It appears that the Trump administration does not do even the most cursory examination of someone’s past before appointing them to important offices in the government. Otherwise how can you explain how a nutjob like Gregg Phillips was made head of the the office of response and recovery at FEMA, the federal agency tasked with responding to natural disasters and other emergencies?
Gregg Phillips, who in December was appointed to lead Fema’s office of response and recovery, has spoken on “multiple podcasts” about being teleported against his will, CNN reported on Friday.
On a January 2025 podcast appearance, Phillips claimed that his car was “lifted up” while he was driving and transported 40 miles away into a ditch near a church. And in another instance on the same episode, Phillips said he was teleported 50 miles away to a Waffle House in Rome, Georgia, CNN detailed in a deep dive into Phillips’ past public statements.
“I was with my boys one time, and I was telling them I was gonna go to Waffle House and get Waffle House. And I ended up at a Waffle House – this was in Georgia, and I end up at a Waffle House like 50 miles away from where I was,” Phillips said on the podcast Onward, co-hosted by rightwing activist Catherine Engelbrecht.
Phillips added: “And they said, ‘where are you?’ and I said, ‘A Waffle House.’ And: ‘a Waffle House where?’ And I said: ‘Waffle House in Rome, Georgia.’ And they said: “‘That’s not possible, you just left here a moment ago.’ But it was possible. It was real.”
Here is video of him talking about it.
A cynic (like me) may suspect that finding yourself inexplicably in strange places, like in a ditch 50 miles from where you last remembered, might be because you were drunk or on drugs.
He says that he has been teleported more than once. But don’t worry. He does not treat teleportation casually.
But Phillips did warn about the dangers of teleportation.
“Teleporting is no fun,” he said “You know it’s happening, but you can’t do anything about it, and so you just go, you just go with the ride. And wow, what just an incredible adventure it all was.”
On the plus side, responding to emergencies requires moving people and supplies quickly to the affected areas. Someone who knows how to teleport would be able to do that much better. So maybe they did vet him and felt that this made him ideal for the position, except for the fact that he seems to have been teleported without his consent. But while he did not teleport himself, he may be in touch with those who can do so and they can assist him at FEMA.
But what might have really swung the decision in Phillips’s favor are his other views.
On other podcast appearances, Phillips suggested that both Covid-19 and the vaccine for it were designed to kill people, and also claimed that Department of Homeland Security officials were “planning the next assassination attempt” of Donald Trump after a failed attempt on the US president’s life in 2024.
So who cares if he is nuts? As long as he parrots the insane MAGA conspiracies, he’s alright in their book
The really strange thing is that the Trump administration is so weird and so far out there that this makes barely a ripple in the news cycle.
They are vetted, I suppose… for loyalty to the excrement-in-chief.
Competence is clearly not desirable, it would show up their fellow cultists’ -- and the cult’s subject’s -- lack thereof.
I bet Hegseth has episodes of being teleported from the place where he was drinking to the place where he wakes up the next morning.
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Maybe we should just lean into the weirdness… Zombie Richard Nixon would be an excellent addition to the administration. He is evil, but -- crucially -- not insane. And he would have no problems out-manouvering intellectual midgets like Miller and Hegseth. And should the Orange Guy proved intractable, well, people might fall out of windows, or be hit in the head by golf balls.
In the 1970s, Ron Goulart wrote several Science Fiction parodies about agents in the ‘wild talent division’. For instance, Jake Conger could turn invisible. The hypersexualised agent La Penna was… oh, never mind.
In “Hello, Lemuria, Hello” Jake Conger got help from an alien to teleport to where the evil Lemurians were hiding.
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I have noticed the Iranians do not want to negotiate. As we are living inside a Ron Goulart novel, Marco Rubio should just hang out with Teleportation Dude and go straight to Teheran.
There was also a book with ‘frozen nazis’. Has FBI checked the backgrounds of those weird tech billionaires that keep popping up?
My comment # 3
Ultimately, the voters do the vetting.
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A fun video about voter approval. The good stuff starts one minute in.
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=KJ6pvizJxgA
Leaving aside some words said to be cited by third parties, what Phillips is describing sounds very similar to my experiences with TGA — transient global amnesia. When “in the TGA experience” one is truly lost and can be doing things (even driving a car) that one simply cannot recall moments afterwards but knows must have happened. I have driven miles to a certain place while experiencing TGA and later wondered how on earth I survived — just doing things with an awareness limited to the immediate microsecond all the way. If someone had not once seen my condition at one time and called an ambulance and got me to hospital (none of which I recall, except waking up in hospital) and if I were predisposed to believe in aliens etc, I might put it all down to having been abducted and finding myself “planted” in a particular place.
@#5: I had a similar experience -- swam across a lake (2/3 mile). I keep my head up while swimming to keep my glasses clear. With my head back, circulation in the back of my neck is crunched, and the water was a bit cold. Rode in a boat on the way back across, and started talking nonsense. I remember nothing of that return trip or about 2 hours after that. Woke up in the hospital. Said “I’m back now” and nobody got excited because I’d done that a dozen times already. TGA is indeed weird.
The one job qualification needed is sycophancy.
If I were writing this as fiction instead of seeing it unfold in real life, I might consider the possibility that a candidate for a high position must have some skeleton in his closet that makes it possible to fire him later. That naming one unacceptable nuttiness is a job requirement, a kind of back door, such that if you can’t think of one, you have to invent one. In the world of fiction Phillips’s story would obviously be this, since to believe such a thing is so stupid and crazy that no normal person would….yeah, well anyway, back to the real world, where you couldn’t make this stuff up.
neilgodfrey @#5 and Rebecca K. Weiss @#6,
That is very interesting. I had no idea about TGA!
Just when you thought “heckuva job Brownie” was a low point for FEMA!