Lesbian journalist Rachel Maddow recently unveiled her new investigative history podcast Burn Order, which covers the U.S. government’s forced placement of Japanese people into internment camps during World War II. She felt compelled to create the podcast to draw parallels with the current presidential administration’s treatment of immigrants in the United States.

“When we saw what was going on in terms of people being snatched off the streets and hastily built prison camps going up all around the country in deliberately remote areas, the resonance of it pushed this to the top of the line for us. It just felt like the time to do it,” she told Time magazine of launching her podcast, comparing the forced relocation of Japanese-Americans during WWII to the violent present-day abductions and raids being committed by agents of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

She noted that John DeWitt, the U.S. Army four-star general who oversaw the internment, initially wanted a far less sweeping plan to relocate Japanese people into camps after Japan’s bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. However, Karl Robin Bendetsen, a U.S. Army major at the time, helped develop a plan for all U.S. residents of Japanese ancestry — both foreign- and American-born — to be forced into concentration camps.

“Sometimes when the country does terrible things, when the government does really awful stuff, it feels like we could have never done this before,” Maddow said. “That’s definitely not true. These things don’t just automatically happen. They’re not on autopilot. There isn’t anything inevitable about them. It’s individual people — the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time — to give terrible policy outcomes like this. And so it’s worth being really specific about who is actually making this happen, who’s driving it, who can potentially be targeted, or focused on in terms of trying to stop it or change it.”

Insights for the LGBTQ+ community

Subscribe to our briefing for insights into how politics impacts the LGBTQ+ community and more.

Her podcast not only highlights the villains but also the heroes who fought against the unconstitutional human rights abuses of the time, including Colorado Gov. Ralph Carr (R), who suffered political consequences for defending the dignity and humanity of relocated Japanese people living in the United States.

Maddow’s podcast also highlights three young Japanese Americans who legally challenged their internment and lost in the courts, but later received the Presidential Medal of Freedom for their heroic efforts.

Maddow said she felt particularly compelled to cover this historic incident now, seeing as the current president is exhibiting “a lot of the real hallmarks of state capture of the media that we’ve seen in other authoritarian takeovers in other countries.”

“Some media companies in this country have been… [trying] to please Trump and ultimately to turn over media ownership to oligarchs who are happy to serve the regime,” Maddow said. “There’s almost consensus among real working journalists in this country that we cannot become a country that only has state TV. What it takes to do that is to stand up and be a successful, resonant, scrappy, aggressive, non-state TV competitor.”

“Now, we’re there. There’s no use in warning anymore. We’ve got masked, totally unaccountable secret police grabbing women out of daycares and building prison camps everywhere. In less than a year, the president has stuffed multiple billions of dollars into his own pockets, into those of his family. He has literally torn down the White House,” she added.

“We’re no longer at the point where we need to be warned about what’s coming. We’re now at a point where what we need is understanding what’s going on, knowing what our options are in terms of how to preserve our democracy, to make sure that we’re not going to be the generation that lost the republic,” she said.

Subscribe to the LGBTQ Nation newsletter and be the first to know about the latest headlines shaping LGBTQ+ communities worldwide.