History Can't Hide from Kahlil Greene

The Cornell 7 and the Truth About Drugs in the Ivy League • How abusers use drug culture on elite campuses, from a former Yale student body president.

SpongeBob Lives on a U.S. Nuclear Test Site • The U.S. tested 23 nuclear weapons at Bikini Atoll, the real place behind SpongeBob’s Bikini Bottom. U.S. officials removed Bikini’s residents and secretly studied the Marshallese exposed to fallout.

Leftist Politics Are Not White People Politics • A viral MS NOW interview with Hasan Piker revived the claim that leftism is foreign to Black voters. Black activists developed the ideas Piker explained while they resisted state violence in America.

Why Is Gen Z Nostalgic for George W. Bush? • George W. Bush has spent years repairing his image, and many young Americans tired of Trump have embraced him. Gen Z grew up during his War on Terror, but many know him mainly from viral online clips.

Why Are the Irish So Pro-Palestine? • Irish musicians quit Ed Sheeran's US tour this month after promoters dropped Macklemore for supporting Palestine. Their support comes from Ireland's memory of British occupation and forced famine.

Trump Bans CNN, MS NOW, and Politico From the White House • On Friday, President Trump banned three news outlets from the White House over their coverage of him. Newsrooms that need White House access face pressure, and independent outlets report without it.

Federal Law Bans Armed Agents From Polling Places. The FBI Director Won't Commit to Obeying It. • Kash Patel would not rule out sending FBI agents to polling places on Election Day. Congress created that authority in 1870 to protect Black voters and repealed it in 1894 to allow disenfranchisement.

Macklemore Dropped From Ed Sheeran's Tour After Supporting Palestine • Venue operators pushed Macklemore off Ed Sheeran's tour after he called for a free Palestine. Owners have long used their control of stages and airwaves to decide what political speech Americans hear.

Yale, Do Not Settle With the Trump Administration • I am calling on my alma mater to end settlement talks with the Trump administration and defend academic freedom. Kingman Brewster, Yale's president in 1970, already showed us that it can be done.

Every World Map You've Ever Seen Is a Lie. Africa Is Far Bigger Than You Were Taught. • Last week, 164 countries at the UN voted to promote a world map that shows Africa at its true size. For generations, European mapmakers and publishers taught the world to picture a smaller Africa.

Twenty-Five Years After 9/11, Zohran Mamdani and Muslim New Yorkers Still Face Suspicion • As New York marks 25 years since 9/11, Rudy Giuliani wants Mayor Zohran Mamdani to skip the event. In 2001, investigators treated Salman Hamdani, a Muslim cadet who died rescuing people, as a suspect.

Charlie Kirk Was Killed One Year Ago. Gen Z’ers Have Named Today the “Kirkiversary.” • One year after Charlie Kirk's assassination, young people on TikTok are marking the date they call the "Kirkiversary" with memes. I explain the trend and why so many Gen Z'ers refused to mourn him.

When Sam Altman Says He’s Building AI Data Centers on Land Nobody Uses, He Means Indigenous Land • Sam Altman says the fix for data center opposition is open desert where almost no one lives. The lands American officials call empty hold Indigenous and Black residents with little power to refuse.

This Labor Day, the Federal Government Is Cancelling Union Contracts • The Trump administration has stripped collective bargaining from more than twenty federal agencies this year. West Virginia coal miners fought nine years for those rights before Congress granted them.

America Has an Antisemitism Problem. Mark Ruffalo Is Not It. • Paramount executives called Mark Ruffalo an antisemite for opposing their $111 billion merger. Officials have aimed that charge at critics of Israel for fifty years, and Jews are less safe for it.

WSJ is trying to indoctrinate Gen Z to love Capitalism • Our generation was raised with heightened economic anxiety and a distaste for the status quo, so of course it didn’t work.

This Is Why Black Americans Don’t Trust Banks • The first money most freed slaves ever saved went into a savings bank Congress built for them. White trustees emptied it in 1874, and Black households still hold far less wealth than white ones today.

AI Accounts Are Inventing Fake Black History and Teaching It to Millions • AI accounts now invent Black history and push it to viewers who have no way to check any of it. Every piece in this newsletter comes from documents that a person read and a person checked.

Haitian Student Dies by Suicide After ICE Forced Him to Wear an Ankle Monitor • ICE forced a Haitian student in Springfield, Ohio, to wear a GPS ankle monitor, and days later he died. Trump falsely told the country in 2024 that Haitians in that city were eating people's pets.

Trump Adviser calls 5 Black Women in Politics “Destructive Black B****s” • Laura Loomer called five Black women in American public life ghetto and unfit to hold power, and the White House said nothing. Entertainers and officials built that caricature over three centuries.

Congress Added "Under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance to Fight Communism • Students who stay seated during the Pledge of Allegiance are being pulled out of class by police. In 1954, Congress made the country explicitly religious to counter the atheism of Soviet communism.

Trump Took Another Native Name Off the Map • Trump ordered federal agencies to call Lake Ontario “Lake America,” the third place he has renamed by order. Federal officials have added and removed Native names from the American map for a century.

Black Business Month Ends Monday. The Reason It Exists Doesn’t. • August ends Monday, and with it the month Americans set aside to spend money at Black-owned businesses. The reason two men created that month in 2004 runs back through a century of stolen Black wealth

Karen Attiah Battled Bezos’s Washington Post and Won • An arbitrator ordered the Washington Post to rehire Karen Attiah, the columnist it fired over her posts about Charlie Kirk. She won because of a union contract newspaper workers fought for in 1933.

Karmelo Anthony Denied a New Trial Despite the Discovery of Hidden Evidence • Karmelo Anthony was denied a new trial two days after testimony showed lawyers kept evidence from his jury. Texas legislators wrote a law against hidden evidence after a 1987 wrongful conviction.

Dolly Parton Was the Ally We Should All Strive to Be • Dolly Parton died today in Nashville at the age of 80. She quietly put money into Black communities for decades and fixed the parts of her business that caused harm as soon as people explained them.

Miss Rachel Says to Support This Black Business • Ms. Rachel told her audience to spend money at Black-owned businesses, and National Black Business Month ends next Monday. This newsletter is one of those businesses, and paid readers keep it going.

How Reagan Destroyed the American Middle Class • American union membership sat at 10 percent in 2025, half the 1983 rate. Ronald Reagan destroyed the strike as a functional threat and shifted the federal tax burden from corporations onto wages.

Black People Keep Being Found Hanging From Trees. Officials Keep Ruling It Suicide. • Police in Raleigh ruled another Black man’s hanging death a suicide this month. Officials across the country are closing these cases within days, sometimes without autopsies or basic investigation.

Why So Many Black Americans Eat Butter Pecan Ice Cream • Black families have favored butter pecan ice cream for generations, and a viral explanation for why keeps circulating. Historians who checked it found a different story about pecans and the South.

There is No “Woke 1” • AOC called the progressive politics of 2020 “crazy” during an interview this month. Northern Republicans abandoned Reconstruction the same way, and historians called that era a mistake for decades.

How Martin Luther King Became a Communist • In her first ad for governor, Marsha Blackburn crushed fortune cookies and promised to hunt communists. Campaigns of the 1950s and 1960s aimed the same charge at Americans who fought segregation.

Why I Keep Doing This • Last month, a former classmate messaged me to say my work sent him back to school to finish his history degree. We both went to a Maryland high school where white parents picketed integration in 1956.

This Movie Was So Racist, It Birthed the KKK • Nobody in the original Ku Klux Klan wore a white robe or burned a cross. Thomas Dixon put both in a novel, D.W. Griffith filmed them in 1915, and millions of Americans joined the version he sold.

Black Slavery Existed in Europe Long Before America • Portuguese merchants sold enslaved Africans at Lagos in 1444, 175 years before the first sale in Virginia. The plantation system American slaveholders ran took its shape on Atlantic islands first.

The Digital Lynching of Jason Arday • Jason Arday died on Friday at 41, nine days after he resigned from Cambridge under a barrage of plagiarism allegations.

The KKK Appropriated the White Hood. Black Men Wore Them First. • The Ku Klux Klan made the white pointed hood into a symbol of racist terror in America. Black Catholics in Seville, Spain, wore that same hood with pride for five centuries before the Klan formed.

Rock Music Has Always Been Black Music • The band Infinity Song released a soft rock album in June, and streaming services call it alternative. Black musicians created rock and roll, and record executives moved them off the rock charts.

Ms. Rachel Says Black Boys Deserve to Grow Up • Ms. Rachel posted that Black boys deserve to grow up, and thousands of her followers turned on her. American juries spent more than a century failing to punish the people who killed Black children.

Trump Uses Spiderman to Promote Deportations! Would the Hero Agree? • Marvel Already Told Us What Spider-Man Would Say About ICE When He Protected An Undocumented Woman

What Really Happened to ‘Staying Woke’? • A guest op-ed by communications strategist Priyanka Mantha on the word behind the attacks on the Smithsonian. Blues musician Lead Belly used "woke" in 1938 to warn Black travelers going to Alabama.

Are Black Americans Really That Religious? • Many Americans view Black churchgoing as something inherent to Black culture. Slaveholders forced Christianity on enslaved people, and many generations of Black Americans have refused it.

ICE Is Older Than America • A guest op-ed by legal historian Gautham Rao on why the overwhelming force behind today's immigration raids is far more American, and far less unprecedented, than most critics assume.

You're Seasoning Your Food With Slavery • Salt costs about a dollar a pound today. Producing it once cost enslaved workers their eyesight and the skin on their legs, in the Caribbean ponds and in brine furnaces from Virginia to Illinois.

Abdul El-Sayed's Historic Victory and the American Tradition of Buying Primaries • Abdul El-Sayed won Michigan's Senate primary against $54 million in outside spending. Another Michigan Senate primary, in 1918, led the Supreme Court to stop Congress from limiting primary spending.

Is Hunter Biden a Cultural Icon? • Hunter Biden now goes onto the podcasts of the people who spent years attacking him, and the videos draw millions of views. His new audience believes what he says about American institutions.

BTS Just Rejected the Grammys’ New "Asian Pop" Category • BTS pulled out of the 2027 Grammy Awards after the Recording Academy created a new category for Asian pop. American awards groups have offered separate recognition to excluded artists for a century.

Planned Parenthood Had a Racist Founder—Here's what the CEO has to Say • A recording from Kahlil Greene's live video

This New Kids' Movie Is About Surviving Genocide—Avatar: The Last Airbender Review • A franchise built on Indigenous and Asian spirituality returns at the exact moment "woke" has become a dirty word in Hollywood boardrooms.

Captain Morgan Owned 131 Enslaved People, and Other Things I Learned in Curaçao • In January, the Dutch government paid to fly me to Curaçao and learn the island's Black history. I learned about the people Dutch colonists enslaved there and about Tula, who led them into revolt.