173 Comments

You only have to listen to the podium priesthood to understand the disdain these appointees have for survivors and any emergent response group that steps in to assist them. They are dismayed — “Disappointed, I tell you!” — that survivors and their citizen-helpers lack proper gratitude and respect. H.L. Mencken said "The State doesn't just want you to obey, it wants to make you want to obey." Initiative and improvisation by survivors and emergent response groups injures official credentialed pride. Those feigned injuries illustrate what Lance Morrow said: “Evil portrays itself, almost without exception, as injured innocence, fighting back.”

They “fight back” by chastising self-helpers (“You need to be a more grateful victim”), painting the government response in the most favorable light (“Pretty awesome we can maybe loan you $750 and still provide concierge services to illegals and Lebanese citizens”), and placing their responders on pedestals (“Don’t hurt their feelings, it makes them feel unsafe; and don’t forget to use their desired pronouns”). Deaf; surly; condescending; combative. Their attitude is redolent of Louis XV: “Après moi, le déluge“ or Hillary’s: “We Lose Total Control.”

It’s not just that they’ve lost trust, it’s that they’ve actively sown distrust.

They pretend to authority yet chronically underperform.

They speak of certainty but demonstrate elite panic.

They hide behind the credentials and accreditation they award one another.

They default to the monopoly on violence when facing righteous resistance — “I’ll arrest you if you try to rescue anyone.”

Finally, they champion an institutional ethic of “Equity uber alles” which is a brazen expression of indifference to the greatest good.

James Fenimore Cooper said "Whenever the government of the United States shall break up, it will probably be in consequence of a false direction having been given to publick opinion. This is the weak point of our defenses, and the part to which the enemies of the system will direct all their attacks. Opinion can be so perverted as to cause the false to seem the true; the enemy, a friend, and the friend, an enemy; the best interests of the nation to appear insignificant, and trifles of moment; in a word, the right the wrong, and the wrong the right."

Your “make it work” should be our default. St. Augustine said: “And you all say, ‘The times are troubled, the times are hard, the times are wretched.’ Live good lives, and you will change the times by living good lives.” But we still need to rectify the wrong, and that requires the public will to dismantle or reform corrupted institutions (I’m talking about you, DHS), and keelhaul those accountable for egregious failures and malicious indifference. If we don’t, they’ll only accelerate their white-hot hatred and bigotry — you know, lecturing grim-faced Americans about how “…it's not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy…”

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author

Brilliantly said.

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Brilliant. And I will copy James Fenimore Cooper's startlingly prescient remark, and thanks so much for quoting it!

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I'm saving all of what you said. well done.

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founding

Yeah. Next level.

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Like x 1000! Very well said! Bravo!

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Winner for best comment of the day.

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21 hrs ago·edited 21 hrs ago

The best kind of leader is one who is unknown, followed by one who is loved, followed by one who is feared, and the absolute worst kind of leader is one who is hated.

We are ruled by leaders who are not only hated, but think that being hated is an accomplishment.

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Which kind of leader is worse-- the one who thinks that being hated is an accomplishment, or the one who thinks that being hated for their incompetence is an offense to their dignity?

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Your words make me think, for the first time, I understand how the French peasants behaved during the French Revolution. I am starting to understand how they became so wildly angry. So full of rage. Hunger alone doesn't get you to that point.

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That’s an astute — and an ominous — portend. I agree there are parallels with our circumstances and those of pre-revolutionary France. France’s First and Second Estates (the clergy, and the nobility) were minuscule in size (the First Estate was perhaps 1% of the population, and the Second perhaps 4%) yet they held social and political power, controlled the bulk of wealth and property, and imposed unequal taxation and draconian laws on the Third Estate (the commoners, 27m strong, 95% of the French population). The Oxford History of the French Revolution had a line that resonates today: “Hatred grows more bitter and the state is divided into two classes: the greedy and insensitive, and murmuring malcontents.”

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founding
Oct 11·edited Oct 11Liked by Chris Bray

I'm telling ya...they really don't mind killing us.

That evil elf, Mayorkas, is to Homeland Security, as that evil gnome, Fauci, is to Public Health.

They enjoy watching people suffer. Its hard to come to any other conclusion.

It's just fucking disgusting.

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i saw a photo of him on jeff childers' stack and thought it was dr. evil. really. have they ever been seen in the same room together

glad to see your internet up and running RG

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founding

Yeah...that hurricane threw us a beating...but somehow I got away with minimal damage.

Thx for checking, buddy.

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you and the fam in my prayers dude

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Oh, gosh, I didn't know! Glad you have power back already and are up and running.

Be blessed for the cleanup, it's.... long. And smelly like mangroves.

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founding

Thx Kathy.

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Are you in NC?

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founding

Sarasota

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Right now that's probably better than NC, all things considered.

Glad you're OK!

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founding

Thank you so much for your well-wishes!

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Very good news!

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Nope, they want us dead or enslaved, but they won't do it themselves. That's the most disgusting part to me: they coerce, con, or threaten regular people to do the dirty work they refuse to do.

They consider us to be sub-human, they are evil, and I know exactly how to behave with such.

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Evil elf indeed! Perfect!

With his caterpillar eyebrows, his skin like wet clay, golf ball eyes, a true caricature.

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founding

Eyes just like The Great Walz of China!

Always the cRAzY eYeS with the left. Always.

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“The Great Walz of China” — I love that line!

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Eyes are a window into the mind and sometimes the soul. Cold, undead mind and soul? Cold, undead eyes.

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Sanpaku eyes!

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Golf ball eyes? That’s an insult to golf balls! The evil elf has LYIN’ EYES!

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Words like Sociopath and Psychopath get thrown around a lot, but Mayorkas is the real deal.

The fact that it didn’t even occur to him to avoid being seen shopping, even just for the sake of optics, is nuts.

We know they don’t care about anyone, but to not even understand that they should at least act like they do? It reveals a total lack of humanity that is hard to wrap your head around.

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author

Absolutely. They don't even have a sense of how to fake it.

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They don't see any need to fake it!

I suspect that many of our would-be lords and masters don't really think of the great unwashed as fully human.

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This is why they're called lizard people.

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founding

Lolll

I dunno....I'm beginning to think they think we're the "lizards"!

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Did you ever see the 80s TV show "V?" I can see Mayorkas taking his fake face off. His face looks kinda fake. I can see him being a lizard. We're their food, you know. 😉

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founding

Yes. Lolol. Exactly.

Totally forgot about that one. I used to love it.

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Oct 11·edited Oct 11Liked by Chris Bray

"Deanne Criswell and Alejandro Mayorkas don’t understand the most basic meaning of their roles."

I have to respectfully disagree here.

Whatever the assigned roles or responsibilities of their political positions may be, the first rule of any member of our elite class is now simply: always be denouncing our political enemies for their thought crimes and the dangers they represent and always be pushing the idea that there is only One Truth and we are its infallible bearers and its human incarnation.

"Fighting disinformation" is simply Newspeak for smothering dissent and smearing anyone who dissents from orthodoxy as dangerous possibly fascistic "extremists" aka enemies of the state.

And no matter how many natural disasters hit, nothing takes precedence over the battle for total power and pursuing it through the Friend/Enemy distinction.

If the whole country was razed by a natural disaster but it also meant that they could vanquish the Deplorable threat to their rule and lock in total power, the owners of America would take that deal in a heartbeat.

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founding

I agree.

At times it's a "beautiful disaster" tho. Like watching Witchmer with a Que Mala/Walz hat performing the Eucharist as a sacrament with a Dorito chip, replete with a porn star exaggerated swallowing gesture, on a podcast called "Hotties for Harris "

Maybe Witchler is trying to stir up Catholics so that they could be blamed for a riot-yet-to-happen?

I mean some of it is just beyond Babylon Bee.

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Honestly, I thought someone said she was black. Like at the beginning of covid. I was shocked to see this white thing in the video and it said it was her. 🤔

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“And no matter how many natural disasters hit, nothing takes precedence over…” Luxury shoe shopping and expensive sushi.

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Build Back Better

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As we finally wake up to the fact that the government bureaucracy is being run by a pack of sociopaths, with Mayorkas as the perfect example, we need only remember two things to survive the insanity. Completely ignore the robots in government and switch our focus to what we can do to help our family, our neighbors, our friends and ourselves. The Golden Rule comes to mind.

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No one is coming to save us .

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founding

The sooner people recognize this, the better....but i fear economic collapse is the only thing that will sharpen minds.

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Either that or they run out of locally sourced vegan skinny matcha oat decaf latte.

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Their intentional or unintentional total incompetence is viciously denied as “ misinformation “… this is basically how our government agencies have and maintain zero accountability. They colossally eff up but we the peons suffering the consequences thereof are “ LYING”…. And President Biden says that is un American…..this circus must be shut down…

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Completely F it up & then take no responsibility. The best depiction of a government run that way was the series Chernobyl. I remember thinking at the time that the communist Soviet government officials unwilling to take responsibility for the blast & then lie to their great leader out of fear was crazy. It was chilling how the officials were willing to risk a global calamity - and the continuing exposure of themselves & their neighbors to deadly radiation poisoning simply to avoid being held responsible. Now here we are.

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Oct 11Liked by Chris Bray

Such are the pathologies of authority.

Authority’s prime directive is to protect itself. THEN to establish itself as competent and possessive of enough power to make what it wants happen. THEN to maintain order. Then, and only then, will it protect others, and subordinate/incidental to those other tasks.

It takes a real servant leader's heart to transcend all of this, including putting all of this at risk in service to others.

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My sister asked me yesterday what I meant when I said, again "Everything is breaking."

You just described it:

"is that foundations are no longer under our feet. People who are supposed to be there aren’t there, because they don’t know they’re supposed to be there. You call the disaster relief people in an emergency, and they show up to lecture you about your tone."

My Dad was a private pilot (for fun) and a mountaineer, and a mechanical engineer. He was built for chill, and I relied on it more than I realized. It makes me cry I miss it so much.

Many of us feel the "everything is breaking" deeply. It's disregulating. I'm angry all the f'ing time and I swear I'd do violence against the entire FEMA organization if they caught me on a bad day. I've worked disasters, worked with FEMA, and their fecklessness is criminal. WE ALL KNOW IT.

We won't simply repair the breaks in our great system. We're meshing together an entirely new Republic, based on the foundational principles of the old, rejecting the communist-controlled America that's "breaking" around us.

Chris Bray is an f'ing hero for writing about all this with such clarity. It helps.

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And at the risk of sounding like the Queen of Reynolds Wrap…. One more hurricane and the rumblings of delaying “the Election” will commence….

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There are several possibilities, Mrs. M.

One of the LEAST disastrous might be postponement of the election due to 'natural disaster'.

The much more worrysome probabilities include declaration of martial law, death/murder of a candidate, or nuclear war.

** Touches brim of tin foil Stetson**

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Regrettably, I have been expecting the first two probabilities you listed.

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There are many, many more events that could be staged to provide an excuse to postpone or cancel the election. But those first two are the ones that are starting to keep me awake some nights.

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“Their” credibility when they pull this stunt should “ oh no you don’t “… but people are so susceptible to fear…

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Heck, I've got a whole tinfoil suit at this point. Complete with galoshes.

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founding

They've really taken all the fun out of being a conspiRACIST.

It's like betting on a game and knowing what the final score is.

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Very perceptive, thank you. Captain Sullenberger is the best retort to DEI.

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author

I still listen to that radio traffic at least quarterly, as a reminder.

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In annual crew coordination training back in the 90s, we'd regularly listen to the ATC recordings from various mishaps. I can't find it now, but there was a student/inexperienced pilot who lost a piece of wing and got talked down to landing by a passing airline pilot who was as cool as the other side of the pillow. Dude sounded like he was drinking gentleman jack & smoking a stogey while he was talking, but he was simultaneously flying an A320 filled with folks bound for somewhere. His plane was in the vicinity and he had eyes on the stricken aircraft trying to regain control. Dude's voice was liquid lorazapam. All calm, all control, while someone was trying to wrestle an aircraft coming apart. I wish I could find it because it was incredible.

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Pilots actually practice "pilot voice" the way musicians practice violin or piano. At least I did in my student days. According to the pattern smashers at my home airport, I just ended up sounding like Lauren Bacall. 😂

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On the flight where we were required to brief the “lost” procedures, I had an IP tell me that “we will be a smoking hole in the Earth before we come up on the radio and start crying about being lost.” 😃

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"Aviate, navigate, if one of you mooks dares to communicate I'll give you something to mayday about!" 🤣 Like you could get through on guard over all the meowing anyway.

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Oct 13Liked by Chris Bray

When I was in medic school, one of the things they focused on was "medic voice" calm, in control, this is just another call thing when you're shaking apart on the inside going WTF. Same with the radio. I apparently was even in The Voice when I was calling in my own wrecks (2 in 22 years)... If YOU aren't in control, neither is that scene.

It's one of the ways you can identify the BTDT people in an emergency. You can also CLEARLY see it in the people who have stepped up in the absence of authority in the hurricane zones. Competence shines through.

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Oct 11·edited Oct 11

gathering goateggs - In reference to the Lauren Bacall comment. That's funny. But I have to ask are you a man or a woman? Not trying to stir any controversy, but it would be even funnier if you are a man.

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I’m a woman, and I do have a naturally deep voice. But I was chagrined to learn that I was pitching for calm and professional and instead I got flirtatiously sultry. Of course the last laugh was on the Cessna airforce — they were expecting Slim from “To Have and Have Not” at the fuel pump and instead they got a dumpy 50-something in coveralls and a Bella Abzug haircut.

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That's good. I can always use a good laugh. Thx.

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Still chokes me up💖👍

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Mayorkas is a human rat.

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"Rat" I can buy.

Not so sure about the "human" part though.

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He's only human on the outside. Watch him - he doesn't even know how to act like a human. He seriously is on the edge of uncanny valley. Not quite human, not quite robot. Creeptastic to the nth degree..

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Oct 11Liked by Chris Bray

I don't think it's possible to be anything *other* than an empty, septic, sociopathic and dangerously stupid skinsuit of a human being that allows one to rise and thrive in modern bureaucracies. Now there is no pretense to the contrary whatsoever.

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You omitted one adjective: overpaid

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Oct 11Liked by Chris Bray

The tone policing is of course occasionally suspended whenever they take a moment to quietly celebrate the deaths of the politically undesirable under the thinnest veil of concern trolling.

Oh gosh, oh darn, all those Trump supporters may not be able to vote, isn't that just horrible? *hides smirk behind hand

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Many of them seem to have forgone the "hiding the smirk" bit.

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We are going to have to make it work . And I think we are … slowly … but we are going to need to put our foot on the gas . Very small case in point. Monday I dislocated my finger (dog, squirrel.. I’m sure you get it ) I looked at it , thought about 10 hours at the ER, and called my neighbor, a police officer to yank it back in , whine I looked the other way. Ten minutes tops . Institutions are dead. Time to regroup

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Oct 11Liked by Chris Bray

As much as both DHS and FEMA richly deserve the scorn they are receiving, the root cause of this shit show sits squarely with the executive leadership of the State of North Carolina. The Governor and the Department of Public Safety Emergency Management are responsible for the initial response to the disaster., and any delays in getting the emergency management team stood up cascades into chaos at the point of impact for the citizens. They should have already prepared emergency response plans, response asset allocations identified and national guard units on the ready as soon as the governor declared the state of emergency. Until the governor requested a federal emergency declaration, the Feds really have only a consultation role, the sole authority resides with the state designated Incident Response Commander until such a time the Governor requests the response to be federalized like they ultimately did with Katrina.

From the outside looking in there clearly was a cascading breakdown in the initial response by both county and state officials, and once the feds inserted themselves into the mix it became an uncoordinated mess. Governor Roy Cooper deserves as much scrutiny for his leadership failures as the clowns from Washington.

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author

Important point. And compare to Florida, where state officials got way out in front of it. Calm, ordered thinking make calm and order.

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