'The Informant' | Ep. 1: There's No Place Like Home

February 1, 2023·44 min·3 clips

An FBI recording captures a militia member in Kansas planning to kill people and make it look like an accident.

A flyer starts the trouble. In Garden City, Kansas, a Facebook rumor about an ISIS recruiting drive worries people enough that someone calls the FBI, and the caller is not shrugged off. The episode drops that call into a country still primed to fear Muslim Americans after 9-11. The numbers make that fear look crooked. From 1994 to 2020, the narration says right-wing extremists planned more than half of domestic terrorism plots, while Muslim terrorists accounted for far fewer, around 15%. Still, Islam-inspired terrorism had a huge hold on the American imagination. An election was coming. Some politicians were, in the episode's words, putting Muslims together in a box labeled terrorist. Militias were watching too, talking about replacement, Sharia law, and a new world order run by the Muslim Brotherhood. Garden City looks neighborly from a distance: beef economy, open prairie, people who know each other. But it is not sealed off from the rest of the country. Tony Mativi sharpens the picture with groups convinced Muslims were bad, immigration was too loose, and the government was failing to act. Then Robin Smith, a former FBI special agent, enters the investigation. The informant sits at the center of it all, an ordinary Kansas father and husband asked to help stop an attack close to home. The question lands hard: would someone risk that much for strangers?

As heard by us

A tense Kansas-set opener about an FBI informant, anti-Muslim extremism, and a terror plot forming close to home.

An ordinary man from Kansas, a husband and father, is pulled into an FBI effort to stop a terror attack being planned close to home. The opener grounds the case in Garden City, where a Facebook rumor about an ISIS recruiting flyer lands in a climate already charged by post-9/11…

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Why you'd press play

When a Kansas rumor pulls the FBI into a terror case.

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