Rachel Maddow’s six-episode podcast Burn Order, released in December, 2025, is an outstanding contribution to knowledge of American history and psyche, and absolutely vital listening in our imperiled era. Maddow grippingly relates the flawed decision-making behind the unconstitutional, unethical, and immoral imprisonment of Japanese Americans during World War II, and the remarkable discovery of the failed attempts to prevent this national trauma, which were covered up for decades with a “burn order” to destroy a report that irrefutably documented the loyalty of Japanese Americans.
The series begins in media res, with Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga combing through records at the National Archives in 1982. Herzig-Yoshinaga was a “a retired housewife living in suburban Washington, D.C., and she started coming to the Archives basically as a hobby,” looking to understand her own family’s history in the wartime prison camps. She made copies of relevant documents with her own portable copy machine, and created a meticulous index with copious notes. By 1981, she became a researcher for the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC) to uncover the motives behind Executive Order 9066 (the relocation order) and to document its impact. The CWRIC was created by an act of Congress, signed into law by President Jimmy Carter in 1980, but propelled by the demands and persistence of Japanese American survivors of the camps and legislators including Senators Daniel Inouye and Spark Matsunaga.
On that day in 1982, Herzig-Yoshinaga spotted a report and an indication that it should have been destroyed. The documents revealed that the American government had lied to the courts and illegally withheld information that might have changed history in 1942. The “Ringle report,” produced by Naval Intelligence officer Ken Ringle, provided deep evidence of Japanese American loyalty, contradicting the biased – and delusional – imaginings and insistence of men like John L. DeWitt, Commanding General of the Western Command, and his assistant, lawyer Karl Bendetsen.
DeWitt was known for making wild and unfounded claims about Japanese American spying and sabotage. Bendetsen, a Stanford-trained lawyer, ably fortified and advanced those claims to action, despite many in the chain of command recognizing DeWitt was ungrounded, to say the least. Bendetsen and DeWitt made headway because of “wartime hysteria” after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, on top of pre-existing racism, and greedy desires to possess the land held by Japanese American farmers.
Some leaders at the time refused to bow to the hysteria. Republican Governor Ralph Carr of Colorado famously affirmed Japanese Americans and the Constitution against a tidal wave of popular opinion. Carr was vindicated in the historical record: he is now recognized as an American hero, and Maddow says “practically everything” is now named after him in the state, including the Ralph L. Carr Judicial Center in Colorado, the seat of Colorado’s justice system. However, he paid a price for his conscience, losing his bid for Senate in 1942.
The real heroes of this history are those who were impacted by the government’s lies, and those who resisted. Mitsuye Endo was fired from her California civil service job in 1942 – for being Japanese American – and sent to Tule Lake, California, and then Topaz, Utah concentration camps. Lawyer James Purcell, enlisted by Saburo Kido of the Japanese American Citizens League, pursued a habeas corpus petition which ultimately led to the Supreme Court ruling that the government did not have the right to detain loyal citizens, and the closure of the camps in 1944.
Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga’s discovery in 1982 was central in the 1983-1987 coram nobis cases overturning the wartime convictions of Fred Korematsu, Min Yasui, and Gordon Hirabayashi. Coram nobis refers to correction of prior decisions based on improper evidence. The errors in these cases included suppression of the Ringle report. Korematsu, Yasui, and Hirabayashi had defied curfew or relocation orders, but they were caught up in a system biased against their ethnicity. Korematsu’s case was overturned in 1983, with Federal Judge Marilyn Hall Patel ruling from the bench that the government’s failure to respond to allegations of misconduct was “tantamount to a confession of error.” Hirabayashi’s case was finally decided in 1987 by a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, with Judge Mary M. Schroeder writing that “the information now in the public record constitutes objective and irrefutable proof of the racial bias that was the cornerstone of the internment orders.”
In his statement before the court in 1984 (from the Densho encyclopedia),
“Hirabayashi pointed to the publicly-expressed sentiment that favored interning persons of Iranian ancestry during the 1979-80 hostage crisis in Iran. He continued: “My case stands for the precedent that it can happen again. This is not only my case. This is not only a Japanese American case. This is an American case. Since the answer to the question ‘Can it happen again?’ is yes, it is vitally important during relative periods of calm to ensure that ‘bizarre solutions’ have less opportunity to occur again.”
Bias can infect leaders and the population-at-large, leading to great harm and lasting trauma. Racism and other prejudices can become amplified under conditions of cultural stress, and mobilized by leaders who wish to ride popular fears to political and cultural power.
In 1942, Earl Warren vigorously supported the mistreatment of Japanese Americans. He was Attorney General of California, and became governor after the war. He became the liberal lion of the progressive civil rights era as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court beginning in 1953, writing the majority opinion in Brown v Board of Education in 1954. However, his prior actions haunted him. His posthumously published memoirs echoed a 1972 interview (again from the Densho Encyclopedia):
“I have since deeply regretted the removal order and my own testimony advocating it, because it was not in keeping with our American concept of freedom and the rights of citizens. Whenever I thought of the innocent little children who were torn from home, school friends, and congenial surroundings, I was conscience-stricken. It was wrong to react to impulsively, without positive evidence of disloyalty, even though we felt we had a good motive in the security of our state.”
We would do well to trust leaders of conscience, calm, and reason, not leaders prone to fear and cruelty, who easily scapegoat and demonize perceived “enemies” in pursuit of their own ambitions. As a psychiatrist, I know that our true “enemies” are not people but qualities of mind.
Freud wrote that the unconscious causes distress until it is named and brought to consciousness. It is certainly regrettable that powerful biases are exposed and in play now, with daily harm to vulnerable populations and threats to laws, democracy, and even life on earth. But perhaps awareness of these biases can call forth deeper agency to overcome them.
Psychologist, trauma specialist, and filmmaker Satsuki Ina was born “doing time” at the Tule Lake Segregation Center. She is also featured in Maddow’s podcast. Ina’s groundbreaking work includes co-founding the social justice organization Tsuru for Solidarity, which actively protests migrant detention and promotes healing of intergenerational trauma. Her story illustrates, for psychiatrists, mental health clinicians, and all health care workers, that healing extends beyond the consulting room.
Listening to Burn Order is essential continuing education for us all. Allowing the “evidence-based medicine” of historical knowledge to inform our work as clinicians and citizens could do much to stiffen our resolve to creatively stand up for our patients, communities, and the best of our humanitarian values.
Awareness of and engagement with the cultural forces that produce suffering, including bias and abusive power, is difficult but necessary for our missions of mental health and social well-being.
(Cross-posted at East Wind eZine. Ran on AsAm News on January 27, 2026. Thanks to Randall Yip!)
Ravi Chandra is a psychiatrist and writer in San Francisco. You can find him on Substack. His 2025 essay on free speech is available as a pre-print on Cambridge Engage. You can read more about Satsuki Ina’s memoir here.
Free America Walkout! Next Tuesday, January 20, 2-5 pm!
The organizers at Women’s March are organizing a Walkout for our Freedoms next Tuesday, January 20, 2026 from 2-5 pm, local time. Find your local event here, and sign up for updates. We may be approaching a General Strike, folks. There is no business as usual at this point.
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Ravi Chandra is a psychiatrist, writer, compassion educator, and civilizational health shaman in San Francisco, and a Distinguished Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association. He is the recipient of the 2025 Kun-Po Soo Award for Achievement in Asian American Psychiatry from the APA and APA Foundation. Here’s his linktree. Please sign up for East Wind and Psychology Today updates via Substack where you can also support his educational and creative mission by becoming a free, paid or founding subscriber. For fourteen years, he was lucky to have his MOSF posts published by the Center for Asian American Media, and is now at work broadening and building a diverse creative community and coalition through reflecting on culture and psychology for East Wind eZine. Sign up for updates here, and see all the posts here. He writes from the metaphorical intersection of The Fillmore and Japantown in San Francisco, where Black and Asian communities have mingled since the end of the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. He literally works there, between two Indian restaurants, go figure. His debut documentary was named Best Film (Festival Director’s Award) at the 2021 Cannes Independent Film Festival. The Bandaged Place: From AIDS to COVID and Racial Justice is available on-demand, and with the discount code “Awake” you can get a 20% discount. His nonfiction debut, Facebuddha: Transcendence in the Age of Social Networks, won the 2017 Nautilus Silver Award for Religion/Spirituality of Eastern Thought. You can find him on Psychology Today, Medium, Twitter, Threads, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, SoundCloud, or better yet, in the IRL.
The “Ringle report,” produced by Naval Intelligence officer Ken Ringle, provided deep evidence of Japanese American loyalty, contradicting the biased – and delusional – imaginings and insistence of men like John L. DeWitt, Commanding General of the Western Command, and his assistant, lawyer Karl Bendetsen. History would have changed without DeWitt and Bendetsen. Fred Korematsu, Min Yasui, and Gordon Hirabayashi were cleared in the 80’s with the truths.
*there are plans for corporate to set up 23 internment centers. the contracts may have already been issued. *there is also the call from the ‘administration’ for 100 million deportations, many more than undocumented folk.