How Many Domestic Terrorists Does It Take To Stop FEMA In North Carolina?
One or a convoy, and that's not funny!
The Hurricane Helene conspiracy theories out of North Carolina have taken an even darker turn. Stripes reported yesterday that on Saturday, the US Forest Service sent an urgent message to federal aid workers — who were searching for survivors, clearing roads, and delivering supplies — to evacuate Rutherford County, North Carolina, immediately, because of threats from marauding domestic terrorists: “National Guard troops ‘had come across x2 trucks of armed militia saying there (sic) were out hunting FEMA.’”
FEMA didn’t provide any other details, but acknowledged that they’ve had to make operational adjustments for safety, and recovery efforts in Ashe County have also reportedly been paused. WTF, people?
FEMA contractors doing inspections were ordered to pause and head back to their hotels, and a guy was arrested for “going armed to the terror of the public” — love those olde-timey torts! — with his assault rifle while threatening FEMA. He was let go after bailing out for $10,000, or $1000 to a bail bondsman. The Rutherford sheriff now says it was just that one dude, and no militia convoys at all. Who can say?
What’s spurring this crazy? Probably the rumors that have been spreading on Elon Musk’s MySpace and from brain genius Alex Jones that if people apply for financial assistance, FEMA will take their house, so that the government can mine their properties for lithium. Elon Musk has also personally been lying that FEMA has “actively blocked” donations from getting to storm victims, and lied that the agency is “seizing goods […] and locking them away to state they are their own.”
And then there’s Marge Taylor Greene and other conspiracists fantasizing that the storm was made by the Democrats who control the weather, probably using the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP), and/or cloud seeding, and surely The Jews are involved somehow, with their space lasers. The storm has been such a cornucopia of rumors that FEMA has its own rumor-debunking page.
So the secretary of Homeland Security and FEMA’s director of public affairs and the mayor of Asheville have been the target of antisemitic attacks. Trump, never one to see a disaster and not try to find a way to make it benefit him personally, has been ranting that Harris “spent all her FEMA money, billions of dollars, on housing for illegal migrants, many of whom should not be in our country,” and “they stole the FEMA money, just like they stole it from a bank, so they could give it to their illegal immigrants that they want to have vote for them this season.” Hell, even Glenn Kessler called that one outrageously false, because the only person who’s diverted FEMA funding to locking up illegalz was Trump.
There’s rumors that have been spreading that FEMA is refusing to help in Republican areas, and also just a few days ago a competing rumor was that Rutherford County search and rescue efforts had been abandoned, and Chimney Rock was going to be bulldozed. It’s Schrödinger’s FEMA: both absent and bulldozing your land for the lithium! Do we need to say that none of this is true? None of this is true.
It is also not helping anything that JD Vance refused to disavow rumors of mismanagement in an interview with ABC’s Martha Raddatz yesterday.
All of this lying serves Team Treason in a few ways. They can complain that Kamala Harris is doing a terrible job with the recovery efforts, even though she is vice president and it’s not her job to begin with, and North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper says that the state is getting everything they need. (He’s a Democrat and would say that, but the governors of Florida and Georgia … are probably secret Democrats too.) The rumors of FEMA failure also help people forget Trump’s response to Hurricane Maria, which killed about 2,975 people, which was to throw some paper towels at Puerto Ricans and shit-talk the mayor of San Juan.
And as it happens, Project 2025 calls for gutting FEMA, eliminating Small Business Association Disaster Loans completely and limiting what the federal government can contribute to disasters. And for eliminating any mention of climate change at all in government, of course, and gutting or eliminating National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, The National Weather Service, and the Environmental Protection Agency. “FEMA’s not working” makes for a nice segue into “let’s get rid of FEMA, and replace it with concepts of a plan.”
It’s all terribly sad, in terms of existentially WTF is going on in this country, and particularly for people in western North Carolina who still need help, are trapped by roads washed out or covered with debris from mudslides, and are without water, electricity, or Internet. It’s the most vulnerable people who always get hurt the most by this bullshit!
But Trump don’t care, do U?
[Stripes]
Self-Fulfilling Prophecy 101 teaches:
1. Declare federal agency is evil and ignoring survivor needs based on political leanings.
2. Stir indignation amongst crazies who are among the survivors who most need evil federal agency support.
3. Crazies take up guns, threaten to kill federal civil servants.
4. Agency withdraws employees from area for obvious safety reasons.
5. Presto! People are denied help and support. Crazies point to new fact as proof that federal agency is evil and ignoring survivor needs based on the political leanings of the violent crazies.
6. Prophecy fact check: true.
Imagine joining The National Guard and finding out the biggest danger wasn't scary furriners, but militia dumbshits from right down the street.