The Case of Earl Warren

How the guilt over sending kids to concentration camps may have led to the unanimous end to official school segregation in America.

It’s so easy to feel like a fool trying to appeal to MAGA’s conscience, trying to reach people who seemed to have decided, at some point between 2015 and now, to stop being reachable. And look. Maybe we were fools. And maybe we still are. Look where we are.

But what if good and evil—as concepts, as actual forces in the world—what if they exist? What if people—regular, flawed, embarrassing, complicated people—can actually be moved beyond the programming of their nervous system or algorithm or the combination of the two? What if it’s possible to change your mind, or someone else’s mind, or the collective mind of a country that has been, let’s say, unwell? And maybe, by making the case now, we can shape history in the coming years by beginning a process that might regenerate something we once called conscience?

Consider Earl Warren.

The Politician Who Filled the Camps

Earl Warren was, in 1942, the attorney general of California, and he was running for governor, and he had found his hook: Japanese Americans. Specifically, the incarceration of Japanese American civilians for no decent legal reason, which was directed by the leader of the Democratic Party, who was the most popular president in modern history.

Warren, a Republican, supported this crime against humanity that looted more than 120,000 Japanese Americans—including 70,000 American citizens—of their homes, lives, and years, loudly, publicly, enthusiastically. He supported it in the way that people support things when they have decided that this—this right here—is the thing that will get them elected.

And it wasn’t a leap. He was a member of the Native Sons of the Golden West. (The name alone.) He looked at the sitting governor, who had the mildly moderate position that maybe Japanese American farmworkers should be allowed to keep farming — because food — and Warren said, essentially: you are being soft on the enemy.

To make it even more relatable to our present crisis, Warren said that the fact that Japanese Americans had not committed any crimes was “confirming and disturbing confirmation evidence” that they would. The absence of crime was proof of future crime. He told the Tolan Committee in February 1942: “Such a distribution of the Japanese population appears to manifest something more than coincidence.” Many Japanese Americans lived near military bases because there were farms nearby, btw.

Earl Warren went on to become Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, appointed by Dwight D. Eisenhower. He went on to make Brown v. Board of Education unanimous. Easy to believe he spent the rest of his judicial life trying to repay a debt.

In his autobiography, he confirmed this reading. From The Memoirs of Earl Warren (Doubleday, 1977):

“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 so impulsively, without positive evidence of disloyalty, even though we felt we had a good motive in the security of our state.”

Worth noting: Warren refused to issue a public apology during his lifetime. The memoir quote was published posthumously in 1977, three years after his death. He was changed. He could not fully say so in public. I wonder and have to believe the revelation of the Nazi atrocities refigured how he saw his own rush to put people in camps, even if just out of convenience.

I’m not telling you this to make you feel better. I’m not telling you this because the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice and all of that. I’m telling you because the conditions that produced Earl Warren in 1942—the organized fear, the nativist infrastructure, the information environment that made cruelty feel like common sense—those conditions are not so different in their structure from what’s producing the people who scare and exhaust us today.

Which means: they are not a different species. Which means: some of them can be moved. Which means: the work of figuring out how to move them is not naive. We shouldn’t be speaking to move future Earl Warrens. We should be awakening all decent Americans who reject the bumbling, invidious spectacle of this regime’s cruelty as a service—as a service to billionaires who want to be trillionaires. Their voices and actions are what changes minds.

That’s what this episode was about to me. The clips below are, hopefully, part of the slipstream that brings us to a deeper understanding and a commitment to act.

Every episode of Next Comes What uses a collage of clips — primary sources, news footage, academic talks, congressional testimony, and Trump brain gas. Starting with the May 7th episode, I’ll be trying to deliver a companion post based on the clips I add as the show’s producer. It won’t be a summary, but a research trail you can follow, share, or come back to in six months when you need the Earl Warren clip and can’t remember where you heard it.

The Clips: Where to Find Them

Here’s the source of just about every clip from Episode 70, in order of appearance, with links and a few words on what the clip means beyond the direct or oblique connection to the episode.

THE ARCTIC TEASE

TVP WORLD — Cold Response: Is NATO preparing for a new Arctic front?

Andrea’s forthcoming book Snowblind looks at a story from a century ago but it isn’t a retreat from the present.

SIGNS OF A SICK SOCIETY

The United Front Show — REAL DOCTOR demonstrates Trump’s ACTUAL COGNITIVE TEST

I hate getting too into it as Trump obviously feels it’s part of his con. But such a good metaphor for the show’s theme of diagnosis being almost meaningless without action.

MSNBC — The Supreme Court guts the Voting Rights Act

The end of the civil rights era was predictable and predicted when the public didn’t punish the GOP or the Supreme Court for gutting the Voting Rights Act. And Ali Velshi’s show is consistently awesome. Like Democracy Now! with a Dateline approach and budget.

ABC News — SPECIAL REPORT: Supreme Court ruling limits Voting Rights Act

The immediate scramble — North Carolina, Texas, the states that no longer felt hemmed in by law in terms of racially excluding people from representation. Watching it unfold in real time. It sucks!

MeidasTouch — AOC mocks GOP for whining about Virginia redistricting

There’s a quality of exhausted righteous fury in this clip that felt like the correct emotional register for the section. And I love that AOC’s voice is now instantly recognizable.

MSNBC — BREAKING: Supreme Court temporarily restores telehealth abortion pill access

The mifepristone thread. The court gave with one hand and then appeared about to take with the other. As Andrea said, serious court watchers read the stay as a move to look reasonable before elections. That we are even at this point with a medically sound and well-vetted treatment is a proof of the sickness.

BILLIONAIRES, DOGE, ICE

Fox News — DETAILS: Elon Musk could become world’s first trillionaire

From Fox intentionally. That audience is being told this is aspirational. The USAID and ICE clips that follow are the other side of the ledger — what that concentration of power has bought, measured in dead bodies.

MSNBC — ‘Clueless buffoons’: USAID whistleblower reveals true damage DOGE did

Researchers at Boston University put the death toll from USAID cuts at more than three-quarters of a million. This clip with whistleblower Nicholas Enrich gives the gory details of how that happened — what it looks like when you gut an agency that was keeping people alive and turn it into one of the greatest humanitarian disasters of the century.

Democracy Now! — Deaths in ICE Custody Skyrocket: 2026 Toll Reaches 17, on Average One a Week

Wanted to include Detention Watch’s Setareh Ghandehari in this. Essential heroes of the movement who will remind history that we knew exactly what we were doing.

CBS — Citadel CEO Ken Griffin buys copy of U.S. Constitution for $43 million

Billionaires are literally buying our history and our institutions. Ken Griffin now owns the only two private copies of a first printing of the US Constitution. That sentence is real. Didn’t include this from a few years ago when Griffin bought his first Constitution but worth a link.

JOSEPH STIGLITZ ON INEQUALITY

If you want the economic architecture underneath everything else in this episode, Stiglitz is your guy. Three clips, one through-line: we have been here before, and the exit is not a mystery. He doesn’t answer whether we’ll find it this time. I don’t either.

ColumbiaNews — Joseph Stiglitz — The Price of Inequality

Stiglitz gives us the thread. The Gilded Age → Progressive Era → Roaring ’20s → New Deal pattern isn’t exactly comforting, but it makes the present moment feel less unprecedented. We have pulled back from the brink before.

New Economic Thinking — Joseph Stiglitz: It’s Time to Get Radical on Inequality

TEDx Columbia SIPA — The Costs of Inequality: Joseph Stiglitz

THIRTEEN / MetroFocus — Joseph Stiglitz: Why Occupy Wall St. Failed

We have to think about Occupy, a massive messaging success that changed brains but didn’t persist due to a strategic decision against formal organization. “We are the 99%” is probably the most effective political framing of the last twenty years.

THE LEVITSKY / CHENOWETH BREAKDOWN

Harvard Ash Center — The Breakdown with Erica Chenoweth and Steve Levitsky — April 30, 2026

Steve Levitsky co-wrote How Democracies Die. Erica Chenoweth literally wrote the book on nonviolent resistance. When they talk in real time about what’s working, why, and what we need next, you listen. Criminally underviewed but an incomparable asset for history.

EARL WARREN / JAPANESE AMERICAN INCARCERATION

Stop Repeating History — Earl Warren: Champion of Civil Rights, Dangers of Politics, and the Japanese American Incarceration

The moral center of the episode to me. Warren wasn’t a total monster. He was a politician, a nativist organization member, a man swimming in the assumptions of his moment — and he went on to be one of the greatest justices in American history. Maybe the greatest? Huge revelation for me.

Warren fact-check sources: Densho Encyclopedia on Earl Warren — the definitive resource on his role, with the full memoir quote. Supreme Court Historical Society profile — confirms the memoir text. California AG Rob Bonta’s 2023 historical statement — cites Warren’s 1942 congressional testimony and the Alien Land Law. Warfare History Network on the incarceration — broader context including Douglas and Eisenhower’s later regrets. Densho: Anti-Refugee Rhetoric and WWII-era incarceration parallels — Warren’s February 1942 Tolan Committee testimony quoted directly.

VACCINE HESITANCY AS MODEL

CNN / Dr. Sanjay Gupta — The origins of vaccine hesitancy in US

Wish I could find this whole doc. Reminds me of those brief moments in 2021–2022 when there was no Trump to cover and the press could actually report stuff.

First Coast News / DeSantis — Gov. Ron DeSantis doubles down on anti-vaccine, anti-masking stance in Jacksonville

DeSantis has to be in for how he weaponized doubts during Covid to become a punching bag for Trump — whose career is just now a massive disgraceful tunnel painted on a wall.

10 Tampa Bay News — US on track to meet goal of 100 million vaccines in 100 days

The Biden rollout was an incredible accomplishment. And it still wasn’t enough.

THE FARMERS

CBS News — Iowa farmer says Trump’s ‘golden age of agriculture’ rhetoric ‘doesn’t match the reality’

A farmer describing betrayal, plainly. When the White House says it’s the best friend a farmer has ever had, you say: “That doesn’t say much about my friends. People are out here hurting.” Not trying to empathize but emphasize that no one is better at hurting Trump voters than Trump.

RECONSTRUCTION AND ROBERT SMALLS

CBS Sunday Morning — The story of Reconstruction

This is the most hopeful section of the episode, and I didn’t want to be coy about that. Robert Smalls is the story I keep returning to: what people did under conditions of mortal danger, the genuine democratic possibilities that opened briefly during Reconstruction, and how those possibilities were systematically destroyed — and then how the destruction was justified through propaganda like Birth of a Nation. The revisionist history of Reconstruction succeeded for most of a century and on through the Civil Rights movement, unfortunately. When Frederick Douglass saw the portrait of Hiram Revels, he said: “At last the Black man is represented as something other than a monkey.” These things happened. Then they were erased, and the erasure was called history.

THE HOUSING MEETING MOMENT

NBC10 Boston — The simmering housing-transit debate behind this viral video

Red & White Wire — This Man Asked One Question At A Town Meeting — 3 Million People Watched

I love this clip — this guy at a Marblehead, Massachusetts planning board meeting just keeps asking, genuinely puzzled: “Are we trying to do nothing? I didn’t even know it was a golf course. People live in houses.” Hey, why-aren’t-we-doing-the-obvious-thing — that’s what bringing people along sometimes looks like. At least to me.

ICE DETENTION

Duke University panel — ICE Detention and Families — Panel Discussion

Andrea is a part of this. Puts ICE camps into a perspective that frankly damns us all.

Detention Watch Network / MSNBC — ICE fails to hold contractors accountable

ICE fails to hold their contractors accountable. Congress has failed to hold ICE accountable. Private corporations profiting off the pain of adults and children alike. It is a vicious cycle by design.

One More Thing

The soundtrack of my life this week that you may hear in the subtext: an alternate version of “Visions of Johanna” that sounds like a template for a whole vein of the Velvet Underground. But Reed and Cale surely never heard it then—it only came out in 2005 as part of the soundtrack to Martin Scorsese’s doc No Direction Home. Listen:

“Inside the museums, infinity goes up on trial.”

Yep. Hopefully elsewhere, too.

Funny aside: Andrea’s most viral piece ever was about how Bob probably cribbed SparkNotes for his Nobel speech. Read it on Slate—it’s still hilarious.

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Related Episodes Worth Revisiting

If the Warren section rocked with you, these episodes from the archive go deeper on the same threads:

The Concentration Camp Tendency (Apr 29, 2025) — Warren’s logic of preemptive exclusion — “absence of crime as proof of future crime” — is the same logic Andrea traces through every camp system in this episode. Listen on Apple Podcasts | YouTube

What’s in a Concentration Camp? The Name Game (Jul 10, 2025) — The definitional work Andrea does there is the scholarly backbone behind this episode’s more narrative approach. Listen on Apple Podcasts | YouTube

Homeless in America: Detention’s Precursor (Jan 30, 2025) — The same Mussolini and Hitler preemptive exclusion pattern, different targets. Listen on Apple Podcasts | How to Get ICE Out of Your Town (Aug 2025) is the action companion.

All episodes available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube.