-
1 week ago | 
wkamaubell.substack.com | W. Kamau Bell |Kathleen Hanna
In my role as the self-appointed official (unofficial) spokesperson of Substack, I was thrilled to welcome the legendary Kathleen Hanna to the platform. You know and love her from Bikini Kill, Le Tigre, The Julie Ruin, and her book Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk. Well, she has a new newsletter, Future Windows, that you should check out. She even made the intro video to beat all intro videos.
-
3 weeks ago | 
wkamaubell.substack.com | W. Kamau Bell
Earlier this month when I was on Marc Maron’s podcast WTF, Marc and I had a rollicking good time. We talked about everything under the American sun… but mostly the fall of America. At one point, Marc shifted the conversation and asked me about being a dad, something we had never really talked about in the years I have known him. I was excited to let him know about my three girls, but then somehow — as always seems to happen in conversations these days — we made it back to the fall of America.
-
1 month ago | 
wkamaubell.substack.com | W. Kamau Bell
In the early years of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg used a perfectly Zuckerbergian motto. Because of the success of Facebook, the motto was adopted all over Silicon Valley. The depressingly misanthropic motto is “Move fast and break stuff.” At some point Mark Zuckerberg claimed to have changed the Facebook motto to “Move fast with stable infrastructure.” Meh. You’ll notice that even with the change of motto, there is nothing in there about Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook making the world a better place.
-
1 month ago | 
wkamaubell.substack.com | W. Kamau Bell
In case you missed it, here’s a recording of today’s Office Hours with Anna Sale. We had fun with our first Substack Live. We’ll be live again next month with another set of Office Hours. Get more from W. Kamau Bell in the Substack app Available for iOS and Android
-
1 month ago | 
wkamaubell.substack.com | W. Kamau Bell
It was a nice day. I do remember that. But because it was San Francisco, I have no idea if it was July, November, or March. Any of those days could be a “nice” day in the Bay. I was walking down 4th Street in downtown San Francisco, between Market Street and Mission Street. For those of you who don’t know, Market is the main street of downtown SF. It is basically the “Broadway” of San Francisco.
-
1 month ago | 
wkamaubell.substack.com | W. Kamau Bell
One of the most cringeworthy political moments of my life happened in the summer of 2020 when several Democratic Congress folks draped themselves in Kente cloth and took a knee to protest police violence. We know that the moment was clearly designed as a photo op, because we have photos of it. Plenty of them, in fact. It was a part of Congressional Democrats’ press run around the Justice in Policing Act.
-
1 month ago | 
wkamaubell.substack.com | W. Kamau Bell
Steve Bannon looks like the dad who left home in 1970 to buy cigarettes and not only forgot to come back, but also forgot to take a shower or change his clothes. He's just been deadbeat dad-ing it around for the last 50 years. Steve Bannon looks like he smells bad from the inside. Like if you cut him open, he would bleed and then the air would get thick with sulfur. Steve Bannon is halfway to Beetlejuice. Steve Bannon doesn’t look like he has an alcohol problem.
-
1 month ago | 
wkamaubell.substack.com | W. Kamau Bell
We’re meeting on Zoom TODAY Thursday 2/27 from 12pm PT - 1pm PT / 3pm ET - 4pm ET. Join me and a special guest Khalil Greene, the Gen Z Historian, to celebrate Black History Month. Kahlil has a new substack called History Can’t Hide that you’ll probably love. And he has a new National Geographic series called Hidden History. In case this is your first time joining Office Hours for paid subscribers, here’s how it works:You click the Zoom link below. You can be on camera but you don’t have to be.
-
2 months ago | 
wkamaubell.substack.com | W. Kamau Bell
There has been a lot of talk about boycotts recently. That is totally understandable given the current state of our country. What do you do when you want to fight back in a system run by capitalism? You defund capitalism. Much of the Black community’s focus has been on corporations who have dismantled their D.E.I. programs now that D.E.I. isn’t cool anymore. Fortune 500 companies are getting rid of D.E.I. like my 13 year old got rid of the Stanley cup that she so desperately ”needed” in 2023.
-
2 months ago | 
wkamaubell.substack.com | W. Kamau Bell
I swear that this newsletter is not going to turn into The Nazi Report. I have interests beyond writing The Week in Modern Nazism. But what can I say? There’s a lot of Nazi News, and just last week, in this newsletter, I declared myself to be on Nazi Watch. Yay? Anyway… onto my new and frustratingly regular feature, I Did Nazi This Coming!I’m a mixed martial arts fan. That may surprise many of you, but as a kid I was both a Bruce Lee fanatic and a watcher of boxing.