In a monologue entitled “It’s Not Coming, It’s Here,” MSNBC host Rachel Maddow declared, “We do now live in a country that has an authoritarian leader in charge. We have a consolidating dictatorship in our country.”

RACHEL MADDOW, MSNBC HOST: You can narrow or widen the aperture as much as you want. You can look at the very big picture or the small local picture anywhere in the country. And we try to do as much of both of those things as we can every week here on this show. But whether you’re looking at small-scale local stories or the biggest picture stories about what’s happening in our country, the story is the same, and it is now an undeniable thing. We have crossed a line. We are in a place we did not want to be, but we are there. The thing we were all warning about for the last few years is not coming. It is here. We are in it. This is what it likes, it turns out. This is what it’s like, right? I mean, it’s August. It’s a Monday. Every day the sun rises and the sun sets. And there are, you know, sports and movies, and there are new hit songs. There are scandals here and there. There are crimes. There’s everybody’s personal quotient of family drama and health worries and money worries and falling in and out of love and in and out of faith. Life has not stopped, and none of our personal lives have stopped. But also, at the same time, life in the United States is profoundly changing, is profoundly different than it was even six months ago. Because we do now live in a country that has an authoritarian leader in charge. We have a consolidating dictatorship in our country. And it sounds melodramatic to say it. I know. But just go with that for a minute, right? Think in melodramatic terms. Think in cinematic terms. Imagine the cartoon-level caricature of what you think a dictatorship looks like. I mean, it’s secret police, right? A massive, anonymous, unbadged, literally masked, totally unaccountable internal police force that apparently has infinite funding but no identifiable leadership. And they act in ways designed to instill maximum fear and use maximum force. I mean, when you imagine an authoritarian country, right, what you imagine is masked secret police breaking people’s car windows and snatching people off the streets and out of church parking lots and courtroom hallways and taking them away with no charges, no notice, no paperwork, no explanation. Not letting them see lawyers. And then moving them secretly to what are effectively black-site prisons where they won’t tell you who’s there and where no one’s allowed in to see what’s going on. And that kind of a cartoon caricature of an authoritarian country. The one you might have imagined. In melodramatic and cinematic terms ever before we got here, you would expect, right, that you’d have a scapegoated minority group blamed for all things. In our case, immigrants. And the new extraordinary powers and shows of force by the secret police, among other things, all these extraordinary powers and shows of force will be framed as necessary to stop this terrible internal enemy. Frame everything as immigration enforcement. Because for immigration enforcement, not only is all force justified, but maximum force is preferred. And they’re trying to make it into a national entertainment to threaten to feed immigrants to alligators in South Florida. They’re making them eat off dishes on the floor, like they’re dogs.

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