Speaker 1: What's going on. Thank you so much for listening to
this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon
to three on WBT Radio in Charlotte. And if you
want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream,
my daily show prep with all the links, become a patron,
go to vpeteclendershow dot com. Make sure you hit the
subscribe button. Get every episode for free right to your
smartphone or tablet, and again, thank you so much for
your support. We had Andrew dunne on in the first
hour and I asked him about a story that actually
appeared at the Washington Post. It's a story by Brianna
Sachs and Jake Spring, and the focus is on Donald Trump,
because of course, right it's on how folks in western
North Carolina that were devastated by Hurricane Helene that they
all voted for Trump and they thought they were getting
Trump to help them, and now you know, where's all
the help and all of this. Okay, that's the focus
of the story. But there's a pretty amazing account in
here that I had not heard before, and I feel
like I followed this stuff pretty closely. I'm not sure
why I was not aware of this but let's just
kind of go through this piece by piece. So the
story centers, you know, as you normally find with these
types of stories. They go to Avery County and it's
a you know, a two lane highway, and western North
Carolina winds through a landscape littered with crushed cars, houses
knocked off their foundations, and thousands of downed trees. Five
months after Hurricane Helene, about three hundred privately owned bridges
in Avery County have yet to be fixed. Okay. While
Americans typically rely on a mix of state and federal
aid in the wake of a disaster, the recovery for
many here has become akin to a personal test of
their relationship with President Donald Trump. That lingering frustrations. Again,
they're connecting Trump to these voters, right, and it's a
personal relationship. If he doesn't deliver for them, oh, they're
gonna vote against him next time around. Oh wait, yeah,
never mind. Okay. The lingering frustration across parts of twenty
seven hurricane hit counties in North Carolina's Appalachian Mountain region
speaks to the complexity of rebuilding in a place dotted
with Federal Emergency Management Agency centers. But people say they
feel abandoned. Trump and his allies have blasted President Joe
Biden's response, feeding an online frenzy that has portrayed FEMA's
response as disastrous. So again, Orange man bad, you get
the sense. Let me skip ahead here, because this is
the to me, this is the headline. To me, this
is the story complaints about And this is I don't know,
second page in on a six page story. Yeah, so,
complaints about FEMA always followed disasters. As the nation's lead
disaster response agency, FEMA has a specific and often misunderstood
role to provide funding, coordinate resources, and help state and
local officials navigate a complex web of programs and resources.
FEMA was on the ground even before the storm hit,
according to Amber Silver, an emergency management expert at the
University of Albany who also happens to have both of
her names the names of alerts Amber and Silver. Anyway,
I just noted that I thought it was interesting, very Dickensian.
So she called it a common misperception that FEMA was
late in coming or that they didn't get to certain
parts of the state. Helene's sprawl made the response logistically complex,
especially since some mountainous communities and hollers in Appalacha are
extremely difficult to access. All of that is true, and
I was saying this from the very beginning that the
topographical challenges presented in western North Carolina are not the
normal kinds of environments that FEMA goes into a lot
of times. They're at the coast, right, they got a
hurricane that's slammed in to the country. It's usually it's
usually at the coast, and it's way more flat land,
you know, to see something like this in the mountains,
and then the wall of water and the types of
mud slides. It's just this is not something that they
deal with on a regular basis. Another potential obstacle was
that North Carolina here it is never appointed a disaster
recovery coordinator to take charge of communicating with federal agencies,
which is what FEMA recommends. William Ray, the States director
of the agency, confirmed that, saying officials decided to take
a different approach. So I'm not sure what is that
different approach. They were just not going to have somebody
running point under Roy Cooper. But then when Josh Stein
took over, apparently they did. They have somebody. Now, what
the heck? What was Roy Cooper doing. How is it
possible that Roy Cooper as governor for eight years with
multiple hurricanes, right, that he never could quite figure out
how to get people into homes after these disasters. It's
been seven years, eight years since some of those hurricanes
left people homeless, and some of those folks still don't
have their homes replaced. From Matthew and Florence let alone, Helene,
this guy has gotten a complete pass by North Carolina
media for his ineffectual disaster response. And we saw it,
heard the stories. Right, this is the five year anniversary
of the beginning of COVID, right, and everybody you know,
ran to his well. They couldn't actually go in person
to his press conferences during COVID, but reporters would go
and join the zoom call and patiently, you know, raise
their hand digitally and wait to get called on, and
you know, ask questions about how can we enforce you know,
these lockdowns, lock us down harder, daddy, you know, like
that was that was the entire tone of all of
this stuff. There was there was like no skepticism at all.
There was just this this rolling over and hoping that
he knew what he was doing. And just giving him
the benefit of the doubt that he did know what
he was doing. And that's fine if that's the way
you want to play it while it's going on. But
afterwards you should take a look and see did he
actually make the right decisions? Some of these things work,
did some of them not work? We should have an
accounting and we have not done that. Nobody has done
that with his policies. People haven't held him to account
for some of these decisions. So this is a pretty
big one. Right, Why why are we just now? How
did the Washington Post figure this out? And nobody else?
I don't know the answer to that, but they did.
They figured this out that apparently he never appointed a
disaster recovery coordinator. Natalie Simpson, an emergency management expert at
the University of Buffalo, said that she was shocked that
the state did not appoint a disaster response czar and
said this could help explain the uneven response. If there
were genuine problems with FEMA's response, like not penetrating fast
enough into the affected areas, somebody that the state appointed
as the czar would have been sounding deal arm earlier. Right,
That's why it seemed like their response was not being
well run. It's because it wasn't. It wasn't. If FEMA
was guilty of anything, the state of North Carolina is
equally guilty of it, she said. It wasn't until early
January that newly elected governor Josh Stein appointed a leadership
team to oversee the recovery in western North Carolina. Josh
Stein did that, and even now, as we heard from
Andrew Dunn in the last hour, I don't hear much
from that guy Collabria I think is his name. I
don't hear much at all from that office, from whoever
it is. That's running point like this is one of
the things that people expect of their governors to be
competent and surround themselves with competent They have to respond
to these disasters. You have to and we have known
this since the days of Jim Hunt, right going back
forty years. You got to know how to respond to
natural disasters. And Roy Cooper just apparently never learned, which
kind of makes sense because he went from you know,
a legislative seat, then to attorney general. You're not really
dealing with that stuff there, and then he ends up
as the governor. And that was probably the first time
in his life he ever had to really worry about
disaster response, and he didn't do a very good job
at it. Now will that haunt him when he runs
for US Senate, if he runs for US Senate against
Tom Tillis, I don't know. Will anybody in the media
care to ask him? I don't know that either. All right,
if you're listening to this show, you know I try
to keep up with all sorts of current events, and
I know you do too. And you probably heard me
say get your news from multiple sources. Why Well, because
it's how you detect media bias, which is why I've
been so pressed with ground News. It's an app and
it's a website and it combines news from around the
world in one place, so you can compare coverage and
verify information. You can check it out at check dot ground,
dot news slash Pete. I put the link in the
podcast description too. I started using ground News a few
months ago, and more recently chose to work with them
as an affiliate because it lets me see clearly how
stories get covered and by whom. The blind spot feature
shows you which stories get ignored by the left and
the right. See for yourself. Check Dot Ground, dot news
slash pete subscribe through that link and you'll get fifteen
percent off any subscription. I use the Vantage plan to
get unlimited access to every feature. Your subscription then not
only helps my podcast, but it also supports Ground News
as they make the media landscape more transparent. So the
Washington Post with this story about our former governor, my
good friend Ray Cooper, who did not appoint anybody as
a disaster recovery coordinator to take charge of communicating with
federal agencies. And this is something that FEMA recommends that
the states do, but the state did not. Roy Cooper
did not do this. And I saw Matt Mercer, who
is the Republican Party, the North Carolina Republican Parties communications guy,
and you know, he points out here that after families
down East went the entirety of Roy Cooper's tenure as
governor without getting homes rebuilt because of incompetence or willful
negligence in recovery from Hurricanes Matthew and Florence, the final
act of Roy Cooper's time was screwing over the other
part of the state, the western part of the state.
Like that's three hurricanes three hurricanes that Roy Cooper failed
at and A wasn't a lifetime pandemic. Which, oh, by
the way, did you see the uh do you see
the protesting that they're doing around the country over the weekend.
They were doing the rallies and such, the stand up
for science, not for Fauci. No, this isn't standing up
for Fauci aka the science. This is. This is to
This is in defense of government funded grants that have
been identified for potential cuts by doge right. And you
remember Francis Collins, Remember that guy, the guy who wrote, well,
he led the NIH but then he also sang like
rewrites of folk tunes and yeah, yeah, he did one
somewhere after the pandemic. It was to the tune of
Somewhere over the Rainbow. Yeah, that's well, he did it again. Yeah,
I got I've got the audio. We'll take a listen
to it. But let me get let me finish up
this Washington Post piece that since the disaster, FEMA has
poured nearly eight hundred million dollars into North Carolina's recovery.
About half that funding has gone to one hundred and
fifty six thousand households for rental assistance, home repairs and
other relief. They were on the ground here with us
since the beginning, and we're here with us all the
way through the response, said William Ray, speaking of FEMA.
In every response and recovery effort. We wish things had
gone faster, but that is the nature of disaster response.
Although many people said they were helped by the agency,
in fifteen weeks of driving across the state from his
home in Greenville, Sean Hendrix said he saw just two
FEMA workers and to him and to other residents, all
the federal rules in red tape have left people floundering
in dire financial situations and unacceptable living conditions. And then
they talked with Matt Vaughan's Van Swoll, a thirty year
old marketer who was one of Sean Hendricks's avid followers.
Sean Hendricks was apparently one of the Mister Beast's guys.
The YouTuber Mister Beast, he's one of his guys. Like Hendricks,
Von Swall remains outraged by what he described as FEMA's
complete failure to help his community of Weaverville and those
around him, as well local elected officials in Avery County,
all Republicans, say, the new administration and Trump's executive order
have made little discernible difference so far. William Ray, the
head of North Carolina Emergency Management, said that the federal
government's responsiveness on the disaster has been about the same
under Trump and Biden. So that's where it stands now.
I'm sure just like the homelessness problem, now we can
tell the story. Right now, we'll be able to tell
the story because now it's Trump's FEMA that's failing. Here's
a great idea. How about making an escape to a
really special and secluded getaway in western North Carolina. Just
a quick drive up the mountain and Cabins of Asheville
is your connection. Whether you're celebrating an anniversary, a honeymoon,
maybe you want to plan a memorable proposal, or get
family and friends together for a big old reunion, Cabins
of Asheville has the ideal spot for you where you
can reconnect with your loved ones and the things that
truly matter. Nestled within the breath taking fourteen thousand acres
of the Pisga National Forest, their cabins offer a serene
escape in the heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Centrally
located between Ashville and the entrance of the Great Smoky
Mountain National Park. It's the perfect balance of seclusion and
proximity to all the local attractions with hot tubs, fireplaces,
air conditioning, smart TVs, Wi Fi grills, outdoor tables, and
your own private covered porch. Choose from thirteen cabins, six cottages,
two villas, and a great lodge with eleven king sized bedrooms.
Cabins of Ashville has the ideal spot for you for
any occasion, and they have pet friendly accommodations. Call her
text eight two eight, three six seven seventy sixty eight
or check out all there is to offer at Cabinsofashville
dot com and make memories that'll last a lifetime. I
got a message from It's all a distraction who says
Hurricane Cooper was the worst storm to hit North Carolina.
I did mention Francis Collins uh and Russ says I
might be more disgusted with that guy than even Fauci.
His fingerprints were all over the sketchy research programs and
horrific response, but he used his faith as a shield
against criticism and a cudgel to force people with legitimate
concerns into compliance. He did the whole evangelical influencer circuit,
questioning other people's faith if they didn't like what was happening. Yeah,
I was not aware. I just recently found out about
Collins's evangelical connections, and yet I was not aware of
any of that, of that effort that he was undertaking
and had for a while. But I do know that
the guy loves to sing some nineteen sixties folk music
protest songs. I do know that he likes to do it.
In fact, there was a rally on Friday. I guess
it was against the Trump administrations sweeping cuts to research
funding and federal agencies tasked with advancing science. This is
from the USA Today article dubbed stand Up for Science.
The rallies brought together leading researchers, former administrators, and people
who benefited from medical advances. The main rally occurred on
the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington excuse me, DC,
with an estimated thirty events held from Seattle to Tallahassee, Florida,
and even in France. Why France.
Speaker 2: So?
Speaker 1: Doctor Francis Collins, the longtime former director of the National
Institutes of Health here is well. He took the stage,
he made some comments for about a minute or two,
and then he brought down the house here.
Speaker 2: I think if we're going to talk about people, there's
one more thing we need to do before I sit down.
Speaker 3: We need to sing out there.
Speaker 4: Yes, okay, Yes, we're gonna hope the wind doesn't get
the better of this.
Speaker 1: Okay, Yes, he's really working this crowd. Oh yeah, there
we go. Oh my gosh, he got his papers paper
clipped from the wind.
Speaker 2: Can we get a guitar?
Speaker 4: And this is a sing along?
Speaker 1: Yes, and a chorus.
Speaker 2: It's really easy to learn.
Speaker 5: Can you find the guitar?
Speaker 1: I mean I think I hear a guitar. Yeah, that's
a guitar. Something he can't hear the guitar?
Speaker 2: Hello, sound booth?
Speaker 1: Oh gosh, why.
Speaker 2: Can I get a little if we might be getting
this to work? Yes, the film's up. Good you can okay?
Are good?
Speaker 1: He couldn't tell okay.
Speaker 2: So this is a song that's often sung at the
end of a folk festival, but it's been rewritten for
today by me.
Speaker 3: It's a song about all the good people that I
was just talking about. You are all the good people? Well,
this is a song, Oh God, for all the good people,
all the good people. We're part this family. This is
a song for all the good people.
Speaker 1: Oh my gosh, what the heck?
Speaker 3: We're joined together by this noble dream.
Speaker 2: You got that, so it's just all the good people.
Speaker 1: But I'm sorry, I lost track of what lines I'm
supposed to know for this tune. What with all of
the technical glitches, I don't understand what's happening. I thought
you guys had the sound thing figured out, but then
some guy walks over. He starts adjusting one of the microphones.
You get the static, and then you get the loud
pop there. I I don't even know what we're doing
at this point, Like this is and well, who told
this man he needs to sing in public? Why are
they encouraging this kind of behavior? In Francis Collins, didn't
you learn anything with the somewhere after the pandemic song?
Why are you still doing this? Why are people encouraging
him to do this? Now he's gonna get everybody in
a sing along. And apparently there's one woman who is
on a microphone, so you're gonna hear her. This is
like top quality production levels here, guys, Top quality.
Speaker 2: Second line part of this family, and the last line,
we're joined together by this noble dream.
Speaker 4: Do that with me.
Speaker 3: This is a song for all the good people.
Speaker 1: Oh my gosh, what the heck part.
Speaker 3: Of this family. This is a song for all the
good people. We're joined together by this noble dream.
Speaker 1: So you really do get a sense of the virtue signaling, right,
It really does come through. You are the good people,
We are the noble dream pursuers and hars and such
a right. They really do think of themselves in these terms,
in these ways, we are morally superior. Like this is
a perfect encapsulation of the left. It really is. Thank you,
doctor Collins. You know, stories are powerful. They help us
make sense of things, to understand experiences. Stories connect us
to the people of our past, while trends generations. They
help us process the meaning of life. And our stories
are told through images and videos. Preserve your stories with
Creative Video. Started in nineteen ninety seven in Minhill, North Carolina.
It was the first company to provide this valuable service,
converting images, photos and videos into high quality produced slide shows,
videos and albums. The trusted, talented, and dedicated team at
Creative Video will go over all of the details with
you to create a perfect project. Satisfaction guaranteed. Drop them
off in person or mail them. They'll be ready in
a week or two. Memorial videos for your loved ones,
videos for rehearsal, dinners, weddings, graduations, Christmas, family vacations, birthdays,
or just your family stories, all told through images. That's
what your photos and videos are. They are your life
told through the eyes of everyone around you and all
who came before you, and they will tell others to
come who you are. Visit creative video dot Com got
some messages here. This is from Stan who says, so
Roy Cooper did not appoint somebody to interface with FEMA
for the Hurricane Helene disaster, as FEMA recommends. Well, wouldn't
you think that FEMA would have asked who that person was?
I would think so. Yeah, Like, this is literally the
first I had heard about them not having a coordinator,
that Cooper didn't set up somebody to be the point
person with FEMA, and that that is unusual and this
is the first I've heard about it, and it came
to us out of a report at the Washington Post.
Paul says, you love Elon Musk making cuts to save
tax dollars. But when Cooper doesn't waste taxpayer money on
a disaster team, there's a problem. Yeah, yes, yeah, or
just you know, don't have the funding right, this is
like this, this is the thing. If you're going to
promise that kind of an operation FEMA response, then yeah,
you should have somebody that runs point with that response. Otherwise,
what you like, what are you even doing? Look, maybe
Cooper's approach would have been a better approach. I don't
think it was. It turned out not to be so. Again,
like there needs to be an assessment of whether his
decision was the right decision or not. Ken says, thank
you for highlighting the need for prayer for the woman
facing surgery and her daughter in Durham who's in the hospital.
I am one of hundreds who will heed your call. Secondly,
I have been streaming on my phone since about twelve
fifty PM and I have experienced no issues with fading volume.
Thank you, Ken, I appreciate it. So I don't know,
I'm not sure. I just I pass along the reports
just so this way, if you are experiencing the same
sort of an issue, you don't think you're crazy, you know, like,
wait a minute, is this volume going up and down?
It's hard to tell. It's all a distraction, says listening
to Francis Collins makes me wish my feed was cutting out.
That's fair. You know, he did get he did get
it going after you know, the the problems with the
with the microphone and the feed and all of that,
he did get it going.
Speaker 5: A song.
Speaker 1: Yeah, for all of those dreamers. I don't know who,
the woman on the microph.
Speaker 5: Your answers to come our way, scientists, doctors, students, sauce seekers,
come and sharing the hops for a much brighter day.
Speaker 3: Come on. This is a song for all the good.
Speaker 1: People, all right. So I'm curious, like does this actually work?
Is that does this motivate the youth or really anybody
that's not like, I don't know a seventy year old
that remembers the sixties, which I feel like then that
you did the sixties wrong if you remember it. But seriously, like,
is this sing Is this singing supposed to win people
over to the cause.
Speaker 3: It's your edication, that's our insperbation.
Speaker 1: When wet I don't know, but the reverb is we
have to stand.
Speaker 3: So this is for all the good people, all them.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like this does not feel like I don't know,
this doesn't get me amped up, you know, it just doesn't.
I don't know. Can we get some of the Hamas holies,
maybe get some of them to show you how to
do like the the proper riotous chanting and beating on
the drums and stuff. I don't yeah, I don't even
know what's going on there. Yeah, Francis Collins, no, Russ.
I don't think he does have anybody in his life
that loves him enough to tell him to never sing
in public again. I don't think he does. Yeah, I
don't think he does, which is said speaking of Elon Musk.
Have you heard what's been going on there? Terrorists are
now attacking Elon Musk's Tesla dealerships and vehicles. It's happening
all over the country and it is, you know, the destruction,
the vandalism, it is terrorism. That's the whole point, right
It's to it's to try to force Elon Musk and
anybody around him to stop doing what they're doing. And
he's also been Twitter was actual or ex was also
hit with a hacker attack yesterday. He said that the
social media platform faced multiple outages around the world on Monday.
There were several different hacks or d doos. These like
spam attacks basically that denial of service attacks. He said,
there was a massive cyber attack against x We get
attacked every day, but this was done with a lot
of resources. Either a large coordinated group and or a
country is involved and we are tracing it. The reports
of outages were not localized to the US. Users as
far away as Europe had reported issues using the site
as well. Again, this is shut up ry, this is
shut up. Stop doing what you're doing. Stop participating in
the democracy. You are not allowed to participate because I
don't agree with your aims, and so you have to
be stopped. Think about like what they're saying here is
that we're going to destroy your free speech platform. We're
going to destroy your efforts to root out waste and
fraud because we make money because what we have some
sort of inside track on the platform or something like
I'm trying to figure out why these are bad things
per se. All Right, that'll do it for this episode.
Thank you so much for listening. I could not do
the show without your support and the support of the
businesses that advertise on the podcast, so if you'd like,
please support them too and tell them you heard it here.
You can also become a patron at my Patreon page
or go to thepetecleanershow dot com. Again, thank you so
much for listening, and don't break anything while I'm gone.