The Pete Quiñones Show - **Exclusive** Old Glory Club First-Hand Report on Helene Recovery w/ NotMeNotYou

Episode Date: October 14, 2024

68 MinutesPG-13Pete is joined by fellow Old Glory Club member NotMeNotYou to talk about his experiences on the ground in North Carolina helping with disaster recovery.Old Glory Club YouTube ChannelOld Glory Club SubstackOld Glory Club WebsitePete and Thomas777 'At the Movies'Support Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's Substack Pete's SubscribestarPete's GUMROADPete's VenmoPete's Buy Me a CoffeePete on FacebookPete on TwitterBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-pete-quinones-show--6071361/support.

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There's air of cooctuagin. Full of nis more in the Ergrid Pongaii. I want to welcome everyone back to the Piquino show. I am here with fellow Old Glory Club member, not me, not you. How are you doing today? I'm doing pretty great, Pete. How are you doing? Doing good, man.

Let's just jump right into it, uh, what we're here to talk about. Yeah, we had this thing that, this 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 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 don't you just start from where you think the story starts? Yeah, I mean, I think with the start of the story, that the most important part is exactly

where 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, 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 as of the time of recording, they're 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 14 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 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 distance 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? Well, I think the narrative is really really the way to go and then we can just pick out the issues as we go. Sure. So we started in a township that was a 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 this up for the first night and we deploy in the first day. We meet at the county courthouse at 6 a.m. 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 was a local,

he was a principal of the local school system. He was retired. And 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 would never do spreadsheets again. But 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 see the hand of Providence at work, and so did I. And 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 shear. They were 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 good cheer. So anyway, I'm going a little, I guess I'm 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 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, We found some funny things. Like there was a Lowe's 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 had occurred. We found that they had been taken 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 is 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. and the listeners may be aware that the Asheville 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 taking care of. But this is when the first, this is the first major thing really stood out to me. Asheville as a city is kind of known as shitlib central in North Carolina. The whole area surrounding Asheville is deep red and Asheville 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 Asheville itself turned into a war zone. Within days, the people of Asheville were turning on each other. They were literally shooting each other in the streets before any kind of government could come in and reimpose order. I mentioned this on another stream, and our friend El Femplar, also known as Cringewalker, 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 you know there's infrastructure collapse and natural disasters just happen and they're going to happen in the future so i guess this the 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 um you know there it's where money is made through finance and you know the the centers of culture and we've all heard it before but really as things break down they're the last place that you uh you really want to be uh i feel like i've been going for a little bit you do you want to say anything no keep going let's um let's hear more about asheville because that's the that's what they're hiding i mean just to to to say

that people 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 everyone. Right. And it's, it's very similar to, you know, 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 save everybody. But I mean, I use 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 Asheville 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 sizable 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 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 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 the EOC. Then there are large organizations like Samaritan's purse, like these mega huge charity 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 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 so these are the smaller, the smaller guys. And then there's the volunteer cores. So the volunteer cores are basically just people who are unaffiliated with 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 tradesmen 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 small

organizations were operating without any sort of official sanction reconnoitering these areas that were cut off from communication. And God bless him, Elon Musk donating all of those Starlings 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 the 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 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 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. is what FEMA should have been doing. If FEMA was run by people who weren't our enemies, if FEMA was run by people who are intelligent and competent, 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 82nd 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 C2 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, God bless him, he shrugged at me and said, well, I guess you guys aren't 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 of an info dump right there. Do you want me to just keep going? What exactly was he saying to you? He's saying you're not, you're just not going to get any cooperation from us? 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 82nd 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 delivering supplies to people who are no to supply centers that are no longer in need. So it, you know, there wasn't a very warm feeling on the ground for Fila, for Fila. FEMA among the denizens of the area.

I guess one more question before we move on. It's being reported, and I see some of our guys even counter signaling it, saying it's ridiculous, that FEMA, some of the federal emergency management is clearing out because there are credible threats to their safety. When you hear that, what do you think? Yeah, 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 post or something, but. Okay. All right. Well, keep going. Keep going from where you were, where you were. Yeah, so the Everything's running kind of smoothly I mean, it's not running smoothly, but it is running.

There are all of the small operations on the ground. So you know, 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 Ancapistan, right? 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, 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 de facto governments that are incapable of being these governments. And that that caused a lot of delay and a lot of confusion. And I'm sure that some people died as a result of this. Well, 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 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. Right. no one should be in charge then how are these how is any of this going to get distributed right um well it has to be voluntary bro it has to be voluntary uh and caps and lulbert's not taking an l challenge impossible but um you know the reason why it 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 a government power imposed on them. I know Sean Ryan did a podcast with some of 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 similar. They rolled into a town, and some boomers 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 aid, this is where it's going, you know, stop, stop imposing yourself. Just remove, just remove that person. I mean, just be like, okay, you're not in charge here. I'm taking over. Fuck you. Right. And that that would be the idea. And if you don't like

and I'll shoot you. I mean, literally. 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 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 Samaritan's 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 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 Samaritan's 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, incident control system to keep track of all of this intelligence because there's a lot of fog or 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 we're getting different signals and both of them can be true but when you get uh like someone who who decides that their voices is the one that needs to be listened to, not relaying the needs

of their community, it becomes a problem. Yeah, I mean, it would seem to me the easiest thing to do. It'd be like, okay, you have all these, if the firehouse is taking charge, and then the churches are beneath them, you're the firehouse is just getting lists from each church, and that's how it gets, that seems really simple. It does. And, you know, there's, there's going to be a lot of, I mean, 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 Ancapistan.

Well, 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, you know, may need to be dealt with. 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. So it fell to the smaller teams that were willing to either bypass the police checkpoints or massage their way through them in order to get real intelligence on what's going on.

Let's run back to, we'll run back to Asheville for a second, because I'm sure people would like that, you know, like to hear more about that. I mean, you said that there was violence. What was reported? So now this is what I heard from being on the ground. These aren't things that I specifically witnessed. But basically, mugging's people like looting whatever they could before FEMA got there to reestablish control. And that's pretty much it. I didn't stay in Asheville.

I drove through it and it looked like nothing. It didn't look like anything had happened there. It looked like the storm had missed it almost completely. But yeah, that's just what I had heard. Well, 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 the line crews have been working nonstop 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. I remember driving through Atlanta one day and driving through one of the areas that had been um you know fixed that what do they call it gentrified. And I remember just I'm driving through one day and I'm looking at all these people walk in 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 fan these people are going to be eating each other within like two weeks yeah and essentially exactly that happened and it you know it didn't

really happen in the surrounding areas now there are some areas of uh of swananoa that one of the the really hard hit parts, massive destruction down there. That had Section 8 housing. And 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 place where 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 they can't fend for themselves but also when people show up with stuff they just kind of see it as something that that's theirs so it's uh 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. Yeah, and we keep importing them from islands in the Caribbean, but. Right. Yeah. 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 were just taking like generators and high ticket items off of the supply drop points. Like, you know, is that true? I have no way to corroborating it. Is it believable? 100%. Yeah. Yeah.

So all right, well, keep going. What else, where else are we going to hit? Yeah, so these, this is pretty much my experience 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 X. 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, low 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 an area. is 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 100%. So this is 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 due diligence. Sounds to me like you're making the argument for the anarcho-capitalists.

I know, right? What I'm actually making an argument for is that we need sound government. If this government 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. 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 Pazawid, 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. The jump right into conquest there. Yeah, and I would say my point is, sure, you can have your incapistan 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're a small army. Oh, we're going to put an army together. Okay, that sounds like Ancapa Stan. 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. But go ahead. Right, and that's exactly what it did turn into. And as far as philosophical lessons go, I don't, I think that the lulberts and the Ancraps 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 Nkapistan. We've seen it and we know that that's not how they go. Yeah, I mean, and 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. 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 hauler 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 if you think you have a functioning government that's going to take care of you, when you don't, in some ways it's worse to have that government than it is to have no government at all, which is what we're kind of seeing. It's this weird, 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, 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 way more complex than the N-CAPs would lead you to believe. Yeah, I mean, and if your FEMA field director is somebody who, you know, you could take shade under her nose, well, I mean, what do you expect? Yeah. What do you expect? I mean, oh, yeah, but, you know, like Beaumar said they're successful. Yeah, they're successfully getting jobs.

How come they just can't do the job? Right. And then like, you know, of course, this not like everyone at this point, point knows what FEMA was doing with all of their funding. Everyone at this point knows why. Everyone listening to this knows why FEMA reacted the way it did or lacked a 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 beforehand. 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, you know, some of these areas aren't going to have power until 2025, well, you know, into the new year. And I'm assuming when you mentioned In 2028, you were talking about like roads and things like that. Is that what I'm thinking? 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 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 are. 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's so much clothing that has come into the

area 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 Asheville, who donated many, many, 275-gallon water tanks that were desperately needed at some of the supply depots. So that's one of those private organizations

that are definitely worth patronizing in the future. 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 going to flood there and I'm going to start, but no, shut the fuck. up. What we need is we need to see those elites pop up 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 isn't doing, and then we have people to look to, you know, for guidance. At least we know that they care about us. 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 were stepping up and some people with means who were doing some good things there. Can you talk about that? Yes.

There is, so I mentioned an organization was being funded by a hedge fund manager. And he, he paid, he was paying cash for everything. He got trucks. He got heavy equipment. And he, he was giving out meals to the locals and to it, to the volunteers that that he had around him. The, the professional crews that he brought in there on his own expense. 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, he is helping. And like that sort of thing is, is very important to go forward.

Like it's a good example because he, you know, he bought up somebody's business. And now he, you know, he obviously infuses them with cash, but he's using this business now as a staging area to do what is going to be months of work. Because when we talk about 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 reconstructing. So the more capital infusion that can go down there from these money elites, they can really make a show of it and get the goodwill of the people.

It would be as nothing for a billionaire to show up with a fleet of heavy equipment. And the operators are all there. 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. Yeah, the ones who are 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. Right. And the answer, of course, is we need a new government. We need a, we need a, we circulation, we need effective people in the government.

Like the people at the low level of FEMA and the, you know, the privates and the sergeants that I saw running around with the 82nd 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 competence. And they're there. We know they're there. They're openly stating that these are the things that they care about.

So if you see this as a failure of government and not a failure of this particular government, then you're missing the trees for the forest. You're missing the real issue here. You're missing the granularity. Like I just said earlier, like there's, there's no time for this libertarian nonsense here what we saw is not a is it was not a failure of government as such it was a failure of our particular government 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 were there they'd be taking care of this i mean the things would already that water treatment plant would already start being, the waste treatment plant would already start being built already. And, you know, one of the issues is to go back to that, you know, the fire chief who, you know, goes to the, goes to the firehouse and, like, starts laying down the law and it's getting people hurt. You need someone to decide the exception. You need someone to walk in there and go, okay, 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 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 your legitimacy does not legitimacy comes in a couple different ways one is with a title and with uh with something that most of the people the overwhelming majority that people look upon as being legitimate. Any other way as somebody who just steps up and is what you call quote unquote pillar of the community, that kind of thing. Any other way when you just have some Yahoo come in and go, ah, I don't like the way this guy's running

things, boom, and shoots them. No, 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. 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. 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 of 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 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.

Yeah. And these petty tyrants are all waiting to pop up. And yeah, they don't really care about you or your people. Yeah. I mean, ego is a hell of a thing. And, 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, uh, small homogenous 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. 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 was anybody talking about a death toll down there? 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. Um, I don't know, uh, what the official numbers are at this time, but they're definitely low. Um, you know, the, if you've never smelled death before, you can get it down there. Uh, it's, it's a very particular odor. But, um, you know, there are people, you know, there are people. that will never be found. There are families that I heard a story of one family that lost 11 members in a single night. They're just gone. And it's like that all over the area.

When we were reconning, we made, we hopped the border a couple of times into Tennessee, just as bad, if not worse. And this is up and down all of Appalachia and into some parts of Georgia. So whatever the official numbers are, the real death toll is going to be much higher. That's what I'm afraid of. I was hearing things in the first couple days. 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 10,000. That's what the person, it thought immediate. from the amount of people that she had been lost around her. I mean, it wouldn't surprise me in the least. You know, the stories that I got from the people running, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, Cs out there about some of the things that happened in the local haulers. This one guy, they get the flash flood warning.

And you have to keep in mind, flash flooding happens like that. It, it, it's not something you kind of see coming and you can, you can get out of the way of. you have to 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 stakes that you sometimes see like ribbons for surveying uh yeah 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 the water was rising and he went inside woke his mother up, came back out. It had been maybe 60 seconds. The stake 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 grab 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 20 feet deep. And your house that was, uh, you know, 20 yards from the, 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, 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 you know when I was seeing pictures of people who were um basically riding horses dirt bikes and i saw one picture of pack mules um i'm just thinking like this is an apocalyptic movie this is

like any kind of a 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 treated and everything. But they were, you know, 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 much this is going to be.

You know, the whole thing George Bush hates, you know, Kanye is saying George Bush hates black people. I mean, you can just easily turn that around now when you see the kind of response and just how fast they're going to try and help these people and, you know, put infrastructure back together. 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. Yeah. Yeah. Do you have anything else?

Yeah, there's just one more big thing I wanted to mention. Sure. 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 deaf? 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 this 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. in again a dangerous environment. If you need contacts down there, the 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 a 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. But if you don't, and you hear this, you are never again allowed to say anything like young men can't find adventure in the modern world. Yeah.

And don't contact us. The Old Glory Club at Gmail.com. Hit them up. I know I get a lot of people who contact me directly. It's the Old Glory Club at Gmail.com. Go to the Old Glory Club. There's ways you can contact us from there. We have people who, we have one person who does email.

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 a time when you can get some real experience. You know, 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 accomplished something. 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 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 the shit of it. Shoutouts to all the boys in the OGC and nascent 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. Yeah. Yeah, I can just imagine. I can imagine what it was like on the ground there. All right, man. I guess we're going to 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 doing us proud. I mean, it means a lot. Oh, yeah, man. Thanks for having me on to help get the message out.

Until the next time. Take care.