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Filth and stupidity at the Pentagon
PLUS: Join Tara Palmeri and me TONIGHT at 8 pm ET on Substack Live
The privileges of being an American belong to those who are brave enough to fight for them.
— General Benjamin O. Davis
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.
Under his command, the United States Armed Forces has begun deleting its history and erasing images from its online archives in a Stalinist purge that show the contributions of blacks, women, Mexican Americans, and American Indians to the defense of the United States. Meanwhile, the average mission capable rate for all USAF fleets was 67.15 percent in fiscal 2024, down from 69.92 percent in fiscal 2023 and 71.24 percent in fiscal 2022. Compared to 2004-2006 and 2012-2024, years for which data was available, the 2024 rates were the lowest.
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. Forevermore, 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, they are irredeemably so.
There are simply no known 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.
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 life and legacy will not be erased, and neither will the stories, 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. Pete Hegseth and his hacks cannot erase it.
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 person to graduate from the US Military Academy. When he was commissioned, him and his father were the only black officers in the US Army.
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. He was 18 years old when he went to West Point, and when he left, he was in the top 20 percent of his class. 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.
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 truth could not be denied they were forced to choose between their lives and their prejudices. 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.
MAGA cannot compel us to forget, and they have no right to steal the accomplishments of America’s greatest 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, there was a great wave of national nostalgia, appreciation and awe over the achievements of this generation of Americans who were the older siblings of the silent generation, the parents of the baby boomers and the grandparents of Generation X.
It was a moment where a great dam of silence was cracking and a reservoir of memories, stories and previously unknown accounts were shared by the men and women in their mid-70s, who had returned from war and quietly went on with their lives.
The brilliance of Steven Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan,” and the 20 minutes of unprecedentedly vivid, realistic depiction of combat on the Dog Green Sector of Omaha Beach where elements of the 2nd Ranger Battalion fought, awed the nation.
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.
The second-term president of the United States was a 52-year-old southerner who tantalized America with his tawdriness and recklessness, while presiding over the brief, happy, gilded era of Pax Americana during which liberty, freedom, pluralism, human rights and progress seemed pre-destined and irreversible.
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 the expressions of greatness are embedded with 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 had yet faced.
There should be no room in America for generational conflict and warfare.
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 119,000 surviving veterans.
Soon, they will all be gone, and with them, an ethic of responsibility, service and sacrifice from a momentous era that will forever become part of history, not human memory.
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.
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.
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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.
Like Brokaw and everyone else, I was born into a specific time and place that shaped my perspective on everything.
I lived in an overwhelmingly white town that bordered an overwhelmingly black one.
My heroes were Reggie Jackson, Willie Randolph, Bucky Dent and Thurmond Munson.
The games were on channel 11, and I thought nothing of Phil Rizuttto and Bill White calling a game together. I was completely oblivious about the epic role Bill White played in desegregating baseball just a few short years before my birth.
Looking back from the perspective of middle age, I think about the passage of time more than I once did. I have a greater appreciation for the reality that history did not begin at the moment that I entered the story.
What came before matters, and what comes next, is not contingent on what happened last.
There is a great debate raging in America about race and the question over whether there is racism in America.
The short answer: there is.
Want proof?
Simple.
A Yale study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association reveals a staggering health inequity when it comes to life expectancy between black Americans and their white counterparts between 1999 and 2020.
A data analysis found 1.63 million excess deaths in the black population compared with white Americans.
Case closed.
Among the greatest challenges facing America is being able to talk about race openly, honestly and realistically without fear of instant cultural annihilation and backlash.
I thought about that as I watched an extraordinary interview unfold between Walter Cronkite and President Lyndon Baines Johnson in 1973.
When watching it I was struck by two thoughts. The first was how old the video seemed.
The second was how short the time between the interview and today.
The LBJ interviewed was different than my conception of him from the famous tapes of his politicking, phone calls, bluster and cajoling.
His hair was longer and he was calm, contemplative and at peace in a strange and serene way.
I have never heard a white American politician talk about race like this in my lifetime, and I thought, “What a shame.”
LBJ and Walter Cronkite had never been exposed to the rage industrial complex that would become modern journalism, so instead they had a very deep conversation.
More than fifty year later, the recording stands as a time capsule and a gift to the nation.
Ten days later, LBJ would be dead.
It was his last interview.
Let’s watch:
These are remarkable words from a vice president of the United States 100 years on from the battle of Gettysburg and Lincoln’s famous reconsecration of American liberty and purpose.
They are as searing and honest as are the words that acknowledge LBJ’s self-awareness as a southerner.
Again, his honesty, directness and goodwill are extraordinary to watch from the vantage point of our current idiocracy.
LBJ became president, and used all of his power to advance civil rights and create — for the first time in American history — a society in which black rights were protected fully under the law — at least on paper.
LBJ’s life’s journey changed and altered his perspectives.
Can you imagine a white American politician talking about their life experiences like LBJ? Listen for the directness and honesty talking about race from the perspective of a white, Christian man who was born in Texas in 1908:
In the end, what all of this led towards were some of the greatest legislative accomplishments in American history.
LBJ was the greatest legislator who ever became president. His approach to his job was “all in, all the time.” Consider his achievements:
Lastly, LBJ couldn’t have predicted the rise of a sociopathic demagogue like Trump or a low courtier like Hegseth.
He would have been familiar with their arguments and lies.
There is no question that great progress has been made towards racial justice in America since 1973, but it is also true there is still great work ahead because it is also true that bigotry, prejudice, racism, antisemitism and homophobia are alive and well in 2025.
There is intolerance everywhere.
Listen to President Johnson talk about prejudice:
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 deeply respected.
He was the best of the best and that can’t be erased.
A conversation with Tara Palmeri and me on Substack Live TONIGHT at 8 pm ET
The truth is a jewel that must shined. Otherwise, it is susceptible to tarnish.
The greatest evidence of the danger swirling unseen in the enveloping mist all around us is the fact that so many people can not distinguish reality from fantasy because of the audacity of lying from the state, the media and the world’s wealthiest man.
Donald Trump has broken America’s corporate media. Fortunately, there are islands of fierce resolution that will never bend the knee, Gibraltars of reality and defenders of the Republic like my friend Nicolle Wallace, who was recently attacked by a phalanx of Trump’s winged fascist monkeys.
The next era of journalism will rise in the soil of the First Amendment from the shattered ethos of the Watergate era.
It will rise through the work of independent journalists, who do not seek to be brands, but rather truth-tellers and agents of accountability in an age of apathy, stagnation and corruption.
Tara Palmeri of The Red Letter is such a person. Born in New Jersey, she is a tough-as-nails daughter of a Polish American immigrant and electrician, who wants you to know what is happening.
Tara is an interesting person. She is a rejectionist of sorts.
What attracts her to power is confronting it, analyzing it, seeing it through the prism of selfishness, hypocrisy and the unrelenting miasma of bullshit that is far from a one party affair.
If you’re unfamiliar with her reporting, I’m excited to introduce her to you and her just launched The Red Letter. I highly encourage you to subscribe. It will be worth every penny.
Tara is not an advocate and a partisan. She is a truth-teller. She is a journalist, and now at 38, after a career that has taken her around the world on Air Force One, to Kim Jong Un’s guest house, to Brussels, Washington, DC, and every corner of the United States covering the connection points of politics and corrupt power, she is an entrepreneur.
Congratulations, Tara, and can’t wait to talk with you tonight at 8 pm ET!
To join our Substack Live, you can either download the Substack iPhone or Android app, or you can go to the Substack website on your desktop to access live streams.
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We hope to see you tonight!
Steve
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