Cosmic Waffles and Looney Tunes in the house that Trump built

Richard FAusset, No One at Waffle House Remembers FEMA Official Who Says He Teleported In, NYTimes, April 3, 2026.

In December, Mr. Phillips, 65, a former top health official in Texas, was appointed to head FEMA’s Office of Response and Recovery. The office, with more than 1,000 employees and a budget of nearly $300 million, is central to FEMA’s job of responding to disasters like hurricanes, earthquakes and fires. Mr. Phillips was known, at the time, as a proponent of election fraud conspiracy theories, some of which were amplified by Mr. Trump.

Things got stickier for Mr. Phillips last month, when an investigative report by CNN detailed how, on podcasts and social media, he had propagated other conspiracy theories, used violent rhetoric in discussing former President Joseph R. Biden, and recounted how, on two occasions, he had somehow found himself being moved, by forces beyond his control, dozens of miles from two different starting points in Georgia.

“Teleporting is no fun,” he said on the podcast “Onward,” which is hosted by a conservative activist. [...]

On Wednesday, Mr. Phillips wrote on Truth Social, President Trump’s social media platform, that the incident took place while he was heavily medicated as part of a cancer treatment. But he also described it as a miracle performed by God.

“The word ‘teleportation’ was not mine,” Mr. Phillips wrote. “It was used by someone else in the conversation reaching for language to describe something with no easy name. The more accurate biblical terms are ‘translated’ or ‘transported’ — not new ideas for people of faith.”

But no one at any of the three Waffle Houses recognized his picture.

That's nothing. I once toured a waffle in an X-wing fighter from the Star Wars universe. See:

We are not alone:

Mr. Phillips’s claims are part of a growing trend among high-profile American conservatives to assert the physical presence of beings from the spiritual realm, or from provinces that are often reserved for science fiction novelists. In 2024, Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host, said that he was “mauled,” while sleeping, by “​​a demon or by something unseen.” Former Representative Matt Gaetz recently said that a U.S. Army official had told him about “hybrid breeding programs, where captured aliens were breeding with humans to create some hybrid race that could engage in intergalactic communication.”