SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
fema
How We Can Counter the Far-Right’s Dangerous ‘Deep State’ Conspiracy Theories
To mobilize people, we must have a compelling alternative vision for turning government into a force for equity and justice.
Oct 15, 2024
Lies and rumors about the federal hurricane response serve to build the far-right’s governing power. At the expense of human lives, the far-right—which nowadays includes the Republican party, the Trump campaign, billionaire donors, GOP governors, and the advocates behind Project 2025—deliberately sows distrust in government, specifically targeting federal public administration.
Federal agencies’ roles in a disaster are to issue warnings, provide rescue and relief, and support rebuilding. Across the spectrum of public administration, agencies’ regular jobs involve the things we rely on every single day: ensure our tap water is clean, our food and medicines are safe, our collective bargaining rights are protected, our retirement checks arrive on time, and much more. Yet the far-right peddles a dangerous narrative that casts public agencies and civil servants as the “deep state,” the enemy of the people. By delegitimizing our government, they pave the way for an authoritarian takeover.
As we knock on doors to mobilize voters, we must be prepared to address widespread distrust in government, whether it manifests in anger or apathy. If people give up on government—which we formed to solve problems together that we cannot tackle alone—they retreat or turn to strongmen for answers. How do we debunk the “deep state” conspiracy and shine a light on the essential role of government in delivering on our needs?
There is a bleak logic to gutting public protections and public services: When government is unable to deliver, people become resentful and receptive to authoritarian fixes.
This summer I worked on a new toolkit, recently released by Race Forward, to help shift the narrative and block the far-right’s assault on public administration. It offers ideas for talking about what public administration is, and what it can be. While we know that the federal government produced or maintained many of the inequities and injustices we see today, it can also be part of the solution. Throughout history, movements for civil rights, workers’ rights, women’s rights, and many others taught us how to bend government towards justice.
We must begin by taking people’s affective responses to government seriously. Working class and poor people feel disaffected and disempowered because government hasn’t delivered for them. The class divide is real, the power and wealth gap between the rich and the rest of us is growing, racial injustice remains entrenched, misogyny is on the rise. Decades of neoliberal policies, pushing the commercialization of everything, have produced a full-blown crisis for working class people, disproportionately people of color. Privatization, disinvestment, and corporate capture have hollowed out public institutions and dismantled public goods. Our human rights are violated on a daily basis by unaffordable, commoditized housing and healthcare, food deserts, grocery price gauging, and hazardous workplaces, thereby shortening the lifespans of people pushed to the economic margins. Public administrative agencies are seen as bureaucratic barriers at best, and as controlling, coercing, and policing Black, brown, and poor people at worst.
This crisis has produced a fertile ground for a far-right plan, laid out by Project 2025, to capture the institutions of public administration. By delegitimizing government and setting it up to fail, authoritarians make it easier for themselves to take it over and turn government against communities.
Lying about federal disaster response fits neatly into this strategy. Rumors about the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) seizing people’s property and spending aid dollars on migrants sow distrust, division, and hate and undercut the agency’s ability to deliver. This sets the stage for the far-right’s goal to end any government action to address the climate crisis. Project 2025 plans to drastically shrink federal disaster aid, shift costs to localities, privatize federal flood insurance, and terminate grants for community preparedness. Because climate research and planning are seen as harmful to what Project 2025 calls “prosperity,” the plan is to break up the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), including the National Weather Service that sends out hurricane warnings, and commercialize weather forecasting, likely putting warnings behind paywalls.
There is a bleak logic to gutting public protections and public services: When government is unable to deliver, people become resentful and receptive to authoritarian fixes.
This is particularly painful because it comes at a time when the Biden-Harris administration has taken some steps toward making federal agencies more responsive to people’s needs. This includes not only climate-related investments and jobs, but also new regulations that advance environmental justice, protect workers from heat exposure, increase overtime eligibility, ban non-compete clauses, and limit credit card penalty fees. But such agency actions often remain invisible, obscured by bureaucratic procedures, buried in the tax code, or held up in courts. We can surface these tangible efforts when we talk to potential voters and point to the purpose and possibilities of public administration.
A Trump presidency would reverse both recent progress and systemic protections embedded in the work of federal agencies. Project 2025 is not shy about terminating the enforcement of hard-won civil rights laws and privileging the narrow interests of corporations that price gauge, pollute, and exploit our communities. It would staff agencies with white Christian nationalists who seek to divide and dominate us.
These threats cannot be averted through a merely defensive stance. By calling on people to defend “democracy,” establishment politicians ignore popular anger, rooted in persistent experiences of inequity and injustice. Promoting an “opportunity economy” that relinquishes the goal of equitable outcomes simply doesn’t cut it. We can only block a far-right power grab if we tackle the injustices that fuel resentment. To mobilize people, we must have a compelling vision for turning government into a force for equity and justice. The job of public agencies is to protect our rights and deliver on our needs, and we can make them do just that—as long as we stand together, united.
In this election and beyond, we must contest the far-right narrative that undermines government and public administration. When people are reluctant to engage because the system is not working for them, let’s raise their expectations of government as a protector of rights, a provider of public goods and services, and a site for exercising our collective power.
Keep ReadingShow Less
'Armed Militia' Threatened FEMA Recovery Workers in North Carolina
"Let's be clear," said one journalist. "Armed militia are terrorizing FEMA rescue workers and causing important work to stop because Donald Trump spread lies and disinformation about the hurricane."
Oct 14, 2024
A progressive policy group in North Carolina was among those expressing alarm on Sunday as news spread that federal emergency workers were forced to evacuate an area hit hard by Hurricane Helene late last month after officials warned that "armed militias" were "hunting" hurricane response teams.
But the news didn't come as a shock to Carolina Forward, an independent think tank, considering that it came after weeks of lies from Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump about the Biden administration and the Federal Emergency Management Agency's (FEMA) response to the hurricane.
"This is what MAGA does," said Carolina Forward on social media. "Eventually, their lies have real world consequences."
As The Washington Postreported Sunday evening, a U.S. Forest Service official sent an urgent message to other federal agencies involved in the recovery on Saturday afternoon, saying FEMA had advised all federal responders in Rutherford County, North Carolina "to stand down and evacuate the county immediately."
National Guard troops in the area, said the official, "had come across x2 trucks of armed militia saying there were out hunting FEMA."
The message was verified by two federal officials.
"It's terrible because a lot of these folks who need assistance are refusing it because they believe the stuff people are saying about FEMA and the government... And it's sad because they are probably the ones who need the help the most."
Emergency responders moved to a "safe area" and paused their work in Rutherford County, where they had been delivering supplies and clearing trees from roads in order to help search-and-rescue crews.
"Let's be clear: Armed militia are terrorizing FEMA rescue workers and causing important work to stop because Donald Trump spread lies and disinformation about the hurricane. This is on the Republican candidate for president with help from Elon Musk," said media critic Jennifer Schulze, referring to the billionaire owner of X who has used the social media platform to amplify Trump's lies. "Shameful and disqualifying."
Fox News affiliate WGHP reported Monday that a man was charged with threatening FEMA workers in Rutherford County. The suspect was identified as William Jacob Parsons, who was armed with a handgun when he was arrested. Investigators said he acted alone.
The forced pause in the work is just the latest example of the measurable impact of statements made by Trump and his running mate, U.S. Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), about FEMA in the wake of hurricanes Helene and Milton.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas warned last Thursday that federal employees, thousands of whom have been deployed to states including North Carolina and Florida to help with the response to the devastating storms, have received threats in recent days. Meteorologists have received angry messages from people convinced that weather experts and government officials "are creating and directing hurricanes," The Guardianreported last week.
"I have had a bunch of people saying I created and steered the hurricane, there are people assuming we control the weather," Katie Nickolaou, a meteorologist in Michigan, toldThe Guardian. "I have had to point out that a hurricane has the energy of 10,000 nuclear bombs and we can't hope to control that. But it's taken a turn to more violent rhetoric, especially with people saying those who created Milton should be killed."
President Joe Biden was driven to address Trump's lies about the hurricane response last week, saying the disinformation was "undermining confidence in the incredible rescue and recovery work that has already been taken and will continue to be taken."
Since Helene swept through a number of states late last month, catching communities in western North Carolina off-guard with devastating flooding, Trump has baselessly claimed that:
- Biden ignored a call for help from Republican Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, who denied Trump's claim;
- He received unspecified "reports" that North Carolina officials were "going out of their way to not help people in Republican areas";
- Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, spent "all her FEMA money" on housing for undocumented immigrants; and
- FEMA is providing only $750 to people who lost their homes.
Riva Duncan, a former Forest Service official in hard-hit Asheville, North Carolina, told the Post that locals have told FEMA employees who have arrived with aid to to help with repairs, "We don't want your help here."
"It's terrible because a lot of these folks who need assistance are refusing it because they believe the stuff people are saying about FEMA and the government," Duncan told the newspaper. "And it's sad because they are probably the ones who need the help the most."
In the town of Chimney Rock in Rutherford County, FEMA has shifted to working in secure areas in fixed locations instead of going door to door to assess community needs, the Post reported, "out of an abundance of caution."
Matt Ortega, a web developer in Oakland, California, said the impact of Trump's baseless claims about the hurricane response mirror that of his earlier lies about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, where schools and government business ground to a halt in recent weeks due to bomb threats stemming from claims that Haitian people were stealing neighbors' pets and eating them.
"Trump and Republicans' FEMA lies [incur] a debt, just as they did in Springfield," said Ortega. "The people who pay it are children whose schools are closed due to bomb threats in Springfield and recovery aid workers when militias are 'out hunting FEMA.'"
Keep ReadingShow Less
As FEMA Unveils Flood Rule, Climate Campaigners Urge More Radical Overhaul
One campaigner called for "a modern disaster agency poised to tackle the deadly fossil fuel-driven heat decimating the whole country."
Jul 10, 2024
While welcoming the Federal Emergency Management Agency's new rule to better protect U.S. infrastructure from flooding, one climate campaigner stressed Wednesday that FEMA EMA still must be much more radically transformed to handle disasters of a rapidly warming world.
"FEMA's new rule to rebuild public infrastructure back higher to avoid flood damage is an important shift in policy, but FEMA still desperately needs to transform into a modern disaster agency poised to tackle the deadly fossil fuel-driven heat decimating the whole country," said Jean Su, energy justice director and senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, in a statement.
Extreme weather impacts of global heating—largely driven by humanity extracting and burning fossil fuels—include not only widespread flooding and stronger hurricanes but also record-smashing heatwaves and wildfires.
Extreme heat is currently impacting tens of millions of people across the United States. On the West Coast, it's believed to have killed at least eight people. In Washington, D.C., Tuesday was the fifth day in a row of 97°F or higher, with the upper 90s also forecast for Wednesday. It's "oppressively hot," in Las Vegas, Nevada, which is on track to set a record for the most consecutive days over 115°F.
Texas residents are facing high temperatures along with the effects of historic Hurricane Beryl, which made its third landfall on Monday after hitting Mexico and the Caribbean and kicked off what experts fear will be an "extraordinary" season in the Atlantic. As of Wednesday morning, about 1.7 million Texans still lacked power. The storm is now expected to bring flooding and tornadoes to the Northeast.
"This mindset should be extended to address the nation's enormous need for a bold game plan to save lives and help struggling communities through heat."
"FEMA's rule acknowledges the public impacts of the climate emergency, and this mindset should be extended to address the nation's enormous need for a bold game plan to save lives and help struggling communities through heat," said Su. "There has to be an urgent mass mobilization of resources to deploy lifesaving cooling centers, air conditioning, and community solar, not piecemeal efforts and lackluster leadership."
Last month, over two dozen environmental, labor, and public health groups—including the Center for Biological Diversity—petitioned FEMA "to amend its regulations to include extreme heat and wildfire smoke in the Stafford Act regulatory definition of 'major disaster.'"
"This simple but elegant amendment serves to unlock critical funds for state, tribal, and local governments and communities to manage and mitigate extreme heat and wildfire smoke—both natural catastrophes predicted to worsen in duration, frequency, and severity due to the climate emergency," the coalition explained.
Su and her group are also part of a movement urging President Joe Biden to declare a national climate emergency—which, as she and co-author Maya Golden-Krasner detailed in a February 2022 report, would "unlock emergency executive powers already granted by Congress to aggressively combat the crisis."
While facing pressure from campaigners like Su to go much further, the Biden administration is demonstrating with its new rule an example of the Democratic president's priorities versus those of his Republican predecessor, as they prepare for a November rematch.
As The New York Timesdetailed Wednesday:
FEMA first proposed the rule, called the Federal Flood Risk Management Standard, in 2016 during the Obama administration. The proposal generated intense opposition, particularly from homebuilders who warned that new restrictions would lead to higher construction costs, according to Roy Wright, who ran disaster mitigation programs for FEMA at the time.
The National Association of Home Builders did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
A few months after Donald J. Trump became president, FEMA withdrew its proposal. When President Biden took office, he directed federal agencies to once again set rules to protect the projects they funded in flood zones. FEMA again began the process of drafting a rule.
"The federal government really has a duty to account for a future flood risk when it's providing funding to build or rebuild homes or infrastructure, because it's using taxpayer dollars," Joel Scata, a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council and an expert on flood policy, toldGrist. Under the new rule, he said, FEMA is "going to be building in a way that's not setting people and infrastructure up for future failure."
National Climate Adviser Ali Zaidi said in a Wednesday statement that "President Biden is taking bold action—mobilizing historic investments to protect communities before the storm strikes, upgrade critical infrastructure to reduce vulnerability and risk, and boost our collective capacity to recover quickly after disasters."
"By using commonsense solutions like elevating or floodproofing critical infrastructure, today's rule will help local communities harness the best in science and engineering to better prepare for flood risks from rising sea levels and damaging storms," Zaidi added. "This important step will help protect taxpayer-funded projects, including fire and police stations and hospitals, from flood risks and is an integral part of the Biden-Harris administration's broader efforts to enhance climate resilience across the country."
The rule comes as Biden defies growing calls to step aside and pass the torch to Vice President Kamala Harris or another Democratic presidential nominee following his disastrous debate performance against Trump last month. Long before that, the president was facing criticism of his climate record—especially compared with his 2020 campaign promises.
While Biden has been praised for signing a "landmark" climate package and announcing a pause on liquefied natural gas exports, he has come under fire for skipping last year's United Nations summit, continuing fossil fuel lease sales, and supporting the Mountain Valley Pipeline and Willow oil project—as well as not declaring a national climate emergency.
Trump, meanwhile, has publicly pledged to "drill, baby, drill" if he returns to the White House, and earlier this year reportedly told fossil fuel industry leaders he would gut Biden's climate regulations if they raised $1 billion for his campaign.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular