We're all connected

The US Defense Department is led by a Fox News buffoon and accused rapist with Christian Nationalist tattoos stamped all over his body.

He is a cartoon character come to life in a dangerous world.

This was actually posted by a MAGA account:

It’s supposed to make Hegseth look strong, but it makes me wonder if Liberace had a secret love child.

It is important to remember that Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump needed to lay a foundation before they were able to begin pointing American weapons at NATO allies and the free world in 2026.

Before Trump and his gangsters could threaten the peace of the world they needed to begin eradicating the institutional memory and history of the forces they would use to attack freedom in the name of Trump and the philosophy of the jungle where ‘might makes right.’

Trump and Stephen Mikkker share the ethos of Adolf Hitler who said:

Struggle is the father of all things. It is not by the principles of humanity that man lives or is able to preserve himself above the animal world, but solely by means of the most brutal struggle.

This was the work of 2025 from the Trump gangsters who illegally decreed that the Department of Defense was now the Department of War.

Under mad King Donald the United States Armed Forces has begun deleting its history and erasing images from its online archives in a Stalinist purge to erase the contributions of blacks, women, Mexican Americans, and American Indians to the defense of the United States.

It is a purposeful erasure.

These contributions of American patriots are not part of some woke identitarian agenda, but rather testament to the deepest of American faiths. This is why stealing the stories is a grotesque theft of their dignity and our future.

Our children deserve to know the truth about America and the depth of faith that has been the rock upon which freedom was defended.

What is true about America is that, over and over again, the people excluded from full citizenship believed in the country — despite the country not believing in them.

They retained their faith in the highest values of America, while faithless white Americans abused them, denied their humanity, and tried to exclude them from an idea that could not be suppressed by force, bigotry, hate or violence.

They believed in America so much that they were willing to walk through hatred before they faced bullets choosing to fight for ideas they believed would one day include people like them.

A most remarkable facet of our history is that the people who had no cause to believe in the country believed in it the most time and time again. They died for the promise of a future that did not exist in their present.

They faced hate to have an opportunity to fight for justice and died believing justice would come one day.

Trump and Hegseth are appalling vandals and bigots whose shame knows no boundaries. They are as unfit as any two men have ever been. As a result, the US military is badly led, unsteady and unready for a major war against China or NATO.

The good news is that all images of the historic Enola Gay aircraft commanded by Colonel Paul Tibbets, and named for his mother, have been removed from Pentagon websites so that no American soldier will ever have to worry about being turned gay by looking at a picture of the plane again.

MAGA!

Of course, while all of these actions are sinister, loathsome, dishonorable, and disgusting, they are also incandescently stupid. In fact, irredeemably so.

There are simply no combination of English words that can possibly describe the lunacy, venality and despicable character of the great white-washing of 2025 with one exception:

Trump.

Trump is a cancer but he isn’t a very good eraser. His ambition to delete America’s history will not succeed.

Benjamin O. Davis Jr. was born on December 18, 1912.

His father was the only active duty black officer in the entire US Army.

His titanic life and legacy cannot be erased, nor can the stories and valor, achievements and glory of the men he commanded.

Eighty years ago, above the skies of Europe, there was no deadlier job in the US military than serving in the 8th Air Force.

Over 22 months, the US Army Air Corps suffered more casualties than the entire US Marine Corps during the entirety of the Second World War.

During these bomber missions, where the losses were catastrophic, a legend was born.

Colonel Benjamin O. Davis was 33 years old when he commanded the 332nd Fighter Group. Those units were comprised exclusively of black pilots and crew from every corner of the United States — a minuscule percentage of the 16,000,000 strong US Armed Forces — but what they did will not soon be forgotten in the story of the American soldier.

Colonel Davis was a West Point graduate.

He was appointed by the only black congressman in the US House, Illinois Rep. Oscar S. De Priest. He became the fourth black man to graduate from the US Military Academy.

When he was commissioned, him and his father were the only black officers in the US Army.

1+1 still equaled 2 in segregated America.

Davis was ostracized and silenced during each and every day of his four-year tenure at the Academy.

What this means is that outside of official business he was completely shunned.

No other cadet spoke to him, ate with him, or did anything with him.

Try to imagine the cruelty. Try to comprehend the loneliness, degradation and humiliation.

Davis was 18 years old when he went to West Point.

He did not break under the weight of the prejudice he faced or the loneliness. He committed himself to excellence, and his character was forged like iron in a fire graduating in the top 20 percent of his class.

His country, which he loved, but would not love him back, would need this iron determination.

The black pilots of the 332nd Fighter Group had a calling card. The tails of their planes were painted bright red.

When German pilots saw the Red Tails they trembled before they died.

When the white pilots of the segregated 8th Air Force saw the Red Tails at first they didn’t believe the planes were flown by black pilots.

When the truth could not be denied they were forced to choose between their lives and their prejudices.

The white 8th Air Force pilots began demanding the Red Tails be assigned to escort them into Nazi airspace.

The bomber pilots chose their lives, and so it came to be that Colonel Davis ordered the name of his fighter plane changed to ‘By Direct Request.’

The American story is incomplete and inaccurate without the story of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, in which two of Frederick Douglass’ sons fought for freedom.

It cannot be disconnected from the heroic glory of the Japanese American 442nd Regimental Combat team, which was the most highly decorated combat unit of the Second World War.

Senator Daniel Inouye received the Medal of Honor while serving in this unit. Shot multiple times with his right arm blown off after destroying two Nazi machine gun nests, his grieving men huddled over him believing he had been killed. Inouye opened his eyes, and said “Who told you sons of bitches to stop moving forward?”

It cannot be disconnected from the heroism of the Navajo Code Talkers, and the fact that a Native American helped raise the American flag on Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima.

MAGA cannot compel us to forget, and they have no right to steal the accomplishments of America’s heroes.

The legendary NBC news anchor Tom Brokaw wrote a best-selling book in 1998 that popularized the name “The Greatest Generation.” Brokaw’s thesis was that the generation of Americans raised in the Great Depression, and forged by the Second World War, was the “greatest generation any society has ever produced.”

When Brokaw made the assertion the name would not have stuck if the American people did not agree.

Twenty-five years ago was a golden era unappreciated in its moment. America stood at the edge of a new millennium — triumphant, prosperous, and free.

The Soviet Empire had fallen, democracy was ascendant, the internet era was beginning, and optimism was the order of the day.

Inherent in the Brokaw proposition was the notion that history had reached a type of endpoint where humanity had evolved beyond the titanic and existential competition and conflict that had killed more than 100 million human beings during the bloodiest hundred-year epoch of human history.

The question of generational greatness is beyond debate, but embedded within the branding is a soft dogma that lacks imagination for what has not yet come.

Mr. Brokaw’s label of 27 years ago pre-supposed that humanity’s greatest crisis was the apogee of crisis, as opposed to being the greatest crisis the world has yet faced.

We stand at an hour of danger brought forward by a small cabal of men and women who seem intent on becoming America’s worst generation by abandoning the constitution, liberty, decency and our values for the esteem of a wicked cause led by a wicked man who hates with his whole being.

They have sold out America and have brought us all to the edge of tragic possibilities that did not seem possible not so long ago.

There should be no room in America for generational conflict, warfare and broad generalizations.

Each generation of Americans has produced greatness, and will continue to do so for as long as there is America.

Each generation is trusted with the continuance of the American experiment, and each is morally obligated to perfect the union so that it may be stronger for the following generations.

What Brokaw called “The Greatest Generation” refers to those who are now in their mid-90s.

The 16 million-man US Armed Forces that won the war has less than between 45,000 and 120,000 surviving veterans.

Soon, they will all be gone, and with them, an ethic of responsibility, service and sacrifice from a momentous era that will soon slip from lived memory to remembered history.

If it were the case that these men and women were still alive in America, there could be no Trump because they would have known what he was from the very first instance in overwhelming numbers.

Republicans and Democrats would have stood together and opposed it with every fiber of their beings.

Senator Daniel Inouye spent nearly two years recovering from his wounds in the Percy Jones Army Hospital in Battle Creek, Michigan, where his roommates were Robert Dole of Kansas and Phil Hart of Illinois — three young men whose bodies were ravaged by war who would become US senators.

When Bob Dole came to pay his respects to his old friend, beloved brother and partisan foe he approached the flag draped casket of the Medal of Honor recipient and US senator from Hawaii in a wheelchair.

When he got close Dole rose from his wheelchair and said, “Danny would have hated seeing me in this chair” before coming to attention and saluting with the only arm he had that could move.

During the war against fascism, the US government recognized the profound moral hypocrisy of America’s segregated society in the south and its segregated military.

Americans of every race, religion, background and nationality fought valorously, and played an enormous role in igniting the civil rights movement after the war.

During the war the “Double V” campaign was popularized.

It stood for “Victory Abroad and Victory at Home.”

The heroism of military units like the 442nd RCT of Japanese Americans, or the world-famous Tuskegee Airmen, guaranteed the desegregation of the military by 1947 — the same year that Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in Major League Baseball.

This set in motion a great explosion of civil rights progress in America that happened approximately 100 years after the end of the Civil War in the mid-1960s, just a few short years before my birth.

It is all connected.

We are all connected.

There is a straight line from Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass to Benjamin O. Davis, Jackie Robinson, Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr.

I’ve been thinking lately about the greatest generation of Americans.

I don’t think they’ve been born yet, with all due respect to my friend Mr. Brokaw, an icon of integrity, journalistic excellence, American patriotism and personal character.

The World War II generation saved the world in the way the Civil War generation saved the Republic.

The world will always need saving, and perhaps there will be many more generations of Americans who are called on to make stupendous sacrifices for the maintenance of our American way of life.

The greatest generation though will be the one that finally creates what Winthrop imagined, and that Dr. King saw from the mountaintop.

It is a just, harmonious, peaceful, beautiful “city upon a hill.”

A place where there is no prejudice and hate.

Truly, that accomplishment will suffice to establish for all time the “Greatest Generation.”

Until then let’s hold the line against those who demand we forget who we are.

Let’s hold the line against wicked men who think they have the power to erase the deeds of great men and women. Let’s deny them this power by armoring ourselves with the stories that can never be forgotten.

Let’s hold the line against the awful stupidities and bigotry of Pete Hegseth and all of Trump’s little Eichmanns with a sinister gleam in their eye.

There is something you should know about General Davis.

He wrote an autobiography.

The title had one word: American.

There are many ways to fight for your country, and my friends, we are in the fight.

No American has a right to forget about Benjamin O. Davis.

All true patriots will want to learn his full story for there are many lessons in his titanic life of service, dignity, love and patriotism.

Let me say something as directly as I can as a white American father. I hope my son and stepson will become the type of man Benjamin O. Davis would have respected.

He was the best of the best, and that can’t be erased.

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