I don’t understand how that employee thought they could get away with it. There would certainly have been at least one or a few Trump-supporting people on the relief team (or elsewhere, who would have gotten wind of it) who would have gone nuts about being given such instructions, and leaked it.
There would certainly have been at least one or more Harris-supporting people on the team who would have gone nuts about this also. Not only because this is a clear violation of FEMA’s mission but also because the fall-out for this violation will be a gain for Trump and conservatives.
The links that @duality72 shared show that, in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene doing massive damage in western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee (very red areas), there were numerous threats of violence against FEMA workers.
That doesn’t excuse what the FEMA employee in your OP did, in the slightest, however.
I can’t tell what you’re after with this thread, but here’s my take:
Much like the text messages alerting African-Americans that they’re going to be pressed into slave duty again, whether those texts came from a rabid MAGA sort or were a false flag tactic from a die-hard liberal group, it was repugnant, repellant, and reprehensible, and should be repudiated in the strongest possible terms.
Same with the action of this FEMA employee.
Firing is step one. Step two is vehemently reinforcing the message to the entirety of the agency that this is not who we are.
The fish rots from the head. Trump is poison to this country. Poison doesn’t always honor political boundaries. I’m sorry that Trump’s poison bled over into this asshole’s on-the-job performance.
But, yeah, this is utterly stupid. Even if the idea was being scared about being attacked, it doesn’t take but a second’s more thought to realize how it would come across.
I think the only materially different opinions you might expect to see today would come as a result of the combination of grief and shock that a relative few might still feel from the results of this election.
Which also quite likely explains – but does not excuse – the action in the story itself.
I’m certainly not insinuating that and I don’t see anything I said that would imply that.
A FEMA employee said something very wrong. FEMA fired the employee and publicly denounced them.
Meanwhile De Santis is launching an investigation saying this proves the entire federal government is politicized by Democrats.
If that was true then the employee wouldn’t have been fired. What actually happened demonstrates that FEMA isn’t politicized and won’t tolerate attempts at politicization. So what is De Santis investigating?
My guess is that De Santis and other Republicans are planning on using this incident as an excuse to introduce politicization into FEMA and the rest of the federal government.
As others have posted, there were genuine threats against FEMA workers.
Having said that: my opinion of the story in the OP is that yeah, they should have been fired; and no, they shouldn’t have given that advice. Advising FEMA people to stay away from a specific property because they’d been threatened at that property/by that property’s resident(s)/owner(s) would have been OK. Advising them to stay away from all properties in a given area because there had been too many threats in that general area would have been unpleasant, but possibly justified. Advising them to keep working in an area but to discriminate according to apparent politics of the residents was way out of line.
It puzzles me that you phrased that by asking what we think about it; as if you thought we’d defend it.
They already said, before the election, that they’re going to do that.
The majority of the voting population apparently didn’t find that reprehensible.
I will grant that some of them probably believed the lies that it had already happened in the other direction. As has been posted, FEMA’s reaction to this incident proves that this wasn’t true.