Dear @SecDef :

First, as an African American Navy veteran who is the daughter of one of the first five Black Men to serve as officers on the USS Midway in the 50s, I cannot express how delighted & proud I am of you and yours ascension to the awesome responsibility & authority

Something you may not know is that professional Black women are hyper focused on qualification.

We are told young that there will be no leg-up for us, and that we MUST excel academically.

We work hard, compete & get into college.

For many of us, our whole family is counting

on us. We often carry the burden of inter-generational progress, where our success validates the expectations and sacrifice of those before us.

We are always aware that squandering the opportunity for an education would be disrespectful to those who never got that chance.

Then, if we get into graduate school, we see very few others like us, and feel instantly under scrutiny.

There is no hiding or blending in. All your professors are zeroed in on you, trying to ascertain if you can compete. When you produce the goods, they are delighted,

but the delight is often also telegraphing to us that the talent was not expected.

When we ascend into corporate environments, we are again closely scrutinized, not just for competence, but for “fit.”

Our bosses will test us again and again to make sure the “angry black

woman” doesn’t come out.

The onus is always on us to make those around us comfortable, never the other way around.

Once we put our colleagues at ease, things are fine.... until we start getting close to the power echelon.

Then things get dicey.

It would be a perversion of justice of the highest order if we prosecuted hundreds of people for participating in violent insurrection, but let the mastermind & ring leader skate to a life of luxury & golf every day.

No ONE in America has been better at evading justice & no

one in America has been more deserving of punishment than Trump.

Nuremberg was not about holding low level foot soldiers accountable. They paid a price, for sure, but it was the leaders who were publicly shamed

and made to face the world for their crimes.

Imagine if Hitler had survived the allied liberation. Do you think ANYONE IN THE WORLD would have intimated he be let him go & allowed to retire in peace to promote global «healing» & «unity?»

Trump has the blood of 400,000 dead

Americans on his hands. He broke more laws while in office than we can shake a stick at!

Even the people who are suggesting that he be given a pass aren’t doing so because he isn’t deserving of punishment. They are doing so because they have a stake in preserving the world

order in which wealthy, powerful white men get away with WHATEVER THE HELL they do.

The desperate, almost pathological need to preserve the mystique of powerful white men blocks out rational thinking about accountability & justice. The EXACT SAME mindset that justified giving

For 25 years, the GOP has had almost exclusive control of the FL legislature & admin.

It fashioned every law it could to advantage Republicans, gerrymandered at a bionic level & stymied popular efforts to increase voter participation such as restoration of felon voting rights.

During that same time, the FL GOP poured MILLIONS into turning the state party into a sophisticated, permanent, well-funded voter contact machine.

This gave GOP candidates two massive advantages: 1) they didn’t have to spend on selling the GOP position, 2) all of

in-state messaging got backed up by the RNC, and most importantly, the constant drum beat of Fox News.

There is no biological way to overstate the advantage that Fox News gives to Republicans in red states. MSNBC is NOT the opposite of Fox News.

MSNBC does not structure its programming around whipping up white grievance and fear. Whereas Fox News is the propaganda arm of the RNC, MSNBC is the left leaning version of CNN, not the DNC.

So when I say that Fox News is a huge advantage for the GOP, I know of what I speak.

In FL, Dem candidates spend a inordinate amount of time debunking Fox News lies, even to died in the wool Dems.

Because GOP candidates at every level do not have to spend on messaging, and so not have to spend on attacking Dem policy, they spend almost exclusively on 2 things:

Since the day Sarah Palin called white conservatives “Real Americans,” I have been vociferously warning people about the danger of allowing that mindset to flourish & ossify.

What happened yesterday was the tantrum of people who believe they are the “real” Americans because they

are white, and that their will should always prevail for that very same reason.

The correlative to that is that all other Americans are “fake”
or “fraudulent,” and that our will is of no consequence.

This mindset in the right is what lead to everything, including Wednesday’s

sedition-fest.

It is this mindset that justifies voter suppression, gerrymandering, unequal policing and justice standards, ignoring Congressional acts from a Dem majority, and insisting that votes from black communities be thrown out.

At base, it’s white supremacist having a

meltdown hissy fit because they cannot accept that they aren’t the majority, and likely never will be again.

Their only gambit at power is to destroy the very concept of majority rule, and to enshrine control by the racist minority.

They worship Trump because he was the first

politician who made clear he would do whatever it takes to make that shift occur, mostly out of selfishness and personal greed, not zealous philosophical accord, but the result was the same.

They love Trump because he is their flavor of both ruthless and immoral.

We MUST

It is VITAL that you understand we got here because we allowed Fox News, Newsmax, Alex Jones, Brietbart and MANY MANY others to create a siege mentality in the right.

One of the most disturbing aspects of a siege mindset is a willingness to reflexively believe ANY claim against

the perceived enemy that echoes or aligns with the established belief. Put simply, the right wing talk sphere trained its listeners to be willing to believe ANYTHING about “libs,” without the least requirement for there to be evidence to support it. It obliterated reasoning as

Trevor Chinn has funded various Labour MPs over the years including Owen Smith, Tony Blair, Joan Ryan, Ruth Smeeth, Tom Watson, Ian Austin, Rachel Reeves, Lisa Nandy, David Lammy, Liz Kendall, Dan Jarvis, Tristram Hunt, Jack Dromey, Liam Byrne. #LabourLeaks #StarmerOut #BICOM

Chinn has funded BOTH Labour Friends of Israel and Conservative Friends of Israel . The multi-millionaire pro-Israel lobbyist donated $62,000 to Keir Starmer to win the UK Labour Party’s leadership election. April 2020 #LabourLeaks #StarmerOut #BICOM

Tom Watson, former BICOM staffer Ruth Smeeth and Labour Friends of Israel’s then chair Joan Ryan.

All three played key roles in promoting the smear campaign that Corbyn’s Labour Party was a hotbed of anti-Semitism. BICOM is important to Starmer. #LabourLeaks #Defence #Brexit

Hoping to remove Corbyn as leader. Chinn funded Corbyn’s rival in the resultant leadership election, Owen Smith.

Smith took donations for his campaign from Chinn totaling $33,000, the register shows. #BICOM #LabourLeaks #StarmerOut

The BICOM group arranges for influential figures to take trips to Israel. These have included trips to the Herzliya conference, a major “security” event at which powerful business and political figures discuss how to reinforce Israeli occupation and apartheid. #StarmerOut #BICOM

South African science was crucial in helping UK discover its new variants; but then the UK govt claimed (wrongly) that the SA variant is more transmissible. No evidence to support this, according to @krisp_news

From the Times article: SA scientists "were the first to recognize the importance of a genetic change in the spike protein, something that allows the virus to attach more easily to human cells, making it more infectious than the original version."

The SA discovery was shared on Dec 4 over the WHO’s Covid-19 Evolution Working Group. “Our British colleagues were able to go back to their own databases and interrogate them as a result of the work we shared,” Richard Lessells, an infectious diseases specialist at Krisp, said.

More from the Times article by @janeflan: "While working on a much smaller budget than their British colleagues, the South African team, experienced with work on HIV, have the skills to decode the genome of viruses."

"They started work on samples of the Covid-19 virus soon after the first cases reached South Africa in March. In October they identified the first example that had changed significantly."

Keir Starmer who worked with Theresa May as DPP said '“Whether you agree with her or you don’t, this was a woman broken who had tried to genuinely deliver on what she thought she had to do … I can’t pretend I didn’t feel something.”: #StarmerOut https://t.co/0NzX7Ouv2a

Sir Keir Starmer was elected as an MP for Holborn and St Pancras in 2015. Before that he worked with May as director of public prosecutions when she was home secretary. #StarmerOut #LabourLeaks #Collusion #CONLAB

May was someone who was always straight with him, who always phoned him to ask whether she could use something he had said. “A lot of politicians didn’t do that. She never double dealt. She said what she would do and she did what she said.” #StarmerOut #LabourLeaks

At the end of his term as DPP in 2013, she invited Sir Starmer to dinner at an Italian restaurant in Westminster to say thank you.
“It was a difficult 90 minutes. Both of us were pleased to see the hour and a half was up.” #StarmerOut #LabourLeaks

''Keir Starmer credentials as a former director of public prosecutions (2008 to 2013) placed Starmer a cut above the rest of Labour's frontbench in the eyes of many Conservatives.''. He became acquainted with several senior Tories.