MSNBC's Rachel Maddow on ‘the fight of our lifetimes'

Rachel Maddow has one of the most popular shows on cable television news. She says she doesn’t think that’s such a big deal. What’s 3 million-plus viewers in such a big country?

But her fans do. They filled Benaroya Hall (the main auditorium) to see her.

Maddow notes that she was kind of freaked out when she peeked from behind the curtain before her talk. Not that she sounded nervous. She was in Seattle to promote her new oil and gas industry expose “Blowout: Corrupted Democracy, Rogue State Russia, and the Richest, Most Destructive Industry on Earth.”

Famous for thorough research into her subjects-- she has a doctorate in politics from Oxford-- Maddow covers a lot of ground here, connecting the dots between politicians, gangsters and business moguls around the world and the United States.

She also comes to conclusions about why the Russian government hacked the 2016 U.S. election. Maddow argues that democracy itself is at stake in the fight to regulate an industry and its enablers that can’t be trusted to do the right thing.

Rachel Maddow is the host of MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show. She caught up with the news of the day, read from “Blowout” and had a conversation with multi-media journalist Joni Balter on October 11 in the S. Mark Taper Foundation Auditorium at Benaroya Hall. Seattle Arts & Lectures (SAL) presented the event. KUOW’s Jennie Cecil Moore recorded the conversation.