FEMA Orders Waffle House Teleportation Guy To Shut Up About Teleporting To Waffle House
He's reportedly 'increasingly agitated and suspicious,' just what you want in a top disaster response guy.
Donald Trump is a busy man, what with all the important planning he needs to do for his big ballroom and redesigning Air Force One so it has an all-marble fuselage, as well as little annoyances like his war that’s costing a billion dollars every day. So it’s probably no surprise that when Trump was asked to comment on Gregg Phillips, the FEMA official who continues to insist that he really did teleport to Waffle House, Great Leader wasn’t so sure about any of it, including apparently the very concept of “teleportation.”
In a brief interview with CNN on his cellphone Thursday morning about Phillips, President Donald Trump said, ‘What does teleport mean? Was he kidding?’
Told that Phillips was not kidding, Trump responded: ‘I don’t know anything about teleporting. … It just sounds a little strange, but I know nothing about teleporting or him, but I’ll find out about it right now.’
According to CNN’s follow-up reporting on Phillips (paywalled, unfortunately), shortly after CNN’s initial report in late March about Phillips’s claims, the White House got in touch with Homeland Security and told them to get rid of Phillips or hide him somewhere out of public view, maybe with the Epstein files or in that warehouse where they keep the Ark of the Covenant and the 100-MPG carburetor. A White House official told CNN, “Everyone’s thoughts were, ‘What the hell is this? This guy has got to go.’” But this time, for a change, Phillips has stubbornly refused to teleport out of the public eye.
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Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?
Phillips is still somehow in his job as the head of FEMA’s Office of Response and Recovery, the number-three job in the agency. That’s the biggest division in FEMA, which is responsible for coordinating disaster response, getting teams and equipment to the site of an emergency, as well as providing aid and temporary housing to people as the community recovers.
But as CNN reports, Phillips was abruptly unpersoned from a Capitol hearing where he was supposed to testify, and since then has been
quietly sidelined from parts of FEMA’s operations, according to multiple agency sources. He was also directed to stop posting about teleportation on Truth Social, a source familiar told CNN.
Several sources said Phillips was furious — and is now convinced that Trump officials at FEMA and DHS were angling against him. Since then, he has grown increasingly agitated and suspicious, multiple FEMA insiders who work with Phillips told CNN.
Usually, “increasingly agitated and suspicious” is language you’d expect in a story about someone who’s been ordered to stay at least 1000 feet away from an ex-spouse, or who’s had their firearms seized for their own safety. These days, it just means you’re in tune with the president’s typical mood.
Or perhaps this simply illustrates the folly of trying to put in place a restraining order against someone who can transcend time and space.
What We Talk About When We Talk About Teleportation
Phillips does appear to have complied with the directive to shut up about the teleportation thing, at least following an April 1 Truth Social message in which he acknowledged that during the period when he was magically vanishing and then reappearing at various locations, he was under self-treatment for metastatic bone cancer. He said that “conventional medicine had exhausted its options,” so he underwent an “alternative protocol,” which CNN reports involved taking the antiparasitic drugs ivermectin and fenbendazole like he was a sick farm animal.
In that Truth Social post, Phillips explains that reporters got it all wrong, because they left out the important context that during his first “episode” of involuntary teleportation in 2023, he was “in the opening days of intensive treatment, heavily medicated, not thinking about future headlines.” Of course, he was presumably stone cold sober — and miraculously healed of cancer!!!! — by the time he told a rightwing podcaster all about it in January 2025.
Phillips added that there is nothing odd at all about what he’s certain happened, because it’s really common in the Bible:
The word 'teleportation' was not mine. It was used by someone else in the conversation reaching for language to describe something with no easy name. The more accurate biblical terms are 'translated' or 'transported' — not new ideas for people of faith.
He noted that 162 million Americans are Christians, implying that obviously they all believe God sends people gallivanting through space from time to time, so how dare anyone question him. “If you believe that God moves in ways we cannot fully explain, as I do, then having faith is not a soundbite. It is the whole point.”
He added that millions of people have survived cancer, and know all about fighting for their lives no matter what, but that “The press chose to mock that fight.” Because obviously, if you make fun of the weird shit he says he “remembers” from a period when he was heavily medicated and operating a motor vehicle, you are mocking every Christian and every brave cancer survivor in America. Indeed, you are ridiculing all the people of faith in our constitutional republic, and he will not stand for it while you badmouth the United States of America. Then he presumably began humming “The Star-Spangled Banner” as he hit “send.”
Are These Actual Miles?
The CNN report also gleaned previously unreported details from Phillips’s podcast appearances, most of them with his longtime conspiracy-theory collaborator Catherine Engelbrecht. When not streaming bullshit about teleporting Christians, Engelbrecht’s the founder and leader of the grifty “True The Vote” outfit that spread — with help from Phillips — the thoroughly debunked “2000 Mules” conspiracy theory about nonexistent “fraud” in the 2020 election. Among other Amazing True Spiritual Adventures, Phillips said in April 2025 that a friend in Mobile, Alabama, said all Phillips’s mystical travels meant he was “half in and half out” of heaven, but remained in the earthly realm to keep doing God’s work (of lying about the 2020 election, we guess).
The friend joked that Phillips was “God’s zombie,” and he readily agreed, claiming that “I’m actually dead. But I’m here doing God’s stuff. And so we laugh about that a little bit.” Somebody should tell him that he’s actually doing the Zen Buddhist practice of “living as one already dead,” just to freak him the fuck out.
We already knew about his claim that this one time when he was driving, his vehicle “lifted up” and miraculously reappeared in a ditch near a church 40 miles away from Albany, Georgia (remember, he was heavily medicated but not driving while impaired, no no no). But apparently his vehicles fairly regularly took flight in those days, like a wingéd chariot in the Bible, or Fred MacMurray’s Flubber-enhanced Model T! In that January 2025 podcast where Phillips said he’d teleported to Waffle House, he also
described a near-crash in the desert in which he said a deceased girlfriend appeared inside his moving car and lifted it off the road to avoid an oncoming truck. Phillips said he was driving a car he had recently won in a poker game.
“The girl that I had dated came into the car with me, the girl that had died,” Phillips said. “She said ‘You’re not going to survive this. So I’m going to take you away.’ And she lifted me and the car up and out of the way from a truck that had slid across the road and had come all the way across the road and was about to hit me.”
We assume this has to be a separate Harry Potter Magic Car flight, since there aren’t any deserts near Albany, Georgia. Unfortunately, CNN doesn’t say where he ended up after that encounter on a dark desert highway: A ditch, a Waffle House, or the Hotel California.
Phillips has also talked several times about a time where he vanished from a Lowe’s hardware store in Indianapolis for two hours, then reappeared in his car in a McDonald’s parking lot across the street, but his phone showed he had taken 15,000 steps! Phillips says Goddiddit.
“The whole space and time thing, continuum, got all — it fell with me,” he said. “This isn’t a health thing. This isn’t the cancer. This isn’t me. This is a spiritual thing.”
“At some point, I had gone through the drive-through, apparently, gotten a Coke and a Big Mac, and then parked and fell asleep for two hours[.]”
Very stupid scientists all agree this bizarre event cannot possibly be explained in earthly terms like “driving across the street, ordering food, then blacking out without remembering everything you did.”
A Small, Weird Thing
Finally, in a detail that most coverage of Phillips seems to have overlooked, the CNN story also notes that, for all his very weird weirdness, Phillips actually has been one of the few top FEMA appointees to resist the massive layoffs and spending cuts imposed by others in DHS, go figure!
Phillips repeatedly warned that those moves were putting Americans at risk, earning him respect from some senior agency staff who worry FEMA’s capabilities have been crippled in Trump’s second term.
For months, those senior staffers have argued that despite Phillips’ checkered past and history of controversial, conspiratorial statements, he has been the most reasonable and trusted political appointee inside the agency. Phillips, they said, was one of the few willing to push back and protect his team.
Now that his history of bizarre spiritual claims has surfaced, some career officials worry that firing the freaky weirdo could actually make things worse at FEMA. One called the situation “Kafkaesque,” and another said, “Yes, it’s hard to trust the judgment of someone who said they teleported and then doubled down on it. But he seems to really care about people, which I really appreciate. And I think he cares about readiness for hurricane season.”
Strange enough that a FEMA head honcho even knows there’s a hurricane “season.” The risk of keeping Phillips, of course, is that he may decree that rather than wasting money on evacuations, we can just trust God to translate or transport worthy survivors away from impending disasters.
OPEN THREAD.
I couldn't really find anyplace to put this joke I did on the Blueskies yesterday, either:
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:urb2e5upvrdsqbu2gsquhlcf/post/3mjl6amcdvs2d
"Newly released internal marketing studies by Waffle House reveal that between midnight and 5:00 AM on any given night, 30% to 60% of customers cannot state with certainty how they arrived, and believe they may have teleported."
No, there is no logical connection between Raymond Carver and teleportation. I just thought of "will you please be quiet please" and then "what we talk about..." seemed like another good subheading, and so on.