As part of our July Fourth special broadcast, we continue our extended interview with Karen Hao, author of Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI. The book documents the rise of OpenAI and how the AI industry is leading to a new form of colonialism. “One of the things that you really have to understand about AI development today is that there are what I call quasi-religious movements that have developed within Silicon Valley,” says Hao.

In our July Fourth special broadcast, we revisit our interview with longtime technology reporter Karen Hao, author of Empire of AI, which unveils the accruing political and economic power of artificial intelligence companies — especially Sam Altman’s OpenAI. Her reporting uncovered the exploitation of workers in Kenya, attempts to take massive amounts of freshwater from communities in Chile, along with numerous accounts of the technology’s detrimental impact on the environment.

We begin our July Fourth special broadcast with the words of Frederick Douglass. Born into slavery around 1818, Douglass became a key leader of the abolitionist movement. On July 5, 1852, in Rochester, New York, Douglass gave one of his most famous speeches, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” He was addressing the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society.

The Department of Justice is attempting to sabotage a reparations initiative that compensates victims of historic housing discrimination in Evanston, Illinois. For decades, Black residents of Evanston were subjected to redlining and other forms of housing discrimination, which prevented them from obtaining bank loans to purchase property.

Ahead of the July Fourth holiday and the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, we speak with the acclaimed scholar Robin D. G. Kelley, who examines how Black radicals have interpreted the document throughout U.S. history in a new essay for Hammer & Hope. Although the declaration famously asserts that “all men are created equal,” Kelley says that clearly did not extend to Indigenous or enslaved Black people.

In a 6-3 ruling this week that overturned nine decades of precedent, the Supreme Court granted President Donald Trump the power to fire and replace officials at independent government agencies like the Federal Trade Commission. But in a separate 5-4 decision, the justices ruled that Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook can stay in her job as she challenges Trump’s efforts to fire her.

New financial disclosures by President Donald Trump show that he made more than $1.4 billion from his family’s various cryptocurrency ventures last year, reaping a windfall after pulling back on regulation of the industry and promoting the United States as “the crypto capital of the world.