D.I. Smith 🇺🇸

ALDERMAN-at-LARGE; Ridgeland, MS; Proud to Serve!

[Mike Netter @nettermike]

This article was written by a 26 yr old college student by the name of Alyssa Ahlgren, who's in grad school for her MBA. What a GREAT perspecitve..👍🏽

My Generation Is Blind to the Prosperity Around Us!
I'm sitting in a small coffee shop near Nokomis (Florida) trying to think of what to write about. I scroll through my newsfeed on my phone looking at the latest headlines of presidential candidates calling for policies to "fix" the so-called injustices of capitalism. I put my phone down and continue to look around.

I see people talking freely, working on their MacBook's, ordering food they get in an instant, seeing cars go by outside, and it dawned on me. We live in the most privileged time in the most prosperous nation and we've become completely blind to it.

Vehicles, food, technology, freedom to associate with whom we choose.These things are so ingrained in our American way of life we don't give them a second thought.

We are so well off here in the United States that our poverty line begins 31 times above the global average. Thirty One Times!!!

Virtually no one in the United States is considered poor by global standards. Yet, in a time where we can order a product off Amazon with one click and have it at our doorstep the next day, we are unappreciative, unsatisfied, and ungrateful. ??

Our unappreciation is evident as the popularity of socialist policies among my generation continues to grow. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently said to Newsweek talking about the millennial generation, "An entire generation, which is now becoming one of the largest electorates in America, came of age and never saw American prosperity."

Never saw American prosperity! Let that sink in.

When I first read that statement, I thought to myself, that was quite literally the most entitled and factually illiterate thing I've ever heard in my 26 years on this earth. Many young people agree with her, which is entirely misguided.

My generation is being indoctrinated by a mainstream narrative to actually believe we have never seen prosperity. I know this first hand, I went to college, let's just say I didn't have the popular opinion, but I digress.

Why then, with all of the overwhelming evidence around us, evidence that I can even see sitting at a coffee shop, do we not view this as prosperity? We have people who are dying to get into our country.

People around the world destitute and truly impoverished. Yet, we have a young generation convinced they've never seen prosperity, and as a result, we elect some politicians who are dead set on taking steps towards abolishing capitalism.

Why? The answer is this,?? my generation has only seen prosperity. We have no contrast. We didn't live in the great depression, or live through two world wars, the Korean War, The Vietnam War or we didn't see the rise and fall of socialism and communism.

We don't know what it's like to live without the internet, without cars, without smartphones. We don't have a lack of prosperity problem. We have an entitlement problem, an ungratefulness problem, and it's spreading like a plague."

[Bryce Chance @BryceChance4]

To my Bulldog family,

Thank you for letting me suit up in the M over S these past five years. It has been an honor to wear maroon and white as a player, and I will continue to do it for the rest of my life.

[Brian O'Connor @CoachOakMSU]

Incredibly proud of this young man and the bright future he has ahead! #HailState

[abby chance @abbybchance]

Mississippi State Baseball, thank you for giving my guy the opportunity to live out his dream and represent the M over S with all he had. Thank you, DNF and Diamond Dawg fans, for the best 5 years and for the relationships that mean the world to us. - the beans♥️🫘🤟

[Wesley Hunt @WesleyHuntTX]

Hey Jasmine…

Black pilot here.

I think you missed the plot.
Then again, that’s becoming a pattern.

I graduated from West Point.
I went through Army flight school.
I learned to fly the AH-64 Apache.
I deployed to combat and flew 55 combat missions over Baghdad.

Nobody handed me a cockpit because of my skin color.

Nobody lowered the standards for me.

Nobody looked at me and said, “Let’s check a diversity box.”

That’s what people like you don’t seem to understand.

Suggesting that Black pilots, Black engineers, Black doctors, or Black leaders need special preferences to succeed is not empowering, it’s insulting.

I didn’t want a different standard.
I wanted the same standard.

And when you’re flying into combat, the American people don’t care what race the pilot is.

They care whether the pilot is qualified.

Merit isn’t racist.
Excellence isn’t discriminatory.

And reducing every achievement to skin color says far more about your worldview than it does about mine.

[Sean Tindell @TindellSean]

BLUE ALERT: 18-year-old Cortavious Lawayne Hobbs and 19-year-old Cortavion Dewayne Hobbs are wanted in connection to an officer-involved shooting that occurred June 8th, 2026 at approximately 3:38 p.m. in Mount Olive, Mississippi.

Both Hobbs are believed to be armed and dangerous and could be in the area of the 200 block of South Bluff Street, Mount Olive, Covington County Mississippi.

Please call 911 immediately if you see either Hobbs or if you observe any suspicious activity.

Cortavious Lawayne Hobbs is described as a black male, wearing a black hoodie, 18 years old, 5 feet and 6 inches tall, 140 pounds, with brown eyes and black hair.

Cortavion Dewayne Hobbs is described as a black male, wearing a camouflage hoodie, 19 years old, 5 feet and 6 inches tall, 140 pounds, with brown eyes and black hair.

If you have any information on the whereabouts of these dangerous suspects, please call 911
or the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation at 855-642-5378.

[Mike Netter @nettermike]

250 years ago today, a man with four fingers missing from his left hand stood up in a sweltering Philadelphia room and said the words that could have gotten him hanged.
It is June 7, 1776. The Pennsylvania State House. The windows are shut against eavesdroppers despite the summer heat. Richard Henry Lee of Virginia rises from his chair.
He knows how to hold a room. They call him the American Cicero. Years before, a hunting gun had exploded in his hands and taken the fingers of his left hand clean off — and ever since, he has worn a wrapping of black silk over the ruin. He has learned to use it. When he speaks, he lifts that shrouded hand and lets the dark silk fall, and every eye in the room follows it.
Today he lifts it, and he reads three sentences.
The first is the one that changes the world: "Resolved, That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved."
He is not asking a question. He is proposing that thirteen colonies stop being British.
John Adams seconds it before Lee has fully returned to his seat.
And then — nothing happens.
This is the part almost everyone forgets. There was no roar, no signing, no leap. Congress looked at what Lee had just put on the table and flinched. They voted to wait. Several delegations had no authority from home to take so enormous a step. Some men wanted alliances and a plan of confederation settled first. And some were simply afraid. They called a recess so the delegates could ride home and ask their people the unaskable question: are we ready to commit treason together?
Because that is what it was.
Every man who would eventually say "aye" understood the arithmetic exactly. There was no legal independence yet, no nation, no army that had won anything decisive. There was only a king with the largest military on earth and a very long memory. If the war was lost, the document they were debating became a confession. The punishment for that confession was a rope.
They knew it. They debated anyway.
The next day, Congress appointed a small committee to draft a statement explaining the decision, should they ever find the nerve to make it — Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, Sherman, and Livingston. They handed the pen to the quiet Virginian, Thomas Jefferson. The famous parchment we frame on walls and read aloud every Fourth of July was, in a sense, the footnote. It exists to justify Lee's motion. The motion came first.
And here is the detail that ought to be carved somewhere.
When the final vote on independence finally came, on July 2, 1776 — Richard Henry Lee was not there.
His wife had fallen ill. Virginia was building itself a new government and needed him home. So the man who stood up and proposed American independence climbed onto a horse and rode away before the question he'd asked was ever answered. Adams stood in for him and carried the argument across the line.
He proposed it.
He didn't cast the vote for it.
He never seemed to mind who got the credit.
The resolution passed on the second of July. Adams was so certain that date would be remembered forever that he wrote home predicting Americans would celebrate it for all time with bonfires and parades. He was off by two days. We kept the fourth — the day the explanation was approved — and let the seventh, the day a man first dared to say it out loud, slip quietly out of the calendar.
But the courage was never really in the parchment.
The courage was in being first. In standing up in a closed room, lifting a maimed hand, and reading three sentences that made you a traitor the instant they left your mouth — with your name attached, in front of witnesses, before a single other colony had promised to stand with you. Then trusting that strangers would find the same nerve, and finish what you'd started, even if you weren't in the room

[alex kershaw @kershaw_alex]

Lowering the flags where 9,389 Americans lie in eternal peace this longest of days. See more at https://t.co/EEg00P06y6

[D.I. Smith 🇺🇸 @DISmithJ]

Required watching!!!

[Dovi Safier @safier]

“It was one of the most monumentally unselfish things one group of people did for another.”

-#DDay veteran Andy Rooney on the young 🇺🇸 🇨🇦 🇬�� soldiers who stormed the beaches of Normandy 82 years ago.

Required watching for every young person today!

[alex kershaw @kershaw_alex]

It's dark now in Normandy. D Day draws to a close. The Allies are ashore, but the beachhead is fragile and will soon come under vicious, sustained attack. Here's a quick run over the numbers on this historic day. Thanks for following my coverage these last few days.

[alex kershaw @kershaw_alex]

The deadliest place on D Day on this longest of days, where the sacrifice has been greatest: Dog Green Sector, Omaha Beach, where 19 Bedford Boys have died, where more than half of their infantry company has been slaughtered, and where the opening scenes of Saving Private Ryan are set.

[Erick Erickson @EWErickson]

One of the greatest speeches of the late 20th century, given on the 40th anniversary of one of the most spectacular days in human history.

[DOW Rapid Response @DOWResponse]

.@SECWAR “Eighty-two years ago today, the survival of Western civilization hung in the balance. The dark forces had swept across Europe.

Hitler boasted that his “Atlantic Wall” was impenetrable—but our enemy made a fatal miscalculation:

They vastly underestimated the fierce, unbreakable will of the AMERICAN FIGHTING MAN.”

[Eric Daugherty @EricLDaugh]

🚨 JUST IN: President Trump OBLITERATES Maryland Gov. Wes Moore for ATTACKING the Air Force by blocking renovations at Joint Base Andrews Air Force Base

"The Governor of the Great State of Maryland, Wes Moore, has put a halt to all work being done at Joint Base Andrews Air Force Base, concerning the renovation and restoration of their two old and dilapidated Golf Courses, into two, World Class, Jack Nicklaus Designed Courses, plus nine additional holes, also designed by Jack, specially adapted for our Wounded Warriors."

"By doing this, the Governor is attacking the United States Air Force, and our Military, not a smart thing to do. These Courses exist, they are terrible, Jack Nicklaus will make them GREAT."

"Why should the Air Force and other Military personnel be forced to wait through a long Legal Review process and, perhaps, even more so, why should Wounded Warriors be forced to travel long distances to play Golf somewhere else or, worse yet, not play Golf at all. Our Soldiers and Veterans deserve THE BEST — NO WAITING, NO GAMES! Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP"

[D.I. Smith 🇺🇸 @DISmithJ]

You need to read this! We don't see this kind of leadership much today!

[Voices of WW2 @VoicesofWW2]

On the night of June 5, 1944, Eisenhower stood on a tarmac in England and watched 13,000 paratroopers board their planes.

He already knew what Air Marshal Leigh-Mallory had told him in private: up to half of them might not survive the night. 6,500 men. Dead before a single soldier touched the beach. Eisenhower had approved the mission anyway, called the decision "soul-wracking," and said nothing to the men.

Instead he drove out and visited them.

He chatted. Laughed. Asked where they were from. Shook hands. Cracked jokes. Not one of them knew their general had just signed what might be their death warrant.

When the last plane disappeared into the dark sky, his driver Kay Summersby looked over at him.

There were tears running down his face.

He drove back to Telegraph Cottage in silence. Then he sat down, picked up a pencil, and wrote a note he prayed no one would ever read.

"Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone."

Look at what he edited.

He had first written "This particular operation." He crossed it out and replaced it with "My decision to attack." Then he pressed the pencil down hard and drew a long, firm line under the words "mine alone."

He misdated it July 5 instead of June 5.

He was so consumed with dread he had forgotten what month it was.

He folded the note and put it in his wallet. He carried it there as 156,000 men stormed the beaches of Normandy. When word came back that the beachhead had held, he took it out, crumpled it, and threw it in the trash.

An aide quietly pulled it out and saved it.

That note is now behind glass at the Eisenhower Presidential Library in Abilene, Kansas. You can still see where the pencil pressed hardest.

Right under the words "mine alone."

82 years ago tonight.

[Military History Now @MilHistNow]

Newsreel footage of paratroopers from the 101st airborne boarding planes for the Normandy invasion. It was happening right now in 1944.

[The Iceman @the_iceman64]

90% of the soldiers on the first boats to hit the beach didn't live to see the end of the day. Look at those faces. Some of them never made it to 18.

Never forget that they paid the ultimate price for our freedom. We live our lives the way we do because of them.

[Joel Coleman @JoelTColeman]

🎼“Cause you see I’m a dinosaur. I should have died out a long time before.”🎶🎶🎶

@BryceChance4 is one of the last of his kind. As his State career winds down, let’s appreciate his story one more time:

📰 - https://t.co/fPXZr5GWC0

[Military History Now @MilHistNow]

Looking forward to this...

[Dr Helen Fry | WWII Historian @DrHelenFry]

The 82nd anniversary of the D-Day landings starts this Saturday.

On X, I'll be sharing some of the remarkable and harrowing stories of some of the German and Austrian Jews who fought for Britain on that historic day.

Through their own first-hand accounts, we will hear what it was really like on the ground as they landed on those beaches and fought their way inland in the struggle to liberate Europe.