On Friday morning at 6:15 a.m., some residents of Swannanoa, North Carolina received an “emergency alert” on their phones.
This screenshot was sent to me by someone living there.
Screenshot: iPhone
As it reads: “Mandatory evacuation in your area. Severe flooding. High water can cause loss of life and property. Move to high ground, away from water, do not delay.” This text came after several other “emergency alerts” were sent throughout the night from the National Weather Service, indicating a flash-flood was in progress. Those alerts were sent at 3:16 a.m. and 5:30 a.m., prior to the evacuation order.
Horrific Flooding yesterday in Black Mountain and Swannanoa, North Carolina.
Human impacts from Helene in WNC will rival Hurricane Katrina based on the hell I’ve seen the last 48 hours.📍Black Mountain, NC pic.twitter.com/pFK8K5RJdf
— Billy Bowling 𝕏 (@babowling12) September 28, 2024
Some people in the area say they didn’t receive these alerts at all. Maybe their phones were off, or they didn’t have a cell signal, or they were asleep. But for the most part, it didn’t matter. The final evacuation alert was too late for many of them to escape. Before dawn, the water was so high that lawns were submerged. Floodwaters had risen more than four feet in less than one hour. 911 calls wouldn’t connect. The worst of the storm was already underway.
The full extent of the devastation, and the number of lives lost, remains unclear. What we do know is that much of Swannanoa — and many other parts of the Southeast — have been destroyed. Cars are hanging from tree limbs. Many homes have been ripped from their foundations and tossed upside down. More than 130 people are dead, with bodies being found every hour. Several people who sought refuge on top of their homes, awaiting rescue, drowned when their roofs collapsed.
Over the past two days, I’ve received several emails from people living in western North Carolina. They all say the same thing: The federal government failed. For all of the billions of dollars FEMA spends on preparing for disasters, they didn’t provide early warning about the potential impact of Hurricane Helene. They didn’t issue an evacuation order soon enough. And then, after the devastation, they didn’t provide immediate resources that could save lives.
Here’s a message that was sent to me from Ashe County, North Carolina. This is a rural area of the state. They’re faring even worse than the cities are. Some of the houses have more than 36 inches of water.
I have seen the devastation with my own eyes and have employees and friends in the mountains that will not have power for weeks. I am a paramedic for a neighboring county. There have been no FEMA personnel sited in our area even though the danger has passed. Our electric cooperative has been amazing and they are the ones building roads, clearing land, and doing overflights. This morning we saw some Blackhawks doing flyovers, but that is the first ones. I’ve been told the DOD is refusing to allow helicopters to fly into our area even though the service members want to help.
“I’ve never seen devastation like this.” Cars and trucks were tossed around like toys in Asheville, North Carolina, after catastrophic flooding from Helene. pic.twitter.com/4wA33g7VLB
— AccuWeather (@accuweather) September 30, 2024
The man adds:
We are coming together and churches and volunteer fire departments are delivering water and food. As we get cell phone service we are reaching out to friends. Lowes ensured a huge delivery of generators was delivered yesterday and no price gouging. Everything that is happening is from locals helping out, churches delivering, local food banks, and businesses. Local government emergency management is doing everything they can. The federal government is failing in every sense of the word. .. The focus has been on the areas that have money and honestly seem as if they vote a specific way.
There are many more reports just like this one. The journalist Nick Sortor reported yesterday:
Shelters in West North Carolina are OVER CAPACITY and DO NOT HAVE ENOUGH FOOD. And FEMA is NOWHERE TO BE FOUND. … one shelter was 30 MEALS SHORT What the hell is going on??! WHERE ARE BIDEN AND HARRIS?
Meanwhile the New York Post reports that, due to the breakdown of law and order, eight “migrants” were just arrested for looting in eastern Tennessee in the aftermath of the storm.
JUST IN: The 8 illegal immigrants who were caught robbing hurricane victims illegally entered the country as “gotaways” according to @AliBradleyTV.
The illegals were caught looting in Eastern Tennessee as locals were fighting for their lives.
Albin Nahun Vega-Rapalo, 24; David… pic.twitter.com/LY3BqZ13G8
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) September 30, 2024
They’re between the ages of 24 and 51-years-old. Charges include burglary and aggravated burglary. These are crimes the federal government enabled on two separate occasions. First they let these criminals into the country. And then they failed to ensure law and order in the aftermath of the storm.
On WMAL yesterday, the Executive Director of Ascend Women’s Center in Asheville, a woman named Kristi Brown, made it clear that more assistance is desperately needed. People don’t have food or water. Listen:
It should go without saying that the federal government should be doing everything it can to pour as many resources as it possibly can into every state that’s been affected by this storm. This should be, by far, the most important issue our government is focusing on.
But that’s not happening.
For his part, Joe Biden was on the beach, supposedly making “phone calls” about the storm. You can only imagine how coherent those alleged phone calls would have been. Then, Joe Biden declared that there’s nothing more his administration can do for the people affected by the disaster in this country. Watch:
“Do you have any words to the victims of the hurricane?”
BIDEN: “We’ve given everything that we have.”
“Are there any more resources the federal government could be giving them?”
BIDEN: “No.” pic.twitter.com/jDMNGhpjOz
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) September 30, 2024
When it comes to foreign aid, no one in the Biden administration has ever said anything like that. Biden has never told Ukraine, “You’re good. You don’t need any more money. We’ve given you all you can.” But when American citizens are drowning in their own homes, they’re on their own. Biden doesn’t seem to care that the shelters are full or that people don’t have food. Neither does the acting president of the United States, Kamala Harris. Her response to the storm has included attending a fundraiser in Hollywood and reading a prepared statement off a teleprompter at FEMA headquarters, without taking any questions.
She also tweeted out this image to document her response to the hurricane, in which she pretends to be taking an important phone call as she holds a pen over a blank piece of paper:
I was just briefed by @FEMA_Deanne Criswell on the latest developments about the ongoing impacts of Hurricane Helene. We also discussed our Administration’s continued actions to support emergency response and recovery.
I also spoke with @NC_Governor Cooper about the ongoing… pic.twitter.com/nlZPB0h3mO— Vice President Kamala Harris (@VP) September 30, 2024
Notice that her wired headphones aren’t even connected to the phone. To be clear, this was not a candid photo. This is the image Kamala Harris’ handlers choreographed and selected to send out during a crisis, to project competence and control. But it does the exact opposite. It highlights what we already knew, which is that Kamala Harris is an actor, miming the motions of what a competent commander-in-chief should be doing. And she happens to be a very bad actor. But Democrats are stuck with her now, so they’re pretending this isn’t obvious to everyone.
They’re also banking that voters weren’t alive in 2005, when Hurricane Katrina hit.
You probably remember that the one enduring image from Hurricane Katrina is a photo of President Bush flying over the aftermath of the hurricane, looking out the window of Air Force One. Here it is:
Paul Morse/White House via Getty Images
This infamous photograph allegedly showed that Bush didn’t care about all the people suffering on the ground — particularly the black people, as Kanye West famously said. It proved Bush was “detached” and “uncaring,” we were told. For well over a decade, media organizations have referred to this photograph as one of the greatest blunders of Bush’s presidency. Bush himself has apologized for it, calling the photograph a “huge mistake.” Of course, the outrage over that photo was totally contrived — Bush was there surveying the damage. Did they expect the sitting president to repel down into the floodwaters and start personally rescuing people? Of course not. If he had shown up to do that, it would’ve been a scandal of its own, because then he’d have been taking up resources for a photo op.
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Bush did the right thing— he wanted to see what was happening with his own eyes, but not get in the middle of it and be a huge distraction. By contrast, Kamala stared at a blank page and pretended to talk into a phone. We have no idea where her plane was. If the media had any integrity at all, this would be a much bigger debacle than the Bush photograph. There would be the same level of mockery and outrage. But, of course, there won’t be because these people have no shame. And also, there’s no racial narrative to spin up here, because many residents of the impacted areas in North Carolina, unlike the residents of New Orleans, are white.
That might be why both the corporate press and the Biden administration have spent the last 24 hours blaming “climate change” for this disaster. The federal government is supposedly blameless. Watch the DHS secretary’s response to the concerns of one mayor in North Carolina, who complains that no one has cell service — which can obviously cause major, life-threatening problems. Watch:
MSNBC: One North Carolina mayor called it “unacceptable and disgusting” that cellular service for the entire region remains blocked. What do you say to people who are desperate to know if their loved ones are still alive?
MAYORKAS: Climate change pic.twitter.com/cw0qci1fhr
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) September 30, 2024
We’ve gone over this so many times that it’s not worth showing all of the data at this point. But here it is, anyway. There’s been no increase in Category 4 or 5 hurricanes that have made landfall in the continental United States from 1900 to 2019.
There’s been no increase in the frequency of hurricanes
And the US government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) predicts the max. intensity of Atlantic hurricanes and tropical storms will rise 5% in the 21st Century, but their frequency will decline 25% pic.twitter.com/HV4M9oNUkK
— Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) August 27, 2020
And, as Michael Shellenberger has reported, “The US government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) predicts the max. intensity of Atlantic hurricanes and tropical storms will rise 5% in the 21st Century, but their frequency will decline 25%.”
The implication that it’s unprecedented for a major hurricane to affect an inland area like Asheville is also false. A meteorology student named Chris Martz pointed out that Asheville was previously wiped out by the remnants of a hurricane all the way back in July of 1916. That was more than a hundred years ago — long before we were supposedly emitting unsustainable levels of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. A disaster like this in a place like Asheville is very rare — which is one of the reasons why the residents were not prepared for this, uoderstably — but it’s not unprecedented. It’s a once in a century kind of event. But how could it be a once in a century event if it’s all because of climate change? None of these politicians or media outlets will ever answer that question, because their goal isn’t actually to save lives. Their goal is to deflect responsibility for their own failures.
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One of those failures — a huge one — involves the government’s persistent, almost incredible ability to waste money while mismanaging massive infrastructure projects. This is an actual “systemic issue” the Biden administration should be concerned with. Specifically, when the Biden administration rolled out its $40 billion plan to connect rural Americans to the internet, all the way back in 2021, they cut Elon Musk’s companies out of the program.
The result was that no one got Internet access. As the Washington Times reports:
The Broadband Equity Access and Deployment Program, or BEAD, has not connected a single rural home to high-speed internet service since Mr. Biden signed the funding into law in November 2021. At the current pace of distributing the funds, high-speed internet connections to most of the rural areas intended to benefit from BEAD won’t be completed until 2030. The Commerce Department, which is in charge of the program, said none of the projects will begin until 2025 or 2026. Mr. Musk’s SpaceX is excluded from the BEAD federal subsidies because the money is reserved for companies deploying fiber-optic cable, which the government views as a more proven technology than satellite connections.
So they spent billions of dollars as part of a plan to implement “Broadband Equity.” Yes, Broadband equity. And what does Broadband equity mean in practice? Well, it means no one gets broadband. It means they cut Elon Musk’s Starlink system out of the funding, probably on a pretext because they don’t like what he’s doing on X. But now that there’s an actual crisis, that pretext doesn’t seem to be a problem anymore. As you just heard the DHS Secretary say, the Biden administration is deploying “communications resources” to North Carolina. More specifically, they’re deploying Elon Musk’s Starlink to the state.
Here’s a Biden administration official stating that they’re installing Starlink systems now on an emergency basis so that people impacted by these hurricanes can communicate with the outside world. Watch:
Homeland Security Advisor Liz Sherwood-Randall: “Today FEMA will install 30 Starlink receivers in western North Carolina to provide immediate connectivity for those in greatest need.” pic.twitter.com/39cntHnjjx
— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) September 30, 2024
Fortunately, people living in North Carolina don’t need to rely on the Biden administration to get these Starlink systems online. There are a lot of private individuals bringing Starlink equipment into the state and setting it up. But again, none of this would be necessary if the Biden administration had done its job in the first place, and spent the $40 billion on technologies like Starlink. This is yet another problem created entirely by the federal government.
At this point, there needs to be accountability, or else more people will die — if not during this disaster, then during the next one. There were massive failures at every level in this storm — from the lack of any early warning, to the aftermath where they blame “climate change” as people are stranded on rooftops. We saw something similar in the Maui fires, where the authorities blocked evacuation routes during the blaze — in part because FEMA didn’t have effective evacuation plans in place. If you remember, during that disaster, people talked a lot about Kamala Harris’ statements about how “equity” should determine who gets critical aid in a time of crisis. People pointed out that FEMA’s top goal, on its website, was literally to “Instill Equity as a Foundation of Emergency Management.” And then everyone moved on. Kamala remained in power, however, along with the bureaucracy that actually runs the country. Now, just a year later, even more people are dead and stranded, without any warning, and the government’s incompetence is once again on full display.
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Saying Helene is the Biden administration’s Hurricane Katrina is actually underselling how callous this administration’s response has been. For all the failures during Katrina, the general consensus among critics was that the government was either incompetent or indifferent. But George Bush never sabotaged rural communities’ attempts to get Internet access. He didn’t use “climate change” as some kind of catch-all excuse, while shelters were overrun and people were dying. He didn’t tell American citizens that there’s nothing more he can do for them. He didn’t go on a podcast and talk about how much he loves Doritos, as Kamala Harris just did. He also wasn’t on the record saying that disaster relief should be distributed based on “equity.”
Here’s Kamala Harris on that point:
This is a frightening philosophy. According to Harris, disaster aid should be based on race and gender, not how much water flooded your home. That’s insane. pic.twitter.com/Nf99blUFzP
— Dan Crenshaw (@DanCrenshawTX) September 30, 2024
How much did this “equity” philosophy interfere with the federal government’s response to Helene? We don’t know. We’ll probably never know. But when you watch clips like that, and you see failures like what’s unfolding right now, it doesn’t look like mere incompetence or indifference. It looks like something else entirely. It looks more like malice — or, as the Biden-Harris administration calls it, “equity.” The only reason more people aren’t pointing this out is that, when the next natural disaster strikes in your neighborhood, they want to administer some “equity” there as well. They want to lecture you about your gas stove while you’re clinging to life on your rooftop. Nearly 20 years after Hurricane Katrina, it turns out that George Bush’s crime wasn’t that he failed. It was that he didn’t fail the right people. In the name of equity, from Hawaii to North Carolina — one botched disaster response at a time — Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are finally correcting that mistake.
