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FEMA prioritizes DEI while veterans provide aid to NC hurricane victims

Following up on my post from yesterday, I found two more articles showing what poor service we get for our tax dollars from secular leftists. Yesterday, we saw how FEMA was getting in the way of Elon Musk giving aid to hurricane victims, and how FEMA had wasted all their money on illegal immigrant welfare, and how the Democrats would benefit from not helping the hurricane victims at all.

Today, let’s look at a couple of articles from the New York Post. I have to give credit to Dr. Frank Turek for finding both of these articles and posting them on Twitter. If you are not following him, you really should. He tweets a nice mix of apologetics and policy.

Here is Frank’s Twitter account.

First article: (Frank’s tweet)

In FEMA’s alphabet, DEI comes first.

A startling 2023 FEMA webinar features federal health and disaster personnel trumpeting the urgent need to move away from policies that benefit the greatest number of people and instead turn focus toward “disaster equity” where aid is distributed based on innate characteristics like sexual orientation and gender identity.

[…]The initiatives raised at the panel discussion echo many of those on FEMA’s own website, which proudly proclaims instilling “equity as a foundation of emergency management” as goal 1.

“Underserved communities, as well as specific identity groups, often suffer disproportionately from disasters. As a result, disasters worsen inequities already present in society,” the declaration reads in part.

Maybe, as a taxpayer, you thought that the Federal Emergency Management Agency would occupy itself with… emergency management. But that’s not the case. Secular leftists don’t have a rational grounding for morality. When you put them in charge of anything, they don’t see it as their job to serve others. They see their job as looking after themselves – their feelings, and their approval from peers. When you give them money, they don’t solve problems with it. They just use it to virtue signal and buy the approval of their friends. This is why it’s a waste of money to elect secular leftists. They can watch the Black Lives Matter and Antifa domestic terrorists run up 1-2 BILLION dollars in damages, and then turn around and focus on pre-dawn raiding the homes of peaceful pro-lifers with armored vehicles and fully-automatic assault rifles.

Here’s the second article. (Frank’s tweet)

Hundreds of special operations personnel in North Carolina have formed their own homegrown rescue and supply operation in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene after they grew tired of waiting for the federal government to get its act together.

The Post found an all-volunteer operation being run out of a Harley-Davidson dealership with ruthless efficiency and military precision.

“Who’s FEMA?” ex-Green Beret Adam Smith derisively responded when asked about the agency’s presence on the ground since the deadly storm ravaged the rural western part of the state.

“This disaster has definitively proven without a shadow of a doubt FEMA’s incompetence and incapability,” he said, noting that the agency didn’t even show up until Thursday — almost a week after the storm that has killed at least 232, nearly half of them in the mountainous west of the Tar Heel State.

[…]They’re using their own aircraft to fly doctors, medicine, generators, fuel and food to isolated residents cut off from the world by the unprecedented floods to washed out mountain roads and wiped entire towns off the map.

[…]Now that the effort has taken on a life of its own, Smith and others leading the operation have gone from cursing FEMA for its absence to hoping they never come back.

Smith said he fears their carefully calibrated rescue mission will be bogged down with governmental red tape if the feds show up.

“Nobody out here wants the federal agencies to come in. FEMA has walked into operations centers like this and has attempted to just take over and tell them what they’re doing is illegal and they’re not allowed to keep going. I’ve seen it firsthand in this area,” Smith told The Post.

“My biggest fear is they’ll move into the area and in the process they’ll reinvent the wheel and rebuild the entire process.”

Smith said he’s even directly told agencies to stay away.

“I’ve respectfully told FEMA individuals on a couple of different occasions, ‘don’t come to our location, we don’t want your help.’”

In just a few days, the “Redneck Air Force” has evolved from surveying road damage and going door-to-door on horseback to the military-scale operation that stands today.

With the group’s rescue operations now complete, they’ve turned their attention to flying supplies to communities cut off from communication and electricity.

By the way, if you are in the Charlotte / Rock Hill area, and would like to attend a really good apologetics conference, check out the Southern Evangelical Seminary National Apologetics conference this Friday and Saturday. It features a few of the recent guests we’ve had on the Knight and Rose Show: Fuz Rana, Casey Luskin and Frank Turek.

3 thoughts on “FEMA prioritizes DEI while veterans provide aid to NC hurricane victims”

  1. I used to work for FEMA and while I HATE defending them, there are some misconceptions about FEMA that inform this story.

    Response time:

    FEMA is not 911. There is a process before FEMA can even come into a disaster. The only FEMA people who may be there during or immediately after an event are Urban Search and Rescue teams, or those helping the state build their case for a disaster declaration. Before that, the response is handled by local, county and state officials and non-profit organizations. These entities often receive funding from FEMA, but until there is a disaster declaration that is the extent to which FEMA can LEGALLY get involved.

    Once the president issues a disaster declaration, FEMA can begin to deploy people to the disaster. About a third of FEMA employees who deploy are reservists, who only work for FEMA when they are deployed. (That’s what I was.)

    When there is a declaration, the state coordinates with FEMA. While I am sure Smith means well and does good work, FEMA will not listen to people like him if he tells them to stay away. He doesn’t have the authority to tell them that.

    Supplies:

    It’s awesome that these people are moving commodities into the area, but one of the biggest (while nicest) problems in disaster response is donation management. These people are operating on the assumption that no one else is bringing supplies in (and he may be right) but if he is not, you quickly run into problems of where to store donated supplies. This is why states have Voluntary Organizations Active in a Disaster (VOAD) committees so that you don’t have duplicated efforts like this could be.

    DEI:

    I got so sick of hearing DEI crap while I was there. They are obsessed with it. However, “equity as a foundation for disaster response” sounds good to the DEI cult, it is sort of meaningless. It doesn’t mean people who don’t check the DEI boxes don’t get the assistance they would otherwise get. It means that FEMA spends additional effort (and money) focusing on “vulnerable populations” in an affected area. This means that in a disaster on the scale of Helene, you may have 4-6 people, “civil rights advisors” working the disaster. They do things from participating in site inspections of potential Disaster Recovery Centers (DRCs) the Joint Field Office, or branch offices to ensure they would be ADA compliant, to calling and visiting organizations that serve “vulnerable populations” to tell them who to call if they have problems getting help. Its wasteful, inefficient, and often done by incompetent people, but it doesn’t take away from the help others get. (Washington NEVER spends money on this OR that, they always spend on both.) These civil rights advisers will spend most of their time either driving from site to site from a central location (when I worked the Mississippi tornadoes in 2023, we would spend 4-6 hours a day driving from Jackson) or sitting in front of a laptop writing reports.

    FEMA is a dumpster fire of DEI hires and inefficiency, but much of the criticism for the Helene response is misdirected.

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  2. After Katrina/Rita (2005), I spent a week with our church’s Childcare Disaster Relief unit; we were in Minneapolis at a resettlement center where people who had given up on New Orleans were being given assistance in finding housing, getting identification, school enrollment, etc. We entered through the back door (with all of the other aid workers) and had to sign in and out each day. We had to use the port a potty out back also. It was half way through the week before I discovered that there was someone (homeland security or FEMA, I think) who was supposed to be monitoring the sign in sheet. We arrived before this person, left after this person, and all of my bathroom breaks on a 12 hour day managed to be while this person was somewhere else for the first half of the week.

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