THE WEEKLY REVEAL
Saturday, Sept. 24, 2022
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Hello! In this issue:
- New proof showing who was involved in the disappearance of 43 Mexican college students in 2014.
- In this week’s democracy roundup: A former state Supreme Court justice calls for revolution, who could stop the election deniers and more.
- A photo showing the brutal power dynamics of convict leasing.
- Our Amazon reporting to be featured in a new VICE TV series.
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THIS WEEK’S PODCAST
After Ayotzinapa: Arrests and Intrigue
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In 2014, students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College in Mexico came under attack by police. Six people were killed and 43 young men disappeared without a trace. Families of the missing students suspected the government was hiding the truth.
In our three-part After Ayotzinapa series, we took listeners inside the investigation of the attack on the students, exposing corruption at the highest levels and an unsettling connection to America’s war on drugs.
It’s been eight months since we first aired the series, and a lot has happened in the case since then, including an arrest of a former top Mexican government official and proof that the military was involved in the crime.
But why hasn’t anyone been convicted? This week on Reveal, a new chapter in the case.
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🎧 Other places to listen: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts.
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🎨 Illustration by Dante Aguilera
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RELATED
📽️ Watch cellphone footage from the attack on the students by police. It was taken by one of the survivors.
🎧 Listen to the After Ayotzinapa series online or in our “Reveal Presents” feed on Apple Podcasts or Google Podcasts.
🎧 Our partners at Adonde Media developed a six-part Spanish-language version of the series. Listen here.
🗣️ Reveal’s Anayansi Diaz-Cortes and National Security Archive’s Kate Doyle, lead reporters on the series, will be speaking at Utah Tech University on Monday, Sept. 26 at 4 p.m. The event is free and open to the public. More information here.
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The threats to U.S. democracy are real and urgent. We’re here to reveal them. Donate today. |
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REVEAL RECOMMENDS
This Week’s Democracy Reads
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There's an ongoing campaign to undermine American democracy. But it's a story that can be hard to follow, so we launched this new section this month to help you keep track of it all.
📄 Just getting started trying to follow the threats to democracy? Here’s a 25-minute video explainer from a journalist who was trying to understand the issue himself, called “Inside the Completely Legal GOP Plot to Destroy American Democracy.” (The New York Times)
📄 A former Wisconsin Supreme Court justice conducted a $1 million investigation into election fraud. He found nothing, but he’s still inciting revolution.
The context: America’s Dairyland hasn’t gotten the attention of states like Georgia and Arizona, but it’s increasingly a place to be watched. It’s a battleground state. The anti-democratic movement there has been strong and long-running. The Republican-led State Assembly has engaged in gerrymandering. Top GOP candidates for statewide offices aren’t just election deniers, they’re still trying to decertify the 2020 results.
The news: The State Assembly gave former state Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman $1 million to investigate voter fraud in the 2020 election, $100,000 of which went directly to Gableman himself. He found nothing and got fired by the Republican Assembly speaker, Robin Vos, who called Gableman “an embarrassment to the state.” The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports that at a Republican event this month, Gableman told the crowd that there should be a revolution over the 2020 election. But Gableman believes it’s not going to happen because “people have become too comfortable to water the ‘tree of liberty’ with blood.” (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)
📄 Here’s how an election-denying secretary of state could wreak havoc on an election. At this point, we’ve probably all read plenty of stories about how election deniers are running to take over one of the key election jobs in states, the secretary of state. But what’s often not clear is exactly *how* they would do so. (This is a question we got a lot when we were working on this show about Michigan’s election-denying secretary of state candidate.)
Here are the Cliffs Notes from The Washington Post. A secretary of state could:
1. Make it harder to vote.
2. Allow for endless audits of results.
3. Refuse to sign off on election results.
4. Sow distrust in results.
📄 There’s been a ton of attention given to the election deniers running for office. But what about the people running against them? TIME profiles the opponents of election deniers, or, as it refers to them as: “The Defenders.”
📄 The Freedom Caucus helped Donald Trump challenge the 2020 election. If the GOP wins the House, it could take control of key functions of democracy. “The caucus has grown increasingly powerful in recent years and is expected to become even more so should Republicans take control of the House. Freedom Caucus members could have significant influence over issues that are crucial to the functioning of democracy, including impeachment proceedings, the Justice Department and amendments to the Constitution.” (Grid)
📄 Sheriffs are attending a fellowship program at a prominent MAGA think tank. The secret curriculum has now been released. The Claremont Institute launched its inaugural class of “Sheriff Fellows” in November, and a second class is currently being recruited for the fall. The program focuses on sheriffs who are currently serving. Jessica Pishko writes that the previously unreported fellowship curriculum “reveals a program that presented for the sheriffs two sets of people in America: those communities sheriffs should police as freely and brutally as they see fit, and those ‘real’ Americans who should be considered virtually above the law.”
Why this matters: Pishko explains that 1) “Information about the fellowship and the program is important for voters who live in counties where these sheriffs run jails, serve warrants, detain individuals at traffic stops, and help federal officials enforce immigration laws.” 2) “Sheriffs also have a great deal of discretion in important contested legal areas like the enforcement of gun laws, where they are often in charge of issuing permits and confiscating weapons under red flag laws, and in how to handle health orders, including enforcement of anti-COVID-19 measures.” 3) “In the wake of Trump’s election lies, sheriffs are demanding more leeway to surveil ballot boxes and have encouraged vote vigilantes to snitch on their neighbors regarding alleged-but-never-proven ‘voter fraud.’” And “sheriffs who are currently serving can act independently from other elected officials to fight this nonexistent fraud with the force of an army and relative impunity. Now, thanks to the Claremont Institute, they can justify such violent and anti-democratic schemes with the patina of intellectual firepower.” (Slate)
Want to suggest a story for our next issue? Is there a specific democracy issue you want us to curate reporting around? Do you have a question about a certain state and its election? Anything goes. Email us at [email protected].
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Lone Rock stockade in Tracy City, Tennessee, in an undated photo. Credit: Courtesy of Travis Turner
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More than 5,000 people served prison sentences at the Lone Rock stockade in Tennessee in the late 1800s. Many of them were Black men, sentenced to hard labor at the prison’s coal mine. This system of forced labor was called convict leasing and has been described as “slavery by another name.”
This photo of a Black man imprisoned at the stockade surrounded by White men shows Lone Rock’s brutal power dynamics.
Last week on Reveal, several people who saw the photo shared their thoughts with us.
“Does he make it out of the stockade? Is he one of the many that died at the stockade? … It makes me wanna cry because, you know, you're just, you're looking at the scene and just it's atrocious,” said Taneya Koonce, who leads the Nashville chapter of the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society.
📄 The show was produced in collaboration with the Associated Press. Read the investigation into convict leasing here.
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In the News
What’s happening in the news – with a Reveal context
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Bexar County Sheriff Javier Salazar. Credit: San Antonio Express-News
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🔹 The Texas sheriff who launched a criminal investigation into migrant flights to Martha’s Vineyard leads a department that has its own history of mistreating migrants. Bexar County Sheriff Javier Salazar on Monday launched a criminal investigation into how 48 migrants were “lured” onto flights last week from San Antonio to Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts. The sheriff called the flights “political posturing to make a point.” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis took credit for chartering the flights, saying it was part of his state’s $12 million program to relocate migrants to a “sanctuary destination.”
You might recognize Salazar’s name from previous Reveal investigations. In June 2021, we published body camera footage of one of his deputy’s pulsing a migrant child with a Taser for 35 seconds at a federal government shelter. The incident took place in 2020, but the deputy, Patrick Divers, was placed on administrative leave only after we released the footage the following year.
As we reported on the story, Salazar’s department provided many contradictory and confusing statements about its investigation into the deputy’s conduct. We also requested to speak with Salazar on at least a dozen occasions and were never granted an interview. We ultimately learned Divers’ administrative leave was only 10 days and the sheriff would not be disciplining him for tasing the child.
🔹 Stacey Abrams comments on “fetal heartbeats,” faces backlash from anti-abortion conservatives. “There is no such thing as a heartbeat at six weeks. It is a manufactured sound designed to convince people that men have the right to take control of a woman’s body away from her,” Georgia Democratic gubernatorial nominee Stacey Abrams said at an event in Atlanta this week. Conservative Christian organization Heartbeat International told Fox News that Abrams is trying to “redefine basic science.”
In a February Reveal show, A Strike at the Heart of Roe, we investigated how for more than a decade, conservative foes of abortion rights pushed for “heartbeat bills” that ban abortion after about six weeks of pregnancy, arguing that the embryo is a baby with a beating heart.
Dr. Lori Strachowski, a professor of radiology at the University of California San Francisco, one of the leading institutions for OB-GYN training, explained to us that the “lub dub” sound heard when a stethoscope is put over a developed heart are the valves of the heart. There are no valves yet developed in a six-week embryo.
And since an embryo does not have a heart yet at six weeks, what we’re hearing at a six-week ultrasound is the vibration of early cardiac cells that will eventually form chambers and valves, Strachowski says. This early in a pregnancy, the ultrasound probe is picking up the movement of those cells. “And that movement creates these waves or sound waves that are considered ultrasonic because they are above the audible range that we hear,” Strachowski adds.
To recap: It is true that the cardiac system is beginning to form in a six-week embryo, so what you’re hearing on an ultrasound is all the cells vibrating. But if you were to use a stethoscope instead of an ultrasound machine, you wouldn’t hear a heartbeat at all.
🎧 For the full backstory on how heartbeat bills went from being dismissed as a fringe idea, even by traditional right-to-life groups, to getting enforced in states across the country, listen to A Strike at the Heart of Roe.
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📽️ Reveal reporting featured in new VICE TV series. The “Land of the Giants: Titans of Tech” series follows the history of the rise of Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google, from their humble beginnings to their present day as global powerhouses. Catch Reveal’s Will Evans on the Sept. 29 episode at 9 p.m. ET. He’ll be talking about his investigation, based on Amazon’s own internal records, exposing the company’s warehouse injury crisis. Find your VICE channel here.
📽️ “The Grab” heads to D.C. Our new documentary feature film, “The Grab,” will be screened at the Double Exposure film festival in Washington, D.C., at 7 p.m. ET Oct. 13. The screening is open to the public and tickets are available for purchase here. Stay after the film for a Q&A with Reveal’s Amanda Pike and Nate Halverson.
In “The Grab,” Halverson uncovers a stunning phenomenon: Food and water are quickly becoming the most precious, conflict-ridden commodities of the 21st century, and powerful governments and corporations are taking drastic measures to control these increasingly scarce resources. Read recent reviews in Variety and The Hollywood Reporter and on RogerEbert.com.
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This issue of The Weekly Reveal was written by Kassie Navarro and Andrew Donohue and copy edited by Nikki Frick. If you enjoyed this issue, forward it to a friend. Have some thoughts? Drop us a line with feedback or ideas!
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