Welcome to Keith Knight. Don't Tread on Anyone in the Libertarian Institute. Today, I'm joined by Amy Lepore. She holds a PhD in public policy from the University of Delaware. Dr. Lepore, thank you so much for your time. It's good to see you, Keith. Thank you for having me on. Absolutely. What is FEMA and what is its alleged purpose? Yes, so, so FEMA has only existed since the late 70s. FEMA was founded in 79 under a
Carter administration. And prior to FEMA, disasters had been handled, the disaster resources at the federal level had been handled by many organizations. And so there was not a centralized effort until the Carter administration. So with the centralization of those efforts, things came under FEMA, not just natural disaster relief the way we think about hurricanes and flooding, but also civil defense was a bit of a holdover from roughly the 50s.
And so the civil defense, which ultimately down the road would become kind of a focus on man made hazards and then on on terrorism. So that also became ushered under the the FEMA umbrella in the late 70s and as you know has changed drastically since then. As far as its alleged purpose or stated intentions for existing, always seems like no matter what they can find an emergency to get us on. Is it a virus? Is the climate changing?
Is Vladimir Putin a bad guy? It's always an emergency which constantly results in the state getting more power and more money. What is its alleged purpose and do they ever define emergency so I can have a reference point? Yeah, we'll, we'll you know, the, the, the term emergency and and even the declaration itself of emergency which brings to bear resources has has seen exponential increase in how we think about it. That term has expanded.
It's certainly never contracted and we can expect that it never will. But you know, so FEMA in delivering those, you know, it's, it's charter really it's, it's so charter is to coordinate resources at the federal level. And ideally in disaster, those resources should not be tapped into until local and state resources like the availability of to evacuate people to shelter, to provide mass care, to make sure people have medical supplies as needed.
Those those types of resources and certainly even homeowner assistance aren't intended to, to be brought to bear until local and state organizations, their Emergency Management agencies say we're topped out. We don't have the people, we don't have the supplies and we no longer have the funds. And we have already contributed XYZ to this effort.
So now we are ready for FEMA to come in and to bring, you know, FEMA brings in not only FEMA, but you can see in the local response, there's also National Guard, we saw Customs and Border Patrol resources. We know there are ATF agents on
the ground. So with with the declaration of this size comes a lot of federal resources and FEMA's is, you know, intended really to provide that centralized hub for coordination within the federal organizations and then also top down from the federal to the state and local organizations as well. But you brought up something
really important. So I'm going to keep going with this because you talked a little bit about the expanding notion of disaster and the expanding notion of deck the declaration process. One of the things that FEMA does, we know they have responsible for the disaster Relief Fund of those funds that are given to state and local
organizations. And then also, I think that encompasses the funds given over to homeowners after damage assessment for things like initial personal goods, but then also repairs to their home and also mitigative measures. So the, you know, opportunity to elevate if you're in a flood area. FEMA does pay for hazard mitigation efforts for local homeowners and local jurisdictions. And over the last 30 years, there's been almost $350 billion spent across 1700 declarations
for for disaster. And about 44% of that, I don't think this is going to surprise you, but about 44% of that has been spent on hurricane response.
And a huge chunk of that, as you can imagine on storms like Katrina, really everything else kind of pales in comparison to to the extent of damage and need for recovery when when you look at Katrina until today, I think what we see happening in Appalachia. But of those $350 billion in the last 30 years, would you believe that 20% was spent on COVID? Not even something that we think about. So, So take away the whole debate about the insane response to this cold. Take that away completely.
Just just thinking about what federal resources are required to respond to emergency, 30 years of disaster relief funds, 20% of that spent on COVID. It's absolute insanity. But it makes great sense when you think about the change in FEMA. And we didn't really talk about that yet. So after 911, FEMA was merged up under the Department of Homeland Security and at this time national security and emergency response kind of became
synonymous. So FEMA merged up under DHS really with this, this, this morphing, this morphing response, moving from natural hazards, maybe thinking a little bit about civil defense, but morphing really from natural hazards to thinking about man made hazards. And not just not just civil defense from like a a nuclear incident standpoint, but also moving to kind of man made terrorism, other acts that could happen in the continental US.
And so we, we really have kind of this expanding notion and then enter COVID, which is really, you know, in, in terms of large scale incidents in the US that have taken that have given the state the opportunity really to take advantage of what they built with FEMA and DHS after 911. I would say that COVID was an excellent test case for how far they could get locals to go. You know, what could they get local officials to do to their neighbors?
And it for me, you know, my research is old at this, My research is almost a decade old at this point. But you know, I got to watch Kovid and got to see some of that unravel. And, and the concerns in my research are really, what are local folks going to do with all this money? Is it going to change how they think about local response and how they how they care for their neighbors and how they plan with their communities? And overwhelmingly the answer is yes.
And we only have to look at COVID and vaccinating our neighbors and telling them they can't go to the park. And and sitting in an emergency operation center plotting and planning really how to manage your fellow citizens. Which is pretty gross if you ask me.
The Libertarian Institute published a book, Diary of a Psychosis by Tom Wood. So on top of the claim that, well, we get to institute a domestic imperialist regime and tell people when they can go outside and who they can do commerce with and when and for what reason, we'll tell you if you're a what was the sickening term that they used, if you're a necessary firm, or if you are, what was the Orwellian term? It was something about whether your job is really important.
Oh, like non essential versus essential? Essential firms. Essential firms. So yeah, first they said there was that. And then it turns out after years of research, Tom Woods gathered that there was no correlation between COVID deaths and states that had severe mask mandates for long term, severe lockdowns for long terms. He compares California and Florida, and he also compares countries, mentioning Sweden. He mentions Japan along with a very similar populations that
had very different responses. There was no significant effect. And Fauci actually knew this because in March of 2020, he was on 60 Minutes and he said people should not be wearing masks. There's no reason. Yes, your doctor wears a mask during surgery, but that's never been well, I'm going to wear this now to protect you from any respiratory viruses I might have. So it was a complete scam. It wasn't only immoral, it was completely ineffective.
Anything else we could learn from the COVID era when it comes to how we can see FEMA as a legitimate or illegitimate organization when it comes to future responses? Yeah, my, my, my analysis of FEMA has really been almost, almost solely focused on its intergovernmental relationship with local governments. So looking at how the, the, how the, the trade in grants rights of federal government gives local jurisdictions so much money and FEMA and DHS are a
major purveyor of that. And so looking at how that, that grant exchange process so that we pay off the local governments, they do whatever we want. And I think again, COVID was a huge test of that. Will local governments, will they, will they act in the the opposite interest to their neighbors? And, and overwhelmingly the answer was yes.
Will public safety agencies lock down parks and beaches and tell families they can't play at baseball outside and make their neighbors wear masks and make them, you know, and, and, and play this role where not just emergency services, although they played a large hand in it, but certainly local public health playing a role in incentivizing the citizenry in their local jurisdictions, their neighbors, their friends, their baseball coaches, the teachers at their schools, incentivizing
them to take an experimental vaccine, right. Whatever to, to, to, you know, and, and I think that the grant exchange process, while it's not sexy to talk about, like money is not like, like, you know, I get that the grant process is not exciting to talk about, but I assure you that it has driven this entire thing, the lack of autonomy that local governments have now because of the amounts of their operational budgets.
And this is especially the case for public safety, even though generally, even though my, my research is almost solely focused on Emergency Management, but that that kind of relationship, that that perversion where the federal government is paying for local operations. What, what vested interest does a federal government have in paying for an emergency manager in a local jurisdiction? It seems, I know like sometimes it seems so innocuous.
Well, they just want local governments to be prepared. Well, that is incredibly foolish. And all we have to do is to take a look at the local government's response to that relationship. And we can talk a little if, if now's a good time, we can talk a little bit about kind of those, those research findings. But we have only to look at a
couple of things. The first is the Uniform Code, the, the code, sorry, the Code of Federal Regulations, which states that any equipment that is purchased with those funds can be reabsorbed by the federal government at any time. So really all we're doing is we are buying the federal government extra Bearcats, extra mass casualty ambulances, extra mobile command units they can position. All those things are assigned to local government.
Local government emergency services essentially become federal outpost staffed with people paid for by the federal government and equipped from their, you know, their from their hazmat units to their mobile command units to their Bearcats equipped nearly in some cases nearly completely with Homeland Security and FEMA dollars, right. And that's separate from the disaster Relief Fund. But the point is the same. There is no autonomy anymore.
And the lines are so completely blurred between what is local and and really the state. The state has a weird role here, right? The state, the state agencies generally serve as a pass through for these grants, but there is nearly a direct funding between the federal and the local government. And, and to think it's not just the equipment piece, it is also the things that we heard emergency managers say in a nationwide study. In their own words, they told us that overwhelmingly they
wouldn't even exist. Their local governments would not fund their their positions if it weren't for federal grant dollars. This calls into question two things. The first is, well, if you're not a priority for your local government, what the heck are
you doing, guy? But also what is the federal government's intention with locally positioning a person whose job is to plan for man made and natural disasters and continue to equip that person and their operation and maybe additional people, you know, large jurisdictions like a Baltimore City, it's going to have many people funded by FEMA and Homeland Security. So what is their intention? And we, you know, in in asking local emergency managers across
the country about that? I think the question was, you know, does your relationship with federal grants, does it inhibit your ability to properly respond to local needs? In other words, does your intake of these federal funds, does it does it lessen your ability to respond locally with proper local knowledge? Like, are you taking care of what the federal government wants versus what is appropriate? Are you versus like properly planning for sheltering and evacuation and, and mass care?
And overwhelmingly, Keith, the answer, the answer was absolutely yes. We are beholden to federal standards. We are beholden to this federal paperwork. We wouldn't be here if it wasn't for them. So we're kind of going to do what they say. And yeah, it's, it's taking away our our local focus. They love just taking away the focus constantly. They're like, we care about the plight of the middle class and especially black Americans.
And I'm like, all right, 60% of black Americans want school choice. And they're like, that's not what we're talking about. At all. That's not If you could stop being a Putin puppet, I would appreciate it because that's not what the That's not what we're
going for. Your PhD thesis is titled The effects of Federal Financial Assistance Attitudes and Actions of Local Emergency Managers. So what is the agreement is the agreement that we're going to give states that meet these requirements X amount of dollars and that's basically how they control it. He who pays the piper calls the tune. They then are able to set the standards by controlling the flow of monetary resources.
What? What do we need to know about how they're funded more generally? Yeah, so there are. So I'm going to try to speak generally because as you can imagine, there are so many grant programs, but I'll talk a little bit about two that come to mind that end up funding Emergency Management staff at the local level, but that are passed through from the the state government. So the Emergency Management performance grant, which is heavily, I think heavily involved in funding staff positions.
And then the state Homeland Security grant program, which can also fund staff positions, but has been largely responsible for funding all of those huge equipment purchases that came in the the years after 911. So those, those two grants come with requirements metrics and the requirements are kind of the thing we talked about already, which is, you know, we're going to buy you some equipment, but like we could take it anytime it can be repurposed for other federal programs.
So essentially you're buying it with the understanding that you can use it until we need it. And the types of things we purchased with those funds are concerning in terms of not wanting to hand over more of that kind of power and and equipment to the federal government. And then there's also a simple guideline, which which sounds like it wouldn't be a big deal, but it ends up being incredibly
time consuming. Things like making sure that all responders in a jurisdiction are trained, kind of centralized and trained in something called the National Incident Management System. And that are, are using kind of an unseen response called the incident command system, which is intended to be just a mechanism of response, a way to organize on scene to make sure you know, kind of in a, in an
innocent fashion, right? Like that all organizations are working together, that your subject matter experts on scene have appropriate kind of insight and oversight of, of local response. But this, it, it seems innocuous, but this, this NIMS and ICS training end up being a, a primary feature of what an emergency manager does. We spent years making people sit through all of these trainings.
I mean, every cop, every firefighter, every dispatcher, every hazmat tech, right through multiple trainings so that you could be in receipt of these grant funds. So in the years after 911, probably, I would say probably for 10 years after that, if not, if not 12, and just a ridiculous amount of time spent on sitting in a classroom training people. And so a reasonable question to ask in exchange for federal grant funds, you have to meet these training requirements.
They are time consuming, but maybe there's a return on investment, right? Maybe this training is phenomenal and it's exactly what first responders need to be able to properly respond. And then just scale that response up if it's not just a singular emergency, but becomes a disaster with several States and many jurisdictions responding. And it would be reasonable if we got really good at that to think, OK, so that was worth our
time. So I'm going to share just a couple of things with you that I think demonstrate that that the incident command system and the mechanism that of of roll out and the the time it has taken, it's unlikely that it has been worth it. And those are two examples that
that you'll be familiar with. So, you know, the, the issues in Uvalde with the school shooting can almost absolutely be pointed to a lack of on you can point to a lack of understanding of how how an incident is supposed to to to unravel that looks like an active shooter. And we have the chief arriving, refusing to take command of the of the incident and saying in his own word in saying he's, I did not issue any orders.
So here we have the state of Texas and all the counties in Texas rolling out this expensive, elaborate kind of requirement for training. And in the one time it was needed in Uvalde, it did not work. And he was the one guy who sat through it in Uvalde. It's absolutely ridiculous. We have another issue where we are not only doing that training, but we are building huge elaborate emergency operation centers and fusion centers with, you know, Department of Homeland Security
and FEMA funding. And in the Marjory Stoneman Douglas, the the school shooting in Florida, those resources were not used. And the report attributes much of the inability for responders to properly communicate during that incident and much of the outcome of that incident to a lack of coordination. The sole use of those facilities and of the training was so that this would not happen, so that there will be seamless communication and coordination.
And that's not happening. So in terms of what does the local relationship with the federal government look like as a response to those grants, It looks like a lot of paperwork and a lot of training that has not made a lot of difference. So your general criticism is twofold. 1, the feds don't necessarily have the knowledge of what people in a certain locality need, and two, they don't have the incentive to provide those goods effectively. Is there anything I'm missing in
your overall thesis? No, absolutely not. And in fact, I think the overall the, the, the thesis would be the incentive provided to local governments of, of finance and the ability to kind of increase bureaucracies at the local level is not correlated at all with an increase in, in local emergency preparedness. So let's use the A Vol Day example because that one was extra egregious. I don't have the numbers in front of me.
I want to say 300 plus officers were dispatched and did not go into the school and one woman was arrested for trying to go into the school where she was just terrified and wanted to save. Her. Child. Yes. OK. I I wanted to make sure I wasn't misremembering that. Thank you. What happened after? See, I would think like they completely lost their funding and the top ten people at FEMA were fired and everyone had to do more training and they had to
give taxpayers the refund. What ended up happening? Yeah. Let me just want to quickly separate the issue. So the, the funding that we're talking about for training is absolutely paid. It it's is funded by the Department of Homeland Security and centralized through the Emergency Management office. The staffers are largely paid with Homeland Security and FEMA dollars. So I'm telling the story I'm telling involves more than one type of federal grant.
So I'm I'm going to try to, to stay on on task here. I don't want to to to misinform. So the issue in Uvalde, I'm I'm not sure what happened afterwards. I read the report. The report didn't include any personnel information at the time.
I'm given to understand that chief is no Chief Arredondo is no longer there and and and others have pointed to his his on scene response and his refusal to take command, his admission that he did not issue any orders despite being the senior person on site when that that incident, when that incident occurred, people certainly pointed to that and I assume it's the reason he was fired. And that is one among many errors that occurred on that
day. But but yeah, so, so I would there is, there is, yeah, your, your I think your question is there ever a refund on, on poor service? And the answer is absolutely not. And in fact, I bet you that that more federal dollars rolled into that that location right into that jurisdiction to to right the wrongs. And there's never an assessment of return on investment, nearly never right for for this
billions of dollars invested. The reason I ask is I so often hear from government advocates that, well, what if there's a company and they do a really bad thing? Well, maybe there's prosecution, but at the end of the day, you can stop funding companies in the voluntary sector, but that's not what you get with government. So I actually, I was not being facetious. I did not know what happened in that of all the case.
Have you come across any evidence that laws against price gouging lower the cost of products without creating shortages or significant decreases in the the quality of goods and services people in disaster zones have access to? Yeah, no, no. And actually I was taking a look at at the the concerns coming out of North Carolina and Tennessee and you know, they're always evident after disaster.
There's always concern. And you always hear your AGS and your state officials decrying price gouging and saying that the type of, you know, saying they they can't wait to can level punishment on on these companies. And what is most interesting about price gouging and the way that people think about it is that they're always referring until the big, big and greedy corporations.
But the truth is a lot of a lot of what's coming out of North Carolina and Tennessee are small companies who, because of, you know, the, the supply that is accessible, must elevate prices. And this, you know, this encourages people, right? People who would be purchasing immediately before or after a disaster to, to, you know, to, to make good decisions with the supply on hand and to not over purchase.
You know, the, the price gouging while while decried by our, our politicians, really is a mechanism by which our, our supply is mediated after disaster. Right now there are over 300 complaints that are being investigated in North Carolina. I don't know about the numbers in Tennessee, but I think generally, you know, it is things like hotel costs, grocery costs and fuel get the bulk of the attention in terms of price gouging.
I think sometimes things like generators and there have been plenty of stories about that after disaster, but these are this is the nature of complaint. It's not just big greedy corporations. People are wrong when they say that. It's often mom and pop shops trying to do the best they can to keep the supply on hand for for folks who really need it. Yeah, I've always been told I need to vilify people who are producing goods and services and
offering them to me voluntarily. But parasites who offer me nothing? Well, those are just my comrades and I got to support them relentlessly. You'd think I'd have a little more appreciation for the people trying to get us out of this mess on page 29, but you say classic economic theory dictates that decision making for the emergency manager must take into account that quote.
According to Applied Economic, citizens will demand an increasing number of publicly provided services in increasing amounts, while wanting to spend less of their personal income for these goods and services. So we're just taking the common sense economics people have known for centuries. When you raise the cost of something, people will consume it less and it will increase the incentive for other producers to come to this specific area and increase the supply of goods and
services. And the federal government keeps protecting us from a higher supply of goods and more options when it comes to quality. Anything else on the incentives created by governments during disasters or what we need to know about this before we move on? Yeah, I would say, I would say there is there is something else that is that is an inappropriate signal I think that the federal government is sending before disaster.
So in the preparedness phase, I feel like FEMA has for for decades now signal to the American public we're going to be there when there is a disaster. And I think that that reduce it. You know, I mean, just like in its simplest form, and we can talk about this in a, in a more complex sense, but in its simplest form, that tells like my monkey brain, I don't have to worry so much in my home, right? I live, if I live on the water, I have subsidized flood
insurance, so that's cool. And also, if my house floods, FEMA's going to come in and they're going to, you know, they're, you know, as long as the the incident is large enough, they're going to come in and they're probably going to help with remediation. And if I'm lucky, I'm going to get a mitigation grant and they're going to elevate my home. And if I'm in a hurricane prone area, they're going to put hurricane shutters on my house.
And I feel like yes, the the blame is partially on homeowners who do not take accountability. But I think that FEMA has signaled in, in just after Katrina and certainly after 911, we started using the, I don't know if you have heard this, but FEMA started using this language. And oh, I heard it from Deanna Criswell, the current director of FEMA just a couple of days ago. They called themselves the federal family.
And they say things like you're a federal family is, is prepared to respond into Tennessee. Your federal family is leaning forward and providing coordination on on the ground. I mean, they're signaling to the American people that you can be less prepared, that FEMA will have resources not just for homeowners and but also businesses. You know, through the through FEMA, the Small Business Administration grants for local businesses are provided.
So there really has been a signaling by the federal government that we can be less prepared in our homes because of the resources that FEMA brings to bear after a disaster. And it's simply not true. There are countless stories. I have my own kind of horror stories of working storms and being the person responsible for telling homeowners or businesses, you know, this, this disaster didn't meet the threshold or home is 10% less damage than your neighbors.
There are no funds. And they would say, but they're always FEMA funds after a disaster. And this is the result of decades of of inappropriate messaging signaling to homeowners that they have a lack of that, that there is not an incentive to be more prepared. And as far as the allocation of responders, are they all in America? I heard you say something to the extent of like the bunch of them went to Kuwait the day before
Milton or something. I'm sorry, I don't have that quote in front of me. I've written that down. Talk to me about the incentive they have to properly allocate, you know, service providers in the case of an emergency. Yeah, this is important and and you'll, you know, you'll be able to, to really weigh on, on this as well. So if you were to ask me some, what are the, the most appropriate initial steps to take to make, to make fairly quick improvement in our system of response.
I would tell you that passing the Defend the Guard Act is one of the issues we're already working. So it makes it slightly more feasible because it is an active piece of legislation in over 30 legislatures and it has the, and it brings with it the opportunity to do 2 really important things. The first related to our conversation is provide well trained, well equipped people who are positioned locally who can respond and frankly, whose job it is to respond to local disaster.
The the folks who heard me talking about who were going to Kuwait was the Tennessee National Guard the day before Hurricane Helene hit. It's unacceptable. Those people should be home. They should be responding in their communities. They do not belong in Kuwait of all places. And the second thing the Defend the Guard bill does is strike a blow at the military industrial complex, right? So, so we like it for a couple
of reasons. But if you were to just say like, hey, what's on the books right now? What what looks like it is not a full solution, but something that could make quick improvement. Keeping our National Guard at home, relying on those assets, relying on state assets and not thinking so much about what the federal government can manifest in disasters is probably a not a quick win, but for whatever state passes at first, certainly a an opportunity for improvement.
Would any of the areas you're referring to, Tennessee or North Carolina, would they be categorized as a rural areas? I yeah, I think the my understanding is even Asheville in North Carolina, which is would be one of the more well populated areas near what kind of contiguous to to where the damage is that did not see the extent of damage that we are seeing in the pictures, right. So that is in the mountains. This is Appalachia. These are absolutely rural
areas. They're areas that don't have the resources of suburban and, and urban areas already, right? Like there's not a grocery store every two blocks. There's not fuel everywhere. There are people living who don't, you know, there's not like not, not all the big box neighborhoods, right? There's people who live in rural areas. They are prone to power outages just based on kind of their, their proximity to the woods,
right? Just and, and the lack of opportunity once kind of trapped in their home or trapped in their small area, the inability to get out and, and to move about and to get quickly to a shelter. Yeah, I think the the primary area that has been hit is largely rural. FEMA produced this document titled Achieving Equitable Recovery, a post disaster guide for local officials and leaders saying why equity matters in
post disaster recovery. The term equity means the consistent and systematic, fair just an impartial treatment of all individuals, including individuals who belong to under underserved communities that have been denied such treatment, such as Black, Latino and Indigenous and Native American persons, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders and other persons of color, members of religious minorities, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer LGBTQ plus persons,
persons with disabilities, persons who live in rural areas, and persons otherwise adversely affected by persistent poverty or inequality. So this is how FEMA responds to who they they say is a very high priority demographic, persons
who live in rural areas. And this is the result that we get absolute catastrophe and sending them to Kuwait before sending them to the taxpayers they claim to be serving and claim to be the employees of. So it is just pathetic to see how the merit is completely thrown out the window. They don't brag about how effective of a job they do. They brag much more about diversity, equity and inclusion. So FEMA's a disaster. Anything on this 'cause we have
two more things I want. To get to Yeah, absolutely, Keith. So just briefly it it's it's far worse than that. FEMA. It's it's clear, especially under this current director who made known very early in her career that she was, you know, going to take on their pet liberal causes. She uses the language of the left and and that's not, there's not really room for that when we're talking about preparing for disaster, who effects that affect everybody.
So taking on their pet, pet pet issues like climate change, if you look further into the FEMA documentation, you look what they're really what their focus is right now. Their focus is on climate change. Their focus is on equity initiatives. And Keith, you're never going to believe what I found not long
ago. So I was looking around this morning kind of kind of digging into actually what you just showed something a little bit more about the, the equity initiatives, because I'll talk here in a minute about what they have done at the local level. And that started a couple of decades ago to, to really round out this initiative. There's a, a organization that works with FEMA that is concerned about whether or not you can access your abortion
during disaster. You know, they passing out free condoms, making sure you can get to your abortion appointment, you know, if there is a disaster in your area. I mean, these, these are these, you know, clearly it's not just using the language of the left. These pet liberal causes are, are really prime drivers at FEMA and certainly at DHS. And I'm sure if we were to dig in at any federal organization,
it's exactly what we would say. But this, this equity initiative is not just at the federal level over I would say the just it, it, it is probably immediately following 911 when they start when jurisdiction started hiring more emergency managers to to, I don't know monitor for Al Qaeda or something here in the US,
right. So they started undertaking things like the federal kind of a higher higher education consortium at the national level to take a look at what the requirements and trainings were needed to be for an emergency manager. And what you see over a period of time is really your your Fire Chief, right, Who retires and maybe becomes your emergency manager because he has incredible kind of unseen experience and local knowledge
like nobody else. You start to see that, that that Fire Chief, and I'm using him as an archetype, of course, but you start to see that Fire Chief push pushed out really in favor of people who have more education, people who are overwhelmingly more female and people who you know, for whom. And, and, and you know, I'm, I don't think it's a leap to say that higher females with higher education levels are more likely to take help take on your pet liberal causes.
So Emergency Management in this country has become has come something that came from civil defense and firefighting and this background and took people who had local knowledge and incredible careers in those fields and turned them into kind of an overarching taking a look at disaster preparedness in your local jurisdiction. Through the this professionalization of Emergency Management effort, which is really taken on by FEMA, they have made more.
They have made sure to hire or to begin to hire people who can be more easily influenced. And that might be hard on the ears of some, but I'm talking about women with higher levels of education, which are notoriously prone to to care for their pet liberal causes. And now we see FEMA rolling out their pet liberal causes of equity DI and things like climate change and making sure you can access your abortion.
Yeah, and I just don't think we should look at, what is it, 96% of preschool teachers are female. I don't look at that at all, even though that's a very influential role to play on the population of children and that could influence them, that it is quite powerful if one demographic is so disproportionate in one area. I don't see anything wrong with that if these are people voluntarily going into the field.
What would be terrible is if you said we're going to focus less on meritocracy and make sure men are proportionately represented as nurses and preschool teachers. I think that would be an absolute sickening disaster. It would be crazy. And I was reading a little bit more about the the current FEMA director about her background.
Interestingly enough, she came out of Aurora, Co kind of some interesting stuff has gone on in Aurora, Co the last, you know, but now certainly, But you know, she she tells a story of walking into a room to take a test, to become AI guess, to become a firefighter with the city and being the only female there. And those stories don't play to my ears like maybe they do with some other people, you know, but but she said, I I almost walked
out. Well, I have been the woman in the the, you know, kind of the only woman in the room before in a public safety career. I was going to make a joke, certainly as a libertarian, but that's a whole different story.
So and, and really adjust, you know, that those types of statements that, that kind of that, that victim mentality, that overstatement of what it is to you know, what, how important your gender is versus how, how critical you are, how, how important, how good you are in your role. These are the things that, and, and this is not a a statement about her professional career. She probably was an excellent
firefighter, whatever, right? She passed the test, but but bringing that mentality to FEMA, letting that infiltrate down into state and local organizations such that you make sure you have people operating in a victim mentality championing liberal causes is absolutely a recipe for disaster. And you know, you know what I can't do? I can't make a connection between that and a piss poor FEMA response in Appalachia.
But but you know, it's, it's hard to know whether or not there is there has been a long term impact of a focus on man made disasters. So kind of spreading FEMA thin in terms of how they're focused. And then really this, this goal of professionalization and equity, whether or not it has had an impact, I suspect one day we will know. It's just a case of opportunity cost. You only have so many dollars, monetary cost.
And then for every minute you spend focusing on what is the race of the person, what was their income background, what is their gender, what do they identify as, Let me make sure I have all these pronouns in the right order. That comes at the cost of actually focusing on the good or service you claim to provide for the public. So it just makes total sense that the more time and effort you spend on this, it has to come at the expense of what
your. Alleged goal is supposed to be when it comes to explicit examples of the government using the term emergency in unjust ways. During the Second World War, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. This would have been in February of 1942, so 2-3 months after Pearl Harbor, which led to the internment. This was before FEMA, but he basically gave the Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, the right to declare military zones and kidnap people by the 10s of
thousands. I think it was 122,000 Japanese, German and Italian immigrants. We're just rounded up based on an emergency. As far as what we've seen with FEMA recently, have there any been, have there been any cases of just explicit tyranny that we should watch out for? You mean other than COVID other? Other think, well, I guess. I mean, COVID, COVID is so I have, I have another, another example that that's that we can talk about.
But COVID is a, a prime example of, of an opportunistic federal government that has provided terrible incentives to state and local governments to do their bidding, right? As, as really just federal outposts and COVID was a test of that. So in terms of, I mean, does it, does it get worse than locking people in their homes, right? Does it does it get worse than shuttering businesses?
Does it get worse than sending your, your Stormtroopers out because a local business is open when it shouldn't be? That, you know, I was in Delaware at the time and we had Delaware State Police and other folks going and knocking on the doors of businesses who weren't supposed to be open, right? Or a restaurant who was caught with their, their chef wasn't wearing a mask or they had patrons seated at a table not
properly wearing their masks. I mean, these are really a government that can get their citizens to to tell on each other in this fashion. Things are already so far gone that, that maybe it cannot even be repaired. But another good example. And, and I think that I, I mostly saw this after COVID. So I think it is, I think it was a response to how effective and how useful and lucrative COVID was for States and local jurisdictions because the money was just, you know, off the charts.
And they didn't use it all for COVID stuff either. I'm sure that doesn't shock you, but there was and like Delaware is a good example. I know this has gone on in other states. There was an attempt to declare a state of emergency around gun violence and this would this, you know, doing that successfully. Can you imagine, you know, Can you imagine what that proceeds, right? What follows a state of emergency declared on gun violence is not an attempt to
reduce crime in an inner city. No one cares about that, right? Not, not an attempt at that at all, but really an attempt to, to pinpoint and to focus on lawful gun owners. People who, you know, are, are, are, you know, are armed and people who have firearms in their homes. This is not, you know, it's always cloaked under the auspices of reducing violence in urban areas.
It never is actually that. And And so in the model of COVID, we saw states like Delaware attempt to pass and I don't think they did it successfully. I'm no longer in Delaware, but attempt to pass. And this is at a time when other legislation was active that was infringing on 2nd Amendment rights as well. So kind of doing, doing large scale battle in a state over whether or not there is a violent, there is a state of
emergency around gun violence. And what would happen after that is, you know, the emergency is kind of how the tap opens, right? And so you end up with, with at least millions of state dollars right, poured into, I would assume public health organizations. And what ends up happening is, you know, they make just like COVID was a a public health emergency. The gun violence would be seen as a public health emergency. So now it's not just like law enforcement that is acting on
perceived gun related issues. It is also public health, right? So an ear toward, you know, making sure your teachers are listening for whether or not their students are talking about whether or not mom and dad have a gun in their home.
Making sure, you know, people like the the counselors that are accessed through public schools and paid with government funds are extra attentive to their counseling sessions if there is any discussion at all of firearms, making sure, yeah, just just that there's education in the schools that is antithetical to how you or I would see, you know, our Second
Amendment rights. So the you know what, what seems innocuous and just a play at solving some inner city problems around gun violence really is, is is so much worse than that. And and, you know, in terms of definitions, yeah, I would agree it is it is tyrannical and done in the model of COVID. I think, I think with, I think the the blue states especially learned that with COVID comes a model for forgetting whatever you want in terms of policy and certainly in terms of money.
All right, So we could say FEMA's a disaster. One thing you can do is fight to abolish FEMA, very costly. So as far as alternatives, are there examples historically or today that you have found of one, an emergency that existed and two, people who organize voluntarily to achieve successful relief efforts? What if if anything meets those
two criteria? There are there are a set of researchers who come out of George Mason and they write for the Mercatus Center there and this has been the sole focus of much of their research. I've done some some projects with them, some book chapters and stuff. They are and of the preeminent experts on how community does emergency response so much better than government can and how often government is an impediment to community
response. And one of my favorite stories that they tell is the story of the Vietnamese community in one of the parishes in Louisiana that was hardest hit during Hurricane Katrina. And there was a community leader. He was well respected. And he may have been a pastor. He may have been affiliated with
a church there. How he rallied the community to make sure that they were, you know, if they were not evacuated, that there was proper care for the elderly, proper care for special needs individuals, that the story is, you know, and I don't have all the, I don't have great details,
but that is one anecdote. This is one story in a in a host of stories where what we what we learn is that the only people who can appropriately respond to a disaster are people who are local, are your neighbors and your communities. Because the thing that government cannot have is local knowledge. It's simply cannot even even your local emergency manager, even that you're even a local emergency manager in a small county.
We've already talked how that person is solely beholden to a federal government and they're busy doing training and paperwork and, and, and thinking about Al Qaeda, right? So they're not thinking about, you know, there. This is not to say there aren't some good ones. I know, I know plenty of people who are, who are doing their best. But this is, and this is a generalization. But only your neighbors, only your local community can understand what those needs are.
And the example of the Vietnamese community coming out of Katrina was a prime, this one that always stuck with me that the the folks from the Mercatus Center wrote about very fondly because of their success. And that's one story out of many. Well, maybe that's why Asians have higher incomes than whites. I'm waiting for that, for that pay gap to be closed. Any day now, I'm sure Kamala Harris is going to write the executive order.
Miss Lepore, is there anything else that you would like to tell me or the audience about that I will that I haven't covered yet? No, I think, I think we've covered the bulk of it. Keith, this was wonderful. You know, this is important to talk about. I know. You know, it's a little out of the headlines now. I'm grateful that you still wanted to chat, but it's a little out of the headlines and it will be out of recent memory.
The important thing is here, you know, there are opportunities to push back. I think defend the Guard and making sure we keep the National Guard at home for domestic response is important. And I think the extent to which we can, you know, the small L libertarians or Big L libertarians can infiltrate their local governments, allow the Mesas Caucus decentralized revolution strategy and start to push back on our local governments heavy dependence on federal grants. It is not healthy.
It's lucrative. Sure, it's great for bureaucracy building, but it is not healthy and it certainly doesn't breed autonomy. These are our two opportunities that the other solutions are, are long slogs, right, Overhauling FEMA, it's overhauling DHS, maybe, you know, just dismembering. The two are are long slogs and unlikely to happen. So I think States and local jurisdictions kind of have to take matters into their own
hands. Thank you to everyone for watching Keith and I Don't Tread on Anyone and the Libertarian Institute. Miss Lepore, thank you for your time. Thank you so much, Keith.