PROGRAM

As we continue to process the results of the 2024 Presidential Election, Roosevelt House is proud to present a discussion featuring Steve Benen, MSNBC producer and author of Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past; in conversation with the inimitable Rachel Maddow, MSNBC host and author of Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism.

 The second Stepanski Family Lecture at Roosevelt House, this discussion will consider the threats democratic values and institutions may face during a second Trump presidency—through the prism of Benen’s and Maddow’s newest books. In Ministry of Truth, Benen delivers a vital investigation of what he considers the Republican Party’s campaign to rewrite recent history in real time, and identifies such efforts at historical revisionism as a known despotic tactic; while Maddow’s Prequel traces the fight to preserve American democracy back to World War II, when, as Maddow writes, a handful of public servants and private citizens thwarted a plot to steer the nation toward an authoritarian alliance.

Steve Benen is an Emmy Award winning producer of MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show and the author of The MaddowBlog. His articles and op-eds have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Monthly, The American Prospect, and Salon. He is the author of The Impostors: How Republicans Quit Governing and Seized American Politics, a national bestseller.

Rachel Maddow is host of the Emmy Award–winning Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC and the hit MSNBC podcast, Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra. She is also the New York Times bestselling author of Drift and Blowout, and the New York Times bestselling co-author of Bag Man. Maddow received a bachelor’s degree in public policy from Stanford University and earned her doctorate in political science at Oxford University.

Anthony Stepanski, former entrepreneur, then CEO of a global computer technology company, is a generous Hunter benefactor and member of the Roosevelt House Board of Advisors. The inaugural Stepanski Family Lecture featured Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and former CNN political analyst John Avlon. Stepanski created and endowed this lecture series in memory of his late wife Jane.