River News: Our View

Perhaps the saddest thing about modern America is that we no longer live in an exceptional land compared to the rest of the world.

American citizens remain as exceptional as ever, that’s the irony, but they have been failed by a government that no longer cares about them, that lies to them, that censors them, that surveils and raids them, and, in short, does not deserve to exist in its present form, so far it has wandered beyond our constitutional boundaries.

Our government is illegitimate and needs to be replaced. 

We know that progressives will argue the point, but the evidence is everywhere. Just look at our major cities. Many like to call themselves sanctuary cities, and they are, if by sanctuaries you mean gathering places for criminals and illegal immigrants. If by sanctuaries you mean places you go when your heart desires to wander though streets of filth and stench.

Walk the streets of San Francisco and try telling us you are not in the Third World.

And yes, we know it is impolitic to say “Third World.” We are supposed to all be living in One World and in its One World Government. We are supposed to call the Third World the Developing World, just like in Wisconsin, where the state Department of Public Instruction has changed their categorization of schools that ranked as “Below Basic Standards” to “Developing Schools.”

In the globalist world, when they call something “developing,” you know that means it’s in the … well, the trash pit.

If more evidence is needed, all we have to do is look at the performance of our federal agencies. At the Post Office, they are all about equity. That’s why if you try to mail a letter to the East Coast it will take about two weeks to get there, if ever. Equity does not recognize efficiency or deadlines, apparently, though maybe they are “developing” them.

Then there’s the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA. They’ve now colossally botched the response to Hurricane Helene’s devastation of western North Carolina. They are essentially doing nothing, while citizens’ brigades organize help and rescue, filling the void.

With help like FEMA has offered, why should our government exist? Couldn’t we do better without it?

The government itself doesn’t even know if it has any money to give the storm victims. The head of the agency says they do, but Homeland Security chief Alejandro Mayorkas says they don’t: “FEMA does not have the funds to make it through the season.” Too bad Asheville isn’t located in Ukraine — they would be awash in American dollars.

The government can’t even get on the same page much less respond to an emergency. Maybe that’s because the agency is only designed to respond to fake emergencies, like Covid and monkey pox and gun violence. 

Just like the post office, FEMA is now guided by principles of equity. A leaked Zoom meeting from last year shows how agency officials and their allies think. Here’s how FEMA administrator Deanne Criswell put it at that meeting:

“We’re turning a page at FEMA and infusing equity throughout our agency, programs, and policies to better serve people who face unique barriers before, during and after disasters.”

At that same meeting, Maggie Jarry of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) put it this way: “The shift we’re seeing right now is a shift in emergency services from utilitarian principles — where everything is designed for the greatest good for the greatest amount of people — to disaster equity. But we have to do more.”

Let that sink in for a moment. What these officials should be saying is that, while the mission itself — to help as many people as possible — is the same, they could better address the needs of vulnerable communities. But that’s not what they are saying. What they are saying is that the mission itself is different, to no longer do the greatest good for the greatest amount of people.

It is instead to focus exclusively on vulnerable communities. It is to ignore “oppressor” communities, those populated by middle-class Americans of all races. That’s what disaster equity means. It means that if you’re part of a politically disfavored class, FEMA will ignore you in an emergency.

It gets even worse. Turns out, according to the leaked Zoom meeting, the vulnerable communities they are talking about are not even what we think of as vulnerable communities, such as minorities and lower-income populations. No, it turns how that disaster equity now means servicing the LGBTQIA community most of all. 

At that leaked zoom meeting, a FEMA official explained why it was so important to help the massive LGBTQIA communities: “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.”

No one else obviously suffers so much as they/them.

We’re not quite sure how FEMA decides which hard-hit communities are LGBTQIA and which are not, but we know the agency spent $12 million on the LGBTQIA equity program this past year, so maybe part of that money went into alphabet detection.

We thought we were joking about that last part, but, as it turns out, they actually did! According to the Daily Caller, the tool is called the Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool to identify disadvantaged communities where FEMA is supposed to help. 

According to the Daily Caller analysis, the tool includes a map of every county the federal government considers “underserved” for the purposes of federal grantmaking, and it includes many smaller tracts, too. Generally speaking, the map identifies disadvantaged communities by race and political identification.

For instance, on that map, Lac du Flambeau is considered disadvantaged. Minocqua is not. Fair enough, but Rhinelander is considered also disadvantaged. Our guess is that you place an overlay of Democratic leaning communities over this social justice map and they would pretty much match.

The problem is, for disaster purposes and indeed for just about every purpose except direct aid based on poverty levels, there should be no disadvantaged categories. Disaster stricken areas should be helped by their government regardless of their sexual identity and economic status. No one should be denied disaster aid because of where they live. That’s redlining in reverse.

Yet, in North Carolina, as the Daily Caller pointed out, many of the counties hit hardest by Hurricane Helene were ineligible for funding through this program as a result of the screening tool’s designations.

“Entities that requested FEMA grant funding had their applications evaluated based on whether or not they selected communities labeled as ‘underserved’ by the Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool as well as the degree to which they centered equity in their proposal,” The Daily caller stated. And then it quoted the grant document: “To advance considerations of equity in awarding RCPGP grant funding, FEMA will add additional points to the scores of projects that will benefit disadvantaged communities.”

Now if this isn’t a racist and partisan government prop, we don’t know what is. It’s a tool by which to direct government discrimination, and that is at the heart of America’s problem today. A government that overcame cultural discrimination to become a force for justice has now again become a troll for discrimination by those who have captured bureaucratic power.

It’s a shame and it’s sad and it has Third World written all over it.

We say Third World because this is what Democrats and establishment Republicans have turned America into. 

It was called the Third World because it was undeveloped or underdeveloped, lacking manufacturing. After NAFTA hollowed out America’s heartland, that’s pretty much what the U.S. is.

It was called the Third World because it was poor, with a large underclass, no middle class, and an elite living in geographical enclaves who enjoyed the privileges of prosperity. That increasingly is what America has become.

It was called the Third World because its urbanity was Dickens-like in its crime and filth and homelessness and prostitution. That is what American cities increasingly look like.

It was called the Third World because drug gangs and cartels ran entire towns and communities, holding law-abiding citizens hostage with rampant street violence. More and more American communities are looking just like this.

And it was called Third World because the government itself was run by tinpot despots who could not take care of the population as a whole, or care to, but did cater to favored population groups that helped to keep them in power.

Look around. Look at the Post Office. Look especially at FEMA, which can’t take care of the weather disasters that have afflicted us but targets the help it can muster to favored communities.

The problem is, it’s not just FEMA. Every federal bureaucracy is riddled with such thinking and such tools, and the infiltration of such garbage began long before Biden, at least as far back as Barack Obama.

The other day in Butler, Pennsylvania, Elon Musk spoke at a Donald Trump rally and predicted this would be the last election unless Trump won. We think he was being optimistic.

The last election may have already happened, in the sense that it may not matter who wins in November. We may have already surrendered our exceptional government to an unexceptional but ruthless bureaucratic governance. 

We hope we’re wrong. But it’s up to the American people to prove it. It’s up to the American people to turn America the Third World into America First again.