Reveal

A police officer chased a Native teen to his death. Days later, the police force shut down without explanation. In 2020, Blossom Old Bull was raising three teenagers on the Crow Indian Reservation in Montana. Her youngest son, Braven Glenn, was 17, a good student, dedicated to his basketball team. That November, Old Bull got a call saying Glenn was killed in a police car chase that resulted in a h...

It’s been 20 years since the Battle of Fallujah, a bloody campaign in a destructive Iraq War that we now know was based on a lie.  But back then, in the wake of 9/11, the battlefield was filled with troops who believed in serving and defending the country against terrorism.  “Going to Fallujah was the most horrific experience of our lives,” said Mike Ergo, a team leader for the US Marines Alpha Co...

President Joe Biden’s pardon of his son and President-elect Donald Trump’s pledge to set free people who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, bring back memories of what’s considered the most controversial pardon ever: Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon. Ford’s pardon of the former president in 1974 sparked outrage among politicians and the American people.  “I had a visceral feeling that th...

In 2015, hundreds of thousands of people fleeing war and repression were trying to reach safe havens in Europe. From his home in Norway, Tommy Olsen decided to travel to Greece, a major gateway for migrants and refugees. He joined hundreds of volunteers  helping the new arrivals and later created an NGO, the Aegean Boat Report, which monitors the plight of asylum seekers in Europe. Today, Olsen is...

It was their first day in battle and the two best friends had just switched places. Bob Fordyce rested while Frank Hartzell crawled down into the shallow foxhole, taking his turn chipping away at the frozen ground. Just then, German artillery fire began falling all around them. With his body plastered to the ground, Hartzell could feel shrapnel dent his helmet. When the explosions finished, he pic...

When Valentino Rodriguez started his job at a high-security prison in Sacramento, California, informally known as New Folsom, he thought he was entering a brotherhood of correctional officers who hold each other to a high standard of conduct. Five years later, Rodriguez would be found dead in his home. His unexpected passing  would raise questions from his family and the FBI.  Before he died, Rodr...

Every summer, 50 of the nation’s best and brightest teenage girls gather in Mobile, Alabama, to embark on two of the most intense weeks of their lives. Everybody wants the same thing: to walk away with a $40,000 college scholarship and the title of Distinguished Young Woman of America. Reporter Shima Oliaee competed for Nevada when she was a teenager, and was invited back as a judge more than 20 y...

Note: This episode contains descriptions of violence and suicide and may not be appropriate for all listeners.  In 1989, Chuck Stuart called 911 on his car phone to report a shooting.  He said he and his wife were leaving a birthing class at a Boston hospital when a man forced him to drive into the mixed-race Mission Hill neighborhood and shot them both. Stuart’s wife, Carol, was seven months preg...

Chief Red Cloud was a Lakota leader in the late 1800s, when the conflict between the US government and Native Americans was intense, and he was the tribal chief when the Catholic church built a boarding school on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Generations of children were traumatized by their experience at the school, whose mission was to strip them of their language and culture. Red...

In the early 1990s, Justin Pourier was a maintenance man at Red Cloud Indian School, a Catholic school on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. One day, he says he stumbled upon small graves in the school’s basement. For nearly 30 years, Pourier would be haunted by what he saw and told no one except his wife.  “Those are Native children down there…hopefully their spirit was able to travel on...

As Donald Trump prepares to enter the White House for a second term, the reasons people voted him into office are becoming more clear.  For Micki Witthoeft, it’s cause for celebration. Her daughter, Ashli Babitt, was shot and killed by a police officer after storming the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. Today, Witthoeft is confident Trump will stand by his word and pardon everyone involved.  “He sai...

Nicole Chase was a young mom with a daughter to support when she took a job at a restaurant in Canton, Connecticut. She liked the work and was good at her job. But the place turned out to be more like a frat house than a quaint roadside sandwich spot. And the crude behavior kept escalating—until one day she says her boss went too far.  Chase turned to the local police for help, but what happened n...

Donald Trump defeated Kamala Harris on Tuesday night to become only the second president in US history to win two nonconsecutive terms. (The last one? Grover Cleveland in 1892.) Trump won the presidency following one of the most tumultuous election years in modern US history—one that included an incumbent president pulling out of his  reelection bid, the vice president becoming the Democratic nomi...

In the late 1800s, Wilmington, North Carolina, was a city where African Americans thrived economically and held elected office. This did not sit well with White supremacists, who during the election of 1898 used violence to intimidate voters and overthrow the elected government. It’s considered the only successful coup d’etat in US history.  The leader of the coup, a former Confederate colonel nam...

Just a few years ago, Elon Musk seemed to be just another Silicon Valley billionaire with no true political compass. He once described himself as “half-Republican, half-Democrat” and often donated money to candidates from both parties. But all that seemed to change during the Covid-19 pandemic when Musk started taking much more right-wing stances about lockdowns, vaccine mandates, and many other d...

In 2020, as elections officials counted votes in Phoenix, protesters swarmed outside the Maricopa County election center. Many held flags; some had AR-15s. Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones was there yelling into a bullhorn, “Burn in hell, Joe Biden.” They claimed the election was stolen.  Since then, dozens of court cases across the country have all found no evidence of widespread fraud. Despite tha...

Earlier this month, former President Barack Obama stopped by a Kamala Harris campaign office in Pennsylvania and made headlines by admonishing Black men for being less enthusiastic about supporting her for president compared with the support he received when he ran in 2008. “Part of it makes me think that, well, you just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president, and you’re coming up...

Every four years, the presidential election brings with it a perennial question about an essential voting bloc: Who will Black voters turn out for?  Mother Jones video correspondent Garrison Hayes has spent months on the campaign trail talking to Black voters about how they see the goals and limits of their own political power. He paid special attention to Black Republicans and a new crop of Black...

The Reverend Rob Schenck was once one of America’s most powerful and influential evangelical leaders. He routinely lobbied legislators to adopt a Christian conservative agenda. Members of his anti-abortion activist group barricaded the doors and driveways of abortion clinics. He even trained wealthy couples to befriend Supreme Court justices in an attempt to persuade them to render judgments that...

A small church in a small town in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, has been flexing its political muscle and building an outsized reputation for blurring the line between church and state. Pastor Don Lamb wants his congregants to be engaged in spiritual warfare and not be “head-in-the-sand, Jesus-loves-you kind of Christians,” especially when it comes to the local school board.  To Lamb, this is no...

As any schoolkid might tell you, US elections are based on a bedrock principle: one person, one vote. Simple as that. Each vote carries the same weight. Yet for much of the country’s history, that hasn't been the case. At various points, whole classes of people were shut out of voting: enslaved Black Americans, Native Americans, and poor White people. The first time women had the right to vote was...

The right to asylum has been enshrined in US law since the 1950s. It’s meant to provide a safe haven for people fleeing violence and government persecution.  Laura Ascencio Bautista and her family have faced both in Mexico, where her brother Benjamin disappeared along with 42 others in 2014 after police stormed a bus from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College. In the years since, violence in her...

In the summer of 2023, Reveal host Al Letson felt compelled to return home to Jacksonville, Florida. His best friend had recently passed away following a long battle with cancer, and he wanted to be close to the place where they became men together. But when he arrived, he found a city and state he barely recognized.  In recent years, the Republican-dominated legislature has passed a slate of laws...

Reveal reporter Jonathan Jones was working on a story about a massive coal plant expansion in Montana when he wondered who was bankrolling the project. It turns out a major shareholder of the energy company driving the project was The Vanguard Group, the investment firm where he happens to have his retirement savings.  This discovery put Jones on a quest to find out why Vanguard and other asset ma...

Pregnant with her fifth child, Susan Horton had a lot of confidence in her parenting abilities. Then she ate a salad from Costco: an “everything” chopped salad kit with poppy seeds. When she went to the hospital to give birth the next day, she tested positive for opiates. Horton told doctors that it must have been the poppy seeds, but she couldn’t convince them it was true. She was reported to chi...