a selection of hosted, produced, sound-designed work

〰 Killed In The Darkness

Antoine and Tammy Bufford’s son, Cortez Bufford, was shot and killed by a St. Louis police officer in 2019. Nearly two years later, the city is still investigating Cortez’s case. No charges have been filed. And the Bufford family is still looking for answers. The police kill more people per capita in St. Louis than in any other American city. Seventy-two percent of these people are Black, like Cortez.

The Chicago-based Invisible Institute recently partnered with The Intercept to examine the circumstances of Cortez’s death. Their resulting investigation, reported by Alison Flowers and Sam Stecklow, sheds new light in the search for truth about this police killing.

〰 Understanding the History of Black Rebellion

Historian Elizabeth Hinton, author of “America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion since the 1960s,” argues that protestors were not rioters but rather political participants in rebellion against their own poverty, inequality, and constant surveillance and brutality by the police.

〰 The Border Patrol’s Abdication in the Sonoran Desert

Customs and Border Protection is dropping asylum-seekers in remote border towns with few resources to receive them.

〰 Trump’s EPA Helped Erase Records of Almost 270,000 Pounds of Carcinogenic Pollution

Investigative reporter Sharon Lerner explains how 270,000 pounds of the chemical ethylene oxide vanished from the public record.

〰 Hope Is a Discipline: Mariame Kaba on Dismantling the Carceral State

Organizer Mariame Kaba talks about her new book “We Do This ’Til We Free Us.”

〰 The Life and Death of an Anti-Fascist

Sean Kealiher was a defining presence on Portland’s protest scene. Why was his murder never solved?

〰 The Democrats’ Long War on Immigrants

Activist and writer Harsha Walia joins Intercepted to discuss the Democratic Party’s fundamental role in shaping the long arc of U.S. border policy and why the practice of “prevention through deterrence” will continue to incur more suffering and preventable deaths. She also presents an abolitionist view of a world without borders. Walia’s most recent book is “Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism.

〰 Inside China’s Police State Tactics Against Muslims

A new report from The Intercept provides a raw glimpse into the persecution and sweeping internment of Muslims in the city of Ürümqi, the largest city in northwest China’s Xinjiang region.

〰 Joe Biden Is President, but Donald Trump’s Legacy of Violence Looms

There are a slew of unanswered questions about the siege of the Capitol. Americans are being asked to believe that the national security apparatus — the same one that charged nearly 200 people en masse, including journalists and observers, with felony rioting when Trump was inaugurated in 2017, and has leveled federal charges including terrorism charges on Black Lives Matter protesters — failed to see the threat to the U.S. Congress posed by right-wing extremists, even as people organized across social media platforms in plain sight.

〰 The CIA’s Afghan Death Squads

A U.S.-backed militia that kills children may be America’s exit strategy from its longest war reported by journalist Andrew Quilty.

〰 Naomi Klein on Fighting Trump’s Tin Pot Coup

The Intercept’s Senior Correspondent Naomi Klein argues why Democrats should forcefully defend the integrity of votes and condemn coup-plotting for what it is, and stop from blowing a mandate they’ve won.

〰 Musician Lido Pimienta on Her New Album "Miss Colombia"

The Colombian-Canadian musician Lido Pimienta talks about her latest album, Miss Colombia, and how the 2015 Miss Universe Pageant inspired her to look critically at anti-blackness in Colombia. She’s currently organizing a relief fund for Colombian families affected by Covid-19.

〰 "Burials Are Cheaper Than Deportations"

The Intercept's Ryan Devereaux has been speaking directly to detainees inside of an ICE facility in Etowah County, Alabama. ICE maintains that it is following appropriate CDC protocols. But as Ryan recently reported in his story “'Burials Are Cheaper Than Deportations': Virus Unleashes Terror in a Troubled Ice Detention Center,” detainees in this facility, overwhelmed by their own precarious conditions in the face of the coronavirus threat, were forced to radically take matters into their own hands to ensure their own safety.

〰 Writer Wilfred Chan on the Pro-democracy Uprising in Hong Kong

Over the past four months, millions of Hongkongers have taken to the streets to protest an extradition bill that would grant Beijing even more control over Hong Kong, further eroding any future Hongkongers might have for self determination. To get a sense of the capitalist authoritarian violence Hongkongers are up against, and the kind of future they are fighting for, I’m joined by Wilfred Chan, a writer and editor who is part of the Lausan Collective. It’s an English-language volunteer, independent platform that is trying to bridge the Hong Kong struggle with the international left.

〰 Nakhane Discusses Decolonization in South Africa and Their Latest Album “You Will Not Die”

Like the United States, South Africa is a country whose history is inextricably built on state violence and the systematic oppression of people of color. Both countries are scattered with statues and place names that function as monuments to white supremacy. But both countries are also home to movements aimed at tearing down these monuments of oppression—from New Orleans, to Cape Town—to decolonize land and to reclaim their own history.

For Nakhane, a South African artist who resides in London, this decolonization came from within as they struggled with christianity and how they says it repressed their identity, and their sexuality. Nakhane’s record, “You Will Not Die,” was released in the U.S. earlier this year, and it tells the story of grappling with religion, growing up Queer in post-apartheid South Africa, and dismantling the history of colonization.

〰 Senior Archivist Jeff Place Talks About Pete Seeger’s Legacy

In the purest sense, Pete Seeger was an educator. He connected generations of audiences through his music — music of the U.S. south, of working people, radicals, indigenous peoples, of oppressed communities of the world — music that would have never reached a mass audience in this country had Pete Seeger never picked up a banjo. These songs often carried messages of peace and equality, but were deeply historical, some dating back over a hundred years and having survived through oral tradition alone. But Pete Seeger paid a price for his beliefs. During the McCarthy era, he was called before the House un-American Activities Committee, where he refused to partake in what he considered a “kangaroo court.” He was subsequently charged with contempt of Congress and ostracized from the mainstream of U.S. public life for nearly a decade.

To celebrate Pete Seeger’s legacy, The Smithsonian Folkways Collection recently released a career-spanning anthology of Seeger’s music. One of the producers of this collection is Jeff Place, a curator and senior archivist at The Smithsonian who has been cataloging Pete Seeger’s work for over 30 years.

〰 Micah Lee Discusses the Security Breach by a Chinese National at Trump’s Mar-a-lago Resort

It’s no secret that Trump’s self-proclaimed “winter White House” — Mar a Lago — has been notorious for the gloriously stupid operational security SNAFUs that have happened there. Just last month, a woman was arrested attempting to gain access to Mar-a-Lago’s pool. The Secret Service found on her four cell phones, a laptop, an external hard drive, $8,000 in cash, five SIM cards, a thumb drive containing malware, and a signal detector device used to reveal hidden cameras.

The woman, a 32-year old Chinese national named Yujing Zhang, claimed that she was there to attend a “United Nations Friendship Event.” Such an event did not exist. So why was she there? Well, we still don’t know. But it begs the question: What would have happened had she gained access? What could she have accomplished?

〰 Katie Alice Greer of the Band Priests on Their New Album “The Seduction of Kansas”

You’re probably thinking, “Why Kansas? There’s nothing seductive about that place at all.” Sorry for those of you listening in Kansas.

Well, you’d be completely, totally wrong — especially if you said that to Priests front-person, Katie Alice Greer, who loosely based the title on journalist Thomas Frank’s 2004 book, “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” Here’s Frank: What the book is about is an examination of populist, conservative culture. Conservatism has invented a fake populism, a way of looking at class that instead of talking about class as an economic phenomenon, it discusses class as a cultural phenomenon.

For Greer, so much of our current discourse on labor rights, and social struggle around issues like a woman’s right to abortion, are deeply rooted in the history of Kansas itself.

〰 Murtaza Hussain Analyses the Alleged Christchurch Shooter’s Manifesto

My colleague at The Intercept, reporter Murtaza Hussein pored over the shooter’s so-called manifesto and writes that as a non-white Western Muslim, he felt compelled to analyze the words of the shooter. He concludes that his writings “reflect a worldview that is not just confined to the dark corners of the internet, but is openly expressed in media and politics.

〰 Professor Shoshana Zuboff on Surveillance Capitalism

The apps we use, the websites we visit, the social media sites we log onto — they all monitor our behavior, our most private communications in a campaign aimed at understanding and manipulating our actual selves, our motivations, and our propensity to consume and spend money through the context of the data we produce. And for the average citizen of the world, these companies pose a far greater danger to them than any government intelligence agency ever will. And many of us willfully engage in it.

Naomi Klein explores this phenomenon with the author and Harvard Business School professor Shoshana Zuboff.

〰 Spaces of Disappearance: The Architecture of Extraordinary Rendition,” an Audio Journey Mapping the Covert CIA Program

It’s clear that U.S. forever-wars have relied on constructing regimes of secrecy in order to circumvent democratic processes — to “operate on the dark side,” as Dick Cheney once infamously said. In these hidden spaces, anything is possible: the Geneva Convention is rendered meaningless, and a vast network of systematic kidnappings and brutal torture can blossom in remote corners of the globe.

“Spaces of Disappearance” is a comprehensive visual history of the Bush administration’s detention and interrogation program. The spatial layouts of CIA black sites, interrogation rooms, and prison cells are rendered in architectural diagrams, recreated from the account of prisoners held in those sites. Alongside other visual elements — satellite images of the black sites in Romania and Afghanistan, snippets of the insidiously bureaucratic memos justifying torture, and photographs of the actual prisoners of this program — the book places the reader in these once unknowable spaces, to make an incomplete history seem slightly less incomplete.