Reveal

More To The Story: Sen. Adam Schiff is often on the receiving end of President Donald Trump’s rage online. It should be no surprise. Back in 2020, the California Democrat was the lead prosecutor during the first Trump impeachment trial as a member of the House of Representatives. Now a senator, Schiff has been laying out a different strategy for how Democrats might challenge the president if they reclaim Congress. Much of that strategy focuses on how the president has enriched himself in the White House—all at the expense, Schiff argues, of the American people. On this week’s More To The Story, Schiff describes what it’s like to be an ever-present target of Trump’s ire, how the Israeli government has pushed longtime supporters like himself to criticize it more openly, and lays out his proposals for rebuilding America’s institutional guardrails in a post-Trump era.
Producer: Josh Sanburn | Editor: Kara McGuirk-Allison | Theme music: Fernando Arruda and Jim Briggs | Copy editor: Nikki Frick | Digital producer: Artis Curiskis | Deputy executive producer: Taki Telonidis | Executive producer: Brett Myers | Executive editor: James West | Host: Al Letson
Listen: The Gaza Flotilla Story You Didn’t Hear (Reveal)
Read: 10 Ways to Enrich the Trumps and the MAGA Movement (Mother Jones)
Listen: Al Gore: Trump Administration Is the Most Corrupt in History (More To The Story)
Watch: Cost of Corruption: Ten Ways Trump Is Profiting off the Presidency While You Lose (YouTube/C-SPAN2)

Donate today at Revealnews.org/more

Subscribe to our weekly newsletter at Revealnews.org/weekly

Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky

Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Skidaway Island, Georgia, is home today to a luxurious community that the mostly white residents consider paradise: waterfront views, live oaks, and marsh grass alongside golf courses, swimming pools, and other amenities. 
In 1865, the island was a thriving Black community, started by freedmen who were given land by the government under the 40 acres program. They farmed, created a system of government, and turned former cotton plantations into a Black American success story.
But it wouldn’t last. Within two years, the government took that land back from the freedmen and returned it to the former enslavers. 
Today, 40 acres in The Landings development is worth at least $20 million. The history of that land is largely absent from day-to-day life. But over a two-and-a-half-year investigation, journalists at the Center for Public Integrity unearthed records that prove that dozens of freed people had, and lost, titles to tracts at what’s now The Landings. 
“You could feel chills to know that they had it and then they just pulled the rug from under them, so to speak,” said Linda Brown, one of the few Black residents at The Landings.
This week on Reveal, with the Center for Public Integrity, we also show a descendant her ancestor’s title for a plot of land that is now becoming another exclusive gated community. And we look at how buried documents like these Reconstruction-era land titles are part of the long game toward reparations.  
This is an update of an episode that originally aired in June 2024.

Support Reveal’s journalism at Revealnews.org/donatenow

Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to get the scoop on new episodes at Revealnews.org/weekly

Connect with us on Bluesky, Facebook and Instagram

Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

More To The Story: Lettuce contaminated with cyclospora. Cruise ship passengers contracting a deadly form of hantavirus. Legionnaires’ disease (yet again) in big cities. RFK Jr. refusing any responsibility for measles outbreaks. That’s just a brief list of public health stories in America this summer. And we haven’t even mentioned Dr. Anthony Fauci being held in contempt of Congress during a hostile Congressional hearing over the Covid-19 pandemic. Public health stories are everywhere right now. So that’s why we invited epidemiologist and science communicator Jessica Malaty Rivera back onto the show. Malaty Rivera fills a vital role through her work translating medical breakthroughs and sorting through conflicting health advice. It’s a role she says the public needs now more than ever. On this week’s More To The Story, Malaty Rivera talks through the ongoing efforts to link vaccines and autism at the highest levels of the Trump administration, which produce we should (and shouldn’t) be eating right now, and the many ways the federal government’s response to public health crises today are driven by politics rather than science.
Producers: Josh Sanburn | Editor: Kara McGuirk-Allison | Intern: Joni Binder | Theme music: Fernando Arruda and Jim Briggs | Copy editor: Nikki Frick | Digital producer: Artis Curiskis | Deputy executive producer: Taki Telonidis | Executive producer: Brett Myers | Executive editor: James West | Host: Al Letson
Read: Covid Truthers Are Claiming Fauci’s Diary Was ‘Scrubbed’ (Mother Jones)
Listen: The Covid Tracking Project (Reveal)
Listen: How RFK Jr. Is Dismantling America’s Health Policies (More To The Story)

Donate today at Revealnews.org/more

Subscribe to our weekly newsletter at Revealnews.org/weekly

Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky

Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Patricia Bailey’s four-bedroom home sits high among the trees in lush Edisto Island, South Carolina. It’s a peaceful place where her body healed from multiple sclerosis. It’s also the source of her generational wealth.
Bailey built this house on land that was passed down by her great-great-grandfather, Jim Hutchinson, who was enslaved on Edisto before he was freed and became a landowner. 
“I know this is sacred land here,” Bailey says, “’cause it's my ancestors and I feel it.” 
Union General William T. Sherman’s Special Field Orders, No. 15—better known as 40 acres and a mule—implied a better life in the waning days of the Civil War. Hutchinson is among the formerly enslaved people who received land through the field orders, which are often thought of as a promise that was never kept. But 40 acres and a mule was more than that. 
It was real.
Over a more than two-year investigation, our partners at the Center for Public Integrity unearthed thousands of records once buried in the National Archives. In them, they found more than 1,200 formerly enslaved people who were given land by the federal government through the field orders—and then saw that land taken away. 
None of the land Bailey lives on today is part of Hutchinson’s 40 acres. Instead, her family’s wealth is built on her ancestor’s determination to get and keep land of his own, after losing what he thought he had gained through the field orders.
This week on Reveal, with the Center for Public Integrity, we’re revisiting our three-part series in which we tell the history of an often-misunderstood government program. We explore a reparation that wasn’t—and the wealth gap that remains.
This is an update of an episode that originally aired in June 2024. 

Support Reveal’s journalism at Revealnews.org/donatenow

Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to get the scoop on new episodes at Revealnews.org/newsletter

Connect with us on Bluesky, Facebook and Instagram

Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

More To The Story: Boston University professor Quinn Slobodian discusses his book “Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed,” which he co-authored with Ben Tarnoff. They outline how Elon Musk’s background and political views have reshaped capitalism and coin new terms to describe the unique ways Musk has been able to forge a close and symbiotic relationship with the government. On this week’s More To The Story, host Al Letson talks with Slobodian about how the world’s richest person has reimagined the relationship between business and government, his unique brand of futurism, and how Musk’s early life in apartheid South Africa ultimately shaped his worldview.
Producers: Joni Binder and Josh Sanburn | Editor: Kara McGuirk-Allison | Theme music: Fernando Arruda and Jim Briggs | Copy editor: Nikki Frick | Digital producer: Artis Curiskis  | Deputy executive producer: Taki Telonidis | Executive producer: Brett Myers | Executive editor: James West | Host: Al Letson
Read: Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed (Harper)
Read: Elon Musk’s Reward for Calling for a Race War? Becoming a Trillionaire. (Mother Jones)
Listen: How Project 2025 Is Reshaping Our Country (More To The Story)
Learn more: Quinn Slobodian's website

Donate today at Revealnews.org/more

Subscribe to our weekly newsletter at Revealnews.org/weekly

Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky

Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices