September 29, 2024
Late Friday night, Tennessee House Republican Caucus chair Jeremy Faison posted “President Biden has finally approved [Tennessee governor Bill Lee’s] state of emergency request,” making it sound as if the delay in federal support for the state during the devastation of Hurricane Helene was Biden’s fault. In fact, while Alabama, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina all declared emergencies and requested and received federal approval of those declarations before the hurricane hit, Governor Lee did not.
Instead, in keeping with an April joint resolution from the Republican-dominated Tennessee legislature calling for 31 days of prayer and fasting to “seek God’s hand of mercy healing on Tennessee,” Lee proclaimed September 27 “a voluntary Day of Prayer & Fasting.”
Lee did not declare a state of emergency until late on September 27, after flash flooding had already created havoc. President Biden approved it immediately.
The extraordinary damage from Helene in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia continues to mount. At least 91 people have died, and search and rescue teams are at work across several states. More than 2 million people are without power, and western North Carolina is isolated after its roads washed out. A fire at a chemical facility in Conyers, Georgia, outside Atlanta forced the evacuation of 17,000 people nearby. The National Weather Service office in Greenville-Spartanburg, South Carolina, wrote to the residents of the western Carolinas and northeast Georgia: “This is the worst event in our office’s history.”
Faison’s implication that Democratic president Biden, rather than Republican governor Lee, was to blame for the slow federal response to Helene in Tennessee illustrated the Republicans’ attempt to create a fake world to motivate their base with fear and anger while leaving Democrats to come up with real world solutions. And since those solutions are popular, Republicans are claiming credit for them.
In the past two days, Republican lawmakers who just days ago voted against funding the federal government and who have railed against government spending have been out front claiming credit for getting federal disaster relief.
Republican presidential nominee Trump and Republican vice presidential nominee Ohio senator J.D. Vance have been claiming that it was Trump who capped the cost of insulin at $35 a month. Vance has accused Vice President Kamala Harris of lying when the Biden administration takes credit for it. Vance’s statement, itself, is a breathtaking lie. Trump signed an executive order in July 2020 establishing a temporary, voluntary program that let some Medicare Part D prescription drug plans cap monthly insulin copayments at $35. The program ran from January 1, 2021, through December 31, 2023.
The Inflation Reduction Act, which Biden signed into law in August 2022, required all Part D plans to charge no more than $35 a month for all covered insulin products. All Democrats in the House and the Senate voted for the Inflation Reduction Act, and all Republicans—including J.D. Vance—voted against it.
As Republicans have lost the support of suburban women for their attacks on reproductive rights and embrace of the misogyny of the MAGA movement, they have tried to beef up the idea that they are the country’s true supporters of women and families. Trump, who has been found liable for sexual assault, has been trying to assure women: “I want to be your protector. As president, I have to be your protector.” With him back in office, he said at a rally in Pennsylvania, women “will be happy, healthy, confident and free. You will no longer be thinking about abortion.”
Journalist Jessica Valenti noted that antiabortion activists are running advertisements blaming the deaths of women in states with abortion bans not on those bans or those who passed them, but on the Democrats trying to protect reproductive healthcare. Women have died when doctors would not give them lifesaving care out of concerns about prosecution under states’ abortion bans or were unable to access abortion care. But the ads, using the names and images of women who have died under antiabortion regimes, claim that lifesaving care is still legal but doctors don’t know they can use it because of misinformation from pro-choice activists.
Antiabortion Republican Derrick Anderson, who is running to represent Virginia’s seventh congressional district, has appeared in campaign photographs with a woman and children posed as if they are his family, but they are not. He is unmarried and childless, and the family is that of a friend.
That last one is really weird, but the biggest lies from the Republicans concern immigration, especially as voters blame the Republicans for killing a strong bipartisan border bill earlier this year after Trump demanded they keep the issue open for him to campaign on. J.D. Vance was among those who voted against it.
There were the lies Vance spread about Springfield, Ohio, of course, attacking the legal Haitian immigrants there who have been credited with revitalizing the city. On Friday and Saturday, Trump lied that Vice President Harris had let 13,000 or 14,000 convicted murderers enter the U.S. in the past three years, who “freely and openly roam our country,” a lie that Elon Musk called “true.”
In fact, as CNN’s Daniel Dale pointed out, it is a lie. The Department of Homeland Security clarified that the data to which Trump appeared to refer lists individuals who entered the country over the past 40 years—including during his own term—committed crimes in the U.S. rather than their country of origin, and either are currently incarcerated or have served their sentences but can’t be deported because their country of origin won’t accept them. Such individuals are monitored.
On Saturday, Julia Terruso of the Philadelphia Inquirer reported that a woman in a Philadelphia suburb received a letter that looked like an official document from the fake “Pennsylvania Congressional Office of Immigration Affairs” telling her that she was expected to provide living space to five migrants under a program “written into Law by President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.”
As Terruso wrote, “No office exists, nor does such a government-mandated housing program, but the letter, doctored to look like an official government document, provided specific details designed to mislead someone less attuned to a scam—and laid the blame for the fake program at the feet of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris during a heated and close election in which immigration has increasingly become a focal point.”
Lies establish dominance over people being lied to, because lies take away a person’s right to make good decisions about their own life. So what’s the purpose of the Republican lies?
Former president Trump is the Republican presidential nominee, but his recent attacks on special counsel Jack Smith and his attempts to sell watches for up to $100,000 apiece suggest he is interested mostly in avoiding prosecution and gathering donations. At his recent events he is slurring his words, unable to answer questions, and seems consumed with anger and a desire for revenge against those he sees as his enemies. He has recently referred to Harris as “mentally disabled,” and today in Erie, Pennsylvania, he said that crime would end “if you had one really violent day…. One rough hour. And I mean real rough. The word will get out and it will end immediately.”
He has, though, focused on painting a picture of the U.S. as a hellscape overrun with undocumented criminal immigrants. Journalist Aaron Rupar of Public Notice, who clips Trump’s speeches on social media, compared yesterday’s rally in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, to the “Two Minutes Hate” against political enemies in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Trump’s attacks on immigrants were so extreme even he admitted “this is a dark speech.”
Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance is also doubling down on anti-immigrant attacks. In that, they are echoing the language Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán used to get voters to support him out of fear of immigrants. Then Orbán took control of Hungary, undermined its democracy, and set himself up as a dictator.
Once in charge, Orbán insisted that democracy was obsolete. The democratic principle that the law must treat everyone equally and give them a say in their government, he said, weakens a nation by treating women, LGBTQ+ individuals, and racial, ethnic, and religious minorities as equal to white, heterosexual men. Immigration weakens a nation by diluting its purity. He set out to establish what he called “illiberal democracy” or “Christian democracy,” enforcing religious rules and laws that reestablish patriarchy.
Project 2025 was backed by the right-wing Heritage Foundation, which has ties to Orbán’s Danube Institute, and to the extent he talks about policies, Trump echoes that game plan. He has promised, for example, that he would replace civil servants with loyalists and today again vowed to get rid of the Department of Education, both key items in Project 2025.
Vance has gone further, attacking secular American society itself. In 2021 he said in an interview that American “conservatives…have lost every major powerful institution in the country, except for maybe churches and religious institutions, which of course are weaker now than they’ve ever been. We’ve lost big business. We’ve lost finance. We’ve lost the culture. We’ve lost the academy. And if we’re going to actually really affect real change in the country, it will require us completely replacing the existing ruling class with another ruling class…. I don’t think there’s sort of a compromise that we’re going to come with the people who currently actually control the country. Unless we overthrow them in some way, we’re going to keep losing.” “We really need to be really ruthless when it comes to the exercise of power,” he said.
On Saturday, Vance spoke at an event hosted by right-wing extremist evangelical leader Lance Wallnau, a member of the New Apostolic Reformation movement that seeks to end the separation of church and state and put the United States under religious rule. At the event, Vance claimed that “American children… can’t add five plus five, but they can tell you that there are 87 different genders.” He claimed that schools are teaching children “radical ideas” rather than “reading, writing, arithmetic.” He called it “creeping socialism in our schools,” and called for cutting funding for public education.
The White House today said that more than 3,300 federal personnel are deployed in the states impacted by Hurricane Helene and that at least 50,000 people from 31 states, the District of Columbia, and Canada are working to restore power. FEMA has moved in food and is working to restore cell coverage; federal search and rescue teams are on the ground; the U.S. Coast Guard is working to reopen damaged ports; the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is assessing damage and moving debris; the Environmental Protection Agency is working on water systems; the Small Business Administration has 50 people on the ground to support small businesses; the U.S. Department of Energy is monitoring power, fuel, and supply chains; the Department of Agriculture is extending credit to farmers who lost crops and livestock.
At a campaign event in Las Vegas tonight, Vice President Harris said “we will stand with these communities for as long as it takes to make sure that they are able to recover and rebuild.”
Wallnau has accused Harris of practicing witchcraft.
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Notes:
https://www.axios.com/2024/09/30/hurricane-helene-death-toll-southeast-flood-damage
https://www.axios.com/2024/09/27/hurricane-helene-rapid-intensification-trend
https://www.axios.com/2022/09/29/hurricane-ians-rapid-intensification-climate-change
https://kffhealthnews.org/news/article/fact-check-trump-lower-insulin-prices-false/
https://www.kff.org/policy-watch/the-facts-about-the-35-insulin-copay-cap-in-medicare/
https://www.newsweek.com/fox-host-confronts-republican-poll-showing-voters-blame-gop-border-1940577
https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/vote1182/vote_118_2_00182.htm
https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/24/politics/donald-trump-women-voters-protector-abortion/index.html
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/sep/27/vance-lance-wallnau-event
https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/29/politics/fact-check-trump-harris-immigrants-homici lol de/index.html
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I often wish that sub stack gave us different or at least multiple options of response. That is, I love that you keep us informed, I hate almost all of what truth demands that you report. The “almost” is highlighting the work of FEMA and other government response teams. Their heroic efforts in dangerous situations cannot be adequately described.
On September 15, 2024, Connie Millard of Missouri died. She had been deployed with MO Taskforce 1, the first FEMA team deployed to the World Trade Center on 9/11. She was a canine specialist in SAR. She and her dog and the rest of their team spent 11 days crawling—literally— through the rubble, seeking survivors at first as the unstable debris trembled and shifted around them, and then later bringing out body parts to help with identification for closure for the victims’ families. Connie and her subsequent dogs (she trained six dogs to live finds and cadaver work at the highest certification in disaster response) went on many more missions, including response to NOLA after hurricane Katrina and CT after hurricane Sandy. There are now only 3 surviving members of the FEMA heroes who were at the WTC.. Take a moment to salute them, please.
RIP, Connie. Thank you for decades of service.
EDIT: Thank you everyone for your support of Connie and through her of all FEMA workers. If you want a larger glimpse of Connie's life and work, go to Facebook and google Missouri Task Force 1, and scroll down to the picture collage. There is one that is just an announcement, but look for the Sept 19th photo collage that starts with noting Connie's name. There are several posts and updates of the current deployment of MOTF-1 to North Carolina in the aftermath of hurricane Helene.
As a practicing witch I can tell you that every time a Christian lights a candle that’s witchcraft. Every time a Christian chants a prayer that’s witchcraft. So mote it be.