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Airing March 30, 2026 | 1 hr, 57 min

We open, as all great intellectual journeys do, with a word: kerfuffle. Turns out it’s Scottish. Turns out the “fuffle” means to dishevel and the “car-” is a Gaelic twist. Turns out Antonio, Jon, and Lybroan will spend a not-insignificant portion of your Monday morning defending this information with the energy of men who just found out their favorite film was also a book. We also stop by the UCLA Black Alumni Association’s Winston C. Doby Legacy Scholarship gala, where the room went predictably, beautifully crazy when Kareem Abdul-Jabbar walked in and casually mentioned that Jackie Robinson and Ralph Bunche personally recruited him to Westwood. You know — just Monday things.

Then we get to work. Because Episode 36 is the one where the guys pull out the dictionary — literally — and refuse to let the word nationalism stay slippery. Black nationalism: community control, economic autonomy, the Greenwood District built from nothing and burned to the ground by people who couldn’t stand to see it standing. White nationalism: the architecture of exclusion dressed up in the language of heritage. And Christian nationalism: what happens when a political ideology borrows the aesthetic of a faith tradition and starts holding prayer services inside the Department of Defense. Pete Hegseth called what’s happening in Iran a “holy war.” A church played “America the Beautiful” over footage of fighter jets. And somewhere in a congressional hearing, a Texas lawmaker had the audacity — the nerve — to remind his colleagues that Jesus never once mentioned abortion or homosexuality, and maybe, maybe, “love God and love people” ought to be the whole sermon.

What makes this episode sing is that it refuses to let the abstractions float. The question isn’t just what is white nationalism — it’s whether there’s a version that isn’t soaked in violence, and whether the honest answer to that question demands a reframe entirely. They invoke Garvey, Malcolm, Du Bois, Booker T., Carter G. Woodson. They invoke Ona Judge, who escaped George Washington’s household, and George Washington, who chased her until he died. They invoke Lin-Manuel Miranda on the power of the right words in the right order, and Eli Pope from Scandal on what it costs to be Black in America. And they invoke Marco Rubio asking Trump’s permission to speak Spanish to Latino journalists, followed by Pete Hegseth announcing — with the confidence of a man who has never once asked himself a hard question — that he “just speaks American.” Three for the Founders is not just a podcast. It’s an argument with history, and history, as usual, does not get the last word.

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Three for the Founders | New Episode — Live Recording Feb. 21, 2026 · 51 min

Three fraternity brothers. One live room. No easy answers.

In this week's episode, Reynaldo Antonio, Jon, and Lybroan gather an audience and go somewhere most institutions won't: an honest reckoning with how history gets taught, who belongs in independent schools, and what DEI actually looks like when the cameras are off.

They talk about the difference between teaching history to do better versus teaching it to feel good. They name the quiet discomfort of being an educator of color in someone else's house. And they make the case — through story, not data — that the people doing the real work are still doing it. Quietly. Authentically. Underground.

Brotherhood built this conversation. Honesty keeps it going.

🎙️ Listen at threeforthefounders.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Like. Subscribe. Share it with someone who needs it.

Here is the playlist of our theme songs . . . What’s Yours? Gimme My Theme Music (A Playlist!)

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Let us ask you something before we even get started.

Do you believe what the founders wrote — or what the founders did?

Welcome back to Three for the Founders — where Brotherhood meets the breakdown.

But first — we have to show some love. Shoutout to Lorelei Newman, UCLA alum, who found this podcast at what sounds like a pivotal moment in her life. She sent us a message with a question we haven't been able to shake: “How do you know when something should come to an end?" Lorelei, we don't know who or what prompted that question for you — but we're glad the show found you when it did. And shoutout to Rahim Muhammad, who heard Episode 18 — "Your bell schedule is racist" — and then did something most people won't do. He went back to Episode 1 and listened to everything. In order. That's not a fan, that's family. And as always — respect and love to the founders of Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity, Incorporated. We don't start without acknowledging you.

2026 is the centennial of Black History Month. One hundred years ago, Dr. Carter G. Woodson — the second Black man to earn a PhD from Harvard, following only W.E.B. Du Bois — looked at American society, looked at what was being taught in schools, looked at what was being erased and distorted and flat-out lied about, and decided he was going to do something about it. He launched Negro History Week in 1926 with a mission that was radical then and — let's be honest — is still radical now: combat the exclusion of Black people from American history. Dismantle the lie that Africa was a "dark continent" with no civilization, no culture, no past worth studying. And affirm, loudly and without apology, that Black achievement didn't begin with survival — it began long before enslavement tried to end it.

A hundred years later, the question isn't whether Woodson mattered. The question is — what have we done with what he built? And what does the next hundred years look like?

That's what we're getting into today.

We're putting a new framework on the table for what Black History Month could actually become — not a feel-good celebration, not a corporate email in February, but a genuine, structured reckoning with the full scope of Black history across its African roots, its atrocities, and its power. We're running the numbers on reparations — and when we say numbers, we mean numbers. Trillions. Per person. We're going into the Atlantic slave trade with the nuance it demands — including African participation, the construction of race as a European tool, and why collapsing an entire continent into a single story is its own form of erasure. We're talking about what made U.S. chattel slavery uniquely, deliberately, systematically cruel in ways that set it apart from slavery across human history. We're wrestling with scripture — how the same sacred text has been used to liberate and to oppress, sometimes in the same breath. And we're asking the hardest question underneath all of it:

Is history something we teach to learn — or something we curate to feel good?

Because as Howard Stevenson put it: "Until lions have their own historians, the story of the hunt will always glorify the hunter."

This is fifty-eight minutes and fifty-eight seconds. No fluff. No shortcuts. Just three founders, doing wha

Thanks for joining us. Still got questions? Other things to say? Hit us up at Three for the Founders on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, or TikTok and let us know. Til the next time...left on founders...we out!