Mark Grober @mgrober

@rkrehbiel @GovStitt Thanks Randy for the stories and I read the World daily and support a free press. The World does a great job.

The Lessons I Learned from My Dad I am not the man my father is. I am trying. Some days closer. Some days farther. He never sat me down and explained these lessons. He lived them. I’m still learning them. Show up. The kitchen table. The hospital room. The funeral. The picket line. The call from the son who won’t answer. Show up. Most days that’s the whole job. My whole life I watched him do it. Not for cameras. Not for headlines. Not because there was something in it for him. He showed up because someone needed him. I learned that grief doesn’t make you special. My father buried a wife and daughter. He buried a son. Yet he never treated grief as a claim on other people’s sympathy. Instead, it made him notice theirs. A mother who lost a child. A father sitting beside a hospital bed. A kid scared about what comes next. A son who lost his mother, his sister, his brother. He always noticed. I learned that power is not the point. The people who chase power eventually confuse the office with themselves. My father never did. Whether he was a county councilman, a senator, vice president, or president, he was the same man. The title changed. He didn’t. I learned that family comes first. The train from Wilmington wasn’t symbolism. It was every night. He read to us. Showed up to games. Sat through hospital rooms. Waited up for children who were lost. And when the day came that the country and the family could not both have him at full strength, he chose family. He relinquished the last chapter of how he wanted to be remembered. And he never complained about it. Most of all, I learned that love is not soft. Love is discipline. Love is showing up at one in the morning when nobody is watching. Love is answering the phone. Love is staying. Love is getting back up after life knocks you down and doing it all again tomorrow. That love saved my life. I’ve failed at many of these lessons, sometimes in very public ways. He loved me anyway. That’s the last lesson. I am not trying to become my father. I am trying to carry what he gave me. And if I can do that, even imperfectly, that will be enough. Happy Father’s Day, Dad. I love you.

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.

Scott Pelley just issued a statement on Bari's remarks this morning:

Ben Mullin @BenMullin

4 weeks ago

Bari Weiss Speaks on Scott Pelley’s Firing: ‘That’s the Path That He Chose.’ New, with @grynbaum nytimes.com/2026/06/03/bus…

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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

The targets described in the leaked docs include a number of right-wing influencers and members of the “dissident right,” including Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and Nick Fuentes. They also reveal that the entire Nick Shirley thing was orchestrated by the White House.

@RpsAgainstTrump What an un Senator thing to say. What a dick

Governor signs into law concept voters overwhelmingly rejected in state question kfor.com/news/oklahoma-…

@Fritschner They have redefined snowflake

@atrupar What an embarrassment our justice department is.

1. A tiny California tribe, the Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation, just donated $2 MILLION to MAGA Inc, Trump's Super PAC. I decided to find out why. It's an illustration of exactly how business is done in Trump’s Washington. Follow along for details. 🧵

@Geiger_Capital Texas???

So, @joerogan probably won’t see this post that’s going viral on Facebook. It’s too long to copy & paste, & it took way more than 4 screenshots But I think it’s essential reading for everyone, because ALL of the lying MAGA Influencers need to face legal consequences /1

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What an embarrassment this man is.

@TheRickWilson Now the which hunt….

Jay Nordlinger saw it coming. His article laid out the architecture. Now comes the confirmation: JD Vance is flying to Budapest to campaign for Orbán. Washington and Moscow, same direction, same result. This is no longer subtext. It is policy. Which is exactly why European leaders and NATO allies need to stop whispering and start speaking on the record. Publicly. By name. The American vice president is actively working to keep a Kremlin-aligned government in power inside a NATO member state. That sentence should be causing emergency sessions, not diplomatic silence. Nordlinger wrote the diagnosis. Europe needs to find its voice before the patient is gone. Gandalv / @Microinteracti1

Jay Nordlinger @jaynordlinger

4 months ago

Since this article of mine was written, it has been announced that Vice President JD Vance will go to Hungary to campaign for Orbán. It is an all-out effort, from both Washington and Moscow. To say this is a curious coalition is to say the least. It is the new shape of the world.

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@RepMaxMiller Why do you lie? You're an embarrassment

Robert Mueller died last night. He was 81 years old. He had a wife who loved him for sixty years. He had two daughters, one of whom he met for the first time in Hawaii, in 1969, on a few hours of military leave, before he got back on the plane and returned to Vietnam. He had grandchildren. He had a faith he practiced quietly, without performance. He had, in the way of men who have seen real things and survived them, a quality that is increasingly rare and increasingly mocked in the country he spent his life serving. He had integrity. And tonight the President of the United States said good! I have been sitting with that word for hours now. Good. One syllable. The thing you say when the coffee is hot or the traffic is moving. The thing a man who has never had to bury anyone, never had to sit in the specific silence of a room where someone is newly absent, reaches for when he wants the world to know he is satisfied. Good. The daughters are crying and the wife is alone in the house and good. I want to speak directly to the Americans reading this. Not the political Americans. Just the human ones. The ones who have lost a father. The ones who know what it is to be in that first hour, when you keep forgetting and then remembering again, when ordinary objects become unbearable, when the world outside the window seems obscene in its indifference. I want to ask you, simply, to hold that feeling for a moment, and then to understand that the man you elected looked at it and typed a single word. Good. This is not a country having a bad day. I need you to understand that. Countries have bad days. Elections go wrong. Leaders disappoint. Institutions bend. But there is a different thing, a rarer and more terrible thing, that happens when the moral center of a place simply gives way. Not dramatically. Not with a single catastrophic event. But quietly, in increments, until one evening a president celebrates the death of an old man whose family is still warm with grief, and enough people find it acceptable that it becomes the weather. Just the weather. That is what is happening. That is what has happened. The world knows. From Tokyo to Oslo, from London to Buenos Aires, people are not angry at America tonight. Anger would mean there was still something to fight for, some remaining faith to be betrayed. What I see, in the reactions from everywhere that is not here, is something older and sadder than anger. It is the look people get when they have waited a long time for someone they love to find their way back, and have finally understood that they are not coming. America is being grieved. Past tense, almost. The idea of it. The thing it represented to people who had nothing else to believe in, who came here with everything they owned in a single bag because they had heard, somehow, across an ocean, that this was the place where decency was written into the walls. That idea is not resting. It is not suspended. It is being buried, in real time, with 7,450 likes before dinner. And the church said nothing. Seventy million people have decided that this man, this specific man who has cheated everyone he has ever made a promise to, who has mocked the disabled and the dead and the grieving, who celebrated tonight while a family wept, is an instrument of God. The pastors who made that bargain did not just trade away their credibility. They traded away the thing that made them worth listening to in the first place. The cross they carry now is a costume. The faith they preach is a loyalty oath with scripture attached. When the history of American Christianity is written, this will be the chapter they skip at seminary. Now I want to talk about the men who stand next to him. Because this is the part that actually breaks my heart. JD Vance is not a bad man. I have to say that, because it is true, and because the truth matters even now, especially now. Marco Rubio is not a bad man. Lindsey Graham is not a bad man. They are idiots, but not bad, as in BAD! These are men with mothers who raised them and children who love them and friends who remember who they were before all of this. They are not monsters. Monsters are simple. Monsters do not cost you anything emotionally because there is nothing in them to mourn. These men are something more painful than monsters. They are men who knew better, and know better still, and will get up tomorrow and do it again. Every small compromise they made had a reason. Every moment they looked the other way had a justification that sounded, at the time, almost reasonable. And now they have arrived here, at a place where a president celebrates the death of an old man and they will find a way, on television, to say nothing that means anything, and they will go home to houses where children who carry their name are waiting, and they will say goodnight, and they will say nothing. Their oldest friends are watching. The ones who knew Rubio when he still believed in something. Who knew Graham when he said, out loud, on the record, that this exact man would destroy the Republican Party and deserve it. Who sat next to Vance and thought here is someone worth knowing. Those friends are not angry tonight. They moved through anger a long time ago. What they feel now is the quiet, irrecoverable sadness of watching someone disappear while still being present. Of watching a person they loved choose, again and again, to become less. That is what cowardice costs. Not the coward. The people who loved him. And in the comments tonight, the followers celebrate. People who ten years ago brought casseroles to grieving neighbours. Who stood in the rain at gravesides and meant the words they said. Who told their children that we do not speak ill of the dead because the dead were someone's beloved. Those people are tonight typing gleeful things about a man whose daughters are not yet done crying. And they feel clean doing it. Righteous. Because somewhere along the way the thing they were given in exchange for their decency was the feeling of belonging to something, and that feeling is very hard to give up even when you can no longer remember what you gave for it. When Trump is gone, they will still be here. Standing in the silence where the noise used to be. Without the permission the crowd gave them. Without the pastor who told them their cruelty was holy. They will be alone with what they said and what they cheered and what they chose to become, and there will be no one left to tell them it was righteous. That morning is coming. Robert Mueller flew across the Pacific on military leave to hold his newborn daughter for a few hours before returning to the war. He came home. He buried his dead with honour. He served presidents of both parties because he understood that the institution was larger than any one man. He told his grandchildren that a lie is the worst thing a person can do, that a reputation once lost cannot be recovered, and he lived that, every day, in the quiet and unglamorous way of people who actually believe what they say. He was the kind of American the world used to point to when it needed to believe the story was true. He died last night. His wife is alone in their house in Georgetown. His daughters are learning what the world is without him in it. And somewhere in the particular hush that falls over a family in the first hours of loss, the most powerful man and the biggest loser on earth sent a message to say he was glad. The world that loved what America was supposed to be is grieving tonight. Not for Robert Mueller only. For the country that produced him and then became this. For the distance between what was promised and what was delivered. For the suspicion, growing quieter and more certain with each passing month, that the America people believed in was always partly a story, and the story is over now, and there is nothing yet to replace it. That is all it needed to be. A man died. His family is broken open with grief. That is all it needed to be. Instead the President said good. And the country that once stood for something looked away 🇺🇸 Gandalv / @Microinteracti1

@ToddOnSports Thanks. Great story. Abe Lemons was a classic!