Oof .. here it is .. it is both hilarious and completely infuriating what they did to the college that graduated more Fulbright scholars per cap than Harvard/Yale … the sickness of DeSantis Rufo and Corcoran should not go without punishment . Truly disgusting how they have literally fed off this college like blood thirsty piranha
https://t.co/5dDCRFQ0Os
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.
So he has completely DESTROYED the South lawn of the White House and has KILLED old growth trees.
TRUMP DOESN'T OWN THE WHITE HOUSE he should not be ALLOWED to do this or else he should USE HIS OWN MONEY TO RESTORE IT !
I stood at this pool, at both monuments and saw both reflections…
He’s a God damn idiot, as are the fools that support him. The “Reflection Pool” wasn’t designed by American architect Henry Bacon a hundred years ago to look like a swimming pool. It’s designed to have a darkened characteristics that has reflective qualities to reflect the monuments.
That way, the Washington Monument is reflective to you when at the Lincoln Memorial, and when at the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial is reflective to you.
It’s designed to enhance the grandeur of monuments, create an illusion of reflection, and inclusion of expansive space of unity.
He’s a tacky vulgar person that vulgarizes everything he touches. America isn’t becoming great, it’s becoming vulgar.
Credit - Mathew Reed
New statement from Scott Pelley:
There has never been anything in America like 60 Minutes.
The Sunday tradition is the most successful program of any kind in history. For more than a decade, its innovative growth on every major online platform has extended its reach to countless millions around the world. This spring, at the end of our 58thseason, 60 Minutes grew rapidly with an unheard-of 9% jump in viewers on CBS.
“60” has been the number-one program in America for decades because our beloved audience finds integrity, quality, and humanity in our stories. When stewardship of the program passed to my colleagues and me, our responsibility was to expand energetically into a new age of media technology while preserving the values our audience expects. Now, the new owner of our network is casting this legend aside, apparently to curry a moment of favor with the Trump administration.
The waste is heartbreaking.
Last month, 60 Minutes lost its DNA when our entire senior leadership and two of our best on-air correspondents were cruelly fired without cause. Good people were silenced because they stood up for our audience. They stood for fairness against the forces of political bias; they stood for professionalism against chaos.
For my part, new management has instructed me to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story. I’ve been told to include assertions that are unverified. To date, in every case, I have managed to ignore these instructions or refuse them. Recently, politicians have been invited to choose correspondents for interviews on the broadcast. Giving politicians control over 60 Minutes interviews is not how this is done. Finally, incompetence and unprofessionalism in the new management have wreaked havoc. In a case involving one of my stories, the entire program came within 19 minutes of not getting on the air at all.
At 60 Minutes, we have fought harder than anyone knows to save the program that became an American icon. We owed that to our millions of viewers. I am deeply moved by the thousands of wishes we have received to “keep up the good fight.” Most of the men and women of CBS News are still in that fight. But now the collapse of values at the top has become untenable. The leadership of 60 Minutes is no longer recognizable. The principles I hold dear are gone, and so I must leave as well.
I depart after 37 years at CBS with one emotion—a heart brimming with gratitude for the men and women of CBS News who encouraged and enriched my work, very often at the risk of their own lives. I pray for a day when those people and their ideals are honored again—a day when sanity, competence, and courage return.
Scott Pelley
🚨JB PRITZKER EMBARRASSES TRUMP:
This is huge! JB Pritzker just BALANCED the Illinois budget with a $0 deficit.
$0!!!!!
The media won't tell you about Democratic accomplishments, so SHARE THIS EVERYWHERE:
While Trump is cutting SNAP, Pritzker is helping families put food on the table.
While Trump's Iran war is driving up energy costs, Illinois is pausing the gas tax increase.
While Trump is building a ballroom, Illinois is funding schools, building housing, wiping out medical debt, and helping working families.
That's what Democratic governing looks like.
Pritzker is lowering costs.
Trump is RAISING them.
His internet has been slow for 6 months. So, he paid Comcast to upgrade his tier.
Speeds got worse.
He called Comcast again. They blamed his router. He bought a new one. Still slow.
He called a third time. They sent a technician out. The tech ran a speed test from inside the modem and said:"Speeds are fine on our end. Must be your devices."
A neighbor who works in IT came over the next weekend with his laptop.
He looked at the router for two minutes, opened the admin panel, and pointed at four settings on the screen.
"Comcast pushed a firmware update last year. They enabled all four of these silently. This is why your internet is slow. This is why every Comcast customer's internet got slower around the same time."
Here's exactly what he found and turned off. 🧵
Trump is now reportedly responsible for roughly 27.7% of the entire U.S. national debt accumulated under all presidents combined.
That is an astonishing figure historically.
The national debt just crossed $39 trillion.
President Trump has added roughly $12–13 trillion to the debt across his two terms in office.
That’s approximately 30% of ALL U.S. national debt accumulated since 1789.
In 2016, Trump said he would pay down the national debt “over a period of eight years.”
Instead:
- First term: +$7.8 trillion
- Second term: roughly +$4–5 trillion already
And yes, COVID affected first-term spending.
It does not explain adding another trillion dollars every five months without a pandemic.
A political movement built on:
“fiscal conservatism”
“small government”
“balanced budgets”
has now overseen the largest debt expansion tied to any single presidency in American history.
Over a million acres of pristine wilderness lakes in Minnesota.
The most visited canoe country in America.
Generations of families have paddled it, fished it, camped it.
The Senate just sold it out outright.
They called it "America First."
Then handed it to a Chilean billionaire — so his company can ship the copper to China.
The Senate voted 50-49 to gut 20 years of Boundary Waters mining protections.
Here's the deal they made.
A Chilean billionaire's company digs the mine.
America can't smelt the copper — we don't have the capacity.
So the ore ships to China.
China processes it.
Sells it on the world market.
Chile keeps the profits.
Minnesotans don't even get the jobs.
Minnesota keeps the pollution.
And Americans get to buy it back from China at full market price.
This same company has a documented history at their Chilean mines: pipeline spills, regulatory fines, and locals fighting back for years.
They paid a former Trump Interior Secretary $380K.
The protection died by one vote.
Here's exactly how it happened — and who made it happen.
Who do YOU think this mine actually serves?
#DemsUnited
I never stop being amazed by them. Launching their “Birdhouse” — a strategic-class missile worth around $100 million, capable of carrying a nuclear warhead — at a garage complex in the Kyiv region.
Let’s calculate how much this night cost them.
One “Oreshnik” — roughly $100 million. Around ninety cruise and ballistic missiles: Kh-101s, Kalibrs, Iskander-Ks — at an average price of about $8 million each — that’s another roughly $720 million. Six hundred Shahed drones at $50,000 each — another $30 million. Plus fuel, launch platforms, maintenance, reconnaissance.
Total: around $850 million for a single night. Nearly a billion dollars.
And what did they get for that billion?
They hit garages in Bila Tserkva. Destroyed the “Kvadrat” shopping mall. Set the roof of a dormitory on fire in Darnytskyi district. Blew apart an entrance section of a five-story apartment building in Shevchenkivskyi district. Hit a market. A supermarket. A construction hypermarket in Obolon. Dropped debris onto the Valeriy Lobanovskyi Dynamo Stadium.
Two sleeping civilians killed. Fifty-six wounded, including children. Is this their strategic result for a billion dollars? This is their “special operation.” This is their “greatness.”
They cannot move forward on the battlefield. Cannot seize a single truly significant settlement. Cannot defeat the army of a country they promised to capture in three days four years ago. And in convulsions, in agony, in powerless rage, they strike residential neighborhoods at night — museums, markets, shops, garages.
Impotent on the battlefield, compensating for their failure with the number of munitions fired at sleeping civilians.
Blind evil and helplessness at the same time.
Monsters. Simply monsters. Rabid, paranoid lunatics with a nuclear button.
I have no other words left for them.
Absolutely love this message from @davidjollyfl. As someone who knows David, this is not just a slogan. This is what David believes. This is who he is. This is why he will be the next Governor of Florida.