God teleports top FEMA official to Waffle House

Per top FEMA official:

A top FEMA official is doubling down on his claim that he has been teleported against his will.

Gregg Phillips is in charge of response and recovery at FEMA and has repeated the claim on several podcasts, according to CNN.

Last year, in an episode of Onward, a podcast co-hosted by rightwing activist Catherine Engelbrecht, Phillips said his car was “lifted up” while driving and he was transported 40 miles away into a ditch near a church. In the same episode, he said he was teleported 50 miles away to a Waffle House in Rome, Georgia.

“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.

He added that teleporting is “no fun,” but an “incredible adventure.”

CNN reports that Phillips recently took to social media to further defend that claim, writing, “I know what I experienced,” and “haters gonna hate.”

Phillips appeared to have a Christian explanation, writing, “The Bible has many examples of the power of God.”

I wonder if we have a case of crank magnetism here?

But Phillips’s past—aside from his teleportation fixation—is controversial. As a major proponent of the “Big Lie,” the conspiracy theory that Donald Trump only lost the 2020 election because it was rigged against him, he had a prominent role in Dinesh D’Souza’s election-denial flop film 2000 Mules. And in January 2025, he said on a podcast regarding President Biden, “I would like to punch that b*tch in the mouth right now. He is a nasty, shitty, crappy human being, and he deserves to die. And I hope he does.”  

Phillips is predictably taking the Christian Martyr Subjected To a High-Tech Lynching By the Godless Marxist Media route, on the road to his own personal Clickbait Damascus:

“God will not be mocked.  People can debate me. Question me.  Even ridicule what they don’t understand.  I know what I’ve experienced.  I know Who I serve.” 

Speaking strictly for myself, if I were teleported by God, I would assume this could be to any location in spacetime, or transcendent realm, so finding myself in a Waffle House would be a significant disappointment. I mean at least make it The French Laundry, if not Michigan Stadium in November of 1969, or a certain maternity ward in the middle of the night on June 17, 1946.

Can a nation that consists of countless millions of people who hold at least two radically incompatible world views not be divided against itself? Those views being fundamentalist Christianity, and the kind of fundamentally secular liberalism that, if admits God into the conversation at all, tends to relegate him to the role assigned to him by Spinoza, or Flaubert, or perhaps David Hume:

This world, for aught [man] knows, is very faulty and imperfect, compared to a superior standard; and was only the first rude essay of some infant deity, who afterwards abandoned it, ashamed of his lame performance: it is the work only of some dependent, inferior deity; and is the object of derision to his superiors: it is the production of old age and dotage in some superannuated deity; and ever since his death, has run on at adventures, from the first impulse and active force which it received from him.

Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779)

I will say this essentially gnostic view has a certain plausibility.

Bathawk, you are on the clock.