Rachel Maddow reacts to MSNBC’s bold new look with one cutting line that stopped viewers cold.NH

Rachel Maddow knows a thing or two about “how you can tell when the government’s going real bad.” Since negotiating a multimillion-dollar deal to host her MSNBC news show only one night a week, she’s explored authoritarianism in her podcast Ultra and zeroed in on the Biden-Ukraine conspiracy theory via the film From Russia With Lev. Her most recent project: the 90-minute documentary Andrew Young: The Dirty Work, which examines the life of now 93-year-old Andrew Jackson Young Jr.’s trajectory from pastor to Martin Luther King Jr.’s right-hand man to serving as the first Black congressman from Georgia since Reconstruction, as well as mayor of Atlanta.

Dirty Work is a portrait of ambition and strategy that lingers less on moments of glory than it does on quandaries and trade-offs. Young describes the “Uncle Tom” role he played in the Civil Rights movement and the scandal that erupted after he had an unauthorized meeting with an official from the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1979. Even though then president Jimmy Carter compared Palestinian liberation aspirations to Black American struggles for civil rights, he accepted Young’s resignation.

I reach Maddow at her Massachusetts home during a big week: MSNBC has begun its transition to a new entity that will eventually be called MS NOW. In a wide-ranging conversation, she weighs in on the rebrand, billionaire media moguls, and the resistance movements she’s clocking today.

Vanity Fair: Bringing historical context to the present moment is one of the hallmarks of your work. So, why Andrew Young? What about his story speaks to the contemporary American experience?

Rachel Maddow: What I have been trying to teach myself this past year is what we can learn in a really practical sense from the movements that have fought the government doing terrible things.