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

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

of Secretary of the entire Department of Defense and its multiple subordinate entities. Congratulations, Sir. Yours will not be an easy task, but your reputation of being a smart, deeply ethical and formidable leader proceeds you, and will serve you well.

I write to raise very

specific concern I have regarding the radicalization and polarization of our troops by media outlets that have targeted them with propaganda and deception.

As I am sure you know, FoxNews, OANN and Newsmax have been selling white supremacy grievance as a business model for years

and their presence on Military bases, installation and deployed units is almost ubiquitous.

As the events of January 6, and the ongoing investigations that have ensued demonstrate, the poison of those

outlets is infecting and debilitating our troops.

It is killing off their discernment, causing them to encamp on absolute lies & fiction, tearing them apart from their fellow brothers & sisters in arms, and in too many cases, inciting people who swear to defend the

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 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

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

1/
A huge mistake people make is to think of postmodernism, post-structuralism, intersectionality, Critical Legal Studies, Critical Race Theory, 4th wave feminism, and Critical Theory as being separate and distinct, having nothing to do with each other

This is a massive mistake.

2/
These disciplines are connected. They are not like individual academic factories producing different theories. The fact is that the ideas that are produced in various disciplines cross-pollinate and influence each other. The theorists make use of and share each others ideas.

3/
These fields are akin to ingredients used by activists to make the stew of Critical Social Justice.

Mix some postmodernism here with some intersectionality there, add Critical Race Theory and 4th wave feminist post-structuralism and *taste test* YUMMY...Social Justice!👨‍🍳

4/
Take a look through the activist literature and you'll see that they pull from all these theorists as they see fit and as they find it useful.

An excellent example of this is the book/website: "Beautiful Trouble." You can see how this dynamic works in that book.

5/
You all know the old trick about how "postmoderns" and Marxists are totally different? Well that was true at one time, but woke activists will gladly take ideas from both the Postmodern philosopher Michel Foucault (1st pic) and the Marxist Antonio Gramsci (2nd pic)

1/ I want to briefly tease out Cruz's statement, which will help set expectations about what might happen January 6:

2/ At its heart, the presser states, "we intend to vote on January 6 to reject the electors from disputed states as not ‘regularly given' and ‘lawfully certified' (the statutory requisite), unless & until that emergency 10-day audit is completed."

3/ How does a10-day emergency audit happen? Congress would need to enact a statute to amend the Electoral Count Act before January 6, when it's compelled by law to meet. That seems unlikely.

4/ Cruz et al. seem to hold a "thick" view of the Electoral Count Act, adhering to the "statutory requisite," which means that Congress would need to amend or adhere to the statute.

5/ A 10-day audit is impossible under the current statute. Objections to a state are limited to 2 hours' debate. Adjournments are fixed in the statute, too--no recess if you've hit five days:

As more folks are arrested for the insurrection we are going to see high rate of people with records of intimate partner violence, stalking, and harassment. 1/

Terrorizing women and girls and internet trolling is directly correlated to being violent and unreasonable in other facets. including work, friendships, school, family, AND POLITICS. 2/

As my colleague, Caroline said, "Violence against women and girls on the micro level of interpersonal IS TERRORISM designed to uphold patriarchy/male supremacy on the macro level. 3/

Some insurrectionists have reported histories of being abusers.
Some in the news have histories of abuse. We know Ashli Babbitt, who was shot dead, trying to climb through the window 4/

into the congressional chambers, had multiple restraining orders for attacking her then-boyfriend’s ex, filing false police reports, rear ending her car, and harassing her with phone calls. 5/