Warning! Public Alert Test Scheduled

The federal government has scheduled a national warning test for Wednesday, Oct. 4, but how truly might this system be used?

Per the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) website, the agency “in coordination with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), will conduct a national test of the Integrated Public Alert and Warning System (IPAWS) on Oct. 4, 2023.”

An agency news release notes “Test Messages Will be Sent to All TVs, Radios and Cell Phones” and describes the action as follows:

FEMA, in coordination with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), will conduct a nationwide test of the Emergency Alert System (EAS) and Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA) this fall.

The national test will consist of two portions, testing WEA and EAS capabilities. Both tests are scheduled to begin at approximately 2:20 p.m. ET on Wednesday, Oct. 4.

The WEA portion of the test will be directed to all consumer cell phones. This will be the third nationwide test, but the second test to all cellular devices. The test message will display in either English or in Spanish, depending on the language settings of the wireless handset.

The EAS portion of the test will be sent to radios and televisions. This will be the seventh nationwide EAS test.

Per the release, FEMA in partnership with the FCC is “coordinating with EAS participants, wireless providers, emergency managers and other stakeholders in preparation for this national test to minimize confusion and to maximize the public safety value of the test.”

It further states:

The purpose of the Oct. 4 test is to ensure that the systems continue to be effective means of warning the public about emergencies, particularly those on the national level. In case the Oct. 4 test is postponed due to widespread severe weather or other significant events, the back-up testing date is Oct. 11.

About what might we be warned?

These two tests are to determine EAS and WEA capabilities, but what are the specific warning profiles of these two programs?

Ready.gov offers this:

Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEAs) are short emergency messages from authorized federal, state, local, tribal and territorial public alerting authorities that can be broadcast from cell towers to any WEA‐enabled mobile device in a locally targeted area. WEAs can be sent by state and local public safety officials, the National Weather Service, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and the President of the United States.

The Emergency Alert System (EAS) is a national public warning system that allows the president to address the nation within 10 minutes during a national emergency. State and local authorities may also use the system to deliver important emergency information such as weather information, imminent threats, AMBER alerts and local incident information targeted to specific areas.

Alerting the public to potentially severe weather is certainly a valid and customary use for warning systems. But 2020 and the ensuing “pandemic culture” taught many people (and confirmed for others of us) that government warnings, directions or mandates should be viewed with discernment.

But are all threats created equal or are some just created?

An effective alert system can warn a population of practical threats. In recent years, however, we’ve also learned that an alert system or other government-controlled apparatus can also be used to propagate the existence of “threats” which may or may not be truly credible. Mask mandates, lockdowns, forced vaccines also taught us that questionable agendas may also be imbedded within government warnings.

On his Who is Robert Malone Substack, Dr. Malone discussed the last years’ promotion of “The Big Fear”:

From the very beginning, the COVIDcrisis has been hyped and promoted by a variety of sources as a potential extinction event– a crisis threat level which is completely inconsistent with the actual measured case fatality rate. And now “Climate Change” is being actively promoted as an existential crisis because it could lead to extinction of the human race – or at a minimum extinction of human existence as we know it. And the prospect of nuclear war is often presented as the granddaddy of all extinction boundaries.

Global corporate media has been collaborating with western governments to repeatedly promote chronic anxiety and fear of catastrophic extinction events consequent to infectious diseases, environmental disasters, energy depletion, and nuclear war for decades. The most profound form of fear mongering: promoting the fear of human extinction. And now we are experiencing a decade in which all of this fearporn is being accelerated and amplified to a dizzying pace by widespread deployment of military-grade psy-ops technologies on civilian populations via an alliance between corporate media and the western “five eyes” intelligence community. Fifth Generation warfare.

We are told these threats exist and without a dramatic altering of our behaviors and lifestyles, the seeds to our destruction are sowed.

Meanwhile, disregard the numerous issues impacting American lives on a daily basis, issues either ignored or addressed with “spin” that is often disingenuous except to the most naïve, unperceptive or lazy/disengaged of our population. Issues such as:

• a steady, ever-growing invasion of our nation via (largely though not exclusively) the southern border;
• rising inflation and economic pressures not seen in four or more decades;
• increasingly obvious unrestricted warfare assaults by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) including – and again, not limited to – bioweapons (COVID-19), chemical weapons (fentanyl), economic warfare (supply chain, currency manipulation, etc.), cyber-attacks (corporate/institutional breaches, grid incursions); information warfare via platforms like TikTok; and brewing kinetic war over Taiwan.

And this doesn’t include current threats to both our food and energy supplies, threats posed not just by foreign adversaries, but by our own government as its merger with and loyalties to global institutions become more evident.

The point: vigilance. In 2016, Stella Morabito wrote a great column entitled Truth or Propaganda? It includes 10 questions to help distinguish propaganda from truth. Is your natural curiosity being suppressed? Are slurs or labels threatened upon speaking out?  Do your opinions “trigger” others?  And are you being expected to trade in reality to prop up another’s illusion? Morabito offers important perspective for exercising human agency in evaluating the slew of “warnings” that seem endlessly coming our way.

Lessons learned

The Lahaina fire should long serve to remind of the deadly nature that unreliable and/or unexecuted emergency preparedness can bring. To that end, this is not about being anti-public warning/alert systems. It is, however, about warning that evaluating the warnings to which you are subjected is critical in today’s world.

Lou Ann Anderson is a writer, former radio producer and current podcaster at Political Pursuits.  Her tenure as Watchdog Wire–Texas editor involved covering state news and coordinating the site’s citizen journalist network. As a past Policy Analyst with Americans for Prosperity–Texas, Lou Ann wrote and spoke on a variety of issues including the growing issue of probate abuse in which wills, trusts, guardianships and powers of attorney are used to loot assets from intended heirs or beneficiaries.  She holds a degree from the University of North Texas in Denton.