God Bless the World. I’m hard to describe. BLM✊🏾 #MaskUp 😷
New Jersey, USA
Joined May 2011
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Monique ND retweeted
Dangerfield Newby is the actual man on which the movie D’Jango Unchained is loosely based.
He was a member of the John Brown raiders. He joined the gang to save his wife, Harriet and children from slavery.
—Dangerfield Newby (1815 – October 17, 1859) was the oldest of John Brown's raiders, one of five black raiders, and the first of his men to die at Harpers Ferry, Virginia.
Born into slavery in Fauquier County, Virginia, Newby married a woman also enslaved. Newby's father was Henry Newby, a landowner in Fauquier County. His mother was Elsey Newby, who was a slave, owned not by Henry, but by a neighbor, John Fox. Elsey and Henry lived together for many years and had several children, although interracial marriage was illegal in Virginia. Dangerfield was their first child. Dangerfield Newby, his mother and his siblings were later freed by his father when he moved them across the Ohio River into Bridgeport, Ohio. John Fox, who died in 1859, apparently did not attempt to retrieve Elsey, Dangerfield, or any of his siblings. Dangerfield's wife and their seven children remained in bondage. A letter found on his body revealed some of his motivation for joining John Brown and the raid on Harpers Ferry.
Dangerfield Newby's wife, Harriet Newby, was the slave of Jesse Jennings, of Arlington or Warrenton, Virginia. Newby had been unable to purchase the freedom of his wife and seven children. Their master raised the price after Newby had saved the $1,500 that had previously been agreed on. Because all of Newby's other efforts had failed he hoped to free them by force. Harriet's poignant letters, found on his body, proved instrumental in advancing the abolitionist cause. Newby was six foot two.
On October 17, 1859, the citizens of Harpers Ferry set to put down the raid. Harpers Ferry manufactured guns but the citizens had little ammunition, so during the assault on the raiders they fired anything they could fit into a gun barrel. One man was shooting six inch spikes from his rifle, one of which struck Newby in the throat, killing him instantly. After the raid, the people of Harpers Ferry took his body, stabbed it repeatedly, and amputated his limbs. His body was left in an alley to be eaten by hogs. In 1899 the remains of Newby-plus remains of nine other raiders-were reburied in a common grave near the body of John Brown in North Elba, New York.
Dangerfield Newby's wife, Harriet and her children were sold to a Louisiana slave owner after the raid.
Monique ND retweeted
More than FOUR HUNDRED families were thrown off the land in one Tennessee winter.
Not for a debt. Not for a crime. They had registered to vote.
So they spent the winter in army surplus tents, in a field, with children.
Fayette County, Tennessee, 1960. Sharecropping families — they did not own the land they worked, and
that was the whole lever.
They registered. The landowners evicted them, many without notice.
Then came the part that was meant to finish it. **The merchants closed ranks.** Names were circulated.
Families who had registered could not buy groceries. Could not buy seed. Could not get petrol. Credit
was cancelled. Insurance policies were cancelled.
And white doctors refused to treat their own patients.
Read that again. Not a mob. Not a night ride. A list, passed between shopkeepers, that meant a
pregnant woman could not see the doctor she had always seen.
John and Viola McFerren had started the civic league that ran the registration drive. A landowner
named Shepard Towles let the evicted families put tents on his ground, which took more courage than
most people will ever have to find.
They called it Tent City. Surplus army canvas, through a Tennessee winter, with no running water,
cooking outside, children going to school out of a tent.
In Haywood County next door, about thirty more families did the same.
They did not fold. The Justice Department came in. By December 1960 it had sued forty-five
landowners, twenty-four merchants and one bank. On 26 July 1962 the landowners were permanently
ordered to stop interfering with Black registration and voting.
So this one ends with a win — a federal injunction, won by sharecroppers living in tents.
But hold the price in your head. Four hundred families. Two winters. And the weapon was not a gun.
It was a grocery list.
Monique ND retweeted
Black Americans were barred from almost every beach in the South.
So in 1935 the first Black millionaire in Florida bought his own stretch of ocean and opened it to everybody.
Two hundred acres, white sand, bands, hotels, and nobody to tell you to leave. American Beach.
Abraham Lincoln Lewis founded the Afro-American Life Insurance Company in Jacksonville and became Florida's first Black millionaire. He bought the land on Amelia Island so his employees and their families would have somewhere to go.
It became the most important Black resort on the Atlantic coast. Zora Neale Hurston went. Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Ray Charles, Joe Louis all played or stayed there.
Look up the photographs. Families in good swimwear beside good cars. Women laughing in the surf. Children buried in sand. It is a complete picture of Black American leisure in the 1940s and 50s, which almost nobody has ever been shown.
Then desegregation opened other beaches, a hurricane took some of it, and developers took most of the rest.
A man bought an ocean so his people could swim. Stories like this are why we document savvypurchase.samcart.com/pr…
Monique ND retweeted
RFK Jr
CUT monitoring of Vibrio - now a major outbreak
CUT screwworm research - screwworm returns
CUT salmonella surveillance - Big outbreak
CUT cyclospora surveillance - Huge outbreak
Cut CDC ship team - Hantavirus ship outbreak
FUNDED Plague lab in Russia - lab leak
Monique ND retweeted
Ladies, we need a club where we can expose rapists and support each other. With each incidence of the rapists getting a slap on the wrist, our value, rights and humanity is diminished.
Monique ND retweeted
I’m just going to let you watch this for yourself
We have a SERIOUS, FOR PROFIT PRISON PROBLEM
This is not about punishment, just bodies and cheap forced labor.
WAKE UP THE FIRST HOMELESS CONCENTRATION CAMP HAS OPENED ALREADY IN THE US. 😡😡😡
Monique ND retweeted
She was bought at fourteen by a man who assaulted her for five years and fathered two of her children.
When she finally fought back and he died, Missouri put her on trial — and the court ruled she had no right to defend herself. Celia. 1855.
Missouri law at the time said a woman could use deadly force to defend her honour.
Celia's lawyers argued that law covered her. The judge ruled it did not — because the statute said "any woman," and Celia was not legally a woman. She was property.
That was the finding. Not that she was lying. Not that it had not happened. That the protection did not extend to her, because she was a thing.
She was convicted and sentenced to hang. The state waited until she had given birth — the baby was stillborn — and then executed her in December 1855.
She was nineteen years old.
Her story is the kind of buried history that we must never forget savvypurchase.samcart.com/pr…
Monique ND retweeted
What is the Nuvaxovid COVID vaccine and how is it different?
@paulseaman31 and I have put together a comprehensive document summarizing the available information regarding the main differences between #Nuvaxovid and the more common mRNA based #COVID vaccines. 🧪🧵1/
#Novavax
ALT Nuvaxovid protein-based nanoparticles are made of engineered proteins that help trigger an immune response ( https://www.nature.com/articles/s41541-021-00330-7 ).
Monique ND retweeted
They organized to demand fair pay for their own cotton. In response, a mob, U.S. troops, three days of hunting Black sharecroppers through the fields—and the deaths of 100 to 200+ Black men, women, and children.
This is the The Elaine Massacre of 1919.
Their crime was organizing a union so cotton planters would finally pay them a fair price for their own crops.
When white landowners found out, they didn't send lawyers. They sent a mob of hundreds, backed by U.S. troops.
Twelve Black survivors were then sentenced to death for "inciting" the violence done to them.
They organized for fair pay. The response was armed violence, a massacre, and then death sentences for the people who survived it.
The Elaine Massacre is one of the histories we documented in our book.
They tried to punish the victims and bury the story. We put the story back on the record savvypurchase.samcart.com/pr…
Monique ND retweeted
"In every country in which there has been a loss of freedom, where does it begin? It begins in news media, in public print, in books, and on the proscenium. That's where they attack you first right there. That's the bread basket." —Rod Serling
Monique ND retweeted
You’ve got to hand it to them.
They changed the language.
Changed the guidance.
Changed the metrics.
Changed the dashboards.
Changed what counted.
Changed what we counted.
Spent months arguing droplets while the virus rode the fucking air.
Then eventually
Oh.
Ventilation.
Filtration.
Aerosols.
Indoor air.
Who knew.
They declared emergencies over and people heard:
Disease over.
They retired dashboards.
Relaxed reporting.
Stopped testing.
Stopped counting as carefully.
Then pointed at the numbers we stopped collecting and said:
See?
Better.
They took a systemic problem and privatized it.
Your mask.
Your vaccine.
Your test.
Your risk.
Your kid.
Your elderly parent.
Your immunocompromised neighbor.
Your problem.
A virus transmitted between human beings became a matter of personal responsibility.
Amazing trick.
They watched vaccine confidence erode.
Watched misinformation metastasize.
Watched people go from lining up for vaccines to treating basic immunology like a fucking personality test.
They taught a generation that infection is inevitable.
That repeated infection is normal.
That protecting other people is neurotic.
That staying home sick is unreasonable.
That wanting clean indoor air is somehow more radical than breathing sewage through a HEPA filter would be.
They turned “living with COVID” into pretending COVID had stopped living with us.
Meanwhile:
People still get COVID.
People still get hospitalized.
People still die.
People still develop Long COVID.
Kids develop it.
Healthy adults develop it.
Workers leave the workforce because of it.
NIH keeps spending hundreds of millions studying it.
The Department of Defense studies it because chronic post-COVID illness can affect military readiness.
Read that again.
We can’t talk about COVID at Thanksgiving without somebody rolling their eyes,
but the fucking Pentagon is worried about what it does to readiness.
That is where we are.
COVID became something that “happened.”
A historical period.
An aesthetic.
Zoom school.
Sourdough.
Tiger King.
Masks.
Lockdowns.
Remember COVID?
Yeah.
I remember polio too.
Still wouldn’t lick the fucking iron lung.
We performed perhaps the greatest linguistic disappearing act of the pandemic:
We ended the emergency,
and somehow convinced ourselves
we ended the disease.
The virus didn’t sign the memo.
SARS-CoV-2 did not attend the press conference.
It did not agree to the new terminology.
It did not care that everybody was exhausted.
It did not care that prevention became politically inconvenient.
It did not care that the economy wanted 2019 back.
It just kept infecting people.
And perhaps the most astonishing part is how thoroughly we normalized the contradiction.
We’ll spend billions studying Long COVID
while acting embarrassed to say “COVID.”
We’ll fund biomedical research into post-viral disability
while designing schools, workplaces, hospitals, restaurants and public buildings as though airborne infectious disease is somebody else’s problem.
We’ll tell disabled people:
We believe you.
And then build society around maximizing opportunities to create more of them.
We’ll tell parents they’re free to send sick children into classrooms.
Tell workers they’re free to come to work infected.
Tell everyone else they’re free to breathe the same air.
Freedom everywhere.
Except freedom from preventable exposure.
Six and a half years.
And where is the reckoning?
Where is the investigation into what we learned?
Where is the massive clean-air infrastructure program?
Where are the ventilation standards people can actually see?
Where is paid sick leave worthy of an airborne pandemic?
Where is the cultural norm that says:
If you’re infectious,
don’t fucking infect other people?
Instead we got amnesia.
We got euphemisms.
We got “summer flu.”
“Something going around.”
“Just a cold.”
“Mystery illness.”
Anything except the word that might remind us we made choices.
Monique ND retweeted
Let us take a moment to marvel at the pinnacle of modern political discourse: the absolute triumph of the reptile brain. Why bother evolving a prefrontal cortex capable of logic, nuance, or reading a basic statistic when you have a perfectly good, scaly brain stem that can just
Monique ND retweeted
OMG I’m downloaded an app called Be My Eyes, where blind people can call and they can ask anything like if an outfit matches or food is in date.
And I just got my first call!! A lady in US asked if she’d bought the right jam. She had. She was lovely. That’s so fcking cool!
Monique ND retweeted
Today, I’m going to give you ten years of therapy in two minutes.
I'm a brain surgeon, and I'm gonna show you how to make rapid progress in healing the wounds you’ve been carrying; the ones from childhood, from broken relationships, from things said that can’t be unsaid, and from things done that can’t be undone. Let's scrub in and get it done.
Here's a Fact: Your Wound Lives in Your Brain, But Your Healing Lives in Your Mind
When something hurts you, your brain stores it. The sights, the sounds, the sting of the words, the shape of the moment. That storage is real and physical.
But here’s where the hope of healing lies: your brain doesn’t get the final vote on what that memory means to you. Your mind does. And your mind is not the same thing as your brain.
Neuroscience nugget: Emotional memories get encoded in circuits involving the amygdala and hippocampus, but each time you recall a memory, it becomes temporarily unstable and gets rewritten via a process called reconsolidation. That means every time you revisit a wound, you have a fresh chance to change how it’s stored.
Self-Brain Surgery Procedure: The next time an old wound surfaces, don’t just relive it. Instead, reframe it while it’s “open.” Ask: What is the truest, most redemptive way to understand this moment now? Speak that new understanding out loud before you let the memory close back up.
Scripture: “He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds.” Psalm 147:3, NIV
This is self-brain surgery. Hard and holy work.
Follow me to connect neuroscience and scripture every day. Save this to help when you need to heal. Share it with a friend who's hurting.
Click the link in my bio to learn more about The Life-Changing Art of Self-Brain Surgery, my NYT bestselling book.
#selfbrainsurgery #neuroscience #neuroplasticity #grief #healing