On with Kara Swisher - Rachel Maddow on Japanese Incarceration During WWII, Mass Deportation & Media Chaos

Episode Date: December 11, 2025

Rachel Maddow is an author, podcast host and producer, documentary producer, and, of course, the anchor of her eponymous show on MS NOW. Her newest podcast, "Rachel Maddow Presents: Burn Order," unravels how the incarceration of more than 100,000 Japanese Americans and Japanese immigrants during WWII was planned and carried out. Shockingly, the full story behind one of the 20th century’s worst American human-rights abuses might never have come to light if not for the relentless work of a hobbyist researcher — who had been incarcerated herself. Kara and Rachel dig into the story and explore the parallels to President Trump’s mass-deportation policies. They also discuss the recent boat strikes on alleged drug traffickers, the escalating drama around the competing bids for Warner Bros. Discovery and what it signals for the future of the news business, and MSNBC’s evolution into MS NOW. Please note: This episode was taped on Tuesday, before President Trump said it was “imperative that CNN be sold." Questions? Comments? Email us at [e-mail] or find us on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Threads, and Bluesky @onwithkaraswisher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

We just moved into Versent headquarters. Versant. Like croissant, I've decided. Also good for rashes and other skin conditions. Yes, ask your doctor about Versent. It's on. Hi, everyone, from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. This is on with Carol Swisher.

I'm Kara Swisher. My guest today needs no introduction, and frankly, is one of my favorite people. Rachel Maddow is an author, documentary producer, podcast writer, producer, and host, and of course the host of our show on MS Now. She has a new podcast called Burn Order that tells the story of the incarceration of Japanese Americans and Japanese immigrants during World War II. Like all of Rachel's podcast, it's deeply research, brilliantly executed, and has clear echoes with the present. She's a history wonk. I love history. This is why I'm so excited. to talk to her about because the topic she takes up have happened before in America. And I think the linkages she makes to today are really important to understand. But it's also important to understand what people did that and who did what and who the heroes were. And I think it's critically

important to look at our history to understand that we have faced issues like this before. We will face them again. And I think Rachel does a great job using history to teach us that. We're going to dig into the podcast, obviously, the contemporary parallels and a bit of news around foreign policy, of course, the news around Warner Brothers Discovery. Our expert question comes from Caitlin Dickerson, a staff writer at The Atlantic who covers immigration, who both Rachel and I have great regard for. But before we get to it, I'm interviewing Darra Costa Shahi, the CEO of Uber, and Chris Irmson, the CEO of Aurora, live on stage at the Hopkins Bloomberg Center in Washington, D.C. on Monday, December 15th. These are going to be two really sharp

conversations about applied AI and autonomous vehicles to register for free tickets, Google Hopkins and Kara Swisher, you will find it. And stay with us for this really great interview with Rachel Madd out. Support for this show comes from Odu. Running a business is hard enough. So why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other? Introducing O-Doo. It's the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all-in-one fully integrated platform that makes your work easier, CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, and more.

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I'm so excited. I love your podcast, I have to say. I'm loving it. Thank you for listening to it. I feel like you enjoy audio in a way that I... I enjoy your audio. I don't enjoy everyone's audio, let me just say. So we've got a lot to talk about. We'll start with your new podcast, Burn Order. Then we'll get to some news items, including the Trump administration's lethal boat strikes, which you've been talking a lot about, America's newsstands towards Europe, and Paramount's hostile bid for Warner Brothers Discovery. of Versant, or Versaunt, which is like, I like to call it. Quassant. Do you like egg and cheese on a croissant? Versaunt does make me feel snacky. Doesn't it? Rassant. Now, I don't think there's anything Frenchy about us at a lot. Flaky Versaunt. It's elite. I think it's Vercent. I know, but it's elite. And you want to be as elite. You want to lean into elite, Rachel. That's

my feeling. It's coming back. I'm like an Adina, Minnesota, Savoy, Massachusetts, kind of, yeah. I think I'm correct about it. this. I'm a good branding person. Anyway, so first, let me ask this. After covering the Trump administration every weeknight for the first 100 days, your show is now back to Mondays. Given the ungodly amount of news happening, how do you handle it just once a week? Well, the good thing about doing the Monday show is that I get my choice of what to cover. Like, yes, it's a daily news show, and so I'm covering what happened on Monday. But I can also sort of take a little bit of a broader view of what's happened in the past week. And I think people are a little more forgiving

in terms of not staying on the minute-to-minute headlines and instead widening the aperture a little bit. So I actually think it's a benefit for being just Mondays. And when you decide, how do you pick and choose? We have this mantra on my show, which is to try to increase the amount of useful information in the world. And obviously it's a very clumsy. It's clumsy for a mantra and a long one. But it's actually a very good guiding principle and we use it all the time. We're explicit about it during the news meeting for every show in the sense that there's not much use in me getting on the air and saying the same thing that everybody else has said or presenting the same information in the same context. And so it's always... People can be repetitive.

I don't know if you've noticed or screaming. And I just, you know, it's not that I need to have like an original take, it's that we need to be, I think, rigorous in terms of what's the most useful thing to be expository about, you know, to explain, to bring people's attention to it. And sometimes that's new facts that haven't been noticed about a story that everybody's talking about. And sometimes it's a story that nobody's talking about. Right. And do you tend towards one or the other? Because, you know, things are so covered in such a, I would say, light, but excessive way, if that makes sense, where you just don't, it's just repetitive, repetitive, repetitive, as I said, and a mile wide and a foot deep.

Yeah. I mean, I think if there's a pattern that, like, a sort of discernible pattern in terms of what stories I pick and how the show gets stacked. I think the thing that's maybe a little bit different about me is that I am not interested in Donald Trump. Like, it's very important who the American president is and what's happening to the country, especially what he's trying to do to the country. But I'm also, I don't care very much about what he says. I've always just sort of felt like he talks in a way that is designed to make the media jump. And I am just allergic to having anybody jerk me around like that. And so I watch what he does, but I'm not that interested in what he says. I see.

Like whatever crazy thing he spews, like, hey, piggy or whatever it happens to be. I mean, if he says stuff that is materially important in. in terms of, you know, revealing something about what the administration is doing or something that we need to, you know, understand about how he's changing the country or something that's going to have, you know, consequences. Fine, you know, words matter. But Donald Trump talking is not news, especially because he tries to make whatever, the most recent thing, he's burped out into a microphone. He tries to make that the news cycle. And I just, I don't want him to program my show. Right. So one of the things that's that I like about your program and these podcasts is it's,

you're really wonky. Like, it's super wonky in a really lovely way. So your new podcast, Burn Order, is obviously a continuation of your narrative historical podcast, Ultra, which had two seasons and the follow-up book prequel, which I actually listened to as if it was a podcast. I know it sounds crazy, but it sounds good to hear them all together. Talk about why you pick the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II and the connection between, what you were doing. And obviously we'll get to the connection of today because everything you're doing has a connection to today. Well, speaking of sort of nerding out a little bit, because you've listened to Ultra Season 1 and 2 and listen to prequel as the audiobook, and I know that you're

into this stuff. I am. I feel like I can tell you a little bit of the backstory that actually didn't make it into the podcast, but is part of my thinking about it. So one of the kind of currents in in Ultra, which is, in some ways, a thriller about Americans who were aligned with the Nazis, aligned with the Axis Powers, are trying to organize that kind of a fascist movement here. There are paramilitary groups. They're, you know, stealing weapons from U.S. military armories. They're doing a lot of really bad stuff. Which is the continuing narrative throughout these.

Absolutely. These groups. And you might remember that there's a spy named, or a spy master. named Leon Lewis, who gets World War I veterans, a lot of them German-American World War I veterans, to infiltrate these fascist groups and find out what they're doing. And he's amassing this incredible, like, scary detail about what they're doing. And nobody in law enforcement will take him seriously. The only people he can get to take him seriously to receive his information and act on it are naval intelligence on the West Coast. You might remember that.

So I followed that thread a little bit. And the naval. intelligence officer that he, that Leon Lewis had success with when nobody else would listen to him was a guy named Ellis Zacharias. Ellis Zacharias turns out to be fascinating. He had a TV show on NBC at one point where he talked about his spymaster exploits. He wrote a memoir that was incredible that absolutely should be the basis for like a franchise series of movies in terms of all the stuff that he got into. And he spoke Japanese, which was a crazy detail. Why does he speak Japanese? That got me to Office of Naval Intelligence and Zacharias and other people. And they ended up playing this really interesting, constructive and ultimately

foiled sort of role in trying to shape U.S. government policy toward Japanese Americans both before World War II and then after. Right. And in a way that we sort of shorthand them like as we think of them as activists, like the analog to people like that today would be activists, but they're kind of more than that. They're these patriots that are operating really on the margins of what's okay when the government isn't doing the right thing. They ultimately force the government to do the right thing. In this case, there's several. There's one, and I'm blanking on his name. Edward Ennis. Not Ennis, but the bad general, the bad colonel. Oh, General John DeWitt

and Colonel Carl Ben Detson. Yes. There's also villains, right, in terms of what it is. And then the doll lady. Velvillie Dickinson. Her name is Velvile. Velvilee is my new porn name, just so you know. I'll send you a picture. Dickinson, I'll keep the whole thing. There's a picture of her doll shop in New York City, and it says on, like, the canopy over the play glass window, Velvily Dickinson on it. Right, right. It's crazy.

Exactly. No, I mean, you find these people. But why Japanese Americans? It just led you here? Well, yeah. I mean, a lot has been written about Japanese American incarceration. A lot has been written about, you know, FDR's moral failing. here and about Japanese Americans not only experience, but they're like sort of incredible

spirit and resilience and response to it over generations. A lot has been written there. I don't know that anybody's written about the fact that the people who actually were spying for Japan were, in large part, white American fascists. Right. Who liked Japan either because just they were paying or because Japan was arguably fascist the way that Germany and Italy were. Right. They were part of those access powers. Yeah. And so when I realized that the guy who is the architect of Japanese American incarceration is also the guy who wrote and signed the memo that said, yeah, let's lock up all Japanese Americans, including the elderly and babies. But let's explicitly not lock up, not evacuate, not removed from the West Coast, the silver shirts, the American fascists who have been plotting to overthrow the U.S. government to ally us with him. Now, I assume that every country has spies from every country and maybe people who are sympathetic to their cause, right, no matter where you are.

And in this case, most of the villains were white people who were either, as you said, paid or part of the, you know, they believed in this what was happening here versus Japanese Americans who were quite loyal to the United States. The whole myth, the whole propaganda campaign that justified or gave the pretext for this incredibly radical thing that we did, 120,000 plus Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans locked up for years, including, I mean, going and getting babies out of orphanages because they had some fraction of Japanese lineage. Well, babies are well-known spies, you know. Yes, exactly. They're cute so they can get in anywhere. They are crafty, but anyway. They just crawl right under. Right. But the whole propaganda pretext and justification for that was that Japanese Americans were on Japan's side that they were treacherous.

And U.S. Naval Intelligence, among others, not only learned that that was not true, but sort of proved that that was not true in part by accessing the Japanese government's own files in which... It showed lists, yeah. They had lists of their spies and assets and their explicit lemon-takes. that they couldn't get any Japanese Americans on their side. As in most stories, there are three main character, which are the villains, the victims, and the heroes, essentially. And the villain is clearly this Carl Bendetson. Bendetson, the man who came up with his plan, a military person.

The victims, obviously, are Japanese Americans who were incarcerated with no due process. Heroes are people like Ken Ringel. And the Japanese Americans themselves who challenged it when nobody would help them. Absolutely. But you begin the story by talking about, is it? It's Aiko Herzig Yoshinaga, right? Good job, yes, exactly. And she's a woman who spent years at the National Archives researching this time in American history

found the document that was supposed to have been destroyed, outlining what Carl did, essentially. Talk a little bit about your faith in these sort of misdeeds coming out in the end. The bad guys get their due, and America will ultimately find out what's right, especially for listeners who right now feel that there are a lot of burn orders happening right now, right? But talk about her for a minute and how random it was that she found this. It could have stayed, you know, gone, essentially rosebudded, burnt up. We never know what it was. So talk about her a little bit. Yeah. And thank you for zooming in on this. I think this is a really important part of it. I mean, I think that when the government does really bad things, when like radical people inside the government get the country to follow their radical. vision and do something that is really plainly beyond the pale in terms of what our Constitution is supposed to allow. No, no, we're all excited about Stephen Miller's emails, but go ahead. Yeah. I think that what they're counting on is that they will, in forcing the country to do something

so radical, they'll kind of win people over to the idea that this was a good idea, and it will start to seem like this was an inevitable policy. This is something that happened sort of with its own inertia in its own way, and they'll never be called out as the agent who made it happen. And actually, I think even in our modern conception about Japanese American incarceration, we think of it as something that just happened, almost like, not that it was inevitable, but that it was going to make, we were going to make our way there to that policy as a country without anybody having to steer it that way. No, there were people who had to steer it that way. And there's reasons that it happened and there's, you know, systemic stuff going on. But you have to have agents

within the government who make it happen. And also put out false news like DeWitt did, there was always an attack in San Francisco wasn't happening. And of course people are nervous because there was an attack. So they think there's someone behind every tree essentially. Oh, yeah. And I mean, in the wake of Pearl Harbor, I mean, the Pearl Harbor, I mean, the Pearl Harbor attack was absolutely devastating. I mean, destroyed the Pacific Fleet, decimated the Pacific Fleet, killed more than 2,000 Americans, a real surprise attack. The Navy Secretary came out after Pearl Harbor and said definitively as if he knew that there had been fifth columnists in Hawaii that made it happen,

which absolutely was not true. There were journalists and politicians and special interest groups all over the West Coast who were invaying against the Japanese as if it was just some received truth that Japanese Americans had been treacherous when they hadn't. And so you've got people who have to make the propaganda happen, but then you've also got people who have to conceive the policy, plan it, and implement it. And at this point, point, you know, when Iko Herzeg Yoshinaga is in the archives, it's decades after the policy was developed. It's decades after she herself was incarcerated along with her family. She gave birth in the camps. She finds essentially a path back to the origin. She finds the documents

that prove not only who orchestrated it, who architected it, who designed the policy, but why he said he did it. And the reason that was a huge bombshell, including in court, is because the army knew that what he admitted about why he did it showed so plainly that it was unconstitutional. This is Carl Bendetson that had the Supreme Court actually seen his explanation of why he did the policy, there's very little chance that it would have survived scrutiny even at the time, even when it was in court in 1943 and 1944. So they had burned the evidence of what they'd done, and Ico found the last copy of what was supposed to have been burned.

And Carl thought this was the right thing, right? He thought they are, in fact, dangerous, correct? Would you say that? Or not, he knew they weren't and did it anyway? I don't know. I mean, listen, I think that... I'm saying he thought it wasn't the right thing. He thought he was doing the right thing.

Or why else do it? I think he designed a policy to incarcerate not just Japanese immigrants, but Japanese-American citizens by the tens of thousands. by the tens of thousands. He devised this policy under General DeWitt's name. General DeWitt was kind of a... Seemed to be losing it. Just not an impressive character. Ben Detson was very impressive.

He got in there, as Ken Ringle's son tells us in his interview, he realized he was in sort of a power vacuum. He had the opportunity to take something over. And then what he designed was this incredibly radical, indefinite mass incarceration policy where he would be in charge of it. So he made the U.S. government do something that's absolutely unbelievable.

Like, you can't believe that this happened in the 20th century, but it's a policy that took a lot of work and a lot of administration and a lot of logistical. And he ran it himself. But does that sound familiar to Stephen Miller, correct? I kept hearing echoes of that,

like how he moved into a policy vacuum and a power vacuum, really. And he's the man behind the man, right? The guy who's in charge, General DeWitt, is very prejudiced and very volatile and has lots of connections with politicians and all this stuff, but is kind of a buffoon. And Stephen Miller, Carl Bendettzen,

is not, knows what he's doing and has a very radical vision for what he wants to do. But it's not like he does it because I do not think there's any evidence that he had a good faith belief that Japanese Americans were committing sabotage or were spies. There was no basis for that. And the FBI was saying so, and military intelligence was saying so, his own office was being informed of that.

They had this whole thing where there were sure to ship communications, radio communications. And the FCC at the time, the nascent FCC comes in at the time and is like, You don't know how to read the instruments you're using. Right, exactly. You're describing stuff that absolutely, not only is it not Japanese Americans who are doing it, but the thing you're describing is not happening. You don't understand how to do this stuff. They knew it was all made up, and yet they kept citing it as the pretext to do this radical and profoundly racist thing.

But that said, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the executive order that kicked out the internment. The Attorney General of California and then governed the state Earl Warren was one of the driving forces behind the policy. Warren obviously then went on become chief justice of the Supreme Court. And both were liens of the American progressive movement and also architects of one of the most racist policies of the past century. Should their legacies be more tainted than what they are in the eyes of the general public? Because it didn't just take this guy. It's easy to say like Miller, right? Oh, yeah. And for Warren in particular, he wasn't just somebody who went along with that. Warren made it happen in a lot of ways. I mean, Warren created for his own, I think, political benefit. the clamor in California politics that really fueled it. And so, yeah, Warren has a lot to answer for. And Warren, it haunted Warren his whole life. I mean, for everything else that Earl Warren ever did, he had a monstrously terrible and racist role in this chapter in U.S. history, and he knew it. He knew it. It did haunt him for all his days. And with FDR, you know, that was a man who, you know, his legacy at terms of what he was trying to do in preparing the

United States for war and then leading us in war once Pearl Harbor happened, obviously a man with a lot on his plate, but boy, did he fail on this. He essentially just checked out. His wife, Eleanor Roosevelt, was very much against this happening. She had sort of Confederates in the White House on her side trying to maneuver her husband away from this, or at least to speak up for for Japanese Americans to protect them from sort of vigilante violence, you know, just to do something. And he just checked out.

He just said, you know, they, he said, whatever it's going to be, if it's military necessity, you have carte blanche. The only thing he said was, and I quote, be as reasonable as you can.

That's what he told the authorities, when he gave them the authority to do this. But when Eleanor confronted FDR about it, he told her never to bring it up again. That's right. Yeah, He absolutely failed on that. It was a moral failing on this.

And it was sort of an abdication of responsibility on this. This is just something he didn't want to think about, didn't want to deal with. And therefore, one of the worst civil liberties and humanitarian catastrophes in our history is stains his legacy forever. So every episode we get an expert to send us a question. Yours comes from Caitlin Dickerson, a staff writer for the Atlantic who covers immigration. Let's hear it. Hi, Rachel. Thanks for the podcast.

I'm really enjoying it. And I want to say shout out to Iko, Herzig, Yoshinaga. I don't know where her story ends, but I, too, have toiled in the National Archives for a very long stretches of time. And I know what it's like to dig through that surprisingly disorganized set of documents and also to come upon finally the thing that you were looking for or even better, as in her case, something you didn't know was there. But that turns out to be even more important than what you had in mind. So it was really hard for me to come up with just one question for you, but I have. We're in another moment now of very controversial policies that are targeting immigrants and in some cases their descendants. Some of those policies rooted in race-based stereotypes and fear-mongering. And I'm getting a lot of questions from people about what to do, how to feel, and what to do.

And so I'm wondering, listening to your show, and maybe you'll get to it, how did the general public respond to the internment of Japanese Americans as it was happening? We were in the middle of a war, so the context was quite different. But did people generally have a strong reaction to that policy if they weren't personally impacted by it? Or did they sort of continue with daily life? What did they do? And what lessons are there for us? now in that response. Thanks. First of all, good on you for getting Caitlin Dickerson. Isn't she fantastic? I think she's amazing. I like to have special things for you, Rachel.

Thank you very much. No problem. Great question. And this is a sort of a part of this story that I think really haunts my thinking about it now because there was no mass protest by non-Japanese Americans against what happened to Japanese Americans. There was when people were being taken out of their homes and put in assembly centers, right? And, you know, forced to report, given a number, forced onto trains or buses, taken to what were, you know, prison camps. FDR called them concentration camps. Americans in their neighborhoods who were not Japanese stood by and watched it happen. Right.

Literally watched the buses and the trains take off. And that, I think, is part of a moral legacy here. There is, it's sort of the whole back half of the podcast deals with this in detail. But the few people that did stand up outside the Japanese American community, I think, had to be singular kind of people. Like, it's interesting, some of the white lawyers who were involved in these cases were real eccentrics or people who are not part of the establishment at all. I think that's important. You need to, people who got outside of group think. So the general public response was muted. One thing that does emerge, though, and this is something that I didn't expect before getting into our interviews and getting into our story, is that even when there weren't protests, the few people who just tried to materially help, who, like, for example, there's a scene in episode three where this group of Quaker women used to come to the fence of one of the camps and throw over fresh fruits and vegetables.

one of our interviewees, her mom was pregnant at the time, and a Quaker woman saw that she was pregnant and brought a homemade quilt, brought a blanket, and threw the blanket over the fence to her and said, I hope this will help. And our interviewe, Satsuki Ina, her mom kept that blanket until literally her deathbed because of what it meant to her, to be betrayed by her country, to be betrayed by their white neighbors, to be betrayed by all the people who they thought were their compatriots, but to have this little spark of, of people trying to help just to mitigate the harm. Those Quaker women at the fence weren't stopping the policy,

but they were recognizing the humanity of the people who are being hurt by it. And that itself is a form of moral defiance. And to me, that makes me think about not just faith communities now, but everybody who's doing things just to materially help the people who are being targeted by Trump. Like women taping it or yelling at police or getting in the way or even. Yeah, I mean, stopping, that's trying to stop what the Trump administration and its agents are doing, but also just mutual aid, just trying to help people, getting groceries for families that are in hiding, turning up at the gates. So, you mean, seeing the Catholic mobilization in Chicago of trying to bring the Eucharist, trying to do a Catholic rights at the Broadview facility.

To the Pope, right? The Pope has been very outspoken about the topic. We'll be back in a minute. Support for this show comes from LinkedIn. You know how important it is to hire the right person for your small business. That's why LinkedIn Jobs is stepping things up with their new AI assistant so you can feel confident you're finding top talent that you can't find anywhere else. The best part is those great candidates are already on LinkedIn. LinkedIn says that employees hired through LinkedIn are third.

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One of the most striking things about listening to Byrne order is how tens of thousands of American citizens had their constitutional rights stripped away from them instantly. Now more than 80 years later, the Supreme Court has basically legalized racial profiling by immigration agents, so-called Kavanaugh stops. Particularly American citizens are being detained. American citizens by ICE agents. ProPublic has documented over 170 cases of Americans being detained by immigration agents. More than 20 cases. They were jailed for over 24 hours and weren't allowed to. call family member or lawyer. So talk about these exceptions to constitutional protections

becoming the norm because we sit there and go, I can't believe they did this, but they're doing it. Yeah. I think you also have to just look at how they're doing it. I mean, citing the Alien Enemies Act, right? Why were they trying to use the Alien Enemies Act against people from Venezuela? Not because of anything that was, there was no war with Venezuela then and there's still none now, but they wanted to use the powers that the Alien Enemies Act gave them to essentially operate outside the bounds of the Constitution. Like, oh, right, okay, denaturalization, right? They're talking about getting rid of people who are naturalized citizens or people who are not born in this country who got their citizenship after birth. They want to denaturalize

and take away citizenship from those kinds of Americans. They talked about doing the same thing to Japanese Americans. Now they're talking about trying to get rid of birthright citizenship. Right. Well, I was just going to note the Supreme Court has taken up the case challenging birthright citizenship that in and of itself can be seen as a victory for Trump that they're even taking it up. Yes. And the court could uphold birthright citizenship, but still chip away at it. They love to chip away and open the door. It's reinterpretation by Congress. That leads to a larger question who is going to ultimately get to decide who belongs in America, right? I think that's what your your podcast is about too. Will it be ICE, Trump, Congress Supreme Court? Was it FDR? Was it like it's the same, it feels so resonant. to what's happening now, which is, why didn't we learn from them and what were the excuses they used then that are similar to today? Yeah, it's about this idea. The authoritarian project is, right, I want to be able to exclude and abuse, incarcerate,

potentially kill. I want to have zero accountability for my actions toward certain people who I want not to be American, right? And once you're down that road, it's just a question of how far you're going to go. But once that's the framing with which you are approaching this, we're going to say that, you know, you're alien enemies. You're not just immigrants. You're enemies to us, right? So therefore, essentially we can treat you as if you are combatant. We are going to take away your citizenship. We are going to say, even though you were born here, you're not the right kind of American. I mean, Trump is talking about stripping citizenship from people who he deems to be incompatible with Western civilization. That would be you and I, but go ahead. Yes, that would be anybody who he chooses to apply that to. do. Like, don't think, oh, I don't look like that kind of person. That'll be in, that'll be in his, in his eyes. And so once you're in that kind of a project, the only question is how far you can go before you're stopped. And with Japanese American incarceration, where we ended up, in part because of people like Iko Herzegoshenaga, and what she did, and because of the Japanese Americans who challenged it and because of people who stuck with it decades later to try to make sure that that legal foundation didn't survive to a new generation of leaders who would try to do this for some reason, is that we ended up overturning the convictions in the Japanese American incarceration test cases. Those convictions

were overturned. The Supreme Court finally acknowledged that Korematsu was wrongly decided. But more than that, the U.S. government formally apologized for it and paid restitution, paid reparations payments to the survivors, while presidents as radical and liberal and socialist as Ronald Reagan said this was a wrong and we will never do it again as a country. We supposedly learned this lesson and committed that we'd never do anything like it again. And we should relearn those lessons and remind ourselves that we got there. Is it the same tactics? I mean, we're talk about the echoes between them because let me just say, a few days ago, Amnesty International released a report alleging human rights violations and torture at so-called

alligator Alcatraz detention facility in Florida and the Crone Detention Center, the ICE detention facility that's also in Florida. The report is shocking, but to give you a small glimpse of what's in it, an alligator alcatraz detainees have described as being put into small cage-like structure for hours. It's approximately two by two feet. Their hands and feet are restrained while they're in it. So let's take Caitlin's question is,

how is the Democratic Party and general public reacting to these deliberately cruel and degrading treatment of enemies, which happened before? Like, this never again thing is, oh, maybe again. Yeah. I mean, you know, I think that the elite and institutional response is woefully inadequate. I think that there is something going on sort of in the heart of the American people that people are responding. I mean, there have been a lot of protests at Chrome.

There have been protests at the Everglades facility, the so-called alligator alcatraz. I imagine that this amnesty report about putting people in this two-foot-tall cage outside in the swamp will, will touch some more people's hearts and people will respond the way that I think Americans have been responding to these sort of outrages. But expecting the Democratic Party to lead on this is something that I've given up on. I expect the American people to lead on it and then Democrats on it. Which didn't happen then, right? Democrats to follow the crowd. No. No, there wasn't. There really wasn't. I mean, the Roosevelt administration sort of soured on mass incarceration of Japanese Americans a couple years into it. By the time the test cases were getting to the Supreme Court,

you know, in 43 and 44, within the administration, they were realizing, like, oh, we got to unwind this somehow. Right. But once you've worked people up into a racist frenzy for needing to do something, it's kind of hard to unwind that. Right. And so they had to be stopped. Mitsuya Endo's case is actually the one of the four Japanese test, Japanese American test cases that succeeded and coincided with the closing of the camps. But yeah, I mean, we're in a position right now where ultimately the people who did this will either be held accountable or, like Carl Bendetson and the other and the other sort of bad guys in this story, they will spend the rest of their days denying it was them and pretending they had nothing to do with it. Well, let's change

and talk about our foreign policy and the boat strike saga. There's apparently a memo from the DOJ's Office of Legal Counsel that lays out the rationale for launch. military strikes against alleged drug runners. According to reports, it claims that cartels using profits from drugs to attack allies like Mexico, and since airstrikes are targeting the drugs, any deaths are justified. This is what the administration has relied on when orders of killing civilians. Are we watching another moment like this when people inside the government and military rely on flimsy legal cover in order to carry out what are essentially illegal orders, right? Yes. Right. And which happened here, it seems like. It happened here and also back

then. Yeah, the really direct parallel is that the Justice Department was fighting against the incarceration policy, and nobody in the Justice Department would write a legal opinion saying it was legal, because it was clearly illegal. And so they found other government lawyers outside the Justice Department to write a memo saying, okay, it was legal. And those lawyers actually talk about sort of liberal lions, talk about Earl Warren and FDR in their legacy. The three lawyers who wrote the memo that greenlit this are all like, you know, new dealer, liberal, like real establishment lawyers and all of them for the ends of their days spent the swinging between apologizing for and denying their responsibility for what they did. Right. And I do

think that it's worth, A, we as American citizens and observers of what going on, we're going to have to answer for what we did and whether or not we did anything to do. try to stop these sort of terrors and whether or not we made sure they were documented and whether or not we stuck out, we spoke out against them, whether or not we knew that was going to affect, you know, it was going to be effective to stop them. Did you actually object? It matters if you object. But the people who enabled this stuff, people who are working in this, in the regime right now that is terrorizing people on the basis of race explicitly, they're going to have to answer for it. And they may have to answer for it just to their

own families and to God. But if we do this right, they're going to have to answer in court as well. And they should know that. And they should be, and they should act accordingly. Right. So when we're talking about these boat strikes in the same way, in recent days, there's a lot of focus on the second strike that really killed two men as they held onto the floating wreckage and whether or not it was a war crime. But as Charlie Savage and Julian Barnes pointed out in the Times, focusing on the details of the second strike might actually play to Trump's advantage because it implicitly accepts the premise that these strikes are part of a war, not simply cold-blooded murder. Is the fervor over the second straight missing the point?

Yeah, and I'm glad you pointed out that Charlie Savage piece, because I think he also makes one very clear, very memorable point that I think, I hope people take away from that article, which is, you know, imagine an American cop on the beat who sees a drug deal happen, who sees somebody buy, you know, a bag of weed or some Coke or something. in seeing that happen can the cop in that instance draw his or her firearm walk up to the person who he or she thinks did the drug deal and just shoot him in the head is that is that how we're dealing with drug problems in our country like if you think there's a meth lab in in your rural community can the sheriff in your county roll up and just machine gun the house in which he suspects there might be a meth lab there. And if people run out, shoot them. And if people are surviving, laying on the ground, have sheriff's deputies walk up and instead double-tap them, shoot them in the forehead twice to make sure they're dead.

I mean, like, is that, is that what we're doing? Because that would, there's nothing that makes it more legal to do that in water than it would be to do that on a street corner in the United States. And there's nothing about the language and the memos that they've generated around what they're doing in the Caribbean that makes it any more illegal than that. And that is not, it's just not what we do. And it's not a war. And this isn't, you know, interception of drug boats, you know, like this isn't law enforcement. This isn't war. This is just illegal murder. No, it's a bad Sylvester Stallone movie. That's what it feels like, essentially. Well, yeah. But it's It's, I mean, what they like about it is the movie aspect of it, right?

Like, what they like is how it looks on TikTok. And Trump likes sitting in the Oval Office and saying, we will kill you, we will kill you, we will kill you. Well, you know, if we started killing everybody suspected of having anything to do with drugs, I mean, lots of people who the president knows are going to have a lot of problems. Correct. It's just, it's not, it's not legal and it's not right. And ultimately, they're going to be held accountable for it. I think Trump is pretty sure he's not going to be held accountable for anything. But people in the U.S. military who are following through with these plainly illegal orders,

it will haunt them and their careers and their lives the whole rest of their lives. And it's not fair to put them in this position. So one of the things that's interesting about the Pagias and the echoes of today is that these people were haunted most of their lives for what they did, right? one of the things I was thinking, I was talking to someone about it and said, oh, should we kick people when they're dead? I'm like, quite a bit. We should kick them when they're dead. Yes, let's keep kicking the corpses of Carl and the rest of them. Well, look at how their lives turned out when they had to drag this moral albatross with them, you know? I mean, wait till you get to episode six and you find out the way things worked out for Carl. I love the what happened. Yeah, we've got Carl in a way that you're not going to expect. But when you decided to do this, is this your goal in pointing that out? to today's people, it's like, I mean, I keep thinking, Christy Noam, you're going to jail. It's going to, you're eventually. Eventually, Pete Heggseth, you're in big trouble. I don't think Trump will be held accountable, actually. So how do you, what was your goal here when you think about doing burn order?

I mean, it's both to make the people who are doing wrong recognize that they should change course now while they still can because otherwise this is going, among other, among all the other things that this is and all the other pain that this causes, they're going to ruin their own lives and their own. they're going to cause generational harm to their own families by being part of something that is so obviously wrong that we will dissect this and get to the bottom this and nobody who is doing wrong on these scores will ever be let off for them. And so if you're, you know, if you're doing, if you're breaking people's windows and dragging women out of daycares and locking up U.S. citizens because they racial, because you racially profiled them and thought that they looked like immigrants even if they weren't. And you're locking up immigrants and calling them murderers and rapists when they got no criminal record and you're doing that by the tens of thousands and you're putting people

in cages and swamps to punish them because you enjoy the torture. I mean, if you're part of any of those things, it's you are ruining your own life and your family's life for multiple generations to do this and think about it. You can get out now. But also on the good side of it. Like the ways to fight these things are myriad and some of them are about helping people now. A lot of this is about saying no and objecting and protesting and confronting people with the moral wrong of what they're doing. We also, frankly, need a lot more lawsuits. We need a better legal defense in this country than we're getting. And that was the big, that was Trump's triumph, I think, in going after the craven but powerful, rich law firms early on, is that they haven't joined in to help people bring a legal offensive here that might slow this stuff further.

And those, you know, white shoe law firms, the Paul Weiss's of the world and all those other law firms that sign those deals, they need to unwind those deals and start working on the right side of history here. they themselves are going to be paying for it forever. Right. And on this topic, the last thing, the Japanese Americans, the people that survive, what echoes of what happened to them, having their constitutional rights? Do you see any parallels to today what might happen to these people who have been so badly victimized by these mass deportations comparatively? Oh, yeah. I mean, the harm here is real. I mean, you can't lock up more than 100,000 people for years.

I mean, some of the ways we locked up Japanese Americans, we locked them up in, the whole family's locked up in horse stalls, you know, through the winter and for months at a time living in, you know, with military style group latrines for pregnant women and elderly people and substandard food and, I mean, taking babies out of orphanages and putting them in prison camp orphanages on the basis of their race. I mean, yeah, the multi-generational harm there is something that I don't have the words for, honestly. I will also say that there's been a lot of Japanese-American leadership against what Trump is doing to immigrants now. And that's also that when we get around to Carl at the end of Burn Order, you're also going to learn a little bit more about that, too. Wow, I can't wait. I hope he gets thrown into the sea. We'll be back in a minute. Support for this show comes from Odu. Running a business is hard enough,

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Netflix deal, the hostile takeover bid by Paramount. We could spend multiple episodes talking about this. This is where things stand as we record on Tuesday morning after Warner Brothers Discovery Board chose Netflix bid. Trump said it would be a problem that it would be involved in the decision to approve or reject the merger. He also called Ted Sarando's, the CEO of Netflix, fantastic. David Ellison's Paramount launched a hostile takeover bid, but not for a porting meeting with Trump

and telling him Paramount would make sweeping changes to CNN if they bought Warner. Trump also said, I never met these people, essentially. He did one of those. They're not really friends of mine, which I loved. Like, Chef's Kiss, Trump. Let's leave aside the movie business and focus on news. Ellison is remaking CBS News in Trump's image, really. Right now, you're in.

a situation where you're all remaking a news company. With you at the center of it, Rachel. You are the Queen Bee? I guess. I don't know what to want. Monday nights at nine. Come on, Carol. Let's not overstate things. I'm going to overstate it because I can tell what they're doing.

Talk about the knock on effects right now for media in general and this particular deal. And let's imagine for whatever reason you were looking for a new TV home, would you consider working at the David Ellison owned CNN for example? By the way, I just publicly stated I will not work a day for them, but go ahead. I just said. Could you imagine? Yeah, let's

have the... I'll be over there, over with you people at Versailles in a very short order. Imagine my interview with Barry Boyce. Yeah, that would be really good. That would be a lesbian face off I don't want to be part of. But so talk a little, talk about that, like what's happening there. Yeah, I mean, let me just, let me, I think the bottom, let's go right to the bottom line here. Donald Trump right now is minus 24 in his approval rating, right? And those polls were done before he started talking about Somali people as garbage and saying that he's going to take away citizenship. Citizenship from Americans who he deems to be incompatible with Western civilization. I'm sorry.

If you run a multi-billion dollar enterprise and your big strategic decision is like, how can I get right with that guy? Right, right. I don't respect your acumen. I don't expect your vision. I mean, he's 79 years old. He lives on cheeseburgers. I don't know what's going on with the hand, but it's not good. I don't know what's going on with the ankles, but it's not good.

He's not going to be there for that long. And his legacy is going to be an oil slick on the bottom of the American, like on the bottom of our founding documents. You know what I mean? It's like, oh, did this fall into something? What's this smear here? Like the idea that you are positioning your company and your family empire for a legacy in which it all comes down to you destroyed something of value, something that contributes to who we are as a country to instead please the guy who will go down as the worst, the worst American in multiple generations, the worst. certainly the worst president we ever had, the man who tried to destroy this country and got pretty far down the road to doing it. I just, I don't, I don't think you're right. I don't think you're making a good decision. And I do think that the people who, you know, plighted their troth with Trump right after the election because he won the election. Now, one year into it, I think, are in a moment where maybe it's time to reevaluate some of those decisions that you made. Maybe you were wrong to plight your troth with him. Maybe this isn't something you want to be associated with forever. Maybe, you know, you should unwind those deals.

Maybe you should stop coutowing to him. Maybe you should get right with history because I don't think his legacy is the one that you want to be intertwined with when you have to answer for who you are. So two more very quick questions. I have to ask about with MS now, your ratings are up since the rebrand. They're significantly up year over year. You have the highest rated show on the network. I don't care if you don't think you are, the most important what you are. The cable television is still shrinking.

How do you look at how you stay relevant when you think about where you are right now? It's a good start. What's the opportunity for something like MS Now? You know, I was stressed about, you know, decoupling with NBC News because, you know, I've always really integrated, like I use a lot of NBC News archives. I've always used a lot of NBC reporting and reporters and correspondence. And I've always had a really good relationship with the news side. So sort of us, splitting off from them, I was anxious about it. But it turns out the way we've split off has been really good. We've hired all these new reporters, this whole new editorial structure. It means that they, every, all of our news gathering apparatus all works just for us and we don't have to like share with another company that honestly has different priorities and different interests. And so we're kind of, we're better actually than we were at, um, at, um, um, at, um, um, at, um, um, in the old structure under NBCUniversal, and that feels good. That feels like a great place from

which to grow. Also, we're doing better, I think, in terms of the way we digitally distribute what we do, like our online presence, I would put up against any other news entity in terms of how we're doing on YouTube and TikTok and places like that. We're strong in the podcast space and getting stronger and doing all different kinds of podcasts. So I think that actually we're in good shape. I'd rather be us than be anybody else in the news business right now. I would agree. Especially with the shame and I think the shame and sort of grubbiness of being part of one of these companies that's trying to please Trump. I mean, that's a good podcast. That's going to follow those people around like a stink. So on the last question,

because your staff is losing their minds right now, but 80 years from now, when someone makes a podcast about the Trump era, maybe you. What will it be called? And we know who the villains and victims are, so who are the heroes? Shame and grubbiness, I think actually is a pretty, it's a pretty, we might, we should. We should buy the URL right now. We should buy the IP. Shame and gruffiness with Kara and Rachel. Yeah, that's true. Well, I'll be coming over to Versen soon if the Ellison's get their grubby hands on. Please. I'm coming. I already talked to Rebecca. I told, you know, I already said it publicly. There's not a, there's not a, there's a, there's a, There's not a millisecond that'll work for these people, just so you know.

What do you want to do at Versaunt? How would we do it? Versant? I want to create a croissant business and say Versaunt croiss with you, and I want to wear outfits. And we can roll them, you know, lesbian bakery kind of thing. We can also a mass market, our haircut? Yes, our haircut. There's so much to happen. There's so much. We can create a lesbian action movie. You know, obviously, as you know from cable these days, between pluribis and the Beast in me, dyspeptic lesbians are the thing for 2026. So I feel really good about our future. We've got to run with this now, Swisher. I know. I've tried. Rachel, I've tried. You just reject

me at all, at all efforts to do so. Yeah, we're going to, I mean, I think that we're in good shape. I think that we should, you and I, and you and MS now, we should be in cahoots more than we are. Cahoots. It's coming. And I think that everybody who's working to try to make our country, not just protect what they're trying to destroy, but who is trying to stand up for the people who they're trying to hurt along the way, gets a starring role in the 80 years, hence, podcast. All right. Then here's to shame and grubby. Okay. Thank you, Rachel. As always, it's a wonderful podcast. Everyone should listen to it. Burn Order. And Ico, thank God for you. That's all I have to say. Thank you, Kara.

Today's show was produced by Christian Castor Roussel, Kateri Yocum, Michelle Alloy, Megan Bernie, and Kalyn Lynch. Nishat Kirwa is Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts. Special thanks to Corinne Ruff and Andrea Lopez Crusado. Our engineers are Fernando Aruda and Rick Kwan, and our theme music is by Tracademics. If you're already following this show, you get to be a hero on shame and grubbiness. If not, you get to work for the Ellisons. Better you than me.

Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Carous Swisher, and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On With Caroushisher from Podium Media, New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us. We'll be back on Monday with more. Support for this show comes from Odu. Running a business is hard enough. So why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other? Introducing Odu.

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