I know it’s been a minute, and I wanted to pop in with an update on Skipped History over the next month and change.

I plan to begin sharing new historian interviews late in September. At the moment, I’m preparing for my third and final show about The Power Broker, Robert Caro, Robert Moses, New York City, and me. It’s happening on Sunday, September 20th at 7 PM at The Bell House in Brooklyn. For anyone not in New York, there’ll be a recording available at a later date. If you’re in the city, you can find tickets here:

Buy tix for The Power Broker Live

The show script is now in the hands of my editor. He called it “provocative,” and not just because musician Jack Johnson, who became a central figure in Part Two of the trilogy and whom I spent a lot of time listening to against my will as a kid, is making an unexpected encore.

The show is provocative because, this time around, I also put Robert Caro under the microscope—and, by extension, me. Who exactly is this guy? What do we know about him? How did his experience growing up in the city color our understanding of Moses and New York?

The lines between the Roberts and me are growing blurrier, and clearer. This morning, I hopped back into the script to work on the section where I talk about the biggest philosophical difference between Caro and me. It’s illustrated by the word “forever,” which Robert Caro uses a lot.

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I write to you amid the fine Finnish furnishings of a friend’s parents’ home in Connecticut. Said friend has edited my show scripts for years and is in town from New Zealand, where he lectures, so I came up to visit him for a few nights. Having borne witness to my creative whirs (madness) for a decade and a half, and being somewhat…

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Hope you’re enjoying the sensational weather. I’m aiming to get outside myself as soon as I finish this note.

On Wednesday, I was back at the Center for Brooklyn History for another thought-provoking conversation, this time with Professor Elizabeth Hinton, whom I’ve interviewed a few times for this newsletter. We talked about incarc…

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In The Extended Universe: How Disney Killed the Movies and Took Over the World, Osterweil argues that Disney's business has never really been about movies. It's been about owning them and using the power of the state to protect that ownership at any cost. The animator who drew Mickey Mouse worked behind a literal curtain. The actress who voiced Snow White was informally blacklisted and never worked again. In 1976, Disney lobbied Congress to extend copyright law for everyone, slamming the door on the public domain that had given them Snow White, Cinderella, and The Three Little Pigs in the first place. Osterweil’s argument? That IP protection (not magic, not imagination) is what Disney actually sells. And that it now shapes the entire economy. “I think we need to want more for ourselves,” she concludes.

Vicky Osterweil is a Philadelphia-based writer, agitator, and worker, and the author of In Defense of Looting. An edited transcript is below for paid subscribers. All subscribers can watch the video and listen on the Skipped History podcast, available on Apple and Spotify.

Ben: Your argument has a lot to do with IP. Can you state it for us?

Vicky: I started out trying to answer two questions: why are all superhero movies the same, and why did Disney, in 2021, send lobbyists to stop the Biden administration from sharing the coronavirus vaccine with the Third World? And why is the answer to both questions the same — which is the protection and management of intellectual property.

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I hope you enjoyed your “holiday” weekend. I was busy getting ready for my show this coming Tuesday (Part One and Three Quarters of my trilogy about The Power Broker), while also swimming in a pool built by Robert Moses, while also processing the event I facilitated at the Center for Brooklyn History earlier in the week.

Professor Khalil Gibran Muhammad and I led a group conversation, which turned into a town hall of sorts, about the Semiquincentennial. The main question on people’s minds was: what the hell were we celebrating? 250 years of what, exactly?

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I just published Part Two of my Power Broker trilogy on YouTube:

I’m really proud of the show! If you watch, clicking like/comment/subscribe tells our algorithmic overlords the performance is worth surfacing.

Robert Moses built so. Much. Stuff. More than anyone else in U.S. history. In Part Two, I explore what he built: the parks, highways, cultural centers, and public housing New Yorkers still live with today. And I try to get at why he built $250 billion of infrastructure. You don’t need to have seen Part One or read the book to enjoy the recording, which is from a sold-out show in March.

I’m back on stage on July 14th with Part One and Three Quarters. (Tickets here.) It weaves together the best of Parts One and Two, so newcomers can get caught up on the series. If you caught both earlier shows, there’s still plenty you haven’t seen: Jane Jacobs’ showdown with Moses in Washington Square Park, a deeper look into Moses’ strange family life, and one or two things I’ve since learned our hero, Robert Caro, got wrong.

The conclusion to the trilogy is coming in September and October. Now, to memorizing 7,000 words about NYC history.

-Ben

A Pulitzer Prize winner, and the author of On Juneteenth, Professor Gordon-Reed and I chatted about the origins of the holiday, the mixture of hostility and jubilation that followed, and what she typically ate growing up to commemorate the day. Her parting reminder? That we may talk about the past a lot (especially in our lines of work), but we are not hostage to it.

A condensed transcript edited for clarity is below. You can also listen to the first ever Skipped History podcast episode here:

Ben: I suppose we should start with the simplest question. Would you mind giving a quick overview of what Juneteenth is and what it commemorates?

AGR: Well, Juneteenth commemorates June 19th, 1865, when United States Army General Gordon Granger came to Texas—Galveston, specifically—and announced the end of slavery in Texas. That was not the end of slavery in the entire United States (that happened legally with the ratification of the 13th Amendment in December of 1865), but this was the end of the military effort to maintain slavery in the Confederate states. So that's what Juneteenth commemorates, and Black Texans have celebrated it every year since then. 

Ben: Going off of that, in On Juneteenth you point out how there's a few-month gap between the Confederacy surrendering and the informing of the enslaved peoples of Texas that slavery is over. I guess this gets to a larger point that there wasn't Twitter, and also that there was perhaps recalcitrance to ending slavery by part of the population, especially in Texas.

Can you talk a bit about that resistance, and what occurred after Juneteenth? Was everyone just immediately like, Okay, we'll get rid of this centuries-old hierarchy. Sounds like a great plan. Why haven't we done this before? 

AGR: Yeah, no. So General Robert E. Lee surrenders in April 1865, and it's really over at that point for the Confederacy, but the Army of the Trans-Mississippi, located in Texas, keeps on fighting. And in fact, the last battle of the Civil War was in Texas and the Confederates won. They knew the whole effort was doomed, but because they were so recalcitrant in Texas, they kept fighting until June. And then once the announcement was made on June 19th, of course, the enslaved people were jubilant.

They knew about the Emancipation Proclamation from two years earlier. They knew what was eventually going to happen. But the former enslavers and people who perhaps hoped one day they would have enough money to own slaves were very, very angry. During my research, I found instances of people whipped for celebrating. And not only were people being whipped and threatened, but whites enforced a system of sharecropping, which was almost like slavery for some people, until the 1930s. Whites did not just give up and try to do away with the whole racial hierarchy.

People have often asked me, should we celebrate this holiday? Because it was so tough after the announcement on Juneteenth. But it’s a time for celebration because enslaved people knew that it would no longer be legally allowed to separate families, to sell husbands away from wives, to send children away from their parents, and so forth. So there was general jubilation about this in the midst of some real hostility.

Ben: In On Juneteenth, you talk about the “masculinization” of Texas history. How does that factor into the hostility enslaved peoples faced?

AGR: Well, one of the things I try to do in the book is explain Texas. I say Texas has been constructed as a white man. When people think about Texas, they think of a cowboy, a cattle rancher, or an oil man, somebody in the oil business.

But obviously, I'm a Texan, and I'm not a white man, and my family has been there for generations, and I wanted to talk about the other part of Texas. The obscured part of Texas that really forms the modern incarnation of the place. Because Stephen F. Austin, the “father of Texas” brings Anglo settlers there in the 1820s, fully aware of—and actually, depending upon—the idea that they're going to come with slaves.

And later on, of course, as the Civil War advances, a number of people from Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, fled Union attacks, bringing the enslaved people with them to stay one step ahead of the war effort. So a lot of the people who come to Texas during the period of the Civil War are really diehard folks. They are the dead-enders. They really, really have faith in the system of slavery and want to preserve it and believe that this is part of the destiny of Texas.

Ben: Wow. I wonder if you could chat about your experience growing up in Texas as relates to this racist dynamic and segregation, which was still persistent. Well, granted you're a ripe 35-years-old, but let's just say segregation was a thing at the time. 

AGR: Very gentlemanly. Yes. 

Ben:  So I wonder if you could talk a bit about your experience growing up, and also your relationship to Juneteenth within that prejudicial environment? 

AGR: Well, I grew up in a small town in Texas, Conroe. It was a small town when I was growing up there. There were fewer than 5,000 people. It had started as an oil town, so it was a prosperous town, but it was deeply segregated. It had very violent origins with respect to Black people. Lynchings had taken place there. The Klan was active there. A man had been burned alive on Courthouse Square in the 1920s, some medieval stuff.

And in the mid-60s, 10 years after Brown vs. Board of Education desegregated the schools (or said that they were supposed to be desegregated), my parents decided to send me to a white school. To work around the Supreme Court decision, Texas, like many southern states, had devised “freedom of choice” plans, where whites were supposed to pick white schools and Black people were supposed to pick Black schools. But when I was going to the first grade, my mother and father chose a white school.

Later on, they said it was because they knew that the Supreme Court was going to strike down these freedom of choice plans. And sure enough, they did [in 1968], but I also think they were idealistic. They viewed their actions as part of the broader Civil Rights Movement at the time. And so I integrated our schools. It was a tough time. The teachers were fantastic to me. Some of the kids were nice and some of them weren’t. So, it was a very intense time. 

That’s why Juneteenth is not just about the day. It's about all of the things around it. Slavery, the racial hierarchy that was created and which continued to exist up until the time that I was starting elementary school. I'm linked to that moment, and in the book, I talk about growing up, celebrating the holiday, the community feel to it, and the special foods we ate.

Ben: You mentioned that you ate goat. Is that right? 

AGR: Well, our family didn't. That’s the sort of traditional fare you're supposed to have: a red drink, goat, and you know, the traditional kind of Southern fare. when I was a little kid, we had tamales. You don't think of Southern fare as including that, but it does in Texas. 

Red is supposed to symbolize the blood of people who suffered. I don't know if that was something that was made up afterward, but the drink that people had at the time was hibiscus tea, which is red. We had soda water. 

Ben: Oh right, you drank a lot of soda!

AGR: Yeah, less healthy than hibiscus tea, but it was red. 

It was a community day, sort of like July 4th for Black people. We celebrated both holidays, but I knew that there was this historical aspect to Juneteenth. My great-grandmother was alive until I was about 11. She would talk a little bit about what a big day it was. Her mother was enslaved. 

So it was a celebration for the kids, a time for us to drink too much soda and run around. But I knew that there was a serious thing attached to it. 

Ben: On a concluding note, in the book, you mention this idea of historical paths not taken; the idea that everything was a choice made by someone. What motivates you to point that out?

AGR: Well, historians always say that nothing is inevitable. One of the purposes of history is, I think, to understand where we are, but I also think it’s to help us make better choices. 

We could have continued in a world after slavery where Black people actually were brought into citizenship. We could have had the talents and the energy and full force of all members of society, and in the process, not kept the country from realizing its greatest potential.

So I want people to think about the choices they make. We talk about the past a lot, but we're not hostage to it. As a citizen, who has hopes for our present and hopes for our future—I have children and I want it to be a certain world for them—my hope is that we'll do better. 

Ben: Mine is too. I appreciate your reminder to be cognizant of the choices you make. I certainly will be deeply considering which type of red drink to have on June 19th. 

AGR: Good luck to you and thank you for inviting me.

In Yuppies: The Bankers, Lawyers, Joggers, and Gourmands Who Conquered New York, Gottlieb traces how Wall Street went from employing 3% of Ivy League graduates in the 1970s to 35% by the end of the ‘80s. Landlords burned down buildings to clear space for them. The New York City Marathon (which I’ve long been a hater of—come for me!) was invented to market the city to them. And Democratic politicians, beginning with Gary Hart, quietly replaced their working-class base with them. Gottlieb helps explain how we got here—that is, when we’re not both losing our minds talking about the Knicks leading the NBA Finals.

Dylan Gottlieb is Assistant Professor of History at Bentley University. An edited transcript is below for paid subscribers. All subscribers can watch the video and listen on the Skipped History podcast.

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How’s your week been? I’m just about done writing Part One and Three-Quarters of my series on The Power Broker. The last thing I’m working on is a new section about Jane Jacobs, a journalist, activist, and author who turned into one of Robert Moses’ leading antagonists. She had a radically different view of what gives a city life, and her writing has me thinking about Costco.

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How’s your spring going? I’ve been quiet for a couple of months but, as paying Skippies know, not idle. I’m writing two shows, developing a new interview format, succumbing to Knicks fever, and wandering around far-flung parts of New York, musing on all of the above.

I have a few updates for you.

First, the shows. I’m nearing the end of a series of performances about The Power Broker, trying to understand how Robert Moses shaped New York. The project is turning into more than an exploration of Moses and the city. It’s an investigation of Robert Caro, the guy who shapes our understanding of Moses; of me, who’s long held on to anger toward Moses; and of memory, and what history is, and why my hometown is consumed with a builder who died in 1981. I did not intend to dive (slip) down so many rabbit holes when starting the project two years ago, but here we are. The shows help me climb back out.

If you’re in New York: I’m performing what I’m calling Part One and Three Quarters on Tuesday, July 14th at 7 PM at Caveat. Think of it as part refresher, part recap, part deeper cut. If you missed Part One or Two, you can get caught up. If you saw both, there’s new material: Jane Jacobs’ showdown with Moses in Washington Square Park, more on Moses’ strange family life, and one or two things I’ve learned that Caro, our hero, got wrong.

Tickets here. $5 off with code RIVERSIDEPARK. Can’t make it in person? There’s a livestream.

Then in the fall: Part Three, the finale. I’ll perform it twice: Sunday, September 20th at 7 PM at The Bell House in Brooklyn (new venue unlocked!), and Sunday, October 4th at 5 PM at Caveat. Ticket links to follow. I’m excited, and a little scared, to see how the trilogy concludes.

If you want some history before then, I’m conducting live interviews at the Center for Brooklyn History with three historians this summer. The series kicks off June 30th (free!) with Khalil Gibran Muhammad, whose work was the source material for my first Skipped History video, over five years ago. We’ll discuss W.E.B. Du Bois’s “The Souls of White Folk” and talk with the audience about what the essay reveals about how far we’ve come as a country, and how far we still have to go. Come out if you can.

As for the new interview format, I teased it for paying subscribers. The short version: I want to go deeper. Not the what, but the why. Those interviews are coming next month, if all goes according to plan (and what fun would it be if it did?).

- Ben

How’s your week been? I’m juggling various creative pursuits and developing some changes to Skipped History — maybe observing some changes is a better way to put it — that I’m interested to hear your thoughts on.

If you couldn’t tell from my last few posts, I’m no longer just interested in what happened in the past. I want to know why.

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On Wednesday, I delighted in my first bird walk of the season with a Skippie who shall remain nameless, named Naomi. Later that day, I interviewed Professor Rhae Lynn Barnes. She’s a professor at Princeton and the author of Darkology: Blackface and the American Way of Entertainment. It took her twenty years to research. Twenty year…

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Hope you’re getting out in the spring sunshine (or the autumnal air if you’re in the southern hemisphere… I think that’s how weather works). I’m deep in the final stretch of Power Broker notes — still about 100 pages to go — and interviews resume next week, including one on the history of blackface in America. I’m excited and wary.

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I hope you’re enjoying the spring and the continuation of civilization (sort of). I’m deep in developing the third part of The Power Broker trilogy and wanted to share an update. In classic comedic fashion, I’ve been thinking a lot about pain lately: what it means to live with it, flee from it, numb it, or pass it on. And what, exa…

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In The Free and the Dead: The Untold Story of the Black Seminole Chief, the Indigenous Rebel, and America’s Forgotten War, Holmes traces the Second Seminole War (1835-1842). Jackson invaded Florida knowing Black Seminoles were free and armed. When war broke out, he kept saying: why isn’t it over? What’s the problem? The war ended up costing up to $40 million (over $1 billion today), killing more soldiers from disease than combat, and could have been avoided entirely. Holmes sees a pattern echoing today: leaders imposing their will by force alone, denying realities they can’t defend on paper, while the media shapes our understanding of wars in real time.

Jamie Holmes is a writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. A condensed transcript, edited for clarity, is below. You can also listen on the Skipped History podcast:

Ben: To set the scene: what was Florida like in the 1830s, and what were the racial dynamics in play?

JH: Florida was originally Spanish — Saint Augustine dates to 1565 — then briefly British, then Spanish again. It didn’t become a U.S. territory until 1821, and it wasn’t a state until 1845. The book takes place mostly between 1835 and 1842, what appears in American history textbooks as the Second Seminole War.

By 1835, Florida was quite sparsely populated: something like 35,000 people, with an enslaved population making up 40% of that.

Ben: I noted there were 0.6 inhabitants per square mile?

JH: That’s right.

Ben: I believe the historical record shows the other 0.4 of each of those inhabitants summered in Cape Cod.

JH: Haha that fits, actually.

The interior was unmapped. There’s a general in the war who said we know more about the interior of China than we do the interior of Florida. Under Spain, there was a three-tier social system where it was relatively possible for an enslaved person to free themselves. When the Americans took over, that changed dramatically. When Florida drafted its constitution before statehood, it tried to ban all free African Americans from entering the state.

At the same time, you had a population of roughly 5,000 Indigenous people on a reservation in the center of Florida, including about 500 Black Seminoles. Then Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act in 1830, which systematized what Americans were already doing: expelling Indigenous families from their homes. Simultaneously, there were private efforts, sanctioned by very high-ranking members of the U.S. government, to enslave the Black Seminoles and separate them from their Indigenous allies.

Ben: Can you introduce us to the leaders on the Seminole side, and what gave them common cause?

JH: Part of what shaped the Black Seminole community was a very old policy: an exchange of military service for civil rights. A gun is a gun, and they needed manpower. So you had families liberating themselves from plantations and joining the community. Children, by old Muskogee custom, could become full members of the tribe.

The central figure on the Black Seminole side was Abraham. In Muskogee he was called Tustenuggee. Alongside him were Chief Jumper, known as the lawyer, and Chief Micanopy, head of the Seminoles. Those three formed the Seminole leadership.

And then there was Osceola, probably the most famous figure from the war, though his fame is largely a distortion. He was a formidable warrior in the war, but in American history books, he was made into a more romantic figure. That narrative was simpler than telling the actual story which, on the American side, involved kidnapping, forced labor camps, and a catastrophic imperial blunder.

Ben: Osceola is still the symbol of the Florida State Seminoles.

JH: Right. I grew up on the south side of Chicago, and we had starter jackets, these shiny sports jackets. I had one with Osceola’s face on it when I was about twelve with no idea who he actually was.

Ben: And here you are wearing his coat during this interview!

JH: Ha! I admit, I still like that coat.

Ben: Jackson, meanwhile, was sleepwalking into a quagmire, what would become the longest American war before Vietnam. How did that quagmire unfold?

JH: Jackson was in his second term and not paying much attention. He kept saying: the Seminoles only have 500 people, I have overwhelming numbers, what’s the problem? There were panicked letters coming from Florida, and Jackson essentially called the local men cowards. There’s a quote that got printed in Florida newspapers where he said it would be better to let the Indians kill all the local men so their widowed wives could find husbands of more courage and “breed up men who would defend the country.”

What he wasn’t accounting for was the terrain. The interior was unmapped, subtropical, and lethal. The great majority of deaths in this war came not from battle but from disease. There was a sickly season from roughly April to November. Troops returned half-naked, barefoot, and sick. On the Suwannee River, malaria was so violent that a guard would stand his turn at night and be found dead of yellow fever by morning. One general wrote: the nature of the country is such that an army of 500 could hold it against an army of 10,000. Think of an early version of the Vietnam War, but in Florida.

In 1836, about 20% of the Officer Corps resigned rather than be assigned there. West Point graduates never reported. There was no honor to be had wandering through Florida and dying of sickness without fighting anybody.

Ben: Can you walk us through the trajectory of the conflict?

JH: The war opened in December 1835 with two shocking events. The first was the killing of Wiley Thompson, Jackson’s Indian agent and liaison with the Seminoles, by Osceola. The second was the Dade Massacre, which set the tone for everything that followed.

A commander named Dade decided, bravely or foolishly, to march a column of about 108 men up through the reservation to meet another force on the northern side. The Seminoles warned them not to come. They split a cow open on the road as a warning sign and tore down bridges. Abraham, Micanopy, Alligator, and Jumper led 180 warriors in an ambush that killed 105 of the 108 men, losing only three of their own. To give you a sense of the size of the U.S. Army at that moment: those bodies lay out in the rain for 54 days because there weren’t enough soldiers to go reclaim them.

What followed was a series of blunders. A general named Scott arrived with — no joke — a Napoleonic handbook and an orchestra. He soon returned to Washington in shame.

The war really shifted when Thomas Jesup took over. He was a quartermaster who had just fought in the Creek nation, and he had a clear strategic vision: hire Creek mercenaries as bush fighters, and target the women and children of the Seminole leadership to force the warriors to surrender. He seized people under a white flag, during protected negotiations, clearly a violation of the rules of war. He was eventually shamed for the white flag tactic, and that became the scandal of record while the far worse things he was doing didn’t make the newspapers.

Ben: Shame on you, but not for the kidnapping squads.

JH: Exactly. Military books make a big deal out of the white flag. Like that’s the thing that bothered you?

In the end, the costs of the war were staggering. The total outlays in 1835 alone were $17 million; the war ended up costing $30 to $40 million, and was largely unnecessary. Many Seminoles ended up agreeing to forced relocation westward, suffering as they were thanks to Jesup’s tactics. But early in the war, the Seminoles submitted a document asking: what if we stay in Florida and submit to your laws? That could have been agreed to. It would not have been a problem at all.

Ben: What connections do you see between this history and the present?

JH: The connection to the current occupant of the White House was top of mind throughout. Jackson invaded Florida in 1817 knowing the Black Seminoles were free, knowing they were armed, and in his letters he simply refused to acknowledge their status or agency. He tried to have them enslaved, his Indian agent pushed back, and Jackson eventually backed off, but he was going to impose his will on the world by force of will alone and deny everything he couldn’t defend on paper.

Meanwhile, the generals in this war were publishing their battle reports in newspapers and writing fanciful accounts of themselves in real time. The role the media plays in shaping our understanding of wars is very much a timeless story.

In The Free and the Dead: The Untold Story of the Black Seminole Chief, the Indigenous Rebel, and America’s Forgotten War, Holmes traces the Second Seminole War (1835-1842). Jackson invaded Florida knowing Black Seminoles were free and armed. When war broke out, he kept saying: why isn’t it over? What’s the problem? The war ended up costing up to $40 million (over $1 billion today), killing more soldiers from disease than combat, and could have been avoided entirely. Holmes sees a pattern echoing today: leaders imposing their will by force alone, denying realities they can’t defend on paper, while the media shapes our understanding of wars in real time.

Jamie Holmes is a writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and elsewhere.

In Chain of Ideas: The Origins of Our Authoritarian Age, Dr. Kendi argues that what we call “neo-Nazism” isn’t new at all—it’s a renovation of Nazi theory with the same bones, just updated for 2026. Instead of Jews as replacers, it’s Muslims or Black people. Instead of “international Jewry,” it’s “globalists.” The book also introduces a distinction between privilege and power. In Dr. Kendi’s view, most people in positions of privilege are, whether they know it or not, dominated by oligarchs who provide those privileges in exchange for submission.

Dr. Ibram X. Kendi is Professor of History and founding director of the Howard University Institute for Advanced Study. He is the author of Stamped from the Beginning, which won the National Book Award, and How to Be an Antiracist. A condensed transcript, edited for clarity, is below. You can also listen on the Skipped History podcast:

Ben: Your new book is called Chain of Ideas: The Origins of Our Authoritarian Age. Its central argument has to do with great replacement theory. Can you define the theory for us?

IXK: Great replacement theory is a political theory suggesting that powerful, shadowy, typically “globalist” elites are enabling people of color to displace the lives and livelihoods of white people, who thereby need authoritarian protection. When you hear ideas like immigrants are “invading” the nation, or that diversity programs are anti-white, or that the primary victims of discrimination are white people — that’s great replacement theory. It has mutated to include men, ethnic majorities, and Christians as victims. The French novelist who named the theory did so in 2010, but the idea had been circulating since the late 19th century.

Ben: Can you talk about the global origins of this theory?

IXK: An idea is different than a person in that an idea can live for a century and not be named.

The origins of great replacement theory lie with colonial officials fearing what would happen if decolonization came. They believed it would be a turning of the tables — that Africans and Asians and Latin Americans fighting off the yoke of colonialism weren’t seeking sovereignty and freedom, but would come and try to colonize Europe. That was one root.

Another was eugenics: the idea that if we allow an “inferior” genetic group to reproduce, they’ll eventually replace the “superior” group. And then there was antisemitism — the idea that Jews were seeking world domination, that all the ills of early 20th century Europe were their fault, that Jews who had lived in Germany as long as anyone else were somehow aliens seeking to replace the Aryan population. That idea found its full flowering in Nazi thought.

Ben: Which brings us to your argument about neo-Nazism. You push back against the common conception of what a neo-Nazi is.

IXK: The common definition is basically someone after 1945 who is hailing Hitler, denying the Holocaust, calling for the return of the Third Reich, or advocating genocidal antisemitism. I argue in the book there’s nothing new or “neo” about that. That is simply a Nazi. When I say neo, I mean something more like a renovated house. You can walk into a house that was built in 1911 but renovated in 2026, and from your standpoint it is completely new: all the updates, literally like a brand new home. But the bones are still from 1911.

Ben: Rephrase: you can give a Nazi a new Vitamix or Viking, but they’re still a Nazi, just with newer appliances.

IXK: Ha, exactly. Great replacement theory is a renovation of Nazi theory in almost every way, updated for 2026. Instead of Jews being positioned as the replacers, it’s often Muslims or Black people. Instead of “international Jewry” as the shadowy global elite enabling the replacement, they say “globalists” — and then typically describe Jewish wealthy people and intellectuals as these globalists. They used to call anti-Nazi intellectuals “cultural Bolsheviks.” Now they call them “cultural Marxists.” New terms. Same bones.

And I’d add: there’s also a dynastic element. Marine Le Pen leads a party founded by her father, who co-founded it with people who collaborated with the Nazis during the occupation of France. The Freedom Party in Austria was founded by former Nazis and is now pushing great replacement theory. José Antonio Kast, the current president of Chile, whose father was a Nazi party member, ran on great replacement theory to get elected.

Ben: You also introduce the concept of “orchestrated distancing” — politicians obscuring their connections to explicitly racist and neo-Nazi roots while continuing to propagate those ideas.

IXK: Le Pen is the clearest example. She calls for banning religious symbols worn by Muslims and Jews, and then tells Anderson Cooper in an interview that she fully supports freedom of religion. She says one thing that demonstrates she is at war with other religions, and then when someone calls her on it, she orchestrates distance as if she didn’t just say that.

And I want to add: the media enables this. In that same 60 Minutes interview, Cooper describes Le Pen as a “conservative.” If the mainstream media identified her as a neo-Nazi the way they identified her father for years, she would be far less electable. By using terms like “conservative,” “far right,” and “far left,” journalists become an escalator carrying people up to great replacement theory in ways they may not even realize.

Ben: There’s a quote from the book I keep returning to: “The grand political struggle in the 21st century is between anti-racist democracy and racist dictatorship. Not between the races or ethnicities or religions. Not between the left and the right.” That’s a significant reframe.

IXK: And it’s supported by what we actually see. After the National Rally won the first round of the French legislative elections in June 2024, the left, center-left, and center-right banded together to keep Le Pen’s party out of power in the runoff. What that showed is that great replacement parties are not interested in coalition governance. They want total domination. The Trump wing of the Republican Party was not willing to share power with the anti-Trump wing. It wanted complete control of the party, and when Trump came to power, control over the government. There’s no evidence that centrist parties can benefit from coalitions with great replacement parties. There’s quite a lot of evidence that those parties are trying to crush them.

Ben: The part of the book that lingers with me most is this distinction you draw between privilege and power. You write: “To identify privileged people as members of dominant groups is to conceal who empowers them — the truly dominant group of oligarchs. When we believe we are dominant as opposed to privileged, we defend our privileges as if defending our domination over others, but in actuality we are defending the domination of others over us.” Can you unpack that?

IXK: One of the major interventions I’m hoping to make with this book is to untangle privilege from power. We’ve long used “privileged group” and “dominant group” almost interchangeably. What I try to show is that most people who are in positions of privilege are simultaneously being dominated by oligarchs who provide those privileges in exchange for continued submission. People don’t realize that in order to maintain their privileges, they have to empower the very people who dominate them.

So there are really two choices. You can advocate for privilege, or you can advocate for power, but you’re not going to be able to have both. The oligarchs are saying: in exchange for giving you privileges, I need to continue to dominate you, and I need to continue convincing you that your privilege is power. It isn’t. And I’m hoping that people across positions of privilege, including myself, as a man, as a citizen, and as someone born in a Christian home, will start to choose democratic power over racist privileges, and realize that is genuinely a better life.

Ben: That choice, you say, is a choice to gain power over your life.

IXK: The chain of ideas, via great replacement theory, leaves us believing our groups are fundamentally separate, fundamentally at war, and that those other groups, particularly groups with less, are coming to take what’s ours. That is its political vision.

The chain of humanity has a different conception entirely. It begins with the premise that our groups are fundamentally linked. There are real differences between us, religious, cultural, phenotypic, and all kinds, and those differences are what make humanity beautiful. But all of those groups are connected, and we should be able to see ourselves in difference, to be curious about difference. As we empower other groups, we become more powerful. As other groups gain, we gain. As other groups become more free, we become more free. What I’m trying to do, frankly, is strengthen every link: to help us realize that we are going to prosper together, or die together.

Ben: I can’t help thinking there’s something daunting about getting free together — like, what lies on the other side of that quest? But when I read your work, my conclusion is: we don’t need to know the answers to those questions. The process of seeking them and building something together might show us the way.

IXK: I wrote the book to raise those questions and have exactly that conversation.

In Chain of Ideas: The Origins of Our Authoritarian Age, Dr. Kendi argues that what we call “neo-Nazism” isn’t new at all—it’s a renovation of Nazi theory with the same bones, just updated for 2026. Instead of Jews as replacers, it’s Muslims or Black people. Instead of “international Jewry,” it’s “globalists.” The book also introduces a distinction between privilege and power. In Dr. Kendi’s view, most people in positions of privilege are, whether they know it or not, dominated by oligarchs who provide those privileges in exchange for submission.

Dr. Ibram X. Kendi is Professor of History and founding director of the Howard University Institute for Advanced Study. He is the author of Stamped from the Beginning, which won the National Book Award, and How to Be an Antiracist.

In a recent New York Times Magazine piece, Anderson traces how two early Cold War coups created a dangerous template. In 1953, the CIA overthrew Iran’s Prime Minister Mosaddegh by basically renting a mob. The following year, a ragtag mercenary army and a fake radio broadcast toppled Guatemala’s president. Two victories by bluff, costing little money and no American lives. Then Eisenhower tried the same playbook in various other countries—catastrophic failures nearly across the board. As Anderson shows, regime change becomes addictive: each intervention produces the crisis that justifies the next. And now Trump, having grabbed Maduro in Venezuela, has his sights on Iran and Cuba. Anderson also discusses his book King of Kings, about the 1978-79 Iranian Revolution that swept the Shah from power—a direct consequence of that 1953 American coup.

Scott Anderson is a veteran war correspondent and contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine. King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution, A Story of Hubris, Delusion, and Catastrophic Miscalculation won the 2025 Kirkus Prize for nonfiction. A condensed transcript, edited for clarity, is below for all subscribers. You can also listen on the Skipped History podcast:

Ben: Your recent New York Times Magazine piece is called “When a President Gets Addicted to Regime Change.” What’s the argument?

Scott: The Cold War started almost concurrently with the end of World War II. When the CIA came along in 1947, the early efforts to roll back communism were in Eastern Europe, and they were across-the-board disasters. They’d drop anti-communist partisans across borders or from airplanes, and they’d get rounded up immediately. So fairly quickly, Europe became a kind of stasis, and attention shifted elsewhere. The mentality was zero-sum: our loss is automatically the Soviets’ gain.

When Eisenhower came into office in January 1953, his Secretary of State — can we use the term “rabid”?

Ben: To describe a guy who — not a joke — stirred his drinks with his index finger, I’d be okay with just about any adjective.

Scott: A rabid anti-communist, John Foster Dulles, was eager to act. The British, who had controlled Iran’s oil industry for nearly half a century, had watched a nationalist prime minister named Mohammad Mosaddegh come to power and try to nationalize the industry. They wanted him gone but wanted to hide their hand. They first went to Truman, who said no. They came back after Eisenhower was elected, and Dulles said, sure. That became Operation Ajax.

The coup actually failed at first. Mosaddegh’s people were tipped off. There were two days of pitched battles in the streets of Tehran, and CIA operatives started to flee the city. As a last-ditch effort, the CIA officer in charge — Kermit Roosevelt —

Ben: — for anyone wondering: yes, related to that Roosevelt.

Scott: —yes, grandson of Teddy Roosevelt — basically rented a mob and sent them marching through Tehran posing as Shah supporters. It worked. Mosaddegh famously jumped out a back window of his prime minister’s palace. The Shah, who had fled to Italy and was having lunch at the Excelsior Hotel in Rome, came back rather shame-faced to become Iran’s absolute ruler for the next 25 years.

The following year, nearly the same thing happened in Guatemala. An elected leftist government, the United Fruit Company worried about land reform, the CIA backing a mercenary army of 400 men that immediately bogged down at the border. But the CIA had a hidden radio transmitter and started broadcasting that the Liberation Army was marching on Guatemala City. President Árbenz panicked, blinked, and Guatemala fell.

Two back-to-back victories by bluff, costing very little money and no American lives. This becomes the template. Over the next six years, they tried it in about a dozen other countries: Indonesia, Laos, and so on. Virtually across the board: catastrophic failures.

Ben: And the parallel to the current moment?

Scott: Trump grabs Maduro, the president of Venezuela, and even his detractors recognized it as a pretty brilliant logistical operation. No Americans killed, they bring him to New York. Trump basically thinks: that worked, let’s do it in Iran. And clearly, somewhere on the horizon, Cuba.

Ben: I want to bring in your book, King of Kings, about the 1978-79 Iranian Revolution. There’s a through-line I keep seeing: the Shah in a bubble, Carter losing touch with what was actually happening on the ground. Elites who are out of touch, whether they’re the ones being deposed or doing the deposing.

Scott: The Shah was actually a highly intelligent man, but he made the fatal mistake of surrounding himself with yes-men. He was in power for 38 years, and it became more and more of an echo chamber. People were lying to him about the inflation rate because he’d get upset. If someone said it was 18%, someone else said 3%, then the 3% guy rose in his esteem. So he genuinely believed his people loved him. When the revolution started, he was like a deer in headlights: a chronic vacillator who never made a hard decision if he could avoid it.

Meanwhile, the Americans knew less and less about what was actually happening there. The Shah hated it when Western diplomats talked to even his moderate opposition, so over time they stopped entirely. By the time Carter came into office, the official narrative was: everyone loves the Shah, smooth sailing. And it was institutionalized. The people who actually spoke Farsi and said there were a lot of people who didn’t like him were first ignored and then reprimanded for going against the official line.

Ben: Carter gave a toast to the Shah saying Iran, because of the Shah’s great leadership, is “an island of stability... the respect and admiration and love which your people give to you.” Within a week, there were the first huge anti-Shah demonstrations. The irony is so rich!

Scott: And you can date the beginning even earlier, to the Shah’s state visit to Washington in November 1977. About 4,000 anti-Shah demonstrators showed up; there were 50,000 Iranian students studying at American universities by then, many radicalized by exposure to democracy. Someone made the catastrophic mistake of broadcasting the Shah’s Washington arrival live back in Iran. What millions of Iranians saw was riots in the streets and people being tear-gassed, including the Shah and Carter on a rostrum together.

The way many Iranians interpreted it was that Carter was deliberately humiliating the Shah. Why else, in their understanding of how the world worked, would you allow that? You can really start dating the anti-Shah demonstrations to within days of that visit.

Ben: And Ruhollah Khomeini (not to be confused with Ali Khamenei, his successor), stepped into that vacuum.

Scott: In exile, Khomeini could say things about the Shah that nobody inside Iran could. When the revolution came, he was seen as the incorruptible one, not bought and paid for. The opposition politicians and ayatollahs inside Iran were all on the payroll. Among the conservative countryside, he had this image of purity. And as the revolution broadened to include Western-educated progressives, he was seen as the spiritual glue: the old man who’d lead the thing and then go back to his madrassa. People were comparing him to Gandhi.

Little did they know. Three Western-educated advisors had smoothed off his rough edges and presented a far more moderate figure to the Carter administration. Carter was still looking at everything through a Cold War lens; his primary fear was that Iran would go communist. These men around Khomeini figured that out and set about convincing the Americans otherwise. But Khomeini was no accident of history. Go back to his early years and you see someone very cunning, very manipulative, very strategic.

He gave a CBS interview in which he said he’d have no official role in the government. The interviewer pressed him: “You will be, in effect, the strong man of Iran.” Khomeini gave a slow, solemn nod and said, “You may assume so.”

Ben: Stating his intentions fairly clearly.

Scott: He did. On the hostage crisis that soon followed: Khomeini didn’t know about the embassy seizure ahead of time. But confronted by an unforeseen event, he made a cold-eyed calculation. In the nine months between the revolution and the seizure, he had taken Carter’s measure as a man who backed down in the face of threats, and he bet his adversary would do the same again. On that bet, as on so many others, Khomeini won.

Ben: What are the possible outcomes for Iran now?

Scott: Three scenarios. First, regime change through military intervention. Without U.S. troops on the ground, it won’t happen. During the January demonstrations, Trump encouraged Iranians to rise up: “help is on the way.” Help was not on the way. At least 35,000 people were killed. They’re not going to rise up again just because the Americans and Israelis bomb military infrastructure. The weapons the Iranian government needs to suppress its own people are machine guns. You can’t bomb those away.

Second, a backroom deal with the Revolutionary Guard. That’s quite plausible, because the Guard’s leadership isn’t driven by theology or politics; it’s about money. The Revolutionary Guard controls roughly 40% of the Iranian economy. A deal not unlike what happened in Venezuela, where the regime stays intact and one man is removed, is possible.

But the most likely scenario: Trump watches his approval ratings drop, watches gas prices climb 50, 60 cents, and realizes he needs out. He’s a master at changing the conversation. He has the power to say “mission accomplished” and look somewhere else. He’s already walked back “unconditional surrender.” I think he’ll find some pretense: they’ve made assurances, they’ve abandoned the nuclear program. Declare victory and go home.

Ben: What I keep coming back to is the Iranian people themselves. There was a British empire that had a firm grip on their country. Then a democratic leader in the early 50s. Then the U.S. deposed that leader. And we’ve been living in the shadow of that action ever since, though it’s considerably easier to live in that shadow from Brooklyn, or from your undisclosed tropical location, than it is for Iranians.

Scott: That’s exactly right.

In a recent New York Times Magazine piece, Anderson traces how two early Cold War coups created a dangerous template. In 1953, the CIA overthrew Iran’s Prime Minister Mosaddegh by basically renting a mob. The following year, a ragtag mercenary army and a fake radio broadcast toppled Guatemala’s president. Two victories by bluff, costing little money and no American lives. Then Eisenhower tried the same playbook in various other countries—catastrophic failures nearly across the board. As Anderson shows, regime change becomes addictive: each intervention produces the crisis that justifies the next. And now Trump, having grabbed Maduro in Venezuela, has his sights on Iran and Cuba. Anderson also discusses his book King of Kings, about the 1978-79 Iranian Revolution that swept the Shah from power—a direct consequence of that 1953 American coup.

Scott Anderson is a veteran war correspondent and contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine. King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution, A Story of Hubris, Delusion, and Catastrophic Miscalculation won the 2025 Kirkus Prize for nonfiction.