0 and enslaved africans, so that the power of both groups would be diminished, because if they came together, they could change everything, and he was trying to change everything by bringing them together, along with impoverished native americans, asian americans, latino americans, obviously our country became much more of rainbow. but at the heart of, it was an appeal to poor whites and poor blacks, to come together. and that's the unfinished work. >> ben, it's always a privilege to see you, thank you my friend for being with us on this important night. we appreciate that. that is all in on this monday night, chris saves is gonna be back tomorrow, at eight eastern, and then again at ten eastern hosting a special national day of racial healing town hall, along with my colleagues joy reid and sean mainly, they will be live in new orleans at 10 pm eastern on msnbc, and streaming on good evening, ali, it's good to see you my friend. thank you very much. much appreciated. thanks to you at home for joining us this hour. we're going to start with breaking news on a story that we first brought you this time last week when it was just emerging. this may have been the only place you've heard about it in the national news. as luck would have it, we brought you the story for the first time a week ago at this time. it's a story out of new mexico. just tonight as we are getting on the air, there is a major development in that story tonight and it is a shocking one. i imagine given these new developments in the story, this will not be the only place you will be hearing about this over the next several days. all right, what we were able to tell you last week is news of a spate of recent shootings that had targeted the homes and offices of at least a half dozen elected officials in new mexico, all of them members of the democratic party. no one was injured in these shootings. these shootings hit buildings, not people. but they apparently had all been targeted at democratic politicians during december and january. so just over the last few weeks. we first learned of the shootings at five homes and offices belonging to some county commissioners and two state senators and new mexico's newly elected democratic attorney general. then we learned that there had also been an additional shooting at the house of the incoming speaker of the new mexico state legislature. we've since learned some additional details about these shootings targeting individual democratic politicians, and it's alarming. it's not an individual potshot here and there. for example, on december 4th, it was eight shots that were fired into the home of one democratic county commissioner in new mexico. that was december 4th. then on december 11th, it was 12 bullets that were fired into the home of a county commissioner. again, all in new mexico, they're all democrats. so again december 4th at one politician's home, a county commissioner, eight shots fired into his home. a week later, december 11th, 12 bullets fired into the home of another democratic county commissioner. then on january 3rd, it was a state representative, a democratic state representative named linda lopez in new mexico. on january 3rd, shots rang out at her house. three bullets went through her daughter's bedroom as her 10-year-old daughter was inside that bedroom asleep. so that's three of them december 4th, december 11th, january 3rd. but all in all, it ended up being six different democratic officials who appear to have been targeted. initially two county commissioners, then a state representative, then state attorney general and then a state senator. so six shootings altogether. again, all targeting democratic party officials in new mexico. tonight albuquerque police have announced that they have made an arrest in these shootings. and i said this is sort of shocking news. the reason it is shocking news is because the man they have arrested and charged is a republican candidate for a statehouse seat in last year's elections. he was the republican nominee for a state legislative election this past november, albuquerque's house district 14. his name is solomon pena. he lost that election by more than 3600 votes to the income bent democrat who holds that seat. there was a local write-up on his candidacy in the santa fe new mexican in august. it said despite being the nominee, he was a convicted felon many times over. he had been convicted, in fact, of 19 different felonies, including burglary, larceny, contributing to the delinquency of a minor, and receiving stolen property. as a result of those multiple felony convictions, he spent almost seven years in prison. but then the republican party picked him to be their nominee for this state legislature seat in albuquerque. again, he made it to the general election as the republican nominee. he lost the election to the democrat incumbent. but now police allege, announcing his arrest today, that he hired people to shoot at some of these democratic officials' homes and offices. in a press conference just tonight, albuquerque officials say that solomon pena pulled the trigger himself at at least one of the shootings, but they also made enclosure that they have evidence connecting this candidate to four of the six shootings that they have been investigating while the other two are still under investigation. again, this is just a remarkable development in this story. the lead in the albuquerque journal tonight is this, the albuquerque police department has arrested solomon pena an unsuccess candidate for the house district 14 seat in connection with the shootings at local democratic politicians' homes. chief harold medina said pena, an unsuccessful candidate in the 2022 election is accused of conspiring with and paying four other men to shoot at the homes of two county commissioners and two state legislators. again, that shows that they are connecting him to four of the six shootings that they have been investigating. they're saying that they are not connecting him and these men he believe -- they believe he hired. he is albuquerque's mayor speaking tonight after the arrest was announced. >> this situation today, i think, obviously points out that these shootings were orchestrated, they were dangerous attacks not only to these individuals, which is personally the most terrifying for them, but fundamentally also to democracy. that is why this is so terrible. this type of radicalism is a threat to our nation and it has made its way to our doorstep right here in albuquerque, new mexico. i know here we are going to push back and we will not allow this to cross the threshold. fundamentally at the end of the day, this was about a right-wing radical, an election denier who was arrested today and someone who did the worst imaginable thing you can do when you have a political disagreement, which is turn that to violence. >> again, that's the albuquerque mayor speaking tonight after the arrest of this republican state legislative candidate was announced by albuquerque police. again, police say they believe he pulled the trigger in at least one of these shootings targeting the homes and offices of democratic elected officials and they believe he conspired with and paid four other men to fire into the homes of county commissioners and state legislators. now, you heard the mayor reference this was about a right-wing radical, an election denier who was arrested today. what that references, i believe, are the frequent public statements, online social media statements by this republican candidate maintaining that he didn't actually lose this election in which he was the republican candidate this past november. again, the republican party nominated him to be their candidate for the state legislative seat out of albuquerque in november. he lost by a large marge en, by more than 3500 votes. since then he has maintained that he didn't really lose and the election was rigged against him. local coverage of his candidacy has noted that he is a, in the words of the santa fe new mexican, gushing supporter of former president donald trump. he appears to have emulated trump in rejecting the results of the election that he lost, but police in albuquerque tonight say he went much further than that, accusing him tonight formally, charging him with having pulled the trigger himself and led a conspiracy with four other men to shoot into the homes of other democratic officials. so again, this is just breaking tonight. we'll bring you more on this as we learn more. we do know the names of these half dozen democratic elected officials in new mexico who we believe were targeted in this string of attacks. we've got calls out to some of those elected officials who were reportedly targeted in those attacks as we collect statements from them and are able to get in contact with them over the course of this hour, we will revisit this story as we learn more. wow. i knew that was a strange story out of albuquerque when we first started covering it. i did not expect that it would develop in this way. it was actually a s.w.a.t. raid on this guy's apartment today in albuquerque that resulted in the first public knowledge that he was the man who had been arrested. as i said, we'll bring you more as we learn more. today of course is the martin luther king federal holiday. i hope you had the day off from work or from school today as we celebrate what would have been the 94th birthday of dr. martin luther king jr. and i know 94 is old. we all hope to make it to 94, right? but honestly it's not that old. there are lots of 94-year-olds still with us, still in our families, still in our communities. i say that just because i think we think of dr. martin luther king as not just of another generation, even another century. i think we tend to think of him as part of history. we think of him as having been of another era on this earth long before our own. but when you hear that today is his -- that we're marking what would have been his 94th birthday, you realize it wasn't really that long ago that he lived and worked among us. i mean had he lived, had he not been assassinated, had he lived a long and healthy life, he might well still be among us today. he would be just turning 94. he might well have spent another 50 plus years among us as a controversial activist, organizer, an orator, a thorn in the side, a kind of moral emergency beacon, insistent and interruptive. think about all the different u.s. presidents he could have driven absolutely crazy by now by the time he was living among us in his 90s. do you have your phone on you or somewhere near you? if you were like me increasingly it's never very far. i used to be -- i used to be kind of attentive to not always having my phone on me. i'd try to put it aside if i was working or didn't want to be distracted or if i was watching or listening to something else. now i feel like it's always on the table in front of me or always in my pocket. when your phone rings and it's a telemarketer or a robo call, phones now will usually say something on the screen like spam likely or probable spam. i feel like we all make the same joke when that happens. oh, it's my boyfriend, spam likely, he always calls me around this time. because of scams and spam, we're trained basically to not answer calls that come in on our mobile phones from unfamiliar numbers unless we have to answer them for some reason. and sometimes the spam and the scams come in as text messages or as emails, but we're increasingly trained not to fall for those either, right? we all sort of know what you shouldn't do. we know when something is scammy. we know not to click on links that somebody sent us. we know not to open attachments to emails unless we know exactly who sent the attachment and why and what it is. i think we all increasingly, no matter how old we are, and how sort of tech native we are, i think we all have developed some good defensive reflexes now about how to not let bad actors use our phones against us, particularly as we have them more and more integrated into our lives. and, you know, if we do make a mistake, if we accidentally do open something we're not supposed to or click on something we shouldn't have clicked on, we can usually tell that's where i went wrong. that was the bad email or that was the bad text or that was the bad link i shouldn't have fallen for and clicked on. that at least can help you identify the source of the scam, the source of the attack and who was trying to get at you through your phone. but what if you didn't have to do anything wrong? what if somebody could target your mobile phone without you having to click on a link or open an attachment or even answer a call? what if just by having your phone number someone who wished you harm could take complete control of your phone from afar. again, without you doing anything wrong and without you knowing that they had control of it. they could see all of your contacts. they could read all of your texts. they could read all of your emails. they could see all of your photos and videos. they could see everything in your calendar. they could listen in on all of your calls. without you knowing they could use the location data in your phone to pinpoint your exact personal location at any time, 24 hours a day. they could turn on the microphone in your phone to listen in wherever you are. they could turn on the camera on your phone to see you and see whatever you're doing, again, without you ever knowing that they were doing it. and again, without you doing anything wrong to make it possible. it turns out that kind of technology exists. where somebody without you knowing can access your phone and do all of those things on your phone and see everything that you do on your phone and have done on your phone. that technology exists. imagine how dangerous a tool that would be against civil rights activists. imagine how dangerous a tool that would have been against the martin luther king era civil rights movement. and in fact this technology, it not only exists, it's not like a concept car. it's not like something that hasn't been deployed, it's just been developed in a lab, it actually has been used already by repressive governments around the world to target exactly who you think they would target with a tool like that. this thing is marketed supposedly as a law enforcement tool, anti-terrorism tool. but government officials have used it around the world against their personal enemies, their ex-wives, their political rivals. and of course they have used it against opposition figures and journalists and human rights advocates and civil rights activists and advocates for minority groups. whoever it is that's that country's thorn in the side, whoever it is that is that country's insistent moral beacon, whoever is making change and leading movements, whoever is angering repressive government officials, that's who's been targeted with this technology. there's a book that's coming out tomorrow, which means technically at midnight tonight and it's called "pegasus" written by two journalists. they expose the existence of this technology and its use by repressive governments around the world. the big break in them exposing it came when they got a list of 50,000 phones that had been selected for targeting with this pernicious software. the software is called pegasus. with that list of 50,000 numbers in hand, these journalists launched an international reporting project to discover what this software was, where it came from, and who it was being used against. and as i said, the book, which is called "pegasus," it comes out at midnight tonight. i wrote the introduction to the book. here's a little piece of it from the audio book. >> the insidious power of a pegasus infection was that it was completely invisible to the victim. you'd have no way to know the baddies were reading your texts and emails and listening in on your calls and even your in-person meetings until they used their ability to track your exact location to send the men with guns to meet you. for the pegasus project to succeed in exposing the scale of the scandal, the journalists knew they would need to be able to diagnose an infection or an attempted infection on an individual phone. claudi oh and donncha figured out how to do it. working quite literally alone, these two took on a multi billion dollar corporation that employed 550 well-paid cyber specialists, many with the highest levels of military cyber warfare training. to best that goliath, these two davids had to fashion their own sling shot. they had to invent the methods and tools of their forensics on the fly. that they succeeded in that is as improbable as it is important, for all of our sakes. here also is the story of the victims of pegasus. among them are those who hold enough power that you might expect they'd be protected from this kind of totalist intrusion, heads of state, high ranking royals, senior politicians, law enforcement figures. and then there's the people whom governments the world over have always liked to put in the crosshairs. opposition figures, dissidents, human rights activists, academics. laurent and sandrine rack focus tight on the group most represented in the leaked data, of course, and that's journalists. it's no surprise that pegasus has been turned full blast on reporters and editors in order to harass, intimidate and silence. if this anti-democratic authoritarian nightmare cannot be safely reported upon, it won't be understood. and if it isn't understood, there's no chance that it will be stopped. >> again, that's from the introduction i did to this book, "pegasus" which comes out tonight at midnight. i did not write the whole book, i just did the introduction because i think the story is incredible. and the story has developed in the united states in really interesting ways. once this international reporting project exposed this kind of surveillance was happening, the u.s. government did an unexpectedly stand up and strong thing. they black listed the company that makes pegasus and banned the use of pegasus software in the united states. that didn't stop it around the world. this is still a live issue. it's still a live issue in the united states. just last week the u.s. supreme court let the company whatsapp go ahead and sue the company that makes pegasus. whatsapp gets to sue pegasus -- sue the company that makes pegasus for using their software to break into people's phones and spy on people's encrypted messages on whatsapp, so that intratech civil lawsuit will go ahead and that could be a big deal. this is a live issue. this is hotly contested territory. but it's sort of from the news gods, i think it's serendipitous. it's a good thing the book is coming out tonight as we celebrate the federal holiday honoring dr. king today. because what repressive governments do to target the activists in their midst, to stop civil rights movements, to stop human rights advocates, lawyers and journalists, yes, the tactics evolve as the technology evolves but the intent and effect is the same the world over. obviously we remember dr. king now as one of the greatest moral leaders ever produced by our country, but he really did have the whole power of the state turned against him in his day, which really wasn't all that long ago. today in every state in the country, we celebrate that federal holiday honoring dr. king. but in two states, in alabama and mississippi, today is not just martin luther king day, today in alabama and mississippi, it's king lee day. not kingly like an adverb, but king-lee, as in martin luther king and robert e. lee. in mississippi and alabama today, in 2023, they have added to martin luther king day another state holiday on the same day honoring the commander of the confederate army that fought to preserve slavery. and virginia used to do that too until the year 2000. and ark