Study Marry Kill

I was bleary-eyed on a delayed flight when I spotted a New York Times article about Kerri Greenidge, a historian of Black political life and memory. It took me a moment to realize I was reading a postmortem, written while the body was still warm. The source of Greenidge’s downfall, The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family, had only recently been treated as a triumph.

On Saturday, the heat wave delivered an unexpectedly immersive America 250 finale: Founding-era conditions, two bars of service, one melting historian—and, above all, gratitude for the moments that served as balm. History is full of them. We treat July 4, 1776, as a kind of instantaneous birth. The founders sign the Declaration. The Liberty Bell rings. A nation appears.

Coverage is retroactive. Subscribe below or Venmo me directly, as the founders intended. S/o to the local Walmart and my newest personality trait: refusing to gate check luggage This is a part of a series. The first installment ran on June 16, 2026. The intro remains relatively unaltered but what follows is new.

Greetings, history cranks and fiends. After years of buildup, bunkum, and bureaucratic jazz hands, America’s 250 is finally here. Starting tonight, I’ll be making the media rounds and until then, here are my latest 250 highlights. There are plenty of critically patriotic options in the SMK archives.

Subscribe below or Venmo me directly, as the founders intended. Lies We Learned: The Christian Nation That Wasn’t Lies We Learned is a series reckoning with the convenient, sanitized legends that survive as historical fairy tales that play dress up as facts. IV. The Gospel According to 1956 We weren’t founded as a Christian nation. We were founded to escape one. The Constitution says so loudly in at least four ways: • By omission. There’s no mention of God. No divine right. No biblical law.

We can do this the one-time way or the recurring way. Or Venmo me directly, as the founders intended. This is a part of a series. The first installment ran on June 16, 2026. The intro remains relatively unaltered but what follows is new. Last week, I attended the inaugural gathering of think tank fellows, Pulitzer Prize winners, public historians, and a few people who resist any neat label, at the Greenbrier in Sulphur Springs, West Virginia.

Or Venmo me directly, as the founders intended. The past helps explains the present, but it doesn’t offer instructions. It’s a point I make often and figured others do, too, and someone had already written a great essay on that argument — the Founding can tell us how we got here, but not what to do next — and found the opposite.

Following extensive review, we have identified the problem as “money.” A paid subscription remains the leading treatment. Or Venmo me directly, as the founders intended. S/o to the local Walmart and my newest personality trait: refusing to gate check luggage This is a part of a series. The first installment ran on June 16, 2026. The intro remains relatively unaltered but what follows is new.

Patronage: Still conceptual but realistically possible and frankly undefeated in this economy. I just spent twenty minutes in a split screen next to JD Vance. Mercifully, it's still less time than his debate with Kamala Harris, and I wasn’t waiting to talk about him, but rather the Obama Presidential Library. More on that soon.

Alexander Hamilton: General, Congress isn’t sending any money, supplies are low and the British are absolutely speedrunning war crimes. George Washington: OMG the cause is experiencing unprecedented engagement?! Hamilton: The engagement is fatal. Washington: Exactly. Patriots are are really connecting with it. Or Venmo me directly, as the founders intended. Fill out this survey Substack claims will save the human race or this newsletter or whatever.