News

Drake thinks the lower court has created an “unprecedented” rule that rap diss tracks can never be actionable with their dismissal of his lawsuit. The Canadian rapper has officially moved to appeal the dismissal of his lawsuit against Universal Music Group (UMG) tied to Kendrick Lamar’s diss track “Not Like Us.” He originally sued UMG last year, alleging the company defamed him by distributing Lamar’s viral diss track, which branded him a “certified pedophile.” However, a federal judge ruled in October that listeners wouldn’t interpret jabs exchanged in a rap feud as literal, factual claims. Rolling Stone reports that in his long-anticipated appeal filed Wednesday, Drake’s legal team argues the opposite is true: That audiences absolutely took the lyrics at face value. “Millions of people understood [Not Like Us] to convey factual information, causing countless individuals around the globe to believe that Drake was a pedophile.” According to the rapper’s attorneys, dismissing the case in spite of that public reaction amounted to the court establishing an “unprecedented” and “dangerous” legal doctrine, one that suggests statements in rap songs can never be defamatory. “It is hard to imagine a statement more damaging to one’s reputation and safety than being labeled a ‘certified pedophile,’ which elicits intense vitriol, and can spur violent retaliation,” Drake’s attorney Michael J. Gottlieb writes in the appeal, obtained by Billboard. “The court’s rule brushes aside the risk of concrete reputational harms that can and here, did spill over into violence.” This appeal serves as the latest turn in a legal saga that caught much of the music world off guard. Very few anticipated that a rap beef would escalate into a lawsuit, leading to some corners of hip-hop culture taunting Drake for taking it there. Lamar dropped “Not Like Us” in May 2024 as the final blow in a fierce back-and-forth between the two artists. Beyond being viewed as Lamar’s lyrical knockout, the song also dominated the charts. It went on to win five Grammy Awards, including record and song of the year, and became a centerpiece of Lamar’s Super Bowl halftime performance. By January, Drake answered not with another track, but with legal action, claiming UMG had defamed him by aggressively amplifying the song’s reach, allegedly through bots and other questionable promotional tactics. While Lamar himself was not named in the suit, Drake accused UMG of having “waged a campaign” against its own star to spread a “malicious narrative.” The post Lawbrey Lawyers Up…Again: Drake Appeals Dismissal Of Lawsuit Over Kendrick Lamar’s ‘Not Like Us’ appeared first on Bossip.

In this dystopian hellscape created by the MAGA-movement and nutless Republicans, armed gang members ride through neighborhoods looking for people to kidnap. In Minneapolis on Wednesday, they killed a woman, Renee Nicole Good, 37, a mother of three. A gentle soul, which I can say without pause, because she was a poet. All poets have gentle souls. She was trying to get away from the armed gang harassing her when they opened fire on her. The gang’s OGs have already started spinning a tale about cars being used as weapons and factions of people learning to drive recklessly to take them out. It’s a story as old as time, this war between gangs and the communities that they terrorize, but this is different. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is a federally funded gang that slides into communities and tears families apart, and they do so with impunity. It is worse than the Crips or Gangster Disciples because ICE is backed by America’s lifeblood, racism, and a racist White House that implored them to make their bones. Racism drives this administration. It’s the spine of Project 2025, the playbook of Trump’s White House. It’s the foundational tenet for ICE’s harassment, kidnapping, and capture of working immigrants who are simply trying to make a way for themselves and their families while navigating an increasingly hostile U.S. immigration system. The U.S. Supreme Court is in on it, too. They allow ICE to racially profile those whom they decide to stop and question. Racism is the sole reason that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) went from a terror-fighting faction of the Department of Homeland Security to those that create said terror. ICE was created in the post-9/11 haze and sold to the public as a necessary evil to protect us from shadowy threats. Two decades later, its actual résumé reads like a rap sheet: family separations, warrantless arrests, deaths in custody, medical neglect, sexual abuse allegations, and now—yet again—gun violence. Remember, most gangs start with good intentions. The Crips were formed to protect neighborhood youth against other, more violent gangs. See what the Crips are on now. Details of the tragedy are still being sorted, but the pattern is familiar: a heavily armed law-enforcement presence, escalating force, and yet another civilian harmed in the name of “public safety.” The script never changes—only the zip code does. “Federal agents have shot people 14 times since last January, killing at least four; on multiple occasions, officers shot at people observing ICE raids and people attempting to drive away,” the Trace notes. At what point do we admit that the people claiming to stop crime are, in fact, committing it? Because let’s be clear: snatching people off the street in unmarked vehicles is not “enforcement.” That’s kidnapping with a PR team. Detaining people indefinitely without charges isn’t “border security.” That’s incarceration without due process. Shooting civilians during routine operations isn’t “keeping the peace.” That’s state violence, full stop. Because ICE isn’t preventing harm; they’re creating it. They are rolling up on unsuspecting people masked up, carrying large weapons, and shouting demands. That’s gang behavior. And to be frank, all of this is a show of force that isn’t even warranted, as crossing a border without papers is a civil violation, not a violent crime. If ICE were a person, they would be locked up, considering they would’ve been charged with unlawful detention, excessive force, obstruction of legal counsel, and gross negligence that has resulted in death. If anyone did even a portion of that, we wouldn’t be debating semantics—we’d be calling a lawyer. ICE doesn’t get to be both the perpetrator and the victim. They don’t get to hop out of tinted-windowed vehicles, guns at the ready, and then claim that the person fleeing this lawless gang endangered their lives by trying to get to safety. But that’s America at work, where the brown face can be charged for hurting the white fist. These agents are not de-escalators. They are not community protectors. They are trained to treat human beings as threats first and ask questions later. When that mindset collides with real neighborhoods and real people, they get hurt. And this is the quiet part that never gets said out loud: all gang structure is to feed an ecosystem of terrorism that thrives off fear and, more importantly, money. Everyone has to kick up to the big homies when they hit a lick, and so does ICE. This anarchic band of hoods kidnapping people is to feed a private prison system that profits off those in custody. There are bed mandates. Quotas. Contracts. When your budget depends on keeping cages full, you stop caring whether the people inside them pose any danger. You just need them compliant—or gone. Which brings us back to the central scam: ICE does not make communities safer. Immigrants—documented or undocumented—are statistically less likely to commit violent crimes than native-born citizens. ICE knows this. Politicians know this. But fear is more useful than facts, especially when elections need winning, and dog whistles need blowing. So the world’s most dangerous crew is ICE. They are neighborhood police with crack strength. And they don’t care. They will show up at courthouses, hospitals, graduations, and birthday parties just to rip families apart because they pledged allegiance to their gang and got jumped in. And they’re the criminals they claim to be looking for. And that’s the uncomfortable truth America keeps dodging: the most dangerous criminals in this country don’t always come from the hood. Sometimes they come with badges, guns, and a talking point about “law and order,” leaving blood, trauma, and broken families in their wake—and daring us to pretend that’s justice. SEE ALSO: Woman Shot And Killed By ICE During Crackdown In Minneapolis ICE Agents Invade Minneapolis Hospital With No Warrant  

At a Turning Point USA event in Phoenix, Vice President JD Vance, the self-appointed “hillbilly” who made it out the mud, told white Americans they no longer have to “apologize for being white.” After Vance’s remarks, much of the media coverage fixated on crowd reaction, viral outrage, and whether the comment was provocative or racist, with outlets describing applause and backlash. The coverage treats the remark like a culture-war skirmish or a spicy soundbite meant to rile liberals and thrill conservatives. Was it divisive? Was it provocative? Was it just red-meat rhetoric for the base? But we need to be interrogating the deeper political calculus behind the message. The one real question we should be asking has been politely avoided: why was this man chosen to say it, on that stage, at this moment? Because the power of the line, which is not new, doesn’t come from its originality, but from its messenger. Those words could never have carried the same weight coming from Donald Trump. He is too rich, too cartoonishly gilded, and too insulated from the daily humiliations of working-class life. He smells like inheritance, bankruptcy lawyers, and gold-plated toilets. White Americans already know Trump doesn’t apologize to anyone for anything because that’s his brand. Coming from him, the remark would have sounded like exactly what it was: a billionaire dismissing accountability from the safety of unearned power. But coming from JD Vance, those words hit different. Vance is the perfect vessel because he is not supposed to be the villain in this story about American decline. He’s supposed to be the proof that the American story still works. He’s the poor white kid who survived Appalachia and clawed his way out of generational precarity. He escaped addiction and instability and sits among elite power without fully shedding the aesthetic of struggle or indicting the system that chewed up everyone he left behind. Appalachia was gutted by corporations, poisoned by industry, abandoned by policy, and exploited by capital. If anyone has standing to name the real villains, it is him. But instead, he stood on that stage and offered absolution to angry white folks. He doesn’t look like a robber baron. He doesn’t sound like a hedge fund vampire. He doesn’t wear his privilege in gold leaf. He arrives coded as earned, not inherited. And that’s precisely why he can say things Donald Trump can’t say without exposing the scam. Vance is the walking proof-of-concept for the lie at the heart of white grievance politics. His biography does the dirty work for him. His mere presence tells struggling white Americans: See? The system isn’t broken. I made it. And if you didn’t, that failure isn’t about class warfare, corporate theft, union busting, or billionaires hollowing out your town. Nope, it’s about culture. It’s about values. It’s about them. ‘Them’ being all those immigrants who “cut the line.” The Black folks who “won’t stop complaining” and “hate white people.” The DEI programs that supposedly stole your job. The leftists and “Democrats” who “hate America.” The queer folks who make you uncomfortable by existing out loud. The problem is anybody but the corporations that poisoned your water. That shipped your labor overseas and cashed the checks while your community collapsed. It’s not the hedge funds that strip-mined your hospitals and nursing homes. Nor the pharmaceutical giants that flooded your towns with opioids and called it pain management. It ain’t the private-equity vultures that bought your trailer parks and jacked up the rent. Not the agribusiness monopolies that crushed family farms, the telecoms that took public money and still left you without broadband. Not the coal and chemical companies that took the land and left the cancer clusters, or the banks that redlined you on the way in and foreclosed on you on the way out. And it’s certainly not the lawmakers who gutted unions, and the billionaires who wrote the tax code so your paycheck shrank while their fortunes ballooned. According to our “hillbilly” Vice President, it’s anybody but the people who actually pulled the levers. That’s the magic trick. Vance stands there as living proof that the ladder still works as long as you redirect your anger at structural violence in the right direction. And once that story takes hold, class solidarity becomes impossible. Because why punch up at the capital when you’ve been trained to punch sideways and down at the people who were never holding the knife in the first damn place? That sleight of hand is exactly why a Turning Point USA stage was the perfect place for Vance to perform this routine. Turning Point USA isn’t some scrappy youth movement. It is a grievance factory bankrolled by wealthy donors who benefit directly from keeping white Americans angry, confused, and misdirected. The same corporate interests that busted unions, suppressed wages, deregulated industries, and strip-mined rural communities now underwrite conferences where white resentment is packaged as “freedom.” Vance’s job is to make sure no one in the audience ever connects those dots. So instead of asking why private equity gutted their hospitals, why pharmaceutical companies flooded their towns with opioids, or why billionaires keep getting tax cuts while their schools crumble, the crowd is trained to seethe at safer targets. Everyone except the corporations in the room and the donors signing the checks. That’s the scammy business model. Vance doesn’t challenge that model; he completes it. He reassures white Americans that their suffering has nothing to do with capitalism run amok and everything to do with moral decline and cultural invasion. He turns class betrayal into racial discipline. He sells the lie that dignity comes not from solidarity or justice, but from refusing to interrogate who’s actually profiting off your pain. And because he comes wrapped in a hillbilly origin story, the absolution feels authentic and trustworthy. When he tells white Americans they don’t have to apologize, it doesn’t sound like a billionaire sneering at accountability. It sounds like a neighbor who understands, a man who’s been

Mercedes Wells, a Black woman in Indiana, went viral earlier this month after releasing a video showing herself being sent home from a hospital despite being in active labor. Rep. Robin Kelly (D-Ill.) introduced a bill in Congress that aims to prevent hospitals from turning away women while they’re in labor. According to NBC News, the Women Expansion for Learning and Labor Safety Act, or WELLS Act, would require hospitals to implement a “Safe Discharge Labor Plan before discharging a patient who presents with signs or symptoms of labor.” The Safe Discharge Labor Plan would see hospitals providing clinical justification for the discharge, assessing travel distance and time before approving the discharge, and receiving a written understanding from the patient. The WELLS Act would also require health care professionals to undergo racial bias training. “My bill aims to address systematic issues around maternal care, racial disparities, and hospital accountability,” Kelly said. “It’s clear that what happened to Mercedes isn’t an isolated incident, nor is it the first time a Black woman’s pain has been ignored.” “Until all women are heard and listened to in our hospitals and health centers, I’ll be their voice in Congress fighting for change,” Kelly added. On Nov. 16, Mercedes Wells’ husband rushed her to Franciscan Health Crown Point hospital when her contractions were 10 minutes apart. After six hours, Wells only received a checkup from a nurse before being discharged from the hospital. She never saw a doctor and wound up giving birth to her fourth child in the backseat of her car, only 8 minutes after leaving the hospital. “It was really a horrific situation to be treated like a dog, or not even like a dog, like less than,” Wells told NBC News. “It says that they don’t care at all for Black women in health, and it’s hurtful. We thought that, you know, things have changed at this point in our country, and I don’t see a change.” Franciscan Health President and CEO Raymond Grady told NBC News that the nurse and doctor who declined to provide Mercedes Wells proper care no longer work for the hospital. Grady also issued a formal apology to the Wells family. “We failed to listen to Mrs. Wells’ concerns,” CEO Raymond Grady said in the statement. “We must fix what failed in our hospital so that no one experiences what happened to Mercedes Wells.” Sadly, Mercedes Wells’ experience isn’t abnormal for Black women. Black women disproportionately represent maternal mortality rates and are three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related complications. These rates have only skyrocketed in states like Texas and Georgia, where stringent abortion bans have led to unnecessary deaths of Black women, like in the case of Amber Thurman. Black people already have a heightened distrust of medical professionals due to historical mistreatment and racial bias in health care. The experiences of Mercedes Wells do little to dispel the notion that the American health care system is designed to work against Black people. Hopefully, this bill passes, so no more women will have to endure what Mercedes Wells went through. SEE ALSO: White Women In Medicine Have Always Neglected Pregnant Black Women 7 Ways Racism Harms Pregnant Black Women  

Despite the GOP and President Donald Trump saying otherwise, the American economy ain’t doing so hot. Sadly, the adage that when white America catches a cold, Black people catch the flu is proving true, as Black women are disproportionately unemployed compared to the national average. According to Black Enterprise, the delayed September jobs report revealed that the unemployment rate for Black women increased from 6.7% to 7.5%. During that same time period, unemployment only ticked up from 3.2% to 3.4%. The general unemployment rate currently sits at 4.2%, though experts believe both numbers may be higher due to the delayed release of the September data. For reference, the unemployment rate for Black women is only 2.5% away from the general, peak unemployment rate reached during the 2008-09 recession. Rep. Ayanna Pressley has consistently been sounding the alarm bells about how what’s happening to Black women is a bellwether for the economy at large. Pressley sent a letter to the Federal Reserve, pressing them to do something to address the increase in Black women’s unemployment. According to AP, Pressley held a roundtable discussion about the issue of Black women’s unemployment. “Everyone is missing out when we’re pushed out of the workforce,” Pressley said during the discussion. “That is something that I worry about now, that you have all these women with specific expertise and specializations that we’re being deprived of.” She added that when Black women do find work, they usually wind up being “woefully underemployed.” Pressley and the participants in the roundtable pointed out how the actions taken by the Trump administration this year have contributed to the increase in Black women’s unemployment. Trump’s erratic tariff policy has particularly hurt small business owners. This has affected Black women in particular, as they have quickly become the fastest-growing group of small business owners in recent years. There’s more and more evidence that America is currently in a K-shaped economy, which means that the highest earners are making more and more while working-class and low-income people face more and more economic uncertainty. Despite no one officially declaring that we’re in a recession, when you compare the current economic climate to what was happening during the Great Recession, it’s getting harder and harder not to see the similarities. Layoffs have already surpassed 1 million this year, rivaling the numbers seen during the Great Recession. Car repossessions have surged at rates not seen since the Great Recession, and credit card defaults are reaching levels not seen since, you guessed it, the Great Recession. The uncomfortable reality is that the American economy is largely being propped up by speculative AI spending, which many experts are concerned is becoming a bubble. One consequence of having experienced a layoff myself is that I’ve become very invested in the world of finance, simply to understand why it’s so hard to find a stable job that pays well. Every time I’ve learned something new about the house of cards that is the American economy, my reaction is always the same: “Oh boy. Oh no. Wait, but how? How?! HOW IS THIS ALLOWED?” It’s incredibly clear that the economy is unsustainable and is already breaking down for those at the bottom. If the federal government doesn’t address the issue with urgency, we’re likely to be dealing with a financial collapse that could’ve been mitigated had we just listened to Black women. SEE ALSO: Ayanna Pressley Addresses Black Women’s Unemployment Unemployment Rate Remained Stubbornly High For Black Women In June

In the wake of the Civil War, Reconstruction resulted in Black people making significant economic and political gains throughout the South. Wilmington, N.C., was seen as an ideal local government, where Black and white people worked together to improve the lives of their residents. This movement was sadly short-lived, as a group of white elites used the media to incite a white supremacist movement that culminated in several Black men being killed, businesses being torched, and the fusionist government being overthrown. Below you’ll find four facts about the hidden history of the Wilmington massacre. Wilmington Had A “Fusionist” Legislature In the lead-up to the Wilmington Massacre, Wilmington’s city legislature was largely run by “fusionist” politicians and representatives. White populists and Black Republicans often ran on fusionist tickets, as they had similar positions and political priorities. With 8,000 Black men eligible to vote, Wilmington’s Black population had significant representation in local government. Three of Wilmington’s 10 aldermen were Black, and 10 of the city’s 26 policemen were Black. There were Black magistrates, postmasters, and the city even had a Black-owned newspaper, “The Daily Record.” Wilmington was unusual for the South, as it was a predominantly Black city with a strong economy. Wilmington’s wealthy white men were threatened by the gains made by the city’s Black population, and thus, they forged a plot to overthrow the city’s fusionist government. The Massacre Was Initially Conducted Through The Press The build-up to the Wilmington was largely conducted through a prolonged campaign in the press. White supremacists (their words, not mine) spread their message through the News & Observer, the state’s most powerful newspaper. They stoked panic over “Negro rule,” using racist cartoons and framing Black men as rapists who were too incompetent to lead. Rebecca Felton, a white woman from Georgia, gave a speech earlier in the year, lambasting white men for not doing enough to combat the “Black beast rapist.” “If it needs lynching to protect women’s dearest possession from ravening human beasts, then I say lynch—a thousand times a week if necessary,”  Felton said in her speech. The News & Observer reprinted the speech, to which The Daily Record responded by saying white men had long raped Black women to no consequence. This further incensed the white elites, who would recruit “Red Shirts,” racists from South Carolina. The red shirts would pull Black men from their homes and threaten them with violence if they tried to vote. The Wilmington massacre occurred during election day on Nov. 10, 1898. A mob of thousands of white people killed several innocent Black people, though a definitive number was never found. The mob held Black politicians at gunpoint and forced them to resign their seats, and burned down “The Daily Record.” In addition to the deaths, 2,000 Black people were forcibly displaced from Wilmington. The effects of that displacement are still felt today as the city went from Black people making up 56% of the population, to only 16% in the current day. Upon taking control of the city government, Wilmington became a model for how Jim Crow laws would be implemented throughout the South in the 1900s. The Wilmington Massacre Was A Coup D’Etat While the Wilmington massacre was quite obviously racially motivated, the purpose of the violence was to take control of the city’s government from the fusionist government. The white supremacist coalition made Black men trying to vote the target of their violence. While that’s easy to intuit by simply taking a cursory look at the facts, for years, the Wilmington Massacre was labeled a “Black Uprising,” as if the Black population decided to torch their businesses and kill themselves. It took until 2006 for a state-commissioned report to properly frame the Wilmington massacre as a coup. A Museum Is Being Built To Acknowledge The History of the Wilmington Massacre Like most of America’s historical sins, the Wilmington massacre has sadly been an under-discussed tragedy. Thankfully, a museum is currently being built in Wilmington to ensure this tragedy doesn’t become forgotten history. The Wilmington 1898 Museum for Healing, Education, and Democracy is expected to open in spring 2028, marking the 130th anniversary of the massacre. SEE ALSO: 5 Race Riots In America That You Were Never Taught In School 100 Years After Tulsa, The Equity Fight Continues