Tag: natural disasters

FEMA politically discriminated against Americans under Biden: Report

Reports of FEMA disaster assistance teams in 2024 bypassing homes displaying signs supporting then-presidential candidate Donald Trump were true and were indicative of a pattern tracing back to Hurricane Ida in 2021, says an internal probe by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

In addition, the 22-page analysis made available Tuesday says the Federal Emergency Management Agency violated the Privacy Act of 1974, treated individuals unfairly based on political beliefs, and these actions stemmed from systemic issues in FEMA policies, processes and practices.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said evidence is clear of “textbook political discrimination against Americans in crisis.”

“The federal government,” Noem said, “was withholding aid against Americans in crisis based on their political beliefs – this should horrify every American, regardless of political persuasion. For years, FEMA employees under the Biden administration intentionally delayed much-needed aid to Americans suffering from natural disasters on purely political grounds.

“They deliberately avoided houses displaying support for President Trump and the Second Amendment, illegally collected and stored information about survivors’ political beliefs, and failed to report their malicious behavior. We will not let this stand.”

Matt Taibbi was first to report the investigation’s conclusion on Monday. The Center Square on Monday was unsuccessful in obtaining a copy of the report before the Tuesday morning national release.

Evidence examined by the Privacy Office of Homeland Security included screenshots of FEMA’s tool to collect and maintain information for the purpose of disaster survivor assistance. The report says, “The entries within the tool clearly showed that canvassers included information related to political party affiliation, campaign signs, and other information that may be considered First Amendment-protected freedom of expression within the free-text notes section.”

And, it said, “In several instances, canvassers’ records indicate that canvassers skipped homes and left no disaster assistance flyers, citing the First Amendment-protected activity.”

A map of the United States includes instances in eight states between 2021 and 2024, with the testimony to Congress quote of former FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell above it. She said, “I do not believe that this employee’s actions are indicative of any widespread cultural problems at FEMA.”

Marn’i Washington, fired from her position as a disaster survivor assistance crew leader for FEMA, on the Nov. 11 edition of the Roland Martin Unfiltered Daily Digital Show had confirmed homes skipped. She said it happened at homes not only with signs for Trump but also for Kamala Harris and Joe Biden.

She said it happened in Florida and the Carolinas. Hurricane Milton was one of three hurricanes to hit Florida in 66 days, and another was Helene that ravaged Georgia, the Carolinas and Tennessee – the most deaths and mostly costly damage coming in North Carolina.

On the Homeland Security report’s map, two notations for North Carolina include instances in October and November last year. The first says, “The survivor had a sign that read NRA, we do our part,” and the second said, “Survivor stated that homes have been damaged, but there are Republicans on the grounds with guns, so please be careful.”

A dot for Florida from October says, “Trump sign, no contact per leadership.” Another dot for November said, “There was a political flyer so I didn’t leave a FEMA brochure.”

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Journalist Exposes More Proof That FEMA Workers Collected Information About Politics of Disaster Victims

Following the disaster of Hurricane Milton, there were multiple reports throughout the affected areas in the south that FEMA workers were politicizing the response by skipping over homes that displayed Trump signs.

It’s maddening to think that such a thing could happen in the United States.

Following these reports, there were denials from some FEMA people while some pointed fingers at others claiming they were told this was official policy. In short, it mess and some people were fired.

Now the journalist Matt Taibbi has exposed more proof that this was happening.

From Racket News on Substack:

Exclusive: FEMA Workers Improperly Collected Data About Politics of Disaster Victims

Last November 8th, on the Saturday after Election Day, one of the more bizarre post-scripts to Donald Trump’s re-election emerged in the form of a Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) decision to sideline one official accused of telling FEMA workers to “avoid homes advertising Trump” while canvassing for victims of Hurricane Milton in Florida. The Daily Wire spoke to multiple FEMA officials who produced screenshots of entries like “Trump sign, no contact per leadership”…

A year later, the Privacy Office of the Department of Homeland Security is releasing a review of that episode, the broader issue of using disaster relief work to collect political intelligence on voters, and the potentially withholding of benefits from some with the wrong beliefs. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the new administration found more than just one “isolated incident,” describing violations of the Privacy Act of 1974, which with a few exceptions bars collection of information about First Amendment-protected speech, like political signage. Most tellingly, though, DHS investigators found — in a near-exact parallel to trends in pro-censorship programs — that a lot of the political controversy surrounding FEMA aid grew out of the vague way in which the agency’s Disaster Survivor Assistance Field Operations Guide was written…

Some examples cited: October, 2021: “Homeowner had sign stated… this is Trump country.” September, 2021: “A lot of political flags, posters, etc. ‘Fuck Joe Biden,’ ‘MAGA 2024,’ ‘Joe Biden Sucks’ ‘Trump 2024’ We do not recommend anyone visiting this location.” November 2024: ‘There was a political flyer so I didn’t leave a FEMA brochure.” Neither Criswell nor Washington responded to requests for comment.

It’s just stunning that this even happened at all.

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World Health Organization Begs Taliban to Accept Female Aid Workers for Earthquake Victims

The World Health Organization (W.H.O.) pleaded Monday with the Taliban junta in Afghanistan to lift its Islamist restrictions against female workers, so that women would be allowed to travel without male guardians and provide humanitarian relief for victims of the devastating September 1 earthquake.

“A very big issue now is the increasing paucity of female staff in these places,” noted the deputy W.H.O. representative to Afghanistan, Dr. Mukta Sharma.

Sharma told Reuters that 90% of the medical staff in the area affected by the earthquake are male, and few of the female staffers were fully qualified doctors. She felt more female doctors would help women in the quake area who were afraid to deal with male physicians. 

Sharma also said the Taliban’s religious edicts against women traveling without male escorts were making it difficult for women to leave the quake area to receive hospital care.

India Today reported on Friday that “Taliban-imposed gender restrictions” are “compounding the tragedy for Afghan women” in other ways as well. 

For example, under the Taliban’s version of Islamic law, women can only make physical contact with their husbands or close male relatives — which means a large number of women are still buried under rubble in villages collapsed by the earthquake, because male rescue workers cannot touch them, and females are not allowed to travel to the disaster area to help.

According to India Today, badly injured female survivors have been left trapped in the debris of collapsed buildings while dead bodies were recovered around them. 

The New York Times (NYT) quoted women who said they were “pushed aside” and “forgotten” while men and boys received treatment for their injuries.

“It felt like women were invisible. The men and children were treated first, but the women were sitting apart, waiting for care,” a male rescue volunteer said.

There are not many qualified female rescue workers to go around, as the Taliban banned women from receiving education in medicine and other advanced fields in 2023. Foreign visitors have observed that hospitals in Afghanistan are almost entirely devoid of female staffers. The NYT said its reporters saw no women among the medical teams treating earthquake survivors.

Maternity care is particularly difficult to come by thanks to the Taliban’s restrictions, and the U.N. estimates there were at least 11,600 pregnant women in the earthquake zone.

The Taliban also banned women from working for foreign humanitarian groups and non-governmental organizations. Even female employees of the United Nations have been harassed and intimidated out of their workplaces.

“The restrictions are huge, the mahram issue continues, and no formal exemption has been provided by the de facto authorities,” Sharma told Reuters. Mahram is the name of the law that requires women to have male escorts when they travel.

“That’s why we felt we had to advocate with (authorities) to say, this is the time you really need to have more female health workers present, let us bring them in, and let us search from other places where they’re available,” she said.

The death toll from the September 1 earthquakes is now over 2,200, plus 3,600 injured. Countless homes were destroyed, leaving survivors to huddle in tents and other temporary structures. Many of the refugees are refusing to return home, now that they have seen how poorly the Taliban junta deals with earthquakes and landslides.

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Trump admin drops Israel boycott conditions from disaster aid guidance after intense backlash

The Trump Administration on Monday dropped language from the Department of Homeland Security that would have denied disaster aid funding to cities and states that boycotted Israeli companies, following intense backlash from both sides of the aisle.

The DHS Standard Terms and Conditions on Monday morning, included the following statement:

“Discriminatory prohibited boycott means refusing to deal, cutting commercial relations, or otherwise limiting commercial relations specifically with Israeli companies or with companies doing business in or with Israel or authorized by, licensed by, or organized under the laws of Israel to do business.”

That language has since been removed from the DHS’s most up to date version. The original post with the Israel-related language may be found here.

The removal followed intense online backlash from right-wing and left-wing advocates online, many of whom deemed it evidence of Israeli capture of the American government.

“Denying American victims of natural disasters aid if they are insufficiently supportive of Israel. Absolute insanity,” wrote podcast Krystal Ball.

“I’ve never seen someone tank their legacy so fast. This is not America first and anyone advising him on this should be fired,” musician Alexandra Lains wrote.

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Climate Alarmists Wrong: Increased Economic Damage Doesn’t Prove Storms Are Getting Worse

One of the indicators that climate alarmists use to push the climate crisis narrative is the increasing cost of storms.

The logic appears straightforward: a storm that did $10 million in damage must be more severe than one that did $1 million in damage, and since storms cost less money in the past, they claim this proves that storms are getting more severe.

They also set dollar thresholds for severe storms, and since more storms exceed this dollar threshold, they claim that severe storms are occurring more frequently.

However, this reasoning fundamentally misunderstands the economic factors driving storm damage costs.

According to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), since 1980, there have been 403 billion-dollar weather disasters in the United States, with tropical cyclones causing over $1.5 trillion in total damage.

In 2024 alone, the U.S. experienced 27 billion-dollar disasters resulting in $182.7 billion in damages. Climate activists point to these numbers as evidence of worsening storms, but this analysis reveals a critical flaw in their methodology.

The $1 billion threshold used to classify “severe” storms is fixed and not adjusted for inflation beyond the basic Consumer Price Index.

According to NOAA’s Climate.gov, this flawed approach has resulted in 57 events since 1980 that were originally below the billion-dollar threshold but are now classified as billion-dollar disasters simply due to inflation.

This artificial inflation of severe storm counts creates the false impression that dangerous storms are becoming more frequent when, in reality, the monetary threshold has simply lost its meaning over time.

Inflation has turned million-dollar storms into billion-dollar ones. The effect is clear in historical comparisons. Hurricane Katrina caused $125 billion in damage in 2005—equivalent to $200 billion today, according to WCNC.

Hurricane Harvey’s $125 billion in 2017 would equal about $159 billion in 2024, a $33 billion jump in just seven years. Most striking is the 1926 Great Miami Hurricane, which cost $105 million at the time but would have caused $236 billion in 2018, per the Washington Post.

These examples show how inflation alone can make storms seem far more “severe” over time.

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Texas Flood Debacle A Predictable Result Of 98 Years Of Government Flood “Control”

As of this writing, at least 110 people are dead with 161 missing as a result of the July 4 catastrophic flooding of the Guadalupe River in Kerr County, Texas. Next door in New Mexico, three people (including two children) were killed on July 8 after a 20-foot wall of water moved through their town of Ruidoso.

Appearing on Fox News Channel on July 7, Republican policy adviser Karl Rove blamed the large number of deaths on the lack of flood warning alarms on the Guadalupe River. On the same day, Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick vowed to use state dollars to have an alarm system installed. The problem is that the Guadalupe’s waters rose 26 feet in 45 minutes between 4 AM and 6 AM on July 4. River sirens—in addition to useless warnings from the National Weather Service—don’t have a prayer of preventing hundreds to thousands of future deaths because the real root of the problem is not being addressed.

How did millions of Americans—despite almost a century of government anti-flood efforts—come to live, work, and even recklessly build Christian girls’ camps in potentially dangerous flood-prone areas?

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Texas man allegedly threatened to shoot Trump on visit to flooding disaster: ‘I won’t miss’

President Donald Trump is visiting the victims of the flooding disaster in Texas, but one man took the opportunity to allegedly make a death threat and win a free trip to jail.

Robert Herrera, 52, of San Antonio allegedly made the threat on social media by implying that he would shoot the president on his visit to Kerr County. Trump previously survived an assassination attempt by mere inches during a Pennsylvania rally.

Herrera was taken into custody on Thursday evening, according to a statement from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Western District of Texas.

Court documents said that Herrera had posted the threat the same day in the Facebook comments section of a news outlet’s article about Trump visiting Texas.

He allegedly posted the message, “I won’t miss,” on a photograph from the 2024 assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, on the president.

When another account responded to him, “You won’t get the chance, I promise,” Herrera allegedly replied, “I’ll just come for you,” and added an image of loaded magazines and an assault rifle.

He is charged with making threats against the president and transmitting interstate threatening communications, and he faces five years in prison for each count if convicted.

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Chelsea Clinton Mocked After Using Texas Flood Disaster To Promote Clinton Global Initiative

X users were very skeptical Wednesday afternoon after Chelsea Clinton—currently a board member of the controversial Clinton Global Initiative (CGI)—announced that CGI members had been mobilized to flood-ravaged Kerr County, Texas.

“Members of the @ClintonGlobal community are on the ground in Texas, supporting families, communities and ongoing search and rescue efforts,” Clinton wrote in a post on X. The post was heavily ratioed.

“Avoid anything promoted by the Clinton family,” one X user said, referring back to a 2016 BBC article titled “What really happened with the Clintons in Haiti?” 

The BBC article cited Haitian activist Dahoud Andre, who had some nasty words to say about the Clintons: “The Clinton family, they are crooks, they are thieves, they are liars.” 

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Cloud Seeding Company Accused Of Causing Texas Floods

Despite the fact that conspiracy theory after conspiracy theory has been proven to be fact and not fiction time and time again, the collective consciousness of society inevitably reaches a point where its psychological defense mechanisms kick in. When subjects too difficult to broach are reached, they’re dismissed as if they’re the apophenic delusions of a madman when in reality they’re often a truth too distressing to acknowledge. Often, association with a tragedy makes recognizing the epiphany that an official narrative is the real work of fiction, like in the cases of Sandy Hook or 9/11, an act of heresy. Then, independent inquiry meant to uncover the truth is treated as an act of violence instead of critical thinking.

This dynamic has reared its ugly head once again in the wake of massive floods across central Texas that have tragically led to the deaths of over 100, including 84 fatalities alone in Kerr County, where 28 children lost their lives after devastating flash flooding on the Fourth of July led to waters from the Guadalupe River rising over 26 feet in merely 45 minutes. The disaster has entered into the history books as one of the deadliest floods in Texas to take place in decades. The fatal turn of events led to a predictably politicized response where leftist media blamed everything from climate change to President Trump’s policy making. Despite that shameless exploitation of the tragedy, the liberal legacy media shied away from another factor behind what may have caused the floods that has remained unexamined despite having more empirical evidence behind its validity: weather modification.

For decades, weather modification has been a facet of technocratic operations led by governments and private industry alike that has been relegated under the dismissive label of being a conspiracy theory. Yet, in the case of the Texas floods, it has emerged as a clear factor behind the natural disaster. On July 2nd, just 2 days before the massive deluge, a cloud seeding company named Rainmaker finished its operations in Texas. Rainmakers operation was designed to modify the weather by inducing cloud formations to fend off droughts in high-risk areas throughout the state. In the wake of the tragedy, its cloud seeding operations have come into focus as being a potential cause of the devastating floods.

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Meteorologists: National Weather Service Had ‘Extra’ Staff During Texas Floods, Not Impacted by Trump’s Cuts

Meteorologists have argued that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and National Weather Service (NWS) did their jobs well during the devastating Texas flash floods — and even had “extra” staff on hand for the storm — despite Democrats’ claims that the Trump administration’s cuts to the agencies contributed to the loss of life over the holiday weekend.

Even establishment media outlets like the Associated Press (AP) have reported on the weather community’s pushback on that narrative, while the Democratic National Committee (DNC) sent out memos arguing that the Trump administration “refused to backfill key roles … likely contributing to preventable deaths and worsened devastation.”

The AP cited NWS meteorologist Jason Runyen, who said the agency’s office in New Braunfels, serving Austin, San Antonio, and the surrounding areas, had more people on duty than normal just before the flash floods occurred before sunrise on Friday.

“There were extra people in here that night, and that’s typical in every weather service office — you staff up for an event and bring people in on overtime and hold people over,” Runyen said, explaining that the office had up to five people on staff, when they would typically have two.

Not only did the NWS issue “a series of flash flood warnings in the early hours Friday before issuing flash flood emergencies — a rare alert notifying of imminent danger,” according to the AP’s Sean Murphy and Jim Vertuno, but they also put out the initial flood watch at 1:18 p.m. the day before. 

The notices “grew increasingly ominous in the early morning hours of Friday,” culminating in a 4:03 a.m. warning for “the potential of catastrophic damage and a severe threat to human life,” the AP added.

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