Colbert Makes Joke at Expense of Interned Japanese Americans

Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars
Mar. 20, 2010

I'm sure James Wakasa finds it hilarious.Stephen Colbert's satirical slap down of paranoia surrounding the 2010 Census on his Comedy Central show last night may have been funny, but only for the ignorant, since most of the issues he mocked are verifiably true and a serious concern for any American who cares about their privacy.

During the course of the 6 minute skit, Colbert made fun of Congresswoman Michele Bachmann for her warning last year that the Census Bureau played an integral role in collecting information that was later used by the government to intern Japanese-Americans in prison camps.

The establishment-left Huffington Post website, which censors any material it deems to be a "conspiracy theory," including former Governor Jesse Ventura's article on 9/11 last week, carried a blurb about the Colbert piece which appeared to put Bachmann's claim in the same category.

Watch the clip below. A shorter version of the clip available to viewers outside the U.S. can be watched here.

However, the fact that information culled from Census statistics was later used by the government to round up Japanese-Americans is manifestly provable.

"A clear picture has emerged in the last decade that the Census Bureau aided the War Department in interning West Coast Japanese-Americans by providing information on the ethnic makeup of neighborhoods," reported the New York Sun in March 2007.

The article cites the work of sociology researcher at Fordham University, William Seltzer, and history professor at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, Margo Anderson, who in a paper show how in 1943, "At the behest of the Secret Service, the Census Bureau drew up a list of 76 people living around the D.C. metro area gleaned from the 1940 census."

"As far as we are aware, this is the first time that conclusive evidence has been offered that a list of personally identifiable information from the 1940 census was provided to another federal agency," Mr. Seltzer said.

Census Bureau official Christa Jones did not doubt the veracity of the documents nor the conclusion of the paper, that information was provided by the Census Bureau which was later used by the government to locate suspected dissidents, a fact Michele Bachmann has been lambasted as a kook merely for highlighting.

Colbert, who made his name by lampooning the Bush administration's abuses of the bill of rights, invokes the ignorant stance of liberals who claim conservative paranoia surrounding the Census is overblown because the Census is inherently Constitutional.

While it's true to say that the government asking how many people live in your house is perfectly Constitutional, what Colbert hides is the fact that some versions of the 2010 Census being sent out to millions of Americans include dozens of personal questions that go above and beyond anything allowed by law.

Colbert's whole skit relies on the Census comprising just 10 simple questions, and this is the version he uses in the piece, yet millions of Americans are receiving a form accompanying the Census which runs to a staggering 69 questions, most of which pry into the most sensitive areas of their lives.

Failure to answer The American Community Survey carries similar threats of penalties to the Census itself -- fines, harassment and home visits from Census goons. The American Community Survey demands answers to all kinds of personal issues that the government has no business sticking its nose into. Some of the questions asked are listed below.

1. How much is your mortgage? Do you have have a second mortgage? How much is your mortgage payment?

2. What's your highest level of education? What is your ancestry or ethnic group?

3. Have you attended a school in the last 3 months?

4. Do you have health insurance? Are you hard of hearing, blind or have a mental condition?

5. Do you have difficulty dressing or bathing?

6. Are you married or did you get married recently? And, how many times have you been married?

7. Have you served in the military? Do you receive military disability benefits? If so, what is your rate of disability (30, 40, 50)?

8. Did you work for money last week? Where?

9. How did you get to work LAST week?

10. What time did you leave home to get to work LAST week? Were you absent from your job last week?

11. Have you looked for work within the last 4 days? How many weeks (or hours) did you work in the last year?

12. How much income did you have in the last year? From where and/or who?

13. Do you receive Social Security, retirement? What are your sources of your income?

And that's not even all of them! In all, there are 69 questions most of which include numerous sub-sections.

Is it any wonder that people are paranoid of the state demanding a treasure trove of their personal information when the government was recently caught having secretly taken DNA from every American baby born since the 60's without consent and storing it in a Pentagon database?

The American Community Survey is completely unconstitutional since it violates the 5th amendment which protects Americans from self-incrimination. The public has a right to be concerned and paranoid -- we live in a police state where new technology is increasingly being abused to harvest our personal information by a government clearly out of control and a system that has resolved to target anyone who dares attempt to extricate themselves from the matrix as a domestic extremist.

Colbert's satirical send up of an Infowars.com link to an article that speculated how GPS coordinates could be used to target dissidents seemingly implies that the notion GPS coordinates were being collected at all was a wacky conspiracy theory, when in fact the Census Bureau's own press release states that "The operation will use new hand-held computers equipped with GPS to increase geographic accuracy."

The video below explains how the Census is getting personal while the Census Bureau itself refuses to answer any questions about what it does with the private information collected about millions of Americans via the American Community Survey.