PART 1: By now, the story of what happened on January 6 2021 is seared into the public psyche. But there is still an untold story. Many of the investigators and team leads on the January 6th Committee were people of color. In this podcast, we bring you the story of their leadership, and why their mix of lived experience as descendents of enslaved people; children of immigrants; or immigrants themselves deeply shaped the committee’s quest to protect and uphold a multiracial pluralistic democracy. The story they tell about the inner workings of the committee also reveal deep rifts over the role of race and Christian Nationalism in the insurrection, and how much of that inquiry should be told while proving former President Trump’s role in the insurrection. As America winds up with endless court cases over the former President and his alleged co-conspirators, it is also, arguably winding up for an increase in domestic violent extremism. In “January 6th: An American Story,” we show – through the investigators of color and lawmakers helping lead the committee – that January 6th is not over, and the ways we continue to make sense of its reverberations could save – or imperil – us all. The story of January 6 is an American Story. It just might be different from the one you thought you knew. In this episode, we meet the Black, South Asian and Latino investigators on the January 6th committee who share their personal stories – whether it be growing up in Harlem in the 1970s and as an Afro Latino in Miami or straddling American and Indian cultures. We learn why these legal eagles were handpicked to serve on the January 6 committee and why they choose to defend a nation that doesn’t always defend them.
Farai Chideya: So just tell me what comes to mind: America.
Sandeep Prasanna: Pluralism. Diversity. Opportunity.
Farai: America.
Marcus Childress: It's the greatest country, I will say that. And it could be even greater.
Farai: America.
Candyce Phoenix: Peril.
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Farai: These voices are the voices from investigators of the January 6th Committee. They are all people of color. Some are immigrants or children of immigrants. Others are descendants of enslaved people. More than a quarter of the some 40 investigators on the January 6th Committee were Black, South Asian or Latino. So were three of the five leaders of the specialized investigative teams.
For the first time, they talk to us.
We went into this documentary with a hypothesis: that the unusually robust representation of people of color was not an accident, nor was it just for show.
In a nation where race has always been tied to democracy and both its aspirations and discontents, we theorized that the lived experience of legal investigators of color could have impacted their work on the committee in ways as profound as their training at Harvard Law School or career as military prosecutors would have.
In fact, their mix of lived experience and professional legal experience would have been just what America needed at a moment like this.
The January 6th Committee’s existence, like the day of the insurrection itself, became a focus of partisan politics and bitter accusations. Here’s GOP Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell:
Mitch McConnell: I think, at the heart of this recommendation by the Democrats, is that they would like to continue to debate things that occurred in the past.
Farai: Senate Republicans filibustered to block the formation of a bipartisan commission. Senate Democrats including New York's Chuck Schumer were furious.
Chuck Schumer: Shame on the Republican Party for trying to sweep the horrors of that day under the rug, because they are afraid of Donald Trump.
Farai: Former President Donald Trump, who lost the 2020 election and raised hundreds of millions of dollars after his defeat by claiming that he won, called the committee “a political witch hunt.”
Republican members of Congress largely boycotted the committee, with then-House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy calling it a “sham.”
Kevin McCarthy: You know it. We predicted it back at the very beginning. This is a sham committee that’s just politically driven by Speaker Pelosi.
Farai: Then, on the eve of the January 6th Committee’s release of its report, a Republican committee released its own, which ignored the actions of former President Trump and focused only on Capitol police preparedness. Here is GOP lawmaker Jim Jordan:
Jim Jordan: Why wasn’t there a proper, uh, proper security presence at the Capitol that day? They’re not gonna address that. They just want to be partisan. They just wanna continue to attack the former president.
Farai: The people who bear the weight of racial bias also do the most service to fix racial bias. Their counsel is often overlooked until things get too critical to ignore. That's arguably what happened with January 6, which is rooted in the rise of modern domestic extremism and political disinformation.
This is “An American Story.”
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Farai: Let's start with how these investigators learned about the insurrection and decided to join the team.
It is January 5, 2021.
(Crowds sound)
Farai: Crowds are amassing in Washington, D.C.
Soumya Dayananda: There was something in the air, even in the days preceding. We live on Capitol Hill, and my daughters were at Senate daycare.
Farai: Oh wow.
Soumya: And the day before the Senate daycare decided to, um, shut down for the day. People who weren't necessarily in the Capitol Hill community already in the parks and the nannies were very much on alert, as well as many of the teachers at the Senate daycare. Most of them are Black, and they saw people that they weren't comfortable around. And I think that that was leading up to the day itself.
Farai: That’s Soumya Dayananda, a fierce prosecutor who helped take down the notorious drug kingpin El Chapo.
Soumya: So I was, you know, going to Colombia multiple times, speaking with witnesses, flipping witnesses to become cooperating witnesses for the government.
Farai: Her relaxed demeanor masks her steely determination. Soon enough, she would be called to take on the biggest challenge of her career.
(January 6th sound)
Farai: She was named senior investigative counsel to lead the team that would investigate the law enforcement and military response to January 6.
But, we are getting ahead of ourselves.
Her life began in the middle of Pennsylvania near Penn State. Her mother was a professor there. Her father taught at Lock Haven University. Her sister called it:
Soumya: Indian Amish, because it's the middle of nowhere. And here we were. We created like a subculture within that small town.
Farai: She learned her parents’ native tongue, Kannada, and started spending summers in India with her grandparents. Her identity as an Indian-American was forming.
Soumya: And I think at age 10, I loved Nancy Drew. I loved “Murder, She Wrote.” I loved all these mysteries. I liked to read.
Farai: So this Nancy Drew and “Murder, She Wrote” seems like a little bit of a precursor to you becoming an investigator.
Soumya: If I look back now, how that shaped how I wanted to be in life in the sense of having a beginning and an end, and that's how those Nancy Drew books were, “Murder, She Wrote” episodes, there's chapters, and there's a problem, and you take several steps to then solve it, and I think that is is how I approached being a prosecutor.
Farai: Joining the team, she was grateful to be working again with people who had spent years as prosecutors. It was something she’d missed after she left the Brooklyn U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
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Farai: It’s the evening of January 5th. In the tightly contested election of 2020, all eyes are turned to Georgia. The results will determine who controls the Senate.
Robin Peguero: my nose is usually in something and it was in, my laptop at the time because I was feverishly refreshing the screen to see the returns from Georgia.
Farai: On the morning of January 6, while crowds were amassing in Washington, D.C., Robin Peguero was in Texas at his sister’s home. He says he was filled with a sense of optimism.
The runoff returns projected Democrats to win in Georgia.
Robin: So there was a lot of optimism on my tiny laptop screen. And then a lot of pessimism.
Newscast: All of this horrendous news that’s going on here in Washington. Something that none of us ever expected to see in the Nation’s Capitol. I just wanna make it official right now. CNN can now project that the Democrats will be the majority in the, uh, U.S. Senate.
Farai: Robin and his family were skilled at finding opportunity amid America's conflicts over race, class and national origin.
Robin: My parents are immigrants. My mom came here from Ecuador. My dad is from the Dominican Republic. They met in the U. S. Army. And fell in love, you know, got married, had my sister and me, all in 1980, you know, not long after the Supreme Court decided that people of two separate races, white and Black, could marry.
Farai: He was raised in the Greater Miami area, in Hialeah.
Robin: It's actually one of the most conservative cities in the country. Many Cuban-Americans are die-hard Republicans. And it's also a place where when you walk into a store, the first language they speak to you in is Spanish and not English.
Farai: Robin’s high school was predominantly Latino, under-resourced and considered just shy of failing by the state, but that didn’t stop him from excelling. He graduated first in his class. and was also only the second student from his school to attend Harvard.
Much like Soumya, Robin fell in love with mystery stories.
Robin: I liked, like, the Hardy Boys. And later, obviously, I would become a prosecutor trying to put pieces together in a case. So that probably played a role in that and where I ended up.
Farai: He spent nearly a decade in Miami as a homicide prosecutor, and held on to his creativity by writing a crime novel called “With Prejudice.” Eventually he ended up on Capitol Hill hired by Congressman Charles Rangel, the first Black chairman of the powerful Ways and Means Committee.
But on January 6, Robin watched an American “first” from his sister’s house in Texas that was starkly disturbing.
Robin: And I'm watching the first non-peaceful transfer of power in our history
Farai: His family peppered him with questions:
Robin: They were shocked. They would ask me, as a former Congressional staffer about where is it that they're breaking into? And can they really reach the House floor? Can they really reach members of Congress or the vice president who was there?
(January 6 sounds)
Farai: The situation grows dire. Law enforcement is overwhelmed and unprepared.
(January 6 sounds)
Farai: Little did Robin know on January 6th, he would eventually join Soumya's team – the blue team – to investigate the failures of first responders and the military that day.
(January 6 sounds)
Farai: Across the Potomac River in Alexandria, Virginia, former Air Force JAG prosecutor Bryan Bonner is at home with his kids.
Bryan Bonner: I remember turning on the news going, “Well, what's going on?” And you know, at first you're like, “Oh, it looks like there's a fight at the Capitol. Oh, okay, they'll, they'll square that away.” But then you realize, wait. It's more than that. I turn on the TV like a lot of people, and then I'm just immersed in this event that's unfolding. And my brother, he's a special agent with the ATF Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms. So I call him up. I'm like, "Are you are you seeing all this?" He's like, "Yeah, like, I just talked to my my folks, we've got a group that's been deployed down there to help. It's insane.”
Farai: By 2:11 p.m. the Capitol building is breached. Rioters call for the death of Vice President Mike Pence. Some GOP members like Josh Hawley – who hours earlier egged on the insurrectionists – flee for their lives.
(January 6 sounds)
Farai: Bryan Bonner has bittersweet memories of Harlem in the ‘70s. There were deep wells of community and culture, plus economic stress and post-divorce tensions between his parents.
Before moving to Norfolk, Virginia in his teens, he grew up on 135th street and Broadway in what was then subsidized housing.
Bryan: So we were outdoor kids only because our project had a park in the back that was surrounded by a very large brick wall. So you had to be a tenant in the building in order to get outside, in order to get into that park.
My friends and I were sort of fancied ourselves the action kids. And so, the big thing to do on Saturdays was watching Channel 5 Kung Fu Theater, and whatever was on Kung Fu Theater, everyone was watching because, of course, at three o'clock when we all came outside again, we were all Kung Fu experts because we had just watched “The Five Deadly Venoms” or “The Kid with the Golden Arm.” And all of us are we were practicing our martial arts, inventing our own sound effects while we do it
Farai: Bryan moved to Virginia in his teens, which he credits with changing his trajectory. A guidance counselor who saw Bryan's potential urged him to apply to UVA. He then joined the Air Force, where he became a JAG – a “judge advocate,” or military prosecutor. That job also helped him mend a torn relationship with his dad.
Bryan: As I grew older, we started to become close, and he often watched “JAG.” And he would call me, and he would say, "Bryan I just finished watching ‘JAG.’" And he would tell me about the antics of, I think the main character's name was Harm, and how he had stopped some terrorist from stealing the original version of the Constitution. And, you know, a terrorist plot. And he would ask me if that was my, what was my day like? "No, Dad. That's not what my day was like."
Farai: Bryan applied his legal skills at the Department of Homeland Security. Soon he would have the chance to live out his childhood dream of being an action hero to defend his country when he was tapped to join Soumya and Robin.
There's a second former JAG on the investigative team – Marcus Childress, the breakout star of the January 6th primetime hearings. Marcus came a long way from the introverted boy who was born on Langley Air Force base in Hampton, Virginia.
Marcus Childress: I lived with my grandmother. My dad was in the military, but he was still pursuing his education. My mom was in nursing school.
Farai: Marcus revered his grandmother and family.
Marcus: My aunt likes to joke that when she was a freshman at Norfolk State University, she would push me around in the crib, around campus, with all of her girlfriends, who still know me to this day as, like, Little Marcus.
Farai: Little Marcus recalls watching “Perry Mason,” “Matlock” and C-SPAN with his grandmother.
Marcus: She was big into, like, politics, not even just, like, the Perry Mason, but like C-SPAN, we're going to watch hearings. It was almost like sports play-by-play with her, where she would comment on what was being said, or the bill that was being introduced, or how that member was paraphrasing the legislative need for it.
Farai: On the D.C. Metro one evening, Marcus receives a phone call that changes the trajectory of his life: His beloved grandmother Sil has passed away. She once dreamed of having a lawyer in the family. Marcus turns towards the law and gets into American University. He found a mentor in Professor Raskin – yes, that Raskin: Congressman Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland.
Marcus: So, law school was the first time where I’m, like, reading and learning about politics and philosophy and the Constitution and how the Declaration of Independence tied into the Constitution and things of that nature. And Mr. Raskin was just like the most incredible storyteller you could have. It wasn’t like a lecture. And you can ask my wife this. I would come home and just launch into what Professor Raskin had just taught us.
Farai: After law school, Marcus became a star as a JAG – a prosecuting lawyer in the military – against his dad’s wishes.
Marcus: Uh, he said, "I did not serve in the military for my son to have to serve in the military." And I think he meant to, like, I want you to be a free entrepreneur or whatever. Like “I served in the military. So you don't have to.” I looked at it as, and I still looked at my time in the military as, like, a sign of ultimate respect for my dad.
Farai: Eventually, Marcus switched to private practice in May 2019, settling down in the D.C. region. He decided to watch the counting of electoral college votes on January 6th live and got on the phone with another lawyer whose husband was one of the floor parliamentarians in the chamber that day for the House of Representatives.
(Sound from the floor of the House of Representatives)
Marcus: We're watching this like, “Let's get some popcorn and see how, um, these congressmen are going to argue this objection,” and I remember her saying, “I have to get off,” like immediately rushing off. I was like, “Oh, that's weird.” She just, like, literally just abruptly left and this is before we see coverage of, like, violence or anything.
Farai: Right, but she knew.
Marcus: She got a call from her husband. And then I went in the living room. My wife and, like, something going on the Capitol And so we just watched the coverage literally from probably what about? A little after one o'clock that day through the entire evening.
Farai: After a day of incendiary rhetoric, attackers held a Confederate flag aloft in the U.S. Capitol. This was a first – a feat not even accomplished during the Civil War.
Investigators like Soumya, Bryan and Marcus worked punishing hours for months to uncover what systems failed our national security and the peaceful transition of power on January 6th. They, along with others, paid a deep personal price, even though their investigation led to primetime hearings seen by tens of millions of Americans, plus a 752-page book: The January 6 Report.
D.C. native Candyce Phoenix played an unusual set of roles, and acted as both the den mother and the task master for the group. Here’s her colleague, Marcus:
Marcus: Candyce is easily one of the smartest attorneys I've ever met before in my life. I thought of Candyce as the oversight encyclopedia.
Farai: Candyce grew up in D.C. when it was truly Chocolate City.
Candyce Phoenix: I started out in D. C. public schools at a mostly Black public school that was not particularly, uh, well-off financially.
Farai: Her mom, like so many mothers in working-class communities of color, put a lot of time and strategy into finding the best educational opportunities for her daughters.
Candyce: It was a wonderful academic experience, but it was a shock of a social experience to move from a not very wealthy public Black school in Southwest D.C. to a very rich, very white private school in Virginia, where we were nowhere near the normal income bracket of the folks who were there and to have this sense of, of lack of belonging. I remember that year triggering an identity crisis for me. Although, I didn't have the words for it at the time.
Farai: Still, Candyce excelled. She rose to the greatest heights, often being one of the few Black women in the room. Candyce helped run President Trump's second impeachment hearing, before being named senior counsel and senior advisor for the January 6 investigation.
The task to set up the investigative committee was daunting.
CANDYCE: There were all sorts of things, like personnel manuals and contracts and managing our document discovery management system.
Farai: Candyce also pointed out that the structure of the committee didn’t give them as much legal leverage as they would have liked, as they weren’t set up as a criminal investigation.
Candyce: We were a committee that was made up of currently sitting politicians, the 9-11 Commission was not. We were a committee that had a time limit to – a very short time limit – to what we could do, which was not a constraint, I think, that was on the 9-11 Commission. They may have had a time limit, but it was not like you're going to get gavelled out of here in a year and a half and you're going to get pushed out the door.
Farai: Candyce’s career to date was largely spent at what she calls her dream job – in the civil rights division at the Department of Justice.
Candyce: And all of that changed when Trump won and took office, and we had opposing counsel in some of our cases just tell us a couple of days after the election, "Come on guys, you know we're just going to wait you out. January is coming and none of these cases are going anywhere."
Farai: She lasted two years.
Candyce: But I couldn't help but feel like the impetus of me becoming a civil rights lawyer was just not being fulfilled during that time, and I went to the Hill to get in the game and to be a part of the battle and the fight.
Farai: Candyce landed at Congressman Raskin’s Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties,where she ran point on President Trump’s second impeachment.
Candyce: I always told myself we were, we were impeaching for history, not for the outcome.
(Sound from impeachment)
Farai: It was January 13, 2021 – a week after the insurrection, one week before President Trump’s term was over and the beginning of Candyce’s mental marathon.
She was running both the January 6 committee and the second impeachment for Congressman Raskin at the same time.
Each of our investigators was handpicked.
Robin Peguero got an email from Chief Investigative Counsel Tim Heaphy asking if he would be interested.
Robin: He said, um, “Congressman Aguilar – Pete Aguilar – recommended you,” but I had never met the congressman before, so I was befuddled by that.
Farai: Marcus’ phone rings.
Marcus: I got a call in August of 2021, asking if I was interested in being an investigative counsel for the January 6th Committee. I actually thought it was a prank. I remember thinking, like, “This isn't real,” um, and then kind of having, like, a freak-out moment of “Seriously?” And then in a moment of excitement of being able to, um, investigate that day and that crime. There's 9-11, I remember where I was on 9-11. I remember where I was on January 6th, and so having the opportunity to be able to investigate it was a no-brainer.
Farai: Bryan got a call, too.
Bryan: In my head, I have one side of my brain that's saying, "You don't want any parts of that. Why would you do that? That's crazy. Don't do that." And the other part of my brain is saying, "Are you kidding? This is a historic opportunity. Like, this will never happen again. Like, of course you've got to do it.”
Farai: Sandeep Prasanna was two weeks away from beginning a job in the Biden administration. He worked for the Homeland Security Committee and had a reputation as an expert on right-wing extremism.
But Sandeep had some trepidations about the offer.
Sandeep Prasanna: I think I, I was a little bit nervous about joining the committee, just because it was unknown how much the American people would pay attention to the results, how much Congress would pay attention to the results of the investigation, and whether it would be taken seriously as a kind of bipartisan or nonpartisan effort.
Farai: His belief that they just might be able to do some good, imbued with a sense of patriotism, won out.
Sandeep: I've been thinking about what it means to be an American since I started working on the Select Committee. I have several intersecting identities. I'm the child of immigrants. I'm a gay person. I'm a person of color. I'm an Indian-American. And I understand myself in different contexts, in different ways.But ultimately, my my life, my happiness, the things that I find rewarding wouldn't be possible in any other country.
Farai: He grew up in New Jersey, where he sang classical Indian music and headed to Bangalore every summer to study.
Sandeep: Yeah, it was pretty incredible. You know, New Jersey is a diverse state, and it has the highest proportion of Indian-Americans of any state in the country. So, there was a lot of Indian culture that I was surrounded by in New Jersey. Um, but going from a small town in New Jersey to living in a very, very large and chaotic city in India by myself, was definitely a challenge, but really exciting.
Farai: Soumya too thought hard before she jumped into her role, as a team lead.
Soumya: I think the very initial “Should I take this job?” The thought was the 9-11 commission report. To be part of that would be incredibly, you know, satisfying.
Farai: Soumya reached out to her former colleague Temidayo Aganga-Williams, a prosecutor based in New York with an expertise in financial crimes.
Temidayo Aganga-Williams: I was not planning to leave the office. I wasn't thinking about that. One of my former supervisors, Soumya Dayananda, sent me a text on – it was a Wednesday – and said, "Hey, I think you'd be good at this. are you interested?" And of course I was like, "Are you joking? Tell me more."
Farai: Soumya was convincing. Temidayo packed up his New York apartment and moved to Washington, D.C.
Temidayo: So starting on the committee early, it felt really like joining a startup. You need supplies, you need protocols, you need ways for procurement to get, you know, all kinds of things. So I think there was a lot of just building a plane while flying it.
Farai: Temidayo is the only immigrant on the team who we spoke to. Born in London, he moved to Nigeria and then …
Newscast: The Olympics are just nine days away. Just about everything is ready in Atlanta. Including the stadium.
Temidayo: Well, I moved to Atlanta in the summer of 1996, and the Olympics were going on then. So I think coming to Atlanta at that time truly felt like not only coming to, you know, the great America, but coming to America at a time that was festive. It felt like a dream. And, America, especially when I was growing up, was a place that that was almost mythic in nature, right? That was spoken about in other countries as, you know, the land of milk and honey. So expectations were high for this new country.
Farai: Temidayo also says he was destined for the law.
Temidayo: I'm very stereotypical lawyer in the sense of I've always loved words. I’ve always loved a good discussion from as early as I can remember. I mean, my fifth grade yearbook, in that we all had to say what we wanted to be when we grew up, and I had lawyer written down in there.
Farai: Temidayo saw the events of January 6th through the lens of the stories America tells about itself, and how they don’t always meet reality.
Temidayo: I think so much of America's own lore about itself, um, is that America is different.
Farai: Yes.
Temidayo: And we're not like those countries, and we're not like those people, and this is America. And watching all those people attack the Capitol, I think really burst that bubble and undercut the idea that America is somehow insulated from being like those people, those countries, because we were watching it all for ourselves – basically open hand-to-hand combat at the Capitol.
Farai: January 6, 2021, wasn’t the first time battles erupted at the Capitol: The British set fire to it during the War of 1812. Later acts of violence at the Capitol carried the whiff of white supremacy.
In 1856, a pro-slavery lawmaker caned and beat a northerner unconscious. In 1858, a melee among 30 congressmen flared when a southerner grabbed a northerner by the throat. Then, two years later, congressmen supporting slavery whipped out pistols and canes to protest the speech of an anti-slavery lawmaker.
Racism is ingrained in the Capitol’s story – then and now. The Capitol was built by slaves – Black men and women who were shackled and dragged across an ocean to provide labor and wealth for white men.
It has become a symbol of America – two Americas: one that believes in white supremacy at any cost and another that stands for pluralistic, multiracial democracy.
Here’s Robin:
Robin: I think people of color naturally are, by definition, so far, in the history of this country, have been marginalized, right? They're on the cutting edge of trying to push the society forward, of trying to reimagine it in a way that maybe looks more like themselves, looks more democratic, looks more egalitarian, and, naturally there are going to be forces that fight that.
Farai: Here’s Temidayo:
Temidayo: And I had not seen yet how diverse the committee was going to turn out. But I mean it's the most diverse professional setting I've ever been in.
Farai: This was strategic, and for Temidayo, it was almost overwhelming.
Temidayo: I thought to my mom, like, “Look at me, like, Nigerian boy, come in here with my Nigerian name, looking at the Capitol and being like, we're walking to go defend it.” And I got teary-eyed because there was something, there was world that it felt so American, the idea that an immigrant can be just as American as anyone else, and could come and defend America.
And to be given the job to say like, "You're on this, this superhero team of people who are going to come in and defend what's best about America and restore and build that Capitol." And the beauty about the imagery too was that the Capitol was under some sort of renovation at the time, too. And there was a way in which just physically looking at it, it looked like it was just being rebuilt.
Farai: Temidayo and the other six began to uncover the facts behind January 6. There would be a fork in the road – whether to stick to the present or dig deeper into our history, and what led to the insurrection.
In episode two, we are going to go behind the scenes of the January 6th investigation. What did it take?
Marcus: He said politics is a contact sport. So I know I'm going to get bruised.
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CREDITS
Thanks for listening to "January 6: An American Story,” a special series from Our Body Politic.
I’m host and executive producer, Farai Chideya. For this series, Joanne Levine is our executive producer. Morgan Givens is our senior producer.
The series was written by Joanne Levine, Morgan Givens and Farai Chideya.
Mary Mathis and Nicole Bode are our fact-checkers. The series was sound designed by Rococo Punch. Jordan Greene is our researcher.
Our Body Politic is produced by Diaspora Farms and Rococo Punch. Nina Spensley and Shanta Covington are also executive producers. Emily J. Daly is our senior producer. Our technical director is Mike Garth.
Special thanks to the folks at Clean Cuts, including Carter Martin, Emma Shannon, Harry Evans, Archie Moore, Mike Goehler, Adam Rooner, Molly Mountain and Aliza Jafri.
This series is produced with the support of Ruth Ann Harnisch.
This program is produced with support from the Surdna Foundation, Ford Foundation, Katie McGrath and JJ Abrams Family Foundation, Craig Newmark Philanthropies, Meadow Fund, Democracy Fund, Heising-Simons Foundation, Schusterman Family Philanthropies, Open Society Foundations, The Henry L. Luce Foundation, Compton Foundation, Harnisch Foundation, Pop Culture Collaborative, the BMe Community, and from generous contributions from listeners like you.