Speaker 1: I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekingana Show.
I am here with fellow old Glory club member, not me,
not you. How are you doing today?
Speaker 2: I'm doing pretty great. Pete, how are you doing doing?
Speaker 1: Good?
Speaker 2: Man?
Speaker 1: Let's just jump right into it. What we're here to
talk about. Yeah, we had this thing that the storm
that just did so much damage in Appalachia, and immediately
in the chat, we you know, started talking about if
anybody wanted to go down there and help, and you
were the one who jumped right to the right to
the front and said, yeah, I'll do it, even though
you're probably one of the one of the ones that
lives a pretty good distance away and everything, and so
you know, we said that once you got home and
you got settled, i'd have you on and we'd talk
about everything that you experienced there. So, you know, why
didn't you just start from where you where you think
the story starts.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I think with the start of the
story that the most important part is exactly where you
you picked it up. We had somebody in the OGC
or at least OGC adjacent say I have family in
the area. I need to check on them, and I
need help, and that's really why I jumped up and
was like, well, yeah, it's it. This is the point
of the OGC that when people people turn come to
us for help, come to their brothers for help, that
we're able to drop what we're doing and go. And
you know, not everyone's able to do that, but there's
enough people that are able to do that in the
OGC that we actually did come down there. And as
I'm discussing this a little bit more, I'll be very
vague with names and with locations because our guys are
still down there and there's as of the time of recording,
there's still doing their part to try and make sure
that this operation goes smoothly because the recovery effort down
there is going to take a very very long time.
So I guess basically one of the OGC adjacent guys
is trying to start up. The North Carolina chapter put
out the call and a bunch of people responded. I
went down there, stayed with a fellow OGC member from
the Virginia Chapter on the way down so I wouldn't
have to make the fourteen hour drive in one shot.
We had people join us from New Jersey. We had
people join us from other places in Virginia. The other
people in the Virginia chapter, I met a lot of
the guys that were from the nascent North Carolina chapter,
and they're young, but they're very They've got good, good
heads on their shoulders. Then we had some people come
up from Georgia as well, and as well as one
fellow made the trip all the way from Missouri, which
was about as far a distances as I traveled to
get there. So I really feel his pain. I guess,
do you want to start like just have me telling
in like a narrative format or do you want to
you want to talk about like key issues here.
Speaker 1: Well, I think the narrative is really really the way
to go, and then we can just pick out the
issues as we go.
Speaker 2: Sure, So we started in a in a township that
was rather far north our The person who put out
the call from the North Carolina chapter he was also
our host. So his family has a lot of property
up there and their roots go deep. We were well,
I'll tell the story when we get there about his family.
But so he puts us up for the first night
and we deploy in the first day. We meet at
the county courthouse at six am, wait around for about
an hour before we get sent somewhere else, which is
typical in any kind of operation. But we got to
the place where the Emergency Operations Command was operating. It
was out of an old car dealership, so there were
the offices on one side, and then connected to it
were three bay garages that were loaded to the rafters
with donations. So water, food, diapers, pads, fuel of all sorts,
bar oil for chainsaws, you name it, we probably had it.
And that actually goes for everywhere else too. If you're
listening and you're interested in donating some supplies, keep listening.
I'll mention towards the end what people need still, because
there has been an amazing outpouring of support for North Carolina.
So we find out that the guy running the EOC
he was a local. He was a principal of a
local school system. He was retired. He told us this
story where he was reluctant to come back because he
you know, to do all of this, because he said
he was he would never do spreadsheets again. But when
the when the hurricane hit and the fire chief called
him up, all he needed to do was quote scripture
at him, and he said, well, now I don't have
a choice. And that's something that you'll find out there.
Everyone there is a strong believer, or at least everybody
I spoke to, and I spoke to a lot of people,
and they they see the hand of Providence at work,
and so did I. And it's it's that kind of
strong Christian belief that I think allows these people to
be able to approach this devastation not only with energy
and seriousness, but with good cheer. They're like, you know,
we're dealing with heavy stuff when we're out there dragging
bodies out of the silt or you know, cutting people
out of their homes, discussing the people who were swept
away by the waters, some of them never to be
found again. But they still do it, and they do
it well, and they do it with with with good cheer.
So anyway, I'm going a little I guess I'm going
getting a little long in the long winded about this
particular area. But we spent the first couple of days
doing route clearing and reconnaissance. Route clearing is pretty self explanatory,
but the reconnaissance is really something that you only get
into in places like Appalachia where these there are these
tight mountains with all of these deep hollers, and with
cell phone service pretty much being non existent in them
and all landlines down because of just the utter devastation,
many of these communities were completely cut off with communication
from the outside world. So this township that we were
operating out of was kind of a central hub for
the whole county, and we spent several days just driving
the holler, the holler roads, the mountain roads up and around,
and we found some fun We found some funny things,
like there was a lows box truck that someone started
driving up a mountain town, which was kind of silly.
But anyway, most of the people that we found, so
keep in mind this was a week after the storm
it occurred, we found that they had been taking care
of each other. Everybody that was elderly in the community
was known and they were able to direct resources to them,
and every church was serving as its own miniature hub
of distribution. Keep in mind, these things were able to
spring up organically again without any communication from the outside world,
so people would drive in with supplies, with aid supplies,
and then they just find a place to dump them
and slowly the community would start doling them out to
the people who needed it, and there was no shortage
of volunteers. So we spent the first couple of days there,
but it looked like the township was doing pretty well.
There weren't really many communities that weren't that weren't at
least looked at the wellness checks were going pretty well.
The community was taking care of itself. So we started
heading to a new location about three hours south around
the Asheville area. The listeners may be aware that the
Ashville area got hit particularly hard. Now here too, we
saw the same thing. The community is getting together and
operating with the relief efforts, all of them private to
get their neighbors taken care of. But this is when
the first, this is the first major thing really stood
out to me. Ashville as a city is kind of
known as Shitlibs Central in North Carolina. The whole area
surrounding Ashville is deep red and Ashville is deep blue.
The mayor is a Jewish woman, The town council is
made up entirely of women of various races, and one
of the things that I noticed is that all the
areas around didn't have a problem coming together to help
each other, but ash Fville itself turned into a war
zone within days. The people of Asheville were turning on
each other. They were they were they were literally shooting
each other in the streets before any kind of government
could come in and reimpose order. And I mentioned this
on a on another stream and our friend al Femplar,
also known as cringe Walker, brought up a very good
point that this is kind of a microcosm of what
we can expect all over the country as services break
down and as there are there are more uh you know,
there's infrastructure collapse and natural disasters just happen and they're
going to happen in the future. So I guess this
is the big point here is get out of the cities.
Like I know, people, you know, we we've you've talked
about this before, Pete that the cities are kind of
you know there, it's where money is made through finance
and you know, the centers of culture and we've all
heard it before, but really, as things break down, they're
the last place that you you really want to be.
I feel like I've been going for a little bit.
You do you want to say anything?
Speaker 1: No, keep going, let's let's hear more about Ashville, because
that's the that's what they're hiding. I mean, just to
say that people have were shooting at each other. No
one's heard about this. This is this isn't stuff that
they're going to advertise when they have such a city
of special snowflakes, where you know, women of all color
can rule over.
Speaker 2: Everyone, right, and it's it's very similar to h you know,
to to what we see with the FEMA organization. The
people at the top are incompetent or they have these
fanciful ideas about how DEI is going to to save everybody.
But I mean I I used this to make a
kind of a larger point that all of these communities
that came together had two major things going for them.
I already mentioned one of them. They were all Christian,
But the second one is that they were all white
and outside of Asheville. Asheville was the center of where
the government was operating out of so FEMA and the
National Guard. They were able to roll in there and
reimpose order, but that wasn't necessary in the outlying communities
that had been hit much worse than Ashville itself. In fact,
FEMA didn't show up until I landed on until the
day I landed on the ground, which was about a
week and a half after the storm happened. And by
the time FEMA arrived there, everything was already well underway.
There were at least three sizeable volunteer efforts operating in
the area, and like I said, they're still there. But
one of the issues that we ran into. Okay, so
let me let me let me break this break this
down a little bit. There's the Emergency Operations Command Center
out of that is usually out of a fire department,
and that is a representative representative of the local government
and the state government operating in tandem. So you'll get
all of the officialdom operating in that area out of
out of the the EOC. Then there are large organizations
like Samaritans Purse, like these mega huge charity or operations
that effectively operate as like state actors. So what I
mean by that is they have a lot of bureaucracy,
They have a lot of uh red tape that they
have to cut through before they can start doling things out,
and they need to speak to somebody who at least
nominally represents a government organization in order for them to
actually deliver supplies. And we'll get back to this later
because it causes some issues. And then there are the
smaller operations on the ground. So there are disaster relief
charities that are privately funded, so funded by one of them,
I know, is funded by large YouTube personalities. One of
them is funded by an independently wealthy hedge fund manager,
and you know, so these are the smaller the smaller guys.
And then there's a volunteer corps. So the volunteer corps
are basically just people who are unaffiliated with any larger
organization that float into the area and want to want
to help. And these are going to be people of
all sorts of skill sets, you know, former firefighters, amen,
just anyone who wants to get get involved. And what
we found when we hit the ground there is that
there was no formal communication between these disparate groups. So
what would end up happening is a lot of the
smaller organizations were operating without any sort of official sanction,
reconnoitering these areas that were cut off from communication, and
you know, God bless them. Elon Musk donating all of
those starlinks is one of the reasons why we're able
to get communication with these areas in the first place.
These small organizations would take runners on dirt bikes through
the mountains to these towns where all the roads and
bridges had been washed out, and set them up with
someone who had a generator, usually a church, sometimes a
fire department to get communications out. And what the task
that that me and my partner took on when we
get there, when we got there, was in putting these
people in communication with each other. Often they were overlapping
in their areas of operation, and often they they would
have intelligence on an area that another organization needed intelligence on.
And so we started putting together the groundwork to be
able to be a kind of communications hub between these
outlying towns and these smaller organizations. Now what I'm describing
is the function of a government. This is what FEMA
should have been doing. If if FEMA was run by
people who weren't our enemies, if FEMA was run by
people who are who are intelligent and competent, and they
would have people on the ground gathering all this information
relaying it between all of these organizations. But they just
weren't doing that. When I saw FEMA. They rolled in
with the eighty second Airborne and they were on these
things that kind of looked like side by sides but
would carry like seven men, and they were rolling around
with MREs and water precisely at the point when we
had too many too much food, and too much water
to go around like they're well stocked on all of that.
We didn't need that at that point. What we needed
was what's known in the military as C two command
and control, and we weren't getting that. And I actually
spoke to one of the FEMA representatives on the ground
and told him that our local EOC needed intel on
the southern regions and that we were pretty much operating
blind out there, to which, you know, the God bless him.
He shrugged at me and said, well, I guess you
guys are going to be operating down there then. So
it's just another example of how our government organizations are
not functioning the way that they should be. I know,
that was a lot a lot of an info dump
right there. Do you want me to just keep going?
Speaker 1: What was what exactly was he saying to you? He's saying,
you're you're just not going to get any cooperation from us.
Speaker 2: I mean, it's entirely possible that he had that response
because it's way above his pay grade, but he didn't
really seem that interested. One of the guys that every
one of these FEMA teams rolling around with the eighty
second had someone there with a big ass camera. I
feel like their whole purpose was what our government has
basically become is just perception management. They just seem to
be there to take photo ops of them delaying supplies
to people who are know to supply centers that are
no longer in need. So, you know, there wasn't a
very warm feeling on the ground for FELA, for FEMA
among the denizens of the area.
Speaker 1: I guess one more question before we move on. It's
being reported and I see some of our guys even
counter signaling. It's saying, it's ridiculous that FEMA, some of
the the Federal Emergency Management is clearing out because there
are credible threats to their safety. When you hear that,
what do you what do you think?
Speaker 2: Yeah, that that totally makes sense to me. A lot
of the people in the mountains have formed militias for
fear of looters, and there are in some areas large
encampments of illegals that are just living in the mountains
who will come down at night and just steal from
the AID centers. It came to a point where one
of the AID centers was being actually defended by locals,
one of which had basically a makeshift technical He had
a machine gun or an LMG in the back of
his pickup truck that was mounted there. He would just
sit there all night and make sure no one came
and stole. So for the local people to be putting
together these militias and then also to have such a
you know, a distaste for FEMA, I completely understand. I
completely believe that that's what happened, although I have been told,
because I heard this rumor as well, that it's temporary.
Apparently it was due to some social media posts or something.
Speaker 1: But okay, all right, well keep going, keep going from
where you were where you were.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So the the the everything's running kind of smoothly.
I mean it's not running smoothly, but is running. There
are all of the the small operations on the ground,
so you know, you might you might say this is
a point for libertarianism, but it's really not, because they
the one thing that they needed was a centralizing actor
who could organize all of these efforts, and they just
didn't have it, which actually brings up the next point
I wanted to make about the surrounding unincorporated towns. So
Appalachia has a lot of townships that are unincorporated. That
means that they don't have any official government. These people
just kind of they do their own thing. It's kind
of like kind of like an Cappistan, right, but and
that's the way they like it. But there are fire
stations in most of these townships. And what ended up
happening as a result of the disaster is the state
started sending their law enforcement to these fire departments in
order to kind of, you know, to give them, give
them a law enforcement apparatus that is at their disposal.
And this caused I mean, I don't know if this
if it was necessary, but it did cause some confusion,
some problems in some areas because these local fire departments
don't really know how to deal with this stuff. And
now they're being empowered as being empowered as the de
facto government. And in some of these places, not all
of them, the fire chiefs kind of ran away with
that power. They locked down completely, and they turned away
all aid using the government forces that were given to them.
And what would end up happening in some of these
situations is the fire chiefs would say things like we
don't need help, we don't need aid, go away, And
then the smaller organizations that were running unsanctioned aid into
their towns would come across a parish or a church
and the people there would say, we desperately need aid.
I don't know why the fire department is saying this,
but it's not true. Please help us, excuse me. So
you get in this kind of situation where there are
all of these small fire departments that have become to
facto governments that are incapable of being these governments, and
that caused a lot of delay and a lot of confusion.
And I'm sure that some people died as a result
of this.
Speaker 1: Well why do you why do you think they were like,
you know, just oh, we don't want any help here.
Is it just pure arrogance? Is it? Is it stupidity?
Is it just you know, this is the way we
do things and we don't want any I mean, I
don't try and understand. I mean I understand power trips,
and I understand human nature, you know, which is you know,
libertarians will jump up and go, well, see that's why
no one should be in charge.
Speaker 2: Right, no one should be in charge? Then how are
these how is any of this going to get distributed? Right?
Speaker 1: Well, it has to be voluntary.
Speaker 2: Bro uh uh and caps and Luelbert. It's not taking
an l challenge impossible. But you know the reason why.
I'm sure it's it's as varied as as the townships themselves.
But some of it is is just pure ego. Uh.
Some of it is. You know a lot of these
people went into the mountains to get away from the government,
and now they're just afraid that they're going to have there,
that they're going to have a government power imposed on them.
I know. Sean Ryan did a podcast with some of
the the first responders flying helicopter missions out of there,
and anybody who's interested should go listen to that. Their
story is basically something very very similar. They rolled into
a town and some boomer's giant ego caused confusion and delay,
and it's it's a big problem when you don't have
some kind of centralized authority that can just like look
down at these people and say you're taking this, say
this is where it's going. You know, stop stop imposing yourself.
Speaker 1: Remove just remove that person. I mean, just be like, Okay,
you're not in charge here, I'm taking over a fuck.
Speaker 2: You, right, and that that would be the idea.
Speaker 1: If you don't like it, I'll shoot you, I think literally.
Speaker 2: Well yeah, I mean this area was operating without rule
of law right like every not everyone, but there was
a huge percentage of the people that I worked with
down there that were just armed, like just open carrying,
and most people were and it's it depended on where
they where they were and where what it was that
their operations were doing. But you know, there's it's dangerous
stuff when you start getting these people who become petty
tyrants involved. And this brings me back around to operations
like Samaritans Purse who are so large that they need
some sort of officialdom to tell them what to do
or to tell them to be able to make their
supply drops. We had this specific incident where a fire
chief was telling us they didn't need anything, and so
we got communication with a woman who was basically in
charge of one of the churches there, and the aid
effort going going on in that church. She wasn't like
a pastor or anything, but she told us, no, this
is what we need. So she gave us her list
of needs. We contacted Samaritans Purse. Samaritans Purse contacted the
fire department and said, you know, they're giving us a
different list of needs. And so it caused a big
problem when they made a supply drop and it wasn't
the stuff that the people of the community needed. It
was specifically the stuff that the people at the fire
department asked for. Right yeah, And this is something that
again FEMA could take care of by having their people
on the ground with proper communications equipment and using their
incident Command system or incident control system to keep track
of all of this intelligent all this intelligence. Because there's
a lot of fog, as the communications guys like to say,
there's a lot of noise, and separating out the signal
from the noise in that environment is extremely difficult. So
you have these large organizations that are receiving are getting
different signals, and both of them can be true. But
when you get like someone who decides that that their
voice is the one that needs to be listened to,
not relaying the needs of their community, it becomes a problem.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean it would. It would seem to me
the easiest thing to do. It'd be like, okay, you
have all these if the fire house is taking charge,
and then the churches are beneath them, your the fire
house is just getting lists from each church, and that's
how it gets. That seems really simple.
Speaker 2: It does. And you know, there's there's gonna be a
lot of I mean, there's these questions will never be answered.
I don't think as to why all of these things
kind of broke down, but it's a very eye opening experience,
especially for somebody who might have more libertarian leanings, because
these people effectively live in an capistan. Well.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you know, one of the things I said
was everyone, you can pretend to be an anarchist until
shit goes downhill. You know, in this kind of situation,
you're not caring whether the help you get is private
or public. It's just you need help at this point.
And if you have someone running interference on that, it's like, no,
we're going to take care of ourselves and do everything here. Well,
you know, then that person may need to be dealt with.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it's one of these things, like all the
locals are trying very hard not to step on anyone's toes,
which makes sense. They live there, they don't want to
have to deal with irate neighbors. But it's the So
it fell to the smaller teams that were willing to
either bypass the police checkpoints or massaged their way through
them in order to get real intelligence on what's going on.
Speaker 1: Let's run back to We'll run back to Ashville for
a second, because I'm sure people would like that exp
you know, like to hear more about that. I mean,
you said that there was violence. What was what was reported?
Speaker 2: So now this is this is what I heard from
being on the ground. These aren't things that I specifically witnessed,
but basically muggings, people like looting whatever they could before
FEMA got there to re establish control, and that that's
that's pretty much it. I didn't stay in Asheville. I
drove through it and it looked looked like nothing. It
didn't look like anything had happened there. It looked like
it had the storm had missed it almost completely. But yeah,
that's just that's just what I had heard. Or were
they they were out of power. They didn't have power though,
right the city itself did. Keep in mind, I'm there
a week and a half after the storm itself, so
they the line crews have been working non stop all
over the region to get everything back together. And FEMA
designates red areas, which are you know, where they pour
whatever resources they decide to allocate into, and Asheville was
one of those red areas.
Speaker 1: I remember driving through Atlanta one day and driving through
one of the areas that had been you know, fixed out,
what do they call it? Gentrified? And I remember just
I'm driving through one day and I'm looking at all
these people walking their dogs, and I mean people who
look like they've never they wouldn't even know how to
make a fist to punch someone. And I'm thinking, if
this shit hits the fin these people are going to
be eating each other within like two weeks.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And essentially exactly that happened, and it, you know,
it didn't really happen in the surrounding areas. Now, there
were some areas of Swannanoa that one of the really
hard hit parts massive destruction down there that had Section
eight housing, and one of one of our OGC members
was embedded in one of the local church groups that
had a huge amount of resources, and they were he
was a part of their scouting teams and he I mean,
I think he's still down there, but he was reporting
that the only places where that that they couldn't really
go back to where the Section eight the places that
had Section eight housing. That's where you don't have a
sense of community that those people are reliant on the
government and so they can't fend for themselves. But also
when people show up with stuff, they kind of see
it as something that that's theirs. So it's it's the
same sort of thing as any city. You're going to
have tons of people that are reliant on the state
that can't rely on themselves or their neighbors because they're
just not that type of people.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and we keep importing them from islands in the Caribbean,
but right.
Speaker 2: It's yeah, I mean, like I said, there were there's
reports of people in the mountains that come out to steal.
But you know, this is the issue with separating signal
from noise. You hear all sorts of things. Like one
of the days we were down there, there was a
report of a van filled with illegals being followed around
by a truck with a trailer that we're just taking
like generators and high ticket items off of the supply
drop points. Like you know, is that true? I have
no way of corroborating it is believable one.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, So all right, well keep going. What else
where else are we going to hit?
Speaker 2: Yeah? So this is pretty much my my experience of
of these two areas. There's a lot of lessons to
be drawn out of these, especially when it comes to
things like command and control and communication. It's not that
these small organizations and the EOC were not capable of
putting together an effective communication strategy for all the disparate groups.
What it is is that they didn't have the manpower
to have someone to have people dedicated to doing that.
And in any kind of environment, in any kind of
disaster situation, communication is key. You need to know where
things are, you need to know where things need to
get and you can't do that if everyone's just running
around doing their own thing. Taking some time to talk
about some of the specific groups. There was one group
operating in the area that is doing helicopter stuff, so
they have their air traffic controllers were lent to them
under Title ten. So they're actually Air Force air traffic
controllers that are on the ground making sure that the
helicopters run smoothly. But the organization itself is mostly made
up of private pilots and former Special Forces guys, all
very high speed load drag. But they're really running themselves ragged.
They've been operating fully since the storm hit. And when
I was meeting with them, they were telling me that
they were pulling. They had cadaver teams and they were
pulling bodies out of areas that had already been cleared
by FEMA. That is, FEMA claims to have done a
thorough search of the area and have not found anything,
and these teams are going into those areas and they're
finding lots of bodies. Two days ago, they were searching
for bodies in an area that had already been cleared
by FEMA, and they found a woman who was buried
in the silt and she was still alive. She was
stuck in the mud for eight days and they rescued her.
And if they had just taken FEMA's word for it,
that woman would have died. She would have died of exposure.
So this is a it's a it's another opportunity to
bash FEMA and say, look, not only are you guys
not really helping, you're hindering the process by declaring these
areas cleared without having done your due diligence.
Speaker 1: Sounds to me like you're making the argument for the
for the anarchic capitalists.
Speaker 2: I know, right, what I'm actually making an argument for
is that we need sound government. If this if this
government had been had been run by white Christian males,
if FEMA, if you looked at the FEMA board and
all you saw were white Christian males on there, there
wouldn't have been a problem. But that's not what you see.
What you see people who care about diversity, equity, and inclusion.
The readiness is number three on FEMA's official list of
things that they care about. So it's our government. It's
not that government itself is bad. It's that the government
as we have it is no longer fit for purpose,
or if you want to say, you know the pasowid
the purpose of the system is what it does. It
is fit for purpose. It's just being run by a
cabal of our enemies.
Speaker 1: The jump Brighton's the conquest there, Yeah, and you know,
I would say my point is, sure you can have
your Endcapistan if they're a bunch of Scotch Irish hillbillies,
if you're around people who know, if you're around white
people who know how to do stuff, or you could
just keep advocating for the importation of people who if
something like this happens, they're going to be the ones
who are going to be stealing from you. Oh no,
but we could shoot them, will you really all of them? Huh?
Oh yeah, you go shoot a small army. Oh we're
going to put an army together. Okay, that sounds like kapistans.
I mean, that's the kind of place that everyone's going
to want to live. Go ahead, sell that, Sell that
to everyone, because now you're selling them upon exactly what
we say it would turn into.
Speaker 2: But go ahead, right, and that's exactly what it did
turn into. And uh, you know, as far as philosophical
lessons go, I don't I think that the lullbirds and
the and craps are pretty much are pretty much dead
in the water here because we saw their utopia play
out and people died while a government apparatus was trying
to spin up. And it's just you know, it's why
the libertarians are the other side of the utopian coin
that has communism on its other face. They deny human
nature and human need and everything that they believe is
kind of an abstraction. So, with this being so fresh
in the memory, I don't want anybody listening to ever
allow a libertarian to talk to them about their theory
of how things would or could go under en Capistan.
We've seen it and we know that that's not how
they go.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, let's face it, people don't want people
don't want to be free. Most people are sitting around
waiting to be told what to do. And if it's
against your principles to tell people what to do and
in many cases what to believe, you're not going to
make it.
Speaker 2: Right. And on Sean Ryan's podcast, the first responders were
saying that when they were talking to these these communities
in the mountains that didn't have any way of getting
external communication, they had no idea how bad things were.
They thought maybe just their holler had been destroyed, and
that you know, the government would be coming in to
give them aid and relief any day now. And these people,
some of them, they had been without power and communication
to the outside world for four days. And you know
when these guys touched down and they say, no, it's
bad everywhere. The government isn't really coming to save you. Well,
now a lot of them they want to start jumping
into action. Get the elderly out of here, get the
infirm out of here, get us supplies, and that it
if you think you have a functioning government that's going
to take care of you, when you don't. In way,
in some ways, it's it's worse to have that government
than it is to have no government at all, which
is which is what we're kind of seeing. It's this
weird Uh, there's a kind of a push and pull
here between you know, if you have a bad government,
no government's better, but you still need a government that's
going to that a government will arise out of human action,
and that's exactly what we're seeing, and you need that
government to be a good one. So it's better to
have a good government than no government. And it's better
to have no government than a bad government. It's it's
it's way more complex than the end caps would would
would would lead you to believe.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, if and if you're FEMA Field director
is somebody who you know, you could take shade under
her nose. Well, I mean, what do you expect? What
do you expect? I mean, oh yeah, but you know,
like Beau Maher said, they're successful, Yeah, they're successful at
getting jobs. How come they just can't do the job right?
Speaker 2: And then, like you know, of course, it's not like
everyone at this point knows what FEMA was doing with
all of their funding. Everyone at this point knows why.
Everyone listening to this knows why FEMA had reacted the
way it did or lacked it to lack of reaction.
And it's if this, I think this is going to
serve as a pretty big wake up call to a
lot of people who didn't really understand it before.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, I mean I hope. So you know, it's
sure private people, you know, private people are going in there,
and it's private help that's making this helping these people
to survive. But I mean, even as you said recently
that some of these areas aren't going to have power
until twenty twenty five, well, you know, into the new year.
And I'm assuming when you mentioned twenty twenty eight you
were talking about like roads and things like that, is
that what I'm thinking.
Speaker 2: Yes, roads bridges. One of the big issues that's going
on in the Asheville area is that they now some
areas now no longer have a means of processing their sewage.
Their sewage treatment plant was literally taken down the river.
It came up so high, just lifted the whole thing
up and just gone. So they won't have clean running
water at least water that they're not going to have
to boil for a very very very long time, and
especially as winter comes in. Anybody who's been in construction
knows that any if something takes, you know, two weeks
to do during the spring, it takes four to six
weeks to do during the winter. And so I mentioned before,
I think this is a good time to bring it up.
What the people down there need now Now, what they
need is propane tanks, heaters, gasoline for generators. They need
things that are going to carry them through the winter
so that they don't freeze to death cold weather clothing.
That being said, there have been there's so much clothing
that has come into the area that none of that
no one's accepting it anymore. So best to err on
the side of caution. Don't send clothes food and water
are taken care of. I'd like to give a big
shout out to Highland Brewing, which is a brewery out
of Ashville, who donated many, many two hundred and seventy
five gallon water tanks that were desperately needed at some
of the supply depot. So that's that's that's one of
those private organizations that are that are definitely worth patronizing
in the future.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you know what I would like to say is,
you know, as we talk about things like roads and infrastructure,
water treatment plants, it's like I said on the live
stream last week, and this is where elite theory comes
in and the whole theory of capitalism. You know that,
oh people, Oh, there's a bunch of people right now
who are seeing an opportunity to go in there and
make some money. So they're gonna flood there and they're
gonna starting now. Shut the fuck up. What we need
is we need to see those elites pop up who
who want to be considered elites and go there and
personally build that water treatment plant, start building those roads,
start building those bridges, start doing all of this. Do
the job. Have these elites do the job that the
government is in doing, and then we have people to
look to, you know, for you know, for a guidance
at least we know that they care about us. And
also you had, I think you had mentioned in one
of your one of the voice messages that you sent
into our chat that there are some people who are
stepping up and some people with with means who were
doing some good things there. Can you talk about that?
Speaker 2: Uh, yes, there there is so I mentioned the organize
an organization was being funded by a hedge fund manager
and he uh, he he paid, He was paying cash
for everything. He got trucks, he got heavy equipment. Uh.
And he was giving out meals to the to the
locals and to it to the volunteers that that he
had around him, uh, the the professional crews that he
brought in there on his own spence. And it got
to the point where he was, you know, he didn't
have a place for his men to station out of permanently.
Because the lodging is at a premium, as you might imagine,
there's basically nowhere for you to bed down if you
don't already have something out there. Because of the influx
of volunteers and because of the people who don't have
homes anymore. So he ended up just walking into a
business there, a restaurant that was made out of an
old garage, and he just bought the building. And now
he has ownership stake in the community in which he
is is is helping, and like that sort of thing
is very important to go forward. Like it's a good
example because he, you know, he bought up somebody's business,
so now he you know, he obviously infuses them with cash,
but he's using this business now is a staging area
to do what is going to be months of work,
because when we talk about like rebuilding a water treatment plant,
like that alone is going to take years to go
through the bureaucracy because you might imagine processing waste is
a very law legal, heavy endeavor. And in the meantime,
all of the heavy equipment, the cranes, the back hose,
the tractors, the skid steers, they're all being used to
clear trees off the roads, to clear rubble, to build
temporary bridges into people's homes, to lift trees off of
people's homes. It's going to be months of just clearing
the damage and then that equipment can be put to
use reconstruct acting. So the more capital and fusion that
can go down there from these money to elites, they
can they can really make a show of it and
get the goodwill of the people. It would it would
be as nothing for a billionaire to show up with
UH with a fleet of heavy equipment and and and
the operators are all there. The people, the people are
there to make this stuff happen. If you just bring
the equipment and maybe someone to organize it, you can
really do a lot of good and have the goodwill
of the people.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the ones who were the ones who are standing
back and saying now, oh see see see what see
how the government failed you and everything, But they're not
providing any answers themselves.
Speaker 2: Right, And the answer, of course is we need a
new government. We need a we need a circulation. We
need effective people in the government, like like the people
at the low level of FEMA and the and the
you know, the privates and the sergeants that I saw
running around with the eighty second protecting these people. These
people aren't the ones that are that are screwing you.
The people that are screwing you are the ones at
the top holding the purse strings. And making sure that
DEI takes precedence over over competence. And they're they're there,
We know they're there. They're openly stating that these are
the things that they care about. So it if if
if you see this as a failure of government and
not a failure of this particular government, then you're you're
you're missing uh, you're missing the trees for the forest.
You're you're missing the real issue here, You're missing the granularity.
Uh Like like I mean I just said earlier, like
there's there's no time for this libertarian nonsense here. What
we saw is not is it was not a failure
of government as such. It is a failure of our
particular government.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, if there was, if we had a government
full of people who were in some way, shape or
form related or shared values with the people who are there,
they'd be taking care of this. I mean, the things
would already. That water treatment plant would already start being
the waye treatment plant would already start being built already.
And one of the issues is to go back to
that guy, the fire chief who goes to the firehouse
and like starts laying down the law and it gets
and it's getting people hurt. You need someone to decide
the exception. You need someone to walk in there and
go okay and get out of the way, or I'm
going to get you out of the way. And that's
what brings order and in chaos where it's like you
just have some random guy who you know, I know
that titles aren't you know, titles are fake. They're just
you know, things that people made up, like like words,
then that person needs to be able to at least
have the at least the people would look at that
person as some kind of legitimate authority to remove that
person and then get shit done and remove them however
they need. However, that person needs to be removed to
get things done, and that doesn't happen when you're Legitimacy
does not. Legitimacy comes in a couple different ways. One
is with a title and with with something that most
of the people, the overwhelming majority of the people look
upon as being legitimate. Any other way, as somebody who
just steps up and is what you call quote unquote
pillar or the commune unity, that kind of thing. Any
other way, when you just have some Yahoo come in
and going, I don't like the way this guy's running
things boom and shoots them. Now, legitimacy is important, and
I don't think a lot of people understand that. I
definitely don't hear a lot of people who, you know,
preach radical individualism who understand what legitimate authority looks like
other than you know, other than you know, hey, that guy,
that guy's an entrepreneur, whatever the fuck that means in
this world.
Speaker 2: Right, And the issue of here is that there is
a lack of a legitimate structure with these unincorporated towns,
since there is no government. When a de facto government
is formed, what they what, it's formed by the in
this case specifically this to fact, these de facto governments
are formed when the state comes in with resources. Those
resources are specifically police, and police represent the monopoly on violence.
So the state comes in with their enforcers, and they
turn to what looks to them to be the most
legitimate source of authority in this unincorporated town. In this case,
it's the fire chiefs, because they are the closest thing
to resembling an organized governmental structure within these unincorporated areas.
And so if you have a bad fire chief, well,
now you have a bad fire chief with the unquestioned
power of the state behind him. Now it's possible that
when all is said and done, people will be held
to account. I don't really think that's going to happen.
But the larger point here is that if there were
a structure, a structure in place, a government in place
that had multiple legitimate offices, then the one that is
doing the best for the community can either take control
or be elevated into control beyond the person who is
doing a bad job but might be in power at
the time. But as it stands, there's no way to
dislodge these, uh, these these new you might call petty
tyrants from their position because they have now the monopoly
on violence represented by the state, and it's only due
to the lack of structure that already did not exist
in the area.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and these petty tyrants are all waitings that pop up,
And yeah, they don't really care about care about you
or your people.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, I mean, egos a hell of a thing.
And uh, you know, I don't want to I don't
want this to sound like any kind of black pill,
like there was more good going on down there than bad.
The lesson like the lessons drawn from it are that
small homogeneous communities can rely on each other and take
care of themselves and each other better than diverse areas,
which we already knew. But then the secondary lessons to
come out of it are that legitimate governmental structures are
necessary for human operation, especially in times of disaster, and
that they will naturally establish these things when they are needed.
And when you wait to the last minute to establish
something like that, it's going to be shoddy and it's
going to be prone to all sorts of failures that
were unforeseen because the structure didn't already exist to know
that they would be there.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Well, someone's probably
going to want me to ask this, and I want
to ask it. You talked about rescue missions and pulling
bodies out of the mud and any was anybody talking
about a death's all down there?
Speaker 2: Uh No, I didn't hear any numbers bandied about. It's. Uh,
it's beyond a shadow of a doubt that it's in
the thousands. I don't know what the official numbers are
at this time, but they're definitely low. You know, the
if you've never smelled death before, you can get it
down there. It's it's a very particular odor. But you know,
there are people that will never be found. There are
are families that I heard a story of one family
that lost eleven members in a single night. They're just gone.
And it's it's like that all over the area. We
we when we were recounting we made we hopped the
border a couple of times into Tennessee just as bad,
if not worse. And this is up, up and down
all of Apple and into some parts of Georgia. So
whatever the official numbers are, the real death toll is
going to be much higher.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's what I'm afraid of. I was hearing things
in the first couple of days of people reports on
YouTube from the ground, and people were like, yeah, this
is when all said and done, If they ever do
get like the numbers, it's going to be over ten thousand.
That's what the person it thought immediately from the amount
of people that she had been lost around her.
Speaker 2: I mean, it wouldn't surprise me in the least. You know,
the stories that I got from the people running the
EFC's out there about some of the things that happened
in the local hollers. This one guy they get the
flash flood warning, and you have to keep in mind
flash flooding happens like that. It's not something you can
to see coming and you can get out of the
way of you have to be really on it. And
you know, there was this this one story, this guy,
the flooding was starting and so he grabbed you know
those wooden steaks that you sometimes see like ribbons for
surveying tape. He had one of those, and he was
going into his house to get his elderly mother, and
he drove it into the ground to see how fast
the water was rising. And he went inside, woke his
mother up, came back out. It had been maybe sixty seconds.
The steak was already covered. He was up to his chest.
He had to get everyone out there immediately. It's and there.
You know, there's no shortage of stories like that. People
who a young couple with a new child. The mother
gets the baby out to her husband, turns around to
go something else out of the house, and the house
is just gone. And then she was found days later
in the wreckage. You know, like it's the when you're
in the mountains like that, the water doesn't take the
water follows where the creeks and streams are. But these
creeks might only be a couple inches deep, and then
suddenly they're twenty feet deep and your house that was,
you know, twenty yards from the creek is now in
the center of a raging river. It's the scale of
the destruction is something that needs to be seen to
be believed, because when you're getting pictures of it, you're
lacking context. You see a picture of something something a
destroyed house or road that's gone, and it's just the picture.
When you're there in person, it's that picture, and then
literally in every direction is exactly the same. And it's
like that for miles Miles.
Speaker 1: You know, when I was seeing pictures of people who
were basically riding horses dirt bikes, and I saw one
picture of pack mules, I'm just thinking, like, this is
an apocalyptic movie. This is like any kind of a pie.
It's like walking Dead or something like that. And I
think one other thing people really need to realize is
that this is uh. You can say what you want
about how people in Katrina were were treated and everything,
but they were Yeah, that was a city, and yeah
there was a lot of people who died and everything.
But when it came down to it, They made their
way out there, and they sought to clean it up
as soon as possible. I mean, I don't know how
how much this is going to be the whole thing.
George Bush, Hey, it's you know, Kanye Saint George Bush
hates black people. I mean, you could just easily turn
that around now when you see the the kind of
response and just how fast they're going to try and
help these people and you know, put infrastructure back together.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I mean I'm fairly certain that Louisiana had
multiples of aid dumped on it compared to what from FEMA,
compared to what FEMA is doing for Appalachia right now.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, Do you have anything else?
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's just one more big thing I want. I
wanted to mention. I know that there are a lot
of young men who are going to be listening to this,
and young men who have been waiting for the call
to adventure in order to go out and do something great.
And my only question for those men is are you
fucking death right now? In your country? Your countrymen are
in deep need. It's a dangerous area. It's an area
where you can go to see the greatest that humanity
has to offer, putting their skills and their time and
their expertise to use in pursuit of a unifying goal.
If there were ever an adventure that you could get to,
it's this, So you know, this is the sort of thing.
What you do is what you believe, and what you
spend your time on is what you value most. And
for all of you young men who are looking to
get involved in something like this, to have an adventure
to find the dragon's treasure at the end of the story,
which is an allegory for wisdom and an allegory for skills,
and for the relationships that you're going to make while
you're standing side by side with your fellow man doing
something worthy and noble. This is it. These things don't
come around very often, and you're going to need the experience.
So put your schooling on hold, secure what you can
and go spend some time doing some real good. Again
a dangerous environment. If you need contacts down there, you
OGC's got them. We can slot you in where you
need to be. If all you're good at is picking
things up and putting things down, well we got spot
for you too. So don't think that your skills won't
be needed because they are and one of the biggest
issues down there right now is the turnover of volunteers.
So please get in contact if it's something that appeals
to you, you but if you don't and you hear this,
you are never again allowed to say anything like young men.
Young men can't find adventure in the modern world.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and don't contact us the Old Glory Club at
gmail dot com. Hit them up. I know, I get
a lot of people who contact me directly. It's the
Old Glory Club at gmail dot com. Go to the
Old Gloryclub dot com. There's ways you can contact us
from there. We have people who we have one person
who does email and that's all they do and that's
all you know, that's what they're doing while other people
are doing other things. So yeah, I think that's a
great message. I think that's a great message. This is uh,
this is a time when you can get some real experience.
You know, it's not it might not be something you're
going to put on a resume. I would, but it
may not be something that looks good on a resume
to some of the people who might be hiring you.
Because we know what the world is like now, but
you'll know, You'll know, and that's what's most important. I think.
I think people need to at this point, especially men
need to have a sense of purpose, like they're really
like they can They look at politics and they know
they can't change that. This is the kind of thing
you can change. This is where you could make This
is where you can actually make change and know that
you did something and that you actually accomplish something.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and not to belabor the point, but I'm home now,
and every night i've been home, I've been back in
my area for three days, and every night I'm dreaming
about being in North Carolina helping. And I'm still trying
to do what I can remotely with our guys that
are still that are still down there, still putting in
phone calls, still making connections. But I want nothing more
than to be back down there on the ground in.
Speaker 1: The shit of it.
Speaker 2: Shout outs to all the boys in the OGC and
Nason OGC chapters who showed up. I didn't get to
spend a lot of time with most of them, but
the ones that I did get to spend a good
deal of time with are now my brothers. And that's
what this whole game is about because it's going to
be needed going forward.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, I can just imagine. I didn't imagine what
it was like on the ground there, all right, man,
I guess we're gonna plug anything, plug the OGC, and
we already did that. So yeah, thanks, thanks for coming on,
thanks for doing that, thanks for going there, thanks for
thanks for doing us proud. I mean it means a lot.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, man, thanks for having me on to help
get the message out.
Speaker 1: Until the next time, take care,