Many thanks to Rachel Maddow and her team at MS NOW for reaching out to me and others in the community to help connect the dots between the wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans and the abductions of non-white immigrants and citizens on the streets of America today. Their six-part podcast series, “Burn Order,” dropped the first two episodes today, preceded by this video trailer:

I recorded my interview with producer Jennifer Mulreany Donovan in the heat of August, so it’s been in the works for four months. As you will hear, Jen asked me to cover a wide range of angles on the run-up to incarceration that her team found fascinating. I revisited the pages from We Hereby Refuse for my commentary on Karl Bendetsen, and read from the William Hohri NCJAR lawsuit that we excerpted in The Literature of Japanese American Incarceration. I am glad to hear Lori Bannai recalling the coram nobis lawsuit and Satsuki Ina recalling her parents at the Tule Lake Segregation Center.

The result has a different, outsider’s take that puts a new spin on familiar material. I especially like their line in the video trailer above warning about “The U.S. military deployed on the streets of America.” The militarization of cities I think came after the interviews but is just as much part of the fabric of this story.

Here are direct links to all six episodes. I appear in all six and am featured in the second halves of episodes 2, 4 and 5.

Thanks also to the production for Rachel’s tag to Episode 2, providing new pull quotes for two of my publishers:

“Special thanks to writer and historian Frank Abe. Mr. Abe’s work includes a fantastic graphic novel. Whether or not you usually read graphic novels, you should seek this one out. It’s called We Hereby Refuse, Japanese American Resistance to Wartime Incarceration. Phenomenal book. Mr. Abe is also one of the editors of an important anthology called The Literature of Japanese American Incarceration.”

In three minutes of network television on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Rachel summarized the arc of the wartime incarceration up to and including redress and reparations, some of it drawn from her reading of We Hereby Refuse, and some from what Lori, Satsuki, and I told her team in our interviews. It’s a simplified narrative, certainly, but by framing the story as a thriller she gets the message across that, as she puts it, history is here to help us in times of crisis. Check it out.

I’m looking forward to meeting Ms. Maddow in Los Angeles for the podcast launch before a live audience at The Orpheum Theater on December 14. The plan is for Satsuki, Lori, and I to join Rachel on stage to talk about the material in the podcast, how the history informs our current moment, and how people can fight back.

I talk about the podcast and upcoming Rachel Maddow live event in this conversation with host and historian Feliks Banel on his live radio program, Cascade of History, on December 7, 2025, on SPACE 101.1 in Seattle. Scroll to the 38:52 mark:

From MS NOW: “‘Rachel Maddow Presents: Burn Order’ is the story of one of the most shocking decisions in American history: the executive order to target and round up innocent citizens, Japanese Americans, at the outbreak of World War II. This six-episode narrative podcast will examine and shed new light on how that policy came to be, who was behind it, who attempted to stop it, and the heroism needed to end the policy for good.”