D.D. Miles

A very tired writer, cultural critic, blerd, and warrior-poet with deep south roots. Army Veteran/Alpha 06/PHFAM...

[Christopher Webb @cwebbonline]

I 🤎 the Michelle Obama love…

[Strictly 4 My X’ers @Lizzs_Lockeroom]

Amen 🙏🏾

[The Root @TheRoot]

Marlana Kendricks, who has a son with a developmental disability, traveled over two hours from Cleveland to Columbus to oppose Ohio’s new Medicaid bill, which would ban family members of Medicaid recipients from being certified caregivers.

Listen to her emotional testimony.

[Acyn @Acyn]

Rantz: I'm going to say that it had nothing to do with slavery.

Blow: That's not true. For this man to sit here and say it has nothing to do with slavery. What did you learn in school?

Rantz: I’m not arguing it doesn’t play a role.

Blow: You just said that!

Navarro: You were just schooled on TV.

Rantz: I was not schooled.

Navarro: You were absolutely schooled. Your ignorance was revealed.

[D.D. Miles @EVeritas]

@Asst_to_the_RM So if I work through lunch can I leave at 1600...

[FactPost @factpostnews]

Michelle Obama: We simply don't have the luxury or time to be cynical or complacent. Hope is the essential spark that lights the fire of change. But hope is a choice. Whether or not we speak up is a choice. Voting is a choice. Being a decent human being is a choice. Believing that we still hold the power to build a country that reflects us all is a choice.

[Marvel Studios @MarvelStudios]

Cyclops is back in #XMen97 Season 2, streaming July 1 only on Disney+.

[Occupy Democrats @OccupyDemocrats]

BREAKING: FBI Director accused of BLOWING UP a sealed terror probe with one reckless social media post.

Kash Patel just may have SABOTAGED an active counterterrorism investigation into a drone plot against the White House — because he couldn't resist posting about it on social media first.

According to MS Now's Ken Dilanian, Secret Service officials are FURIOUS that the FBI director prematurely announced details of a SEALED, ONGOING criminal investigation into a plot to attack this weekend's UFC event with drones — and possibly snipers — on the White House South Lawn.

Here's why this is so dangerous: at the time Patel ran to social media to brag, the case was sealed in court and roughly TEN suspects had NOT yet been arrested. The Secret Service and FBI had been working the case together, and had planned to make more arrests, unseal the case later that afternoon, and issue a JOINT statement.

Patel torched all of it for a Twitter post.

"We all woke up this morning to see this on Twitter," one stunned administration official said.

The plot was uncovered when a relative of one suspect contacted Cincinnati-area police, reporting their family member was talking about a vague plot in DC. A Secret Service threat team, with FBI help, subpoenaed an encrypted Signal chat and identified the conspirators discussing drones and snipers. One suspect was arrested June 13th, and the case was IMMEDIATELY sealed so investigators could find and arrest the others.

Then Patel blew the operation wide open.

Secret Service Deputy Director Matt Quinn called Patel out at a Tuesday news conference — pointedly without naming him: "I learned early in my career a phrase: 'Don't choke on your own smoke.'" Quinn emphasized the Secret Service "led that investigation from the beginning" and that they "chose NOT to leak it" to protect the investigation's integrity.

In other words, the FBI director endangered a terror probe and roughly ten un-arrested suspects to feed his own ego.

This is the same Patel accused of running a secret FBI slush fund to pay bonuses to MAGA loyalists, partying at the Olympics, and snorkeling over war graves. And now he can't keep a sealed terror case off Twitter.

The man is a danger to national security — all because of an overly inflated ego (to match his boss’s) and a disturbing lack of maturity and competence.

Please like and share if you think the FBI needs a new director with some actual law enforcement experience!

[Barack Obama @BarackObama]

It was great joining Njideka Akunyili Crosby — a gifted Nigerian-born, Los Angeles-based artist — to unveil our first portrait together. This piece reflects so many chapters of Michelle and my story, and we’re thrilled that it will be on display in the Hope and Change lobby at the Obama Presidential Center starting this Juneteenth.

[Michelle Obama @MichelleObama]

It means so much to Barack and me to open up the Obama Presidential Center on the South Side of Chicago. This is where I grew up, where Barack got his start, and where we raised our girls. So having a place where kids from our community can see themselves, connect with each other, and channel their hope—there’s nothing more powerful than that.

[LanaQuest aka RosaSparks @LqLana]

So whenever white people are uncomfortable Black people have to leave. This is fucking ridiculous. They should have come back w/ parents. Fuck racist fragility comfort. #DemsUnited

[Barack Obama @BarackObama]

To everyone who helped bring the Obama Presidential Center to life, thank you. Michelle and I are so grateful for all your dedication and hard work over the years.

I got a little teary-eyed tonight thinking about my mother-in-law, Marian Robinson.

[Ben Crump @AttorneyCrump]

A 1-year-old child is dead after police officers in Mississippi opened fire on a vehicle in a crowded Walmart parking lot in Senatobia. His mother, who has not been charged with any crime, says she was trying to communicate to officers that there was a baby in the car. They fired anyway, leading to the death of an innocent 1-year-old. We intend to seek justice for baby Kohen and the life that was stolen from him.

[Ben Crump @AttorneyCrump]

The allegations in this case forces us to confront a painful chapter in America’s history, where Black individuals were allegedly treated as test subjects instead of people! From Henrietta Lacks to baby Ross Otto Hambrick and baby Victor King, we cannot ignore the devastating human cost of medical experimentation on Black Americans. Their stories demand that we uncover the full truth, honor their humanity, and hold those responsible accountable.

[Crazy Vibes @CrazyVibes_1]

When the President of France visited the United States in April 1960, he asked the FBI to help him find a man.
The man he was looking for was an American citizen. He was sixty-four years old. He had been awarded fifteen French military decorations and — six months earlier, in a ceremony in Paris — had been made a Knight of the Légion d'honneur, the highest civilian honor France can give. The medal had been pinned to his chest by the President himself, who had publicly called him un véritable héros français. A true French hero.
The FBI located the man within a few days.
He was operating an elevator at Rockefeller Center in New York City.
The elevator operator's name was Eugene Bullard. He had been born in Columbus, Georgia, in 1895, the son of a man whose own father had been a slave.

He had run away from Columbus at the age of eleven, after watching a white mob nearly lynch his father.
He spent the next several years drifting through the American South. At sixteen, he stowed away on a German freighter at Norfolk, Virginia. He landed in Aberdeen, Scotland. From there he made his way to London, where he learned to box. By 1913, at eighteen, he was prizefighting in Paris.
When Germany invaded France in August 1914, Bullard was nineteen years old. He had no legal obligation to fight. He had no French citizenship.
He went to the recruiting office on October 19, 1914, and signed up for the French Foreign Legion.
He spent the next eighteen months as an infantryman in some of the worst fighting of the war — at the Somme, at Champagne, at Verdun. He was wounded three times. The third wound, on March 5, 1916, tore open his thigh and left him with permanent damage to his leg.
He was twenty years old. The doctors told him he would not return to the infantry.
He decided he wanted to fly.

In a Paris café in the spring of 1916, while he was recovering, Bullard mentioned to three white American friends that he was thinking of joining the French air service. A Mississippian named Jeff Dickson laughed.
Gene, Dickson said, you know damn well there aren't any Negroes in aviation.
Bullard answered: Sure do. That's why I want to get into it. There has to be a first to everything, and I'm going to be the first.
Dickson bet him two thousand dollars he would not make it.
Bullard took the bet. He earned his pilot's license on May 5, 1917. He won the bet.
He reported to the front in August 1917 and flew approximately twenty combat missions over the next three months in a SPAD VII. The fuselage was painted with a bleeding heart pierced by a knife and the French phrase Tout le Sang qui Coule est Rouge — All Blood that Flows is Red.
He carried, on every combat flight, a small capuchin monkey named Jimmy in the front of his flight jacket.
The French press began calling him L'Hirondelle Noire — the Black Swallow.

When the United States entered the war in 1917, Bullard immediately applied to transfer to the U.S. Army Air Service.
His application was rejected.
The U.S. Army Air Service had a policy, in 1917, of not accepting Black pilots. The other American pilots flying for France in his unit, all of them white, were transferred to the U.S. Air Service.
He was the only one who was not.

For the next twenty years, he was one of the most familiar faces in the Montmartre nightlife of Paris between the wars. He owned a nightclub called L'Escadrille. He spoke fluent French, English, and German. Hemingway drank there. Fitzgerald drank there. Langston Hughes drank there. Josephine Baker performed there. Louis Armstrong was a personal friend.
When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Bullard was forty-four. His fluent German and his ownership of a nightclub frequented by German officers made him useful to the French Resistance. He became an intelligence agent — eavesdropping in his own bar on conversations between German officers who did not know he understood every word.
When France fell in June 1940, friends in the Resistance smuggled him across the Spanish border before the Gestapo could arrest him.
He came back to the United States for the first time in twenty-eight years.
He arrived in New York with thirty dollars in his pocket and a permanent limp.

He did not return to a hero's welcome. He returned to a country that had no idea who he was.
He worked at a perfume counter. He worked as a security guard. He worked at the Staten Island shipyards. By the late 1940s, he had taken the job that he would hold for most of the rest of his life.
He operated the elevator at Rockefeller Center.
He was wearing the elevator uniform on the day a producer from NBC came down from the studios upstairs to ask if he was the man Charles de Gaulle had been looking for.
A few weeks later, NBC sent a film crew to interview him in the lobby. The studios where NBC produced The Today Show were on the floors above. He had operated the elevator that took the network executives up to those studios every morning for nearly ten years. He had not been recognized as he did it.
He went back to operating the elevator the following Monday.

He died of stomach cancer on October 12, 1961, three days after his sixty-sixth birthday.
He was buried in the French War Veterans' section of Flushing Cemetery, in Queens, in the uniform of the French Foreign Legion. The casket was draped with the French flag.
In 1994 — thirty-three years after his death — the United States Air Force formally commissioned Eugene Jacques Bullard as a Second Lieutenant, posthumously.
It was the first commission the U.S. military had ever offered him.
He had been the first Black combat pilot in American history.
The French had been calling him a hero since 1917.
The Americans got around to it in 1994.

[Rod (Izzy) 🇺🇸🦅 @1zzyzyx1]

Scott Pelley dedicated 24 years at CBS, risking his life to report the truth. He doesn't deserve this treatment from Weiss, CBS, or Trump. He has done more for this country than most realize. Walter Cronkite would be proud. #DemsUnited

[Strictly 4 My X’ers @Lizzs_Lockeroom]

"They Reminisce Over You (T.R.O.Y.)"-Pete Rock & CL Smooth

🗣️I reminisce for a spell or shall I say think back.....

#BlackMusicMonthChallenge

[Camden Stewart @camdenstewarts]

22 today. Thank you for being here. London 12 September. Last seats in bio.

[BEY BASE @BeyBaseHQ]

Do y'all remember when Beyoncé stopped the rain while performing Just For Fun? 🙂‍↔️

[Suzie rizzio @Suzierizzo1]

This Taiwanese American Graduate of Harvard University gives the speech of a lifetime and had everyone in the audience in tears.