Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 40 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
FEMA Guidance to Avoid Trump-Supporting Houses
Allow me to suggest a take on the FEMA guidance to avoid houses sporting Trump signage.
The common take I get from “conservative” media is that this guidance arose from a politically-motivated desire by FEMA to punish political opposition.
But maybe instead the guidance arose from a genuine belief by the FEMA official in the media and Democratic narrative/assertion that Trump supporters were a threat to the physical safety of government employees.
If so, it would show government bureaucrats as stupid, ignorant, uninformed idiots, but maybe not evil. I prefer to avoid ascribing evil when stupidity and ignorance provide a sufficient explanation.
The other items on the “best practices” guidance list all relate to the crew workers’ physical safety and physical well-being.
(photo taken from DailyWire’s initial exclusive report. https://www.dailywire.com/news/exclusive-fema-official-ordered-relief-workers-to-skip-houses-with-trump-signs )
The rest of the guidance list suggests the FEMA official was concerned with the physical safety of the FEMA workers. This in turn suggests that the FEMA official instructed workers to avoid Trump-supporting residences not because of political animosity, but because of concern that the Trump supporters represented a risk to the physical well-being of the workers (i.e., Trump supporters would physically attack the workers). The FEMA official bought into the media/Democratic narrative that Trump and his supporters are a physical threat to the peace and well-being of their neighbors and others.
So maybe the FEMA official’s motivation was not to punish opponents of the government administration politics based on their politics. Again, this would suggest that the FEMA official is stupid and ignorant, but maybe not evil.
I find it less harmful to all if I assume stupidity, ignorance, and idiocy before I assume evil. But either way, it’s an argument for why the government and its bureaucrats should be involved in as few things as possible.
Published in Election 2024
While true, I think that it is quite possible that to wilfully suspend disbelief so as to take the establishment narrative at face value in order to withhold assistance can, in fact, amount to evil. Only a small amount of rational thought is enough to conclude that 50% of the country can’t be physically dangerous. It is fine to hold and express outrageous opinions in the faculty lounge or on X; it is not fine to act upon them in the Real World. People should be held responsible for their own beliefs.
Absolutely.
I worked on a project years ago where the construction manager submitted duplicate receipts (and not just once) with their pay applications. They were either incompetent or criminal. Either way, it seems to me, they should have been fired.
A FEMA official whether this stupid, or ignorant, or evil, should be fired.
Or am I just that intolerant – ‘Get off my lawn!’ By the way, nothing I’ve ever said.
FIFY.
Wat would your reaction be if the official picked a demographic that actually was more likely to be:
?
Fired?? That’s all?
I know that actually getting fired from a government job is practically unheard of, but shouldn’t this kind of maliciousness result in something a little more punitive, some well-publicized jail time? Or maybe the option, given to the perp, of two weeks in a stock on the public square, with baskets of rotted fruit supplied by North Carolina growers?
Depends on what the legalities are. It seems that you often need fairly specific laws in order to get things like this prosecuted successfully.
Marn’i Washington and Lois Lerner will probably get ivy league faculty positions teaching administrative law and practice.
Honestly, FST, I see very little difference between political animosity and fear based on prejudicial ignorance. These are government employees supposedly trained to help fellow Americans trapped in a disaster of one form or another. Politicizing FEMA just emphasizes how close we have come to Divided States of America and how lucky we are that Trump will be the next POTUS.
According to this story, you may be partly right: https://townhall.com/tipsheet/miacathell/2024/11/12/fema-anti-trump-widespread-n2647663
According to the person that was fired, the practice of avoiding “politically hostile areas” is widespread and comes from the higher ups. :
“FEMA previously paused aid in parts of North Carolina in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene. FEMA responders were reportedly relocated over concerns of an “armed militia” allegedly threatening personnel in the area.
“Senior leadership will lie to you and tell you that they do not know,” Washington asserted. “But if you ask the [Disaster Survivor Assistance] crew leads and specialists what they are experiencing in the field, they will tell you.”
But I suspect that they only need the slightest pretense to skip these so-called hostile areas and houses, and I consider that evil.
Thank you for the update with the allegation that the issue is widespread, and emanates from upper management. Who seem to be infected with some combination of stupidity and ignorance, and potential evil, possibly assuming conservatives are as evil as leftists, who of course often desire to kill their political opponents.
Politically devastating. What bypassed house or area isn’t going to notice and harden in their hostility to corrupt elites. How many neighbors and friends will act politically out of sympathy. FEMA actively delegitimized Biden and their own organization.
Empirically, I don’t know how to evaluate this.
Your approach does give a pass to evil, in some instances. That’s not good, either.
Regarding the background of the story, the Daily Wire link indicates, if I understand it correctly, that this “FEMA Guidance” was given by a single supervisor in a single location, Lake Placid, Florida. Is this correct?
It’s not good, but it appears that this was done by a low-level person in a very limited location. Implying that the entirety of FEMA is responsible, as the Daily Wire article seems to do, doesn’t seem accurate to me.
What is remarkable is that apparently the guidance was followed without protest which strongly suggests a uniform political culture and not just an error by a rogue idiot. Marn’i Washington claims that there were other areas (North Carolina) in which this policy was in place. (She thinks that is a defense.) The alleged excuse (can’t find the Twitter item where I came across this) was that Trump-loving rednecks will shoot federal employees who knock on their doors so the heck with them.
The supervisor is claiming she is not a rogue idiot, and it is not a single supervisor, but is in fact a widespread attitude fostered by high level management.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/fired-fema-employee-says-instructions-skip-trump-homes-were-part-colossal-avoidance-policy
Such a policy does suggest a widespread departmental culture that believes Trump-loving rednecks will shoot federal employees who knock on their doors so the heck with them.
Durn revenooers!
I wish I believed it was simply about employee safety. In fact, Isaac Schorr writes:
https://nypost.com/2024/11/12/opinion/fema-not-helping-trump-voters-wasnt-isolated-and-its-a-massive-scandal/
So, it looks as though this may have been about “equity” as much as about safety.
Well, yes, I imagine they do feel that the path to equity is to put down the backward, uneducated rednecks who don’t live and think on quite such an exalted plane as themselves.
I think this is a distraction and not that big a deal. I’m not saying that it is not happening. It could be.
But consider the bigger issue.
The real issue is that FEMA did not come into the affected regions of No Carolina and Tennessee where entire communities had been washed away. Volunteer citizens used their private helicopters to rescue people. In some cases the FEMA officials told them to cut out these rescue attempts and to stop these flights or face arrests.
The flood victims remained cold, hungry, de-hydrated and desperate.
Now FEMA is going and offering these people $2500 per parcel if they sign over their flooded out properties over to them.
I attended a meeting recently in Sonoma Cunty Calif so I could hear first hand accounts of what people there went through after the residents of the city of Santa Rosa lost their homes in the Oct 8th 2017 fire.
The fire was of course a different situation from the floods which we just all witnessed on TV and social media. For one thing, parts of the surrounding environment were unaffected. This meant that people in Santa Rosa and Napa County could go and stay with friends and relatives.
I can’t imagine the despair people experience when they lose their homes and businesses, and know that friends and relatives also perished. But the situation is quite a bit better if you have food, water, necessary medicines and clean clothing provided etc.
However in the weeks following the 2017 fire’s devastation, the residents never imagined that the Sonoma County Master Plan for the future meant they could not rebuild. Only because the entire community united to see that homeowners could rebuild did it happen.
And so people were able to rebuild – and to rebuild in full. (These “sustainable” city and county plans often forbid any new buildings being bigger than 1600 sq ft. So if you lost your 2500 sq foot dream home, officials tell you to dream on and in the interests of greening humanity, learn to be content with a smaller place.)
These catastrophes are all nothing more than an unofficial land grab. It has happened all across Calif and the Pacific Northwest, and in Lahaina HI. Now it is happening in the Southeastern portion of the US.
It is human nature to try and make the victims responsible for what happens in these cases. That way we can say “If I lived in the hills of Tennessee, I’d have gotten out the first moment a raindrop hit my property.” But people rely on the weather being the same as it ever was. No one in these regions had ever even heard of a flood hitting the hillsides they lived on, regarding the people’s homes that were perched on top of the hills. Many people received no warnings of a flood. Others received the official warning via cell phone 17 minutes before their home was sliding down their hillside.
Can you explain what you said here. I haven’t heard this.
Hey! Hey! Those charges were never proven!
That FEMA official gave an interview which indicated that this was policy, from the top. And could prove it if they interview field officials and check the communications. Sounds like one more thing that needs to be investigated in January.
Definitely. The sooner the better.
I hope people don’t forget.
Next time I see a pertinent video of a resident from one of the washed put communities describing what tremendous punishing circumstances the entire region has experienced, plus what FEMA has been doing, I will put it on my youtube channel & then direct people, including you, over to it.
The Mainstream media, and God bless their ever loving truth-avoiding hearts, seems to have ignored the story of all the many criminal activities that have gone on. Local news has been a little bit better.
But the same pattern of lack of state and FEMA agency support plus massive media mis-info followed in the wake of the Paradise fire in Calif in Nov 2018, and after the 2023 Lahaina HI fire.
In the meantime, if you have an “X” account, and anyone who truly wants real news should have one, there is today’s report from The Hodge Twins:
https://x.com/hodgetwins/status/1843142106820276501
The text from their report:
“Today’s update from our team in North Carolina “The public doesn’t understand how bad it is for these rural parts of North Carolina. Their roads are completely gone and have been replaced by the river. It’s going to take YEARS to try and fix.
“We delivered supplies today to multiple remote mountain towns and flew doctors in to check out some elderly folks who lost their homes near Burnsville. Cadaver dogs are still finding people in the rubble and they say this could go on for months. There are trailers full of bodies, it’s much worse than the media is saying.
“We’ve have been here 2 days and have yet to see FEMA. The support operations are almost all from private citizens, mostly former SOF guys who are leading and coordinating. We have seen the National Guard but not as much as you would think.
“It’s TRUE that some local police are threatening volunteers with arrest if they try to go past check points to help, we saw it ourselves. These people need all the help they can get over the next couple months. Plain to see that government has neglected these people.”
My comment: There is a bunch of photos and one video at the above link.
####
Right you are, Kozak.
And it is a situation that has been on going forever. At least going back to 2005 and Katrina.
It needs more than investigation. The people who from their highest spots in bureaucracy direct their personnel to abandon totally wrecked communities, leaving citizens to simply suffer and then suffer some more, should be severely punished. Including the loss of their pensions.
With support from the dying media they will likely claim that they were merely warning their employees that a Trump yard sign in a rural area indicates a risk of encountering a heavily armed racist. Mere prudence.
Imagine if during a similar disaster, FEMA employees were warned to avoid houses in poor urban areas with BLM signs because they might be armed felons afraid of government personnel and because they might be attacked and robbed.
For some of the employees, FEMA could hire some of the workplace consultants that conduct sessions on how not to be racist and sexist, except this time on how not to be bigotted against Trump supporters. This should be followed up to make sure the lessons took hold, and if not, repeat the process until morale improves.
Or just fire some people.