governance or not. those are our peer countries as economies, as democracies, as allies of ours, and as countries that got hit at basically the same time and at the same initial rate that we did. look how closely our initial curve tracks with theirs. well, the difference is that

they responded the way public health experts the world over say that you need to respond to something like this. we instead decided to just pull all the drawers out in the kitchen, turn them upside down over our heads and rain all the cutlery down on our selves while screaming at each other. i mean the reason we still need to extend what was supposed to be temporary economic help, the reason we can't open everything from schools to elective surgeries to beaches to bars and all the rest of it back up is because we can't fix the economic damage of the pandemic without fixing the pandemic, without having less people infected all the time and getting sick and dying, without getting our curve down so that this thing is manageable and we can find hot spots when they arise, find people through testing with timely turnaround times, with good contact tracing. we can identify outbreaks and

squash them by isolating the people who have been exposed. we're so beyond being anywhere near that in this country simply because our pandemic is out of control. and as long as it's out of control, we can't open anything back up. and, yeah, people still need economic help. dr. deborah birx, who is apparently one of the only trained public health people involved in the white house's daily work and decision-making on this crisis -- dr. deborah birx told the "today" show on nbc today that after the country looked on in horror at new york's catastrophe in april, you know, with 25,000 new yorkers dying in a matter of weeks, now she says with new infections nationwide doubling in less than a month, with hospitalization numbers nationwide and death numbers nationwide back up where they were in the worst of it in april, i mean now she says as of today, that the other biggest states in the country -- florida, california, texas -- now dr. birx says their epidemics are all so bad, we

should see all of them as simultaneous analogs to new york at its worst. >> i just want to make it clear to the american public what we have right now are essentially three new yorks with these three major states. and so we're really having to respond as an american people. >> these three major states, florida, california, and texas. today over 150 prominent u.s. medical experts, including zeke emanuel, who you know from here at msnbc, they all signed on to this letter. and i know there's open letters and there's criticism of the government and stuff, and these things kind of come and go. this is actually very simple, very confrontational, right to the point, and worth paying attention to because this is kind of the simple truth right now, at least as i see it. you see their headline, shut it down, start over, do it right. it says this. quote, dear decision makers. hit the reset button. of all the nations in the world,

we have had the most deaths from covid-19. at the same time, we're in the midst of reopening our economy, exposing more and more people to coronavirus and watching numbers of cases and deaths skyrocket. in march, americans went home and stayed there for weeks to keep themselves and their neighbors safe. you decision makers did not use that time to set us up to defeat the virus, and then you started to reopen anyway and too quickly. right now we're on a path to lose more than 200,000 american lives by november 1st. yet in many states, people can drink in bars, get a haircut, eat inside a restaurant, get a tattoo, get a massage, and doo myriad other normal pleasant but nonessential activities. let's get our priorities straight. reopening before suppressing the virus isn't going to help the economy. economists have gone on record saying that the only way to restore the economy is to address the pandemic itself, pointing out that until we find a way to boost testing and develop and distribute a vaccine, open or not, people will not be in the mood to

participate. so shut it down now and start over. nonessential businesses should be closed. restaurant service should be limited to takeout. people should stay home, going out only to get food and medicine or to exercise and get fresh air. masks should be mandatory in all situations, indoors and outdoors where we interact with others. and, yes, that is stark, they're saying. but, quote, we need that protocol in place until case numbers recede to a level at which we have the capacity to effectively test and trace. then and only then we can try a little more opening. one small step at a time. you should, they say, bar nonessential interstate travel. when people travel freely between states, the good numbers in one state can go bad quickly. if you don't take these actions, the consequences will be measured in widespread suffering and death. we need you to lead. tell the american people the truth about the virus even when it's hard. take bold action to save lives even when it means shutting down again. unleash the resources needed to

contain the virus, massively ramping up testing, building the necessary infrastructure for effective contact tracing, and providing a safety net for those who need it. our government has thus far fallen short of what the moment demands. history has its eyes on you. and the headline there, shut it down, start over, do it right. signed by more than 150 u.s. health experts. and what they're asking for here basically is for the u.s. to give it another go. try again. do what all of our peer countries around the world have basically successfully done all over the world. we know what works. for a lot of reasons, we didn't do it on the first round. we missed our chance to get it right the first time. so we should now give it another try. like dr. david ho told us the other night on this program, the best time to act was months ago. the second best time to act is

now. give it another go. try to do it right now rather than resigning ourselves to the deaths of hundreds of thousands more americans and an epidemic that never goes away and an economy and even schools that can never come back because the epidemic is still too gigantic. we missed our chance to get it right the first time. try again. now, importantly, what they're asking for is national action, an abandonment implicitly of this idea that we have been pursuing for some reason, which is that every state should do their own thing on their own timeline with no coordination, right? that's the basic point of the simultaneous action versus sequential action, those graphs from dr. david ho that we've been trying to front-page on this show all week, with the basic idea, the simple idea being that if we act together all at once, if we act simultaneously like the graph shows on the left, the whole thing is over sooner. but if we don't, if we let

everybody act, if we let every state act whenever they feel like it, honestly that may feel good. it may feel like a great american idea from the outset, but what it means epidemiologically is the thing is going to go on and on and on and on and son, aon. and a lot administmore people a to be sick and the economy is going to be hit so much harder because it's going to have to be shut down for longer. it's an infectious disease. this is not an ideological thing. listen to the infectious disease experts about how to do this thing with the least pain. they knew from the beginning. we ignored them and did it the hard way. listen to the experts on how to do this stuffment . if you don't like listening to the experts, instead look at every other country in the world that got it under control by doing that while we still don't even know if we can have school again anytime soon. since the president started

crowing that he was going to use the federal government to somehow force schools open nationwide, we have started to see protests around the country by teachers and by some parents against trying to force schools open in an environment where the spread of the virus is out of control. in just the past week, just looking for these protests just as a top of the line survey, we've seen teacher protests in, as you see here, jackson, mississippi, the state capitol in the great state of mississippi. we've seen big teacher protests in cherokee county, georgia. we've seen protests at the state capitol in the great state of alabama. we've seen protests in chicago and in austin, texas. in iowa, where iowa republican governor kim reynolds says she intends to force schools to open statewide in iowa no matter what, some iowa teachers have started writing their own obituaries and sending them to governor kim reynolds, leaving open a spot where she can fill in the date on which they died. i mention we've also been seeing

florida teachers writing living wills. in jacksonville, they've been naming the mayor there as their health care proxy to make health decisions for them when they're incapacitated. here's an interesting case. in arizona, there's been tons of teacher protests. they've been doing these mobile teacher protests and these pretty significant teacher demonstrations in phoenix, scottsdale, tempe, mesa, gilbert, yuma, surprise, arizona. and arizona is a really interesting case, right? arizona, if you've been paying close attention, their numbers statewide are finally starting to level out a little bit this week after arizona having been the scariest place in the country in terms of covid for much of june and july. now, arizona's republican governor, doug ducey, had initially, like president trump, like florida's republican governor ron desantis, like iowa's very trumpy republican governor kim reynolds, arizona's governor doug ducey had also initially just announced a mandate by which he declared all schools must open no matter

what. but, you know, there was pushback, and the pushback worked. and this sort of thing is worth paying attention to, particularly if you are beaten down by how bad the headlines are and how bad the news is staying. look at the places where people fighting for constructive policy are winning, are getting even politicians who have not been good on this issue to get better. in arizona we saw it when the state public health association balked at what the governor was telling schools to do. the state public health association telling governor ducey that instead of picking a date out of a hat, instead they said the government should pick evidence-based criteria to decide when or whether it's safe to open k to 12 schools. they suggested things like a sustained and consistent reduction in the number of new covid cases in the community. they wanted to see a threshold that communities had to meet. for example, the positivity rate

being under 5% for two weeks at a time. they wanted to see contact tracing being up and running and effective, hospitals having beds available in case there was a new surge. the arizona public health association told that state's governor that he should pick criteria that could indicate that it is safe to open and then make school districts meet those criteria before they open rather than him just randomly declaring that it doesn't matter and it's safe because he says so on a date on which he picked out of a hat. so the arizona public health association speaks up. the state superintendent of schools in arizona joined in that call as well. and, of course, you can overstate the impact of teachers all over the great state of arizona taking to the streets and showing up and being heard. and it takes a lot of work like that, but it has now sort of at least worked. the arizona governor has now reversed course and is now telling schools that they are going to need to meet public

health evidence-based criteria in order to open instead of him just picking a random date for a mandate. it's not perfect. there's still ambiguity and it still remains to be seen. we'll see how it works. but everybody who's been telling you that citizenship is really important right now and that citizenship can really work right now and that your country needs you right now, that we citizens need to make our government do a better job right now, well, i mean it's a small -- it's a small thing, and it's one state. again, we'll see how it works. but the activism and the pressure and the expert opinion and the sustained criticism and the sustained constructive criticism in arizona has this week appeared to make that state's response at least marginally less ignorant, dangerous, and potentially fate the. it has materially helped push that state's decisions to at least scientifically accessible

facts exist and they matter as to what the state should do next. so take that. take that little kernel and run with it, right? be heartened by that example. your citizenship is very important right now. your civic example is very important right now. your country needs you right now because our country needs to get less dumb really fast. perhaps you can help. back in may, the associated press had a remarkable stream of stories, great investigative reporting from the associated press about what the cdc was doing in terms of providing expert cdc advice on how we could reopen things in america. and that a.p. reporting resulted in the initially leaked and then ultimately soft-launched quiet publication of the first cdc guidelines on how a number of different entities in the united states, including schools, should decide whether and how it's safe to reopen. i want to show you the flow

chart from that guidance that again first leaked and then was very quietly released without any announcement in may after the a.p. did that reporting. you see the headline here, reopening schools during the covid-19 pandemic. the purpose of this tool is to assist administrators in making decisions regarding k to 12 schools during the covid-19 pandemic. then in the first column, the top of that column says in bold blue type, should you consider opening? and then it gives you a check list. what's the first item on the check list? well, is the school in a community no longer requiring significant mitigation? that's the first thing you need to check. you're trying to decide if your school should open. the cdc says the first question you need to answer is, is the school in a community where the virus levels are low enough that it no longer requires significant mitigation, meaning significant intervention to try to control the virus there? if the answer to that is no, you still need significant mitigation in your community, you still got a lot of virus

circulating, then the answer from the cdc back in may is, okay, then your flowchart here is over. skip right to the big stop sign. do not open. if you cannot check off that first criteria, you cannot open. that's the cdc as recently as two months ago. cdc guidance saying plain as day with icons, you cannot open any school anywhere in america if the virus is prevalent enough in that community to require significant mitigation measures. and right now in america, that's a lot of america, right? because our epidemic is a catastrophe coast to coast. of course the white house yesterday just released new school opening guidelines under the banner of the cdc. these new guidelines they just released don't even address the issue of whether schools should be safely reopened or not. they just tell you how to

reopen. "the washington post" today was first to report that portions of the so-called cdc guidelines were not actually written by the cdc. they were written by white house staffers. but, you know, the early drafts don't go away. and even though they didn't make a big deal out of them and didn't send out a press release or brag about them because they didn't want to make the white house mad, the cdc did tell us not just in black and white but in bold blue type with a big red stop sign -- they told us back in may before the white house got its mitts on their recommendations to not open schools anywhere in america until community spread was well under control. if you are in a community where there is a lot of virus, there is no safe way to open your school per the cdc before the white house started writing their guidelines and calling them cdc guidelines. now they have, you know, submarined that recommendation. they're hoping, i guess, we didn't print this stuff out before they tried to supersede

it. our national response to coronavirus remains terrible. what we are learning over the course of this thing, though, is that citizens can force the government to get better at it. boy, is it hard with a government this bad. but the alternative is to give up, and why not -- and the reasons not to give up are tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of the lives of our fellow americans, including potentially ourselves. someone who has been right about this stuff from the beginning is going to be our guest live here next, laurie garrett. she has earned a nationwide reputation as sort of the cassandra of this pandemic, as a person willing to say hard, true things, including now, about what is inevitably going to happen with u.s. schools this fall. laurie garrett joins us live next. stay with us. your blood sugar is crucial. try boost glucose control. the patented blend is clinically shown

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question one, should a national scale school reopening be considered at all? answer, emphatically no. that is the opening salvo from laurie garrett, pulitzer prize-winning science journalist who has been both scary and right about coronavirus from the very beginning. she's just written this new very

sobering piece, which is called "america's schools are a moral and medical catastrophe, a guide to understanding the science and the politics preventing u.s. children from being educated this year." this year, this whole year? laurie garrett calling the white house demand for schools to reopen and to figure out how on their own, quote, nothing short of moral bankruptcy. joining us now without further ado is laurie garrett. as i mentioned, pulitzer prize-winning science journalist and somebody who we have been checking back in with periodically over the course of this crisis if for no other reason than she keeps us honest. laurie, thank you so much for being here today. this is a bracing read. >> thank you, rachel. >> you have been willing to say stark things, including in terms that other people would be like i to sugar-coat, and you lay it out bluntly. what do you think is the reality

check that americans need about safety considerations and the realistic chances of opening in-person instruction for kids this year? >> well, there's several things. first of all, it's not zero risk. even in communities where the transmission of covid-19 is relatively low, opening schools is not a zero-risk exercise. you don't know what the scale of the risk is unless you've done your baseline testing. you know exactly what percentage of your kids in each school level, each age group are already infected, what percentage of your teachers, your cafeteria workers, your janitorial staff, and your administrators are infected, and you track them over time in the cohorts so that you follow infection rates and you have baseline data and building data. and then you have people -- you have policies in place for what to do if someone is infected,

and you have people who can track them and figure out if they took virus home to their grandmother, to their father, to whomever. none of this is being done in almost any school district in america. and on top of that, the costs, how do you make a school safe to attend for everybody involved, the adults, the children, the visiting parents? how do you make a school safe to attend? it costs money. you have to have a good air-conditioning and air flow system. you have to limit the number of people per classroom, which means more space needs to be somehow available or staggered schedules with more teachers handling fewer students. all of these things need to be done, and they can't be done in school districts where there has never been enough money to do basic education at any time in the last many decades. so we're asking schools who have

zero spare cash to somehow build a fancy air filtration system, to somehow do testing and somehow create additional classrooms. they don't have money. >> laurie, i am struck that the very first thing that you said was testing, that schools need access to frequent, quick-turnaround, repeated testing for kids, for school staff, for teachers. and it needs to be linked into a competent contact tracing essentially outbreak-monitoring system. i feel like even six months into this in terms of the massive death that we have seen in the united states, we still don't have testing figured out even for nursing homes, even for long-term care facilities where we have had this huge bulk of the american deaths come from. even in well-resourced school districts, it seems to be very

unlikely that they're going to have access just to that first thing you described, that kind of testing regime. >> rachel, universities in the ivy league won't have it, so how would a public school located in a desperately poor community or on native american reservation land or in rural alabama possibly have it? i mean this is just so poorly thought out. it's -- the rewrite on the cdc document is shameful. it is a mandate that doesn't even begin to discuss safety for the employees. it's all written from the point of view of dismissing the possibility that children will somehow get sick and die, and therefore the schools should open without any real precautions taken. it's absolutely immoral. you know, betsy devos gave an interview, and she's the secretary of education, in which

she basically said how you open is up to you, folks. you decide. we're just telling you you have to open, or we're taking your money away from you. now, they don't even have enough money to teach the kids under normal circumstances in many school districts across america, and you're telling them conjure resources somehow to do something unheard of. the real problem, rachel, is that testing anywhere is being -- for any cohort is being done stupidly. it's utterly irrational what we're doing in this country right now. we're asking people to queue up in a parking lot and let their car engine run for eight hours to get a test that they get the results from three to seven to ten days later. what we're not doing is smart testing that targets specific cohorts of people as sort of canaries in the coal mine to let us see over time, uh-oh, we see

a little uptick in the first grade class, ms. mcgrath, her class. we've got to get in there real quick, do some contact tracing and find out what's going on in ms. mcgrath's class. we don't have the capacity. nobody is setting that up. so we're just going to throw children to the wolves, throw teachers to the wolves, all for some mythological reason that somehow there's this massive demand. but in fact, every survey and poll i've seen for the last seven to ten days shows the majority of parents don't want to send their kids to school if they are unsure about its safety, and they are unsure about its safety, especially in these states with rampant, out-of-control community spread of sars-cov2. it's irrational. >> laurie garrett, science writer, former senior fellow,

pulitzer prize-winning journalist. thank you for speaking that blunt truth here tonight. thank you for always doing that. thanks for being here. >> thank you, rachel. >> i will say what laurie is describing there in terms of what sort of can't be done within the u.s. educational system right now, i mean the solution to that the is not that we need to blow up and reassembly education in this country before anybody can go back safely. the solution there is that we need to get the virus under control overall. and once you've got the virus under control overall, then it is potentially safe to open schools. but when the virus is out of control, schools are the last place in the world that will be safe for kids or for anybody who works there. it's community transmission of this virus that must be stopped. the country must act as a whole, as one, to get our curve down, to get our numbers down so that we have this thing to a manageable sizement th. then you can talk about school and everything else reopening. we'll be right back. ack. at fisher investments, we do things differently and other money managers

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a couple of times on this show since the president was inaugurated, we have had a yale historian here, a professor named tim snyder. we've had him here because he wrote what has amounted to a sort of citizens handbook for how to recognize if the obvious authoritarian inclinations of your president actually start tilting your country toward authori authoritariani authoritarianism, what we can learn from other countries who have gone through similar descents like that. the book is called "on tyranny: 20 lessons from the 20th century." it's like six bucks or so, eight bucks. it's longer than a pamphlet but smaller than your typical paperback. it's a practical thing. i've probably bought and given away 30 copies of it. a lot of it is very simple and kind of profound and practical. rule number one, for example, is do not obey in advance.

most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. in times like these individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want and then offer themselves without being asked. a citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do. lesson number two, defend institutions. this one means a lot to me. it is institutions that help us to preserve decency. choose an institution you care about, a court, a newspaper, a law, a labor union, and take its side. then check out lesson 13, which feels both designed by and also sort of thwarted by this particular moment. quote, practice cor porrial politics. power wants your body softening in your chair and your emotions dissipating on the screen. get outside. put your body in unfamiliar places with unfamiliar people. make new friends and march with them. designed for this moment and specifically thwarted by this moment. tim snyder's "on tyranny" is

meant to give you practical work to do. but snyder is also blunt about not just being practical but being alert to the worst, watching for the worst signs. why you shouldn't sugar coat those things, you shouldn't convince yourself they're not a big deal, like this one which has been sort of bugging me for a few weeks now, since we've been seeing what's been happening in lafayette square outside the white house when the president cleared all those protesters violently for the purpose of his photo op, and then what we've seen about the federal agents operating in the streets of portland, oregon. lesson six, be wary of paramilitaries. when the pro-leader paramilitary and the official police and military intermingle, the end has come. and that's not exactly what we've been seeing, but that is the lesson that comes to mind and that's been looming for a lot of us as we have watched

unidentified federal officers of some kind scoot people off the streets of an american city and the president threatening to do that now in democratic-controlled cities nationwide. that's why i wanted to talk to tim snyder again. joining us now for the interview is tim snyder, the best-selling author of "on tyranny." he's professor of history at yale university. he's abroad right now and is up in the middle of the night to be here. professor, thank you so much for being here. i really appreciate your time. >> of course. >> should we be thinking about this thing that we've been watching in portland, the president's threat to use force and his performative demonstration of force against civilians as a material rule of law crisis, as something we ought to worry about in terms of our democracy? >> of course. in a rule of law state, which is what we should be, you can tell the police from the civilians. when the police don't identify themselves, when the police don't wear insignia, when the police act as though they're

above the law, then you've moved clearly into the authoritarian direction. it's the dark fantasy both in life and literature of authoritarianism, totalitarianism, someone you can't identify arrests you and takes you away in the middle of the night. yes, this is something we should be attending to. >> given your seminal work looking at the history across europe of the descent into authoritarianism, and the way that different types of cultures have slid in that direction, are there lessons from history about the right way or the most effective way, the most meaningful way to resist or oppose that kind of thing when it starts to happen in a country that you think of as a republic, as a democracy? >> well, one of them we've already talked about, which is protest itself. you have to start to identify yourself with the protesters. so if first they come for the undocumented and you do nothing

because you're documented, maybe you're making a mistake. then they come for the blacks and you don't do anything because you're not black, then you're making a mistake. then they come for the protesters and you don't do anything, you're making a mistake. at some point you have to turn it around like these moms in portland are doing. if they're coming for the protesters, i have to stand up for my fellow people, my fellow americans, their right to the first amendment, the fourth amendment. i'm going to go out for that reason. and history shows that mass peaceful protest works. so if you're not protesting now, this would be a good time to start. >> one of the things that you spoke with michelle goldberg about at "the new york times" this week in what i thought was an excellent piece of analysis was the importance of the fact that it does seem to be elements of the federal government, elements of department of homeland security specifically assigned to the border and assigned to policing and dealing with immigrants -- those appear to be the parts of the federal

government that have dispatched these unidentified, unnamed federal officers to the streets. that, to you -- you've said that's important that we're seeing that part of the federal government brought off the border and into the interior to start policing civilians. why is that important to you? >> yeah. this is something that any historian of empire would say or the political theorist would say, violence starts at the borderland. people become accustomed to violence at the border. it brings those people back into the cities and uses them against protesters in the cities. people who are trained to think of others as not like us, as aliens, as foreigners are then told, well, they're happening to people inland that are not like us. a similar aspect is the detention centers. we have this huge network of detention centers which are basically lawless zones. people who are trained in lawless zones such as detention centers or concentration camps are then released into cities later on, and they behave the

same way. they behave the way they've been trained. this is the reason why we care about human rights, why don't we don't have lawless zones, why we don't treat people who aren't citizens different than citizens. >> professor snyder, i have another aspect of this that actually is about our president and his connections abroad and the kinds of leaders that he admires abroad. if you wouldn't mind sticking with us for one quick commercial break, i'd like to ask you about that stuff when we come back. >> of course. >> great. our guest is professor tim snyder, the best-selling author of "on tyranny." we'll be right back. i should get a quote. do it. only pay for what you need. ♪ liberty. liberty. liberty. liberty. ♪

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couldn't stay in home confinement anymore if he wanted to write a book criticizing president trump. they told him basically give up the book or go back to jail. i know sometimes this stuff can feel like just another day in the trump administration, but in the cohen case a federal judge ruled our government locked up a american citizen to punish him for writing a book critical of the president, and he ordered that citizen freed. that happened while simultaneously on the other side of the country there's these unmarked, unidentified officers swooping down on protesters in portland, oregon, using tear gas and anti-crowd munitions and brute violence against civilians, including pulling people off the streets into unmarked vans and detaining them without telling them why. for all the multiple crises affecting the country right now, there is an escalating daily crisis of the rule of law that is churning away alongside all of that. here once again to talk about that is tim snyder, professor of history at yale university,

best-selling author of "on tyranny." thank you for sticking around. i wanted to ask you about one aspect about this which i know makes people a little bit crazy. but because of your history, your experience as a historian and the way that you have asked us to learn from other countries that have gone through authoritarian slides, what do you make of the fact that the president seems to be escalating his communication and calls with vladimir putin of russia? the kremlin told us this week that they just had their seventh call since the end of march. should we see this as a separate lane, or should we see these things as potentially connected? >> of course there's connected. mr. trump makes no secret of the fact that he admires mr. putin. mr. putin is someone who has just secured his own ability to be president through the year 2036. that kind of presidency for life is something which naturally interests mr. trump.

the two men have had a vivid relationship for several years now, and mr. putin interfered in our elections the last time around. we're now looking at a situation where mr. trump is getting crushed in the polls. he doesn't seem to have much chance in november, at least much chance in a conventional election. so it doesn't seem surprising that he would think of one of his most important constituents and allies as mr. putin. that's the track i'm most roired abo -- worried about. i think portland is connected with november. it's a dry run for november. if we don't react to it in portland, we're going to see these guys at polling stations. and what can mr. putin offer mr. trump in november? >> tim snyder, history professor at yale university, the author of "on tyranny." sir, i know that you had to stay up to oh dark 30 to be here. i hope you'll come back and be with us soon. >> very glad to be with you. thank you. >> all right. we'll be right back. stay with us. ack. stay with us

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congressman john lewis was the son of sharecroppers. he grew up just outside of troy, alabama. tomorrow troy university will hold a public celebration of his remarkable life starting at 11:00 a.m. eastern. tomorrow night there will be a second service for him at the church that was the starting point for the selma to montgomery marches in 1965. the brown chapel ame church. sunday morning, congressman lewis will make his final crossing over the edmund pettus bridge, the site where he shed

so many blood 55 years ago when he was beaten by police. his body will then be received at the alabama state capitol where he will lie in state. and then monday and tuesday john lewis will lie in state at the united states capitol. msnbc will be is that will do it for us tonight. we'll see you tomorrow night. ali velshi is in for lawrence. good evening, ali. >> john lewis, they broke his school when they beat him. yet every time i met him and every time i interviewed him, the man had kindness. he had a smile on his face. i often think if they jailed me once, i would probably be bad for the rest of my life. so the grace that he brought, even when you talk about him a week after his passing, it still brings a smile to my face. >> oh, yeah. there has never been anybody like him, never. thanks, ali. >> rachel, you have a great weekend, and i will see you in a couple of days. thank you, rachel. lo