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 not a Christian takeover. Yet his church is influenced by an elusive, hard-to-pin-down movement whose followers believe that Christians are called to control the government and that former President Donald Trump was chosen by God. It’s called the New Apostolic Reformation, and it’s nothing like the culture war–fueled Moral Majority of yesteryear. There are prophets and apostles, and a spiritual war is underway, not just in Pennsylvania. To win, the church has to do more than just preach the gospel; it has to get political.

This week, Reveal’s Najib Aminy and Mother Jones reporter Kiera Butler explain what the New Apostolic Reformation is and what happens when it seeps into small-town churches like Lamb’s. 

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 in 1919. 

The reality is that one person, one vote is far from how American democracy actually works. In fact, the political institutions created by the Founding Fathers were meant to constrain democracy, and that system is still alive today. 

Institutions like the Electoral College and US Senate were designed as checks against the power of the majority. What’s more, the Supreme Court is a product of these two skewed institutions. Then there are newer tactics—like voter suppression and gerrymandering—that further erode democracy and often entrench the power of a conservative White minority.

These are some of the conclusions from Mother Jones reporter Ari Berman in his latest book, Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People—and the Fight to Resist It.

In a deep-dive conversation with Reveal host Al Letson, Berman traces the rise of conservative firebrand Pat Buchanan and how he opened the door for Donald Trump. Buchanan made White Republicans fear becoming a racial minority. And he opposed the Voting Rights Act, which struck down obstacles to voting like poll taxes and literacy tests that had been used to keep people of color from the polls. Buchanan never came close to winning the presidency, but he transformed White anxiety into an organizing principle that has become a centerpiece of much of today’s Republican Party.

This is an update of an episode that originally aired in May 2024.

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 home state of Guerrero left Bautista desperate. She heard asylum was created for people like her. So she traveled north, headed for the perceived safety of the United States.

“I was told that if I went to the US border and told my family’s story and how it’s not safe back home, the United States could protect me,” she said.

Despite all the political hand-wringing about a crisis at the border, many Americans don’t understand what’s driving so many people from Mexico and other countries to come to the US in the first place. This week, Reveal senior reporter and producer Anayansi Diaz-Cortes takes us to a part of Mexico that many families are leaving behind—a place where fear is a part of daily life—and unwinds US policies that helped trigger the cycle of violence and migration that continues to this day. 

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 targeting minority groups. Educators could now face criminal penalties over the material they teach regarding gender and sexuality. Schools across the state have banned books about queer families, transgender youth, and Black history. 

Many of these legislative changes were part of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ so-called “war on woke,” launched ahead of his failed bid for the presidency. This week on Reveal, Letson examines Black life in Florida, following a rare travel advisory by the NAACP stating that “Florida is openly hostile toward African Americans, people of color, and LGBTQ+ individuals.” 

This is an update of an episode that originally aired in January 2024.

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 managers continue to invest in fossil fuels at a time when we need to burn less oil, gas, and coal.

This week on Reveal, we look at the unsettling truth that our retirement savings could be fueling the very climate crisis that threatens our planet. From the site of a massive natural gas pipeline cutting through Appalachia to the boardrooms of Vanguard, we explore how our investments might be working against our values—and what can be done to align them with a sustainable future. 

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 child welfare authorities, and a judge removed Horton’s newborn from her care. 

“They had a singular piece of evidence,” Horton said, “and it was wrong.”

Hospitals across the country routinely drug test people coming in to give birth. But the tests many hospitals use are notoriously imprecise, with false positive rates of up to 50 percent for some drugs. People taking over-the-counter cold medicine or prescribed medications can test positive for methamphetamine or opiates.

This week on Reveal, our collaboration with The Marshall Project investigates why parents across the country are being reported to child protective services over inaccurate drug test results. Reporter Shoshana Walter digs into the cases of women who were separated from their babies after a pee-in-a-cup drug test triggered a cascade of events they couldn’t control.

Jade Dass was taking medication to treat her addiction to opioids before she became pregnant. Scientific studies and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say that taking addiction-treatment medications during pregnancy leads to the best outcomes for both mothers and babies. But after Dass delivered a healthy daughter, the hospital reported her to the Arizona Department of Child Safety. 

Even as medications like Suboxone help pregnant women safely treat addiction, taking them can trigger investigations by child welfare agencies that separate mothers from their newborns. Why are women like Dass being investigated for using addiction-treatment medications during pregnancy?

To understand the scope of the dragnet, reporter Shoshana Walter, data reporter Melissa Lewis and a team of Reveal researchers and lawyers filed 100 public records requests, putting together the first-ever tally of how often women are reported to child welfare agencies for taking prescription drugs during pregnancy. 

This week on Reveal, in an episode we first aired in July 2023, we follow Dass as she grapples with losing custody of her baby—and makes one last desperate attempt to keep her family together.

For more about Dass and other mothers facing investigation for taking medication-assisted treatment, read Walter’s investigation in collaboration with The New York Times Magazine.

This is an update of an episode that originally aired in July 2023.

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In 2017, David Leavitt drove to the Northern Cheyenne reservation in Montana to adopt a baby girl. A few years later, during an interview with a documentary filmmaker, Leavitt, a wealthy Utah politician, told a startling story about how he went about getting physical custody of that child. 

He describes going to the tribe’s president and offering to use his connections to broker an international sale of the tribe’s buffalo. At the same time, he was asking the president for his blessing to adopt the child.

That video eventually leaked to a local TV station, and the adoption became the subject of a federal investigation into bribery. To others, the adoption story seemed to run afoul of a federal law meant to protect Native children from being removed from their tribes’ care in favor of non-Native families.  

This week on Reveal, reporters Andrew Becker and Bernice Yeung dig into the story of this complicated and controversial adoption, how it circumvented the mission of the Indian Child Welfare Act, and why some of the baby’s Native family and tribe were left feeling that a child was taken from them. 

This episode was produced in collaboration with the Investigative Reporting Program at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism.

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At the height of the pandemic, COVID-19 was talked about as “the great equalizer,” an idea touted by celebrities and politicians from Madonna to then-New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. But that was a myth. 

Ibram X. Kendi and Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research worked with The COVID Tracking Project to compile national numbers on how COVID-19 affected people of color in the U.S. Their effort, The COVID Racial Data Tracker, showed that people of color died from the disease at around twice the rate of White people.

The COVID Tracking Project’s volunteer data collection team waited months for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to release COVID-19 testing data. But when the CDC finally started publishing the data, it was different from what states were publishing—in some instances, it was off by hundreds of thousands of tests. With no clear answers about why, The COVID Tracking Project’s quest to keep national data flowing every day continued until March 2021. 

This week on Reveal: We examine the myth of COVID-19 as “the great equalizer,” what went wrong in the CDC’s response to the pandemic, and whether it’s prepared for the next one. 

This Peabody Award-nominated three-part series is hosted by epidemiologist Jessica Malaty Rivera and reported by Artis Curiskis and Kara Oehler from The COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic.

In March 2020, health care technologist Amy Gleason had a daunting task ahead of her. She was a new member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force’s data team, and it was her job to figure out where people were testing positive for COVID-19 across the country, how many were in hospitals, and how many had died from the disease. 

Gleason was shocked to find that data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention wasn’t reflecting the immediate impact of the coronavirus. At the same time, the country was suffering from another huge shortfall: a lack of COVID-19 tests. The task force also faced national shortages of medical supplies like masks and ventilators and lacked basic information about COVID-19 hospitalizations that would help them know where to send supplies. 

Realizing that the federal government was failing to collect national data, reporters at The Atlantic formed The COVID Tracking Project. Across all 50 states, hundreds of volunteers began gathering crucial information on the number of cases, deaths, and hospitalizations. Each day, they compiled the state COVID-19 data in a massive spreadsheet, creating the nation’s most reliable picture of the spread of the deadly disease.  

This week on Reveal: The second episode of our three-part series asks why there was no good federal data about COVID-19. This Peabody Award-nominated series is hosted by epidemiologist Jessica Malaty Rivera and reported by Artis Curiskis and Kara Oehler from The COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic. 

This is an update of an episode that originally aired in April 2023.  

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