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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 2, 2024

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Man, this is a bit off the path of this topic, but it's been months since the hurricane fucked up western North Carolina, and I still can't tell fact from fiction. All I see are randos on twitter talking about FEMA kicking people out of shelters, and then taking their kids because they don't have adequate shelter. Some road a bunch of good ol' boys cut through a mountain to Chimney Rock that FEMA closed down, despite there being no other road. Some guy devastated that FEMA stole the building he'd leased for his business, and since his home was washed away, now he has absolutely nothing. There was definitely that one lady who instructed FEMA workers to skip houses with Trump signs, and apparently she went out trying to take everyone down with her, claiming those orders came to her from higher up as well. Was that ever substantiated? I don't know!

It reminds me of the oral tradition from the Great Depression, about FDR stealing gold from lock deposit boxes and slaughtering entire herds of cattle to fight deflation. Visiting local national parks there are exhibits about all the people forced off their land by FDR to establish some of those parks, and how they were totally given a fair market value when they were forced off. I'm pretty sure the worst allegations about FDR stealing people's gold might not have happened exactly the way it's described. But this debunking does not inspire hope as it's full of the usual managerial weasel words I'm used to. FDR didn't steal the gold. He just passed an executive order requiring it be sold to the government at a price they immediately raised after they'd gotten it all. And even when the government did confiscate people's gold, it's because they committed a crime. Like not obeying the executive order to voluntarily sell their gold to the government.