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Many are pointing out that the regime seems to care a lot more about providing aid to the Ukraine than it does about providing aid to Appalachia.

Hurricane Helene and the Lost Mandate of Heaven
“We’re from the government, and we’re here to make sure no one helps.”

As of the time of this writing, over two hundred people are confirmed to have been killed by Hurricane Helene. No one knows the true death toll yet. There are rumours of over 900 unidentified bodies, with some saying that a couple of zeroes need to be added to the death toll. Who knows what the real number is. We may never know. A lot of the bodies may simply never be found.

This is the last image of a husband and wife trying to escape from the flood by climbing onto the roof of the their home in Asheville, NC. The roof collapsed, killing them and their six-year-old grandchild; the child’s mother took the photograph.

There are multiple reports of bodies stuck up in trees (link has video). There don’t seem to be any pictures confirming this yet, but one can understand why people would be reluctant to take such pictures, or to share them.

There are dead bodies everywhere, apparently:

they are not picking up the bodies. The stench of the bodies everywhere is insane and for some reason, the government does not want to pick up the bodies. One pastor of a local church was going to order to door delivering water and they changed their delivery request to body bags because so many of the homes that they’ve gone to have needed body bags, we’re trying to keep the body count. They’re not picking up the bodies. They don’t wanna identify the bodies and they’re just leaving them to rot in the streets.

Conditions on the ground sound absolutely horrific: lost children, separated from their parents, people begging for water:

These are all rumours. There are going to be a lot of rumours in this post. Reports from the ground are conflicting, many of them standing in stark contradiction to official communications from federal and state authorities, and their counterparts in the legacy media. That doesn’t mean that everything on social media is correct. There’s a lot of bullshit out there, like this AI-generated image that made the rounds:

Or this AI-generated picture of Trump personally assisting in disaster relief:

Don’t fall for the obvious Facebook boomerbait, obviously.

I’ve tried to do my best to sort through the Twitter rumour mill, but have erred on the side of inclusion. If you see something here which you know is bullshit, say so in the comments; I’ll update accordingly. It’s not going to be possible to sift truth from rumour and narrative spin, but it might be possible to extract a few themes from the noise.

One thing that we know for sure is that a huge part of Appalachia has been knocked out of the industrial age.

It isn’t clear when the satellite image was taken, but the most recent outage map indicates that the region is still largely dark.

There are estimates that it might take months to restore power to some areas. This is apparently in part because a large fraction of America’s stock of spare transformers were sent to the Ukraine.

Many are pointing out that the regime seems to care a lot more about providing aid to the Ukraine than it does about providing aid to Appalachia.

Maybe if North Carolina changed its name it would have an easier time getting help.

To be fair, most of the aid1 to Ukraine is an accounting fiction: military equipment is assigned a market price and sent to the war zone, with the financial beneficiaries being American arms manufacturers. But this distinction is one of those autistic hair-splitting arguments that avoids the underlying issue, which is that Washington observably cares about its foreign ambitions far more than it does about Americans.

It certainly doesn’t help when Lindsay Graham gets on Fox News to perfunctorily commiserate with the North Carolinans, only to pivot immediately to remind viewers not to lose sight of what really matters: rocket attacks on Our Greatest Ally. If ever there was a time to put the Zionist enthusiasm away for a few minutes, it’s now. But the barely closeted homosexual just can’t help himself, anymore than he could when he was doing whatever it was that Mossad caught on video.

The image of Trump wearing a life preserver and walking knee-deep through a food zone was AI bullshit, but it was also unnecessary: Trump was, in fact, on the ground in Georgia almost immediately, acting as a president should, to rally the people and raise their morale, while working with Elon Musk to make StarLink available throughout the affected region, regardless of ability to pay. Musk bought a lot of good will with that move.

While Trump was behaving like a president, the actual president was shrugging that “We’ve given everything that we have,” without bothering to visit.

Biden has since visited North Carolina apparently, only to promptly forget that it existed.

But we all know that Biden isn’t running anything. The de facto president is Kamala Harris, who after days of ignoring the disaster entirely, was finally observed taking an important call on matter, while looking very serious and concentrated as she took notes and signed orders, or, well, did something with a pen.

The careful observer will note Kamala’s earbuds are unplugged, and that the paper in front of her is blank.

She can’t even be bothered to put minimal effort into pretending to care.

Alejandro Mayorkas, the Secretary of Homeland Security who threw the borders open to invite in millions – possibly tens of millions – of invaders, has announced that FEMA is all tapped out. They spent their whole budget on social programs for people who should never have been in the country in the first place: $640 million in the current fiscal year, and $1.6 billion since 2022. There’s been a lot of outrage over the paltry $750 being offered to the flood victims, but to be fair this appears to be the legally mandated maximum for short-term emergency assistance, with long-term assistance for e.g. housing capped at more generous $42,500. None of which changes the fact that FEMA blew its wad on illegals. This is no doubt an essential element in FEMA’s strategic plan, the number 1 goal of which is not disaster relief, but the promotion of equity.

Some of the invaders Mayorkas allowed in were arrested for looting:

There are unconfirmed reports of orphaned children being raped by illegals.

Don’t worry, though: left-wing NGOs are on the ground, providing such essential services as abortions and free PrEP.

Getting any kind of aid to the disaster zone, whether food and water or really crucial supplies such as drugs for safe gay sex, let alone rebuilding them, is greatly complicated by the fact that the roads been chewed into rubble-strewn river-beds.

Some of the locals have taken to moving supplies in by mule train.

Fortunately, we don’t have to rely entirely on pre-industrial techniques such as a domesticated beasts of burden to reach remote mountainous regions. We also have these wonderful devices called helicopters.

Initially, most of the helicopters seen flying search and rescue operations were private civilian craft, with military or other government aircraft almost nowhere to be seen.

This was apparently very embarrassing for the government, leading to reports of at least one of the pilots flying unauthorized relief missions being threatened with arrest. You see, they didn’t want him interfering with the government aircraft (which weren’t in the air).

It isn’t only civilian helicopters being grounded: Pete Buttigieg has told people to keep their drones out of the air, too, ostensibly to prevent them from interfering with relief missions. It’s true that the last thing a helicopter pilot wants is to run into someone’s quadrotor drone, but people have also speculated that this is because the Feds don’t want people seeing their (lack of) action.

There are multiple reports of FEMA or other government agencies confiscating supplies, blocking volunteers, telling volunteers to stand down, and refusing to accept material assistance:

While FEMA itself is apparently nowhere to be seen:

Here’s a pissed off local woman describing conditions on the ground, and the lack of government response.

One take on FEMA’s behaviour, from a veteran relief volunteer who saw all of this before in the Florida Keys in the aftermath of Hurricane Irma, is that it’s all about the money. FEMA obtains its supplies from ‘preferred vendors’, who in turn provide kickbacks to the government officials who select them. Relief supplies donated to charities get in the way of the grift.

FEMA might be tapped out due to splurging on the Great Replacement, but there are other assets the government could use: the US military, for example. Fort Bragg is right there:

Word is, however, that the military is being told to stay put, possibly because Our Greatest Ally might need them, which the soldiers themselves don’t sound thrilled about:

However, there’s one report that the Feds have been staying out of North Carolina because North Carolina told the Feds to stay out, in order to avoid a repeat of the Hurricane Katrina fiasco (note that “Liberty” is Fort Bragg):

Furthermore, it seems that Biden has, in fact, belatedly authorized assistance from Fort Bragg, with 1000 personnel being assigned to the relief mission.

Florida’s State Guard (which is not the National Guard) is in the area, but one of their special mission unit guys says that they’re having trouble getting access to helicopters, although that seems to have been at least partially resolved:

Meanwhile, North Carolina’s National Guard has apparently rescued over 500 people, using helicopters.

National Guard units from 16 states have also been activated to assist in the relief effort, with 6700 National Guardsmen being assigned.

It’s clear that the government hasn’t literally done nothing, but it seems clear that it took a while to get its act together. Many are suggesting that the government has been deliberately dragging its heals. Have they? I don’t know the answer to that for sure; I don’t think anyone does. With any entity as cumbersome as the US Federal Government, any single unitary explanation for its behaviour is unlikely to be fully descriptive. All sorts of factors are probably in play: the greed of petty officials looking to protect their kickbacks from ‘preferred vendors’; the fragile egos and robotic authoritarianism of bureaucrats unable to look past their best-practices manuals and regulatory fiefdoms; the incompetence of diversity hires; dithering by a divided and confused leadership; resource depletion due to overseas military commitments and domestic illegal immigration policy (or should that be illegal domestic immigration policy?); simple complacence from a remote imperial ruling class towards the fates of America’s most despised population. Corruption, confusion, and fecklessness are probably sufficient to explain the slow response, and probably does explain most of it.

One particularly dark take is that the Federal government’s apparent slow-rolling of the disaster response is a form of voter suppression. North Carolina is a swing state, and with the exception of Asheville the western part of the state is deep red MAGA territory. Voters who can’t reach a polling booth because there are no roads, no power, and no communications, and who aren’t even thinking about voting because they’re more focused on food, potable water, and shelter from the elements, are much less likely to vote. Keep those people from voting, and Kamala might just take North Carolina … and the country.

Again, I don’t know if there’s anything to that, but it wouldn’t surprise me if there was.

A theme that comes through loud and clear – whether in Lindsay Graham’s tone deaf Israel pivot or Kamala Harris’ blundering blank page photo op – is the regime’s general lack of concern with the fate of the Appalachians. This is nothing terribly new. Hillbillies have been derided for generations as ignorant, poor, clannish, violent, and inbred. Appalachia has been one of the most economically depressed parts of the United States almost in perpetuity. Much of it languishes in poverty that would make a third world country blush. The American ruling class is accustomed to treating them with contemptuous dismissal. The white death of the opiod epidemic raged through the region for decades without anyone in power particularly giving a damn.

This hostility is reciprocated by the Appalachians themselves, who are used to being ignored when they aren’t being insulted. This may explain some of the complaints from flood victims on the ground, who don’t see the government helping right now, and conclude that no help is coming at all; the truth may simply be that resources are stretched while the bureaucracy, caught flatfooted, trips over its two left feet in its slapstick efforts to catch up. Generations of neglect will tend to train people to assume the worst. The people at the top might not care that much, or not at all, but The Government is not composed exclusively of careerists and sociopaths. Many of them, particularly in the military, are just people, who genuinely do want to help in a disaster situation like this, because that’s what people do; there’s a bottom-up social pressure from this basic humanitarian instinct that can’t be fully suppressed by scheming criminals.

That points to the other major theme running through these events, which is the instinctive distrust – the bone-deep hatred, in fact – that many Americans have developed for their ruling class.

When I was a teenager, an ice storm hit in early January, covering everything in inches of ice. Trees fell down, dragging power lines with them, taking out the electrical grid over a huge area. Some places didn’t get power back for weeks; I had friends who were showering at the school gym well into February. Over thirty people died as a result. Meanwhile, the entirety of society – including the military – mobilized to rebuild and to get relief supplies to outlying areas. There were no conspiracy theories; no rumours of the government deliberately slowing the recovery; no distrust at all. People simply came together and got it done.

America in 2024 is not like that. The mood is dark, now. There is no trust left. Nor should there be, after everything that’s happened so far this century: the pointless forever wars; the great robbery of the 2008 financial crash; the COVID lockdowns; the vaxx mandates; the stolen election of 2020; the censorship and soft HR tyranny of the Great Awokening; the visible mental decay of the ruling class, many of whom can barely string together a coherent sentence anymore; the population replacement of mass immigration; the open borders; the filth and crime and drugs flooding the streets; food price inflation, the real estate bubble, and the steady collapse in living standards.

The default assumption many people hold now is that the regime is composed of criminals, of enemies. It is difficult not to feel this way. It is, indeed, almost foolish not to.

So when the regime fumble’s the response to a disaster, many will assume that it did so deliberately.

Maybe it did, and maybe it didn’t; that so many assume this to be so is the significant fact.

This is a government which has lost the mandate of heaven. It is no longer fit to rule.

There’s a third theme, though, which is in the long run the most significant.

While the state dithered, schemed, bumped into itself, and got in the way, the self-organizing networks of civil society responded immediately, seamlessly, and nimbly. Civilian helicopters were the first to take to the air; relief supplies were collected and distributed by spontaneously organized rescue missions that got to work right away, without waiting for permission, authorization, or orders.

This is a story we’ve seen before many times, for example with the completely disproportionate effectiveness of autonomous networks versus established academic structures when it came to parsing reality during COVID.

That isn’t to say that there’s no role for the state whatsoever: some aspects of the state have, in fact, been useful, for instance the State Guard that Governor DeSantis built up. Decisive leadership combined with a well-functioning hierarchy can be incredibly effective … just as indecisive leadership combined with a bloated bureaucracy can be a massive liability. As with most things it’s not a question of absolutes, but a question of balance. What’s the right balance? If more resources were in the hands of private citizens, and there was less state interference to obstruct their actions, how much more effective would the self-organizing collectives enabled by network technology be? Given what we’ve seen in North Carolina, and elsewhere, how much government do we really need?

And I think many of us know without being told that the answer is: a whole lot less than what we have now.