MS NOW LIVE with Rachel Maddow on Dec. 14, 2025 at The Orpheum Theater in Los Angeles, California. (Photo Credit: Monty Brinton © MS NOW/ VERSANT MEDIA)
Seattle-based writer and scholar Frank Abe appeared on Dec. 14 at the Orpheum Theater in Los Angeles as part of a live panel for Rachel Maddow’s “Burn Order” podcast on wartime incarceration. The event coincided with the release of the final two episodes of the series, produced by Maddow’s team at MS NOW.
Rachel Maddow and Frank Abe
Abe joined fellow panelists Satsuki Ina and Lori Bannai—also a Seattleite and she served as an attorney for Fred Korematsu—to discuss historical and contemporary issues surrounding Japanese American incarceration. Korematsu was a Japanese American civil rights activist whose 1942 arrest for defying exclusion orders led to Korematsu v. United States, a 1944 Supreme Court decision that upheld incarceration and is now widely condemned.
Maddow credited Abe’s work, including his anthology The Literature of Japanese American Incarceration, as central to shaping the podcast.
On stage, Maddow called the anthology “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.”
The Orpheum event was recorded for a special set to air on MS NOW on Dec. 29.