My idea of what was going on in politics was driven by activism. I came out when I was 17, and right away I started working in the AIDS activist movement. For me, politics was about getting drugs approved and getting prisoners access to the same kind of drugs that you could get on the outside. It was about getting needle exchanges approved. That was politics. These were policy problems that were killing people, and we were trying to get them changed.
Rachel MaddowFamously in 1936, Oswald Mosley led a march of his British black shirts through a mostly Jewish neighborhood, in the east end of London. What resulted was what they called the "Battle of Cable Street", where Oswald Mosley and his fascists basically got the snot beaten out of them when East London rose up against them and beat them up.
Rachel MaddowThat`s how you end up with a guy like Dan Fried, overseeing the U.S. sanctions against Russia for Russia did in Ukraine and Crimea.Russia hates those sanctions more than they love life. They hate those sanctions. So, of course, you need your toughest and most experienced guy running those sanctions.
Rachel MaddowI never thought when I was a kid that I would become an adult. I never thought of myself as having any sort of distant horizon. I have sort of leapt without a master plan.
Rachel Maddow