The US administration tried to pass a ruling through FEMA to withold Federal funding for aid following a disaster, if the state refused to back the US support for Israel’s Netanyahu policy on Gaza.

FEMA admitted this week that it had, until now, required state governments to pledge alignment with U.S. policy toward Israel in order to receive certain disaster aid. The requirement, buried in grant application language, effectively tied hurricane and wildfire relief to a geopolitical loyalty oath. After the policy surfaced publicly, backlash was swift — governors, aid groups, and civil rights organizations blasted it as discriminatory and dangerous. Within days, the administration announced the requirement was being scrapped. No more purity test. No more need to wave the foreign policy flag before the floodwaters recede. But the fact it existed at all is telling.

Officials insisted the requirement was a legacy measure linked to foreign aid compliance standards, not a deliberate political weapon. Critics weren’t convinced, pointing out that its survival into 2025 showed either calculated intent or stunning incompetence. In Trumpworld, those aren’t mutually exclusive. The episode underscored how quietly partisan filters can be baked into apolitical programs, surfacing only when someone bothers to read the fine print. And while this one was reversed, the precedent is troubling — if disaster aid can be politicized once, it can be politicized again, just with more subtlety next time.

For blue states, the rollback is a relief — for now. But the episode reinforced a core truth of the Trump era: no federal program is too essential, too humanitarian, or too obviously life-saving to be repurposed for political leverage. If the public hadn’t caught this one, states could still be navigating a foreign policy loyalty quiz before getting a single FEMA dollar. And the next test may not be so easy to spot.

Source: New York Times…

Terms and Conditions (the small print) now need more than a magnifying glass to read them; an astute mind is required.

Small print paraphrased: Support Netanyahu or FEMA will not support relief in your state.

The manipulation of benign to malevolent intent is upon us.

Whitney Webb would suggest malevolent intent has been with us for decades, she quotes Bruce Hemmings, from 1990, when he said:

If you let them, they will take over not only [the] CIA but the entire government and the world, cutting off dissent, free speech, a free media, and they will cut a deal with anyone, from [the] Mafia to Saddam Hussein, if it means more power and money. They stole $600 billion from the S & L’s and then diverted our attention to the Iraqis. They are ripping off America at a rate never before seen in history. They flooded our country with drugs from Central America during the 1980s, cut deals with Haro in Mexico, Noriega in Panama, and the Medillin and Cali cartels, and Castro, and recently the Red Mafia in the KGB. They ruin their detractors and they fear the truth. If they can, they will blackmail you. Sex, drugs, deals, whatever it takes.”

–Former CIA officer and Iran-Contra whistleblower Bruce Hemmings, circa 1990

From ‘One Nation Under Blackmail’

Take a moment to consider, if humanity is in the end days, why do we carry Hope-in-our-Hearts?

Havel wrote something that seems particularly relevant for us in these very dark times:

“The kind of hope I often think about (especially in situations that are particularly hopeless, such as prison) I understand above all as a state of mind, not a state of the world. Either we have hope within us or we don’t; it is a dimension of the soul; it’s not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation.

Hope is a not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but, rather, an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed.”