Rachel Maddow and her team at MS NOW completed the final two episodes of her Burn Order podcast on the wartime incarceration only last Friday, just in time for the series launch before a live audience on Sunday, December 15, at the ornate Orpheum Theater in Los Angeles. Her team invited Satsuki Ina, Lori Bannai, and me to speak on the first of two panels.

Her team first reached out to us in July and we recorded our interviews for the podcast in August, so that backstage, Rachel greeted us in person like old friends, having heard our voices in her podcast edit bay for the past several months. Yes, she’s just as warm and direct off-stage as she is on the air. She shared that she loves graphic novels and found We Hereby Refuse even before the concept for the podcast took shape, and that she was the one who brought our book to the table at their first meeting.

Rachel was so kind to pose with my two books, certainly making my publishers very happy. Even in the midst of the madness of the daily news she must cover, Rachel took the time to offer an endorsement for our Penguin Classics anthology of The Literature of Japanese American Incarceration, calling it, “An indispensable, important anthology, edited with heart and sharp insight. This should be on the bookshelf of every American who loves the Constitution, and who is willing to fight to defend it.” —Rachel Maddow

One photo I missed getting was with two of the wonderful producers of the show.  Jen Mulreany Donovan and Kelsey Desiderio interviewed us via Zoom in July, helped cut and write the episodes with head writer Mike Yarvitz, and made all the arrangements for our appearance.

Onstage, Rachel put us at ease with questions that were so focused and specific, it was easy to share our thoughts with her wildly engaged fans.

Even in her setup for the panel, Rachel made news by showing a drone photo taken two weeks ago by what she called “a longtime Texas photographer – an Army veteran – who has been documenting the expansion of this immigrant prison camp at Fort Bliss.” The photo shows the standing up of new white tents at the federal property where Satsuki and Tsuru for Solidarity faced down armed soldiers and stopped use of it for family detention in the first Trump term. But under the secrecy of Trump 2, it appears the camp is back and being prepared to house up to 5,000 people.

You can see how prominent the “MS NOW” pillars are on the stage. I think we benefit from the program’s push to establish its name and its brand now that parent Comcast corporation has spun it off from MSNBC into a new entity, Versant Media Group.

The full event was recorded for a special to be cablecast in her usual timeslot on MS NOW on Monday, December 29, at 9:00 pm ET / 6:00 pm PT.

A preview of the special was shown on “The Rachel Maddow Show” last night.

No video file of the event is yet available for reposting, but you can listen to audio of the live event here:

And you can now binge all six episodes of her Burn Order podcast at the usual outlets.