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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, hes taller than you expected. please give a warm welcome to my friend, my beloved colleague, msnbcs 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. thats...

that is tonights >> 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, msnbcs 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 yor...

Fascists. and hes 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 hes doing and that will make everybody say, wow, thats the most fascist thin heard, oh, fascist, no, youre the fascist. and then all of his enemies are fascist. and then the word fascist doesnt mean anything anymore. its just an epithet that flies around in politics and...

He went to, i really dont think that we -- i think we need to kind of, like, reverse the order of that bio. in the two sentences. because its 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 mi...

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, we...

Mean like whatever the stuff is, the charisma, whatever it is and i guess something i was thinking about reading your book is like what is this thing? what is the thing that makes huey long successful in becoming huey long? what is the thing that makes trump successful? theres a particular kind of type, like author karen populist demagogue. different people have tried it in different ways. it has a lot of commonalities in the rhetoric and some succeed and some dont. >> i understand the bake dyna...

>> but how? like i want you to get real brass taxes. >> yeah. >> process, like where does this seed come of, like, the random anecdote, like that is the start of the thing? its youre reading all the time or you follow some set of -- >> well, in general, its good to read all the time. >> right. >> the one thing i always tell people in our business is if theres one piece of advice i could impart to you, well, if youre a female person whos coming to, first of all, never show your emotions, no one w...

Fascist societies, it becomes impossible not to be part of the movement. so you may not be an enthusiast, but even if youre not, air probably going to be out there wearing the badge and doing the thing because theres no choice. i mean, you create the illusion of unitary nation whos all subject to and a fan of the great leader about whom there is a cult of personal and who youre not allowed to oppose. >> if fact, theres an amazing huey long line that you quote and huey long i dont think was a fas...

Free school textbooks and wore silk outfits and theres all sorts of things you could say about him but really what he was a maestro of was power. that he never met a sort of authority that he could not accrue to himself and that was the thing that you need to be able to do to be able to lead a society in that direction while telling a country, while telling a people that they need to do it, that they can only trust you and that their enemies are out to get them and that youre the only one who ca...

Us today who didnt sign up to be heroes but hero yichl is coming to their door? [ applause ] crossing reference, right? so i am energized, i am energized by that but i also feel like for all of us, being a 250-year-old democracy is hard. there arent that many and the seeds of anti-democratic projects and authoritarian projects are within the heart of every person who lives in a democracy because democracy, like you were saying at the outset, chris, is about us all deciding something together, us...