A Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) supervisor told disaster relief workers in Florida to “avoid homes” with signs supporting President-elect Donald Trump, the agency confirmed Friday.
The FEMA official — Marn’i Washington — conveyed her edict both verbally and in a Microsoft Teams chat used by relief workers canvassing Lake Placid homes ravaged by Hurricane Milton last month, according to the Daily Wire.
“Avoid homes advertising Trump,” Washington wrote in a “best practices” memo to employees.
The order was the second bullet point in a list instructing workers to not go “anywhere alone,” practice “de-escalation,” stay hydrated and to “follow the rules.”
Conveniently leaving that context out of the discussion.
By itself, horrible. In the context of the employees being threatened by that specific group of individuals... Not really horrible, it's a clear safety issue.
Trump cultists are actively hostile towards FEMA, despite not even knowing what it is. Orangie-boy told them it's bad, so that's all they need to know. It's a solid strategy to avoid people who are actively hostile towards you, especially when you're trying to save lives, not get into screaming matches with someone who has the emotional maturity of a toddler.
I've heard vocal criticisms of it on social media but I do not think there have been any attacks on FEMA workers. Maybe some frustrated guy who lost everything haranguing a few workers for showing up late and with little to no supplies, but I haven't heard of anyone being put at risk.
Cops have to deal with people telling them to fuck off all the time while doing their jobs.
FEMA isn't horrified. It's a faceless bureaucracy. It's like a Large Language Model. The organization released a statement saying it was horrified because the model stated it should release those particular words in this situation.
To be completely fair, you could say that if a company feels 98%+ a certain way about something that happened, you can just in a shorthand way say that "Samsung regrets this happening," right...