Saturday, 23 November 2024

DAVID KRAYDEN: FEMA has become an ideological joke, where equity is job one and disaster assistance is job none


FEMA is a deeply febrile and inept government agency that should probably be defunded and its work contracted out to effective organizations that really care about people regardless of their gender, skin color or sexuality, like the Samaritan’s Purse.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is serious about putting equity above all. Equity is job one for these bureaucrats who are supposed to be putting disaster relief and saving lives as its top priority, to speak in government parlance. But we learned in the early aftermath of Hurricane Helene that FEMA has decided it is not a search and rescue coordination center, nor a disaster response agency, or even a government department where any common sense abides. Its website heralds how delivering “equity” is FEMA’s top objective. It is an advocate of that woke concept of equity, which though sounding like equality, has nothing to do with assessing people as equals but has everything to do with separating people on the basis of gender, race and sexuality and favoring one group over another on the basis of perceived and imagined past or present discrimination. It is the very basis of identity politics.

FEMA is a deeply febrile and inept government agency that should probably be defunded and its work contracted out to effective organizations that really care about people regardless of their gender, skin color or sexuality, like the Samaritan’s Purse. FEMA has been deeply corrupted by the political tone and blatant ideological lies that have not just corroded the Biden-Harris administration but have defined it – largely because President Joe Biden has been too sick and too inept to chart a rational course for his government and has allowed the kids in the room to do that for him. I wonder sometimes if he woke up from his dementia and pondered for a moment the chaos and stupidity that has arisen around him, whether he would respond with remonstrance or shock.

But it’s one thing to read a website and see how a bureaucracy attempts to popularize its staid talking points and convince you that this is an organization with cutting edge ideas or at least seems to give a damn about doing its job. It’s another thing to hear FEMA employees and other bureaucratic partners in the woke Biden administration actually talk about implementing the organization’s dark agenda.

You can see that on a YouTube video that someone leaked this week. Was it one of the people on the Zoom call? I have no idea but it was certainly someone either being described as a malcontent within the organization or perhaps even a champion of equity who had a revelation, a Damascus road moment, of the need to expose this sick mentality. The video, titled “Helping LGBTQIA+ Community Before Disasters: Preparedness and Mitigation Consideration” is from a March 23, 2023 session available on YouTube.

The meeting is chaired by Tyler Atkins, who, at one point, notes how he was particularly impressed with the phrase "radical spaces of kindness and care" and says the meeting has “sparked, in my mind, thinking about preparedness and how you said, you know, LGBTQIA people and people who have been disadvantaged already are struggling. They already have their own things to deal with. So you add a disaster on top of that, it's just compounding on itself. And I think that is maybe why we're having these discussions. It isn't being talked about. It isn't being socialized. We're not paying attention to this.”

Just how are LGBTQIA people disadvantaged? Some gay couples enjoy a bountiful two-income lifestyle that is not just condoned but lionized by the mainstream media and entertainment industry, So let’s stop the crap, please.

The conversation continues on the video. Maggie Jerry, an employee of the federal government’s Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration, responds to Atkins by saying, “Yeah, there are a couple of things that are intersecting in my mind here. One of them is the culture of emergency management as an organization, as an industry in the United States, specifically not abroad.”

“The shift that we're seeing right now is a shift in emergency management from utilitarian principles, where everything is designed for the greatest good for the greatest amount of people, to disaster equity,” she continued. “But we have to do more, right? And so this topic is intersecting, I think, with a number of other topics where we have to look at policies and understand to what extent they have disadvantaged communities that had less assets, communities that had pre-existing vulnerabilities in accessing disaster related recovery supports.”

So we’ve moved past that silly notion expounded by John Stuart Mill that the state should dispense power for the greatest good for the greatest number of people? Of course, now we can move on to some rubbish termed “disaster equity” or whatever other woke fetish or whim comes to mind.

FEMA has spent more than $1.4 billion on illegal immigrants in the last two years. Well, that’s what it is admitting to. You can bet the actual number is much higher. The Department of Homeland Security Secretary (DHS) has become as cumbersome and corrupt a government appendage as the Department of Defense (DoD) can be. Actually it has become another DoD, but one that is fixated on creating wars with the American people and not fostering endless wars abroad as per DoD’s current mandate.

In the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, I fully supported the creation of DHS, naively believing it really would protect the American homeland from actual terrorist threats and not pro-life activists outside abortion clinics. I believed it would focus on people who wanted to blow up themselves and other Americans in pursuit of a radical agenda to overthrow the government. I would never have believed DHS would ultimately become the chief facilitator of illegal immigration and would be led by a clown like Alejandro Mayorkas, who has let tens of millions of illegals into the country without once admitting there is anything approaching a crisis at the southern border.

Now he is claiming that there is not enough money in the agency’s budget to cover continued disaster relief for hurricane victims. Really? When was there never enough money for anything that the Biden government really wanted to pursue? You are telling me that with all the trillions of dollars this corrupt administration has spent on ridiculous infrastructure plans that didn’t build bridges or inflation-fuelling legislation, outrageously dubbed The Inflation Reduction Act, the bank is closed for poor folks in the South who just went through a horrendous hurricane and might just happen to vote Republican. You’re telling me that you have run out of money when you have always shown the inclination to just print more and spend it on your friends? Sorry, not buying it.

But the best defense is always a good offense, even when that offensive is so laden with mendacity and so stiffened with bureaucratic arthritis that it sounds outrageously out of sync with reality. So FEMA administrator Deanne Criswell did her best to expose the exposers as she attempted to dismiss all the criticism of her lackluster, flaccid and ineffective disaster response as fake news, right from the mouth of former President Donald Trump.

“It’s frankly disappointing we are having to deal with this narrative, the fact there are a few leaders having a hard time telling the difference between fact and fiction is creating an impedance to our ability to actually get people the help they need,” Criswell told MSNBC on Monday.

We are not having a hard time discerning fact from fiction, Deanne. Your own website has made that task quite simple. You are the one who said you favor one group over another in a disaster. Your employees are clearly well-indoctrinated in that belief and yes, you have done an appallingly bad job actually helping people because your pathetic bureaucracy is not geared to help people but to advance an ideology.

So when Trump calls your gang out for abandoning vast swaths of Americans because they don’t practice the government-approved kind of sex or don’t appear to you to be vulnerable folks because the color of their skin is white, he is completely correct and no, such claims are not “frankly ridiculous,” as you had the nerve to suggest to your friends in the left-wing media and he is not writing a “truly dangerous narrative that is creating this fear” among throngs of deserted people. They have every right and reason to be afraid because they can expect no help from you, except perhaps that measly $750 stipend from the federal government that must represent what the Biden-Harris administration considers a bit of black humor at this point.

When you’re caught with a website that advertises exactly what Trump and your detractors are saying, when a video appears that shows exactly what your employees believe, when you’re caught in a monstrous lie about what motivates your organization, you resort to saying everyone else is lying and just fabricating this criticism.

Hurricane Milton is arriving this week and it will be interesting to see if FEMA delivers anything resembling a competent emergency response. Will cueball Mayorkas continue to say there’s no more money or will the cabal supporting the truly incompetent Vice President Kamala Harris decide they had better make this rescue effort look a little better with a presidential election just under a month away? It is all so sickening to watch and to think at the ground level, at the base of all this, all real people with real lives who are incurring hardship and horror while bumbling bureaucrats and petty politicians in the Biden Gang continue to put ideology over solutions. It is a profoundly nauseating performance.

 


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