Feds to Helene Victims: Bulldozing You. Oh And Here's $750
It’s getting worse now, and deadly.
As more and more rural residents regain Internet access — thanks largely to Elon Musk rushing in with connections to his Starlink satellites — the true picture of Hurricane Helen’s wrath and destruction is getting far grimmer, and far more fatal, than the official 200 death count suggests.
Bill Stebbins posted this from a friend who had just regained access to the world.
"This entire area is a war zone, even if not directly “destroyed” by flood waters. There are men, women and children starving, without water and sanitation. No fuel. People can’t get to any distro points because they have no fuel. People are walking on foot and dragging wagons. People are suffering, and communities are rapidly moving to isolation and self defense and policing. There are bodies floating down the rivers. There are bodies stuck in the tops of trees. Linemen entering destroyed areas are finding dozens of children as young as 3 walking thru the mud near naked, crying for their parents, some with ropes still tied on their arms attached to broken lumber where clearly their dead parents had last ditch tied them to something. Entire communities are just gone. Gone gone. Nothing to repair, and in some of the areas just no one to even help anymore. Just bodies, with a stench increasing by the day. The death count WILL be in the thousands. Desperation is increasing, and most vets are lying on their roofs with rifles. Local rural gas stations, markets etc. have militias forming with men in hodgepodge gear and rifles. We are self-policing now. Was talking to a lineman yesterday how he’s finding heads and limbs every time debris is removed.”
Chimney Rock, NC, a village of 113 people in Rutherford County, has been obliterated. Eager to lift the morale of Chimney Rock’s residents, the State Parks Dept raised the American flag in their town Monday over western North Carolina.
But FEMA quickly came in to quash the can-do spirit that characterizes Americans.
They held a town hall a few days later and told residents not to tell anyone but they planned to confiscate their homes and bulldoze their town, including the bodies rotting on the land. Insisting that the agency has run out of money, the feds plan to prevent residents from returning to their land and instead seize and destroy it.
Rescue efforts? Hampered by incompetence, partisan bias and tyranny. Consider:
1,000 troops are ready and authorized to respond in NC, but FEMA Region 4 and Democrat NC Gov. Roy Cooper haven’t yet written up the mission orders that the troops need in order to be deployed. They sit, and wait. Meanwhile Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp was outraged, and called the White House to complain, that only 11 of the 90 counties hit were included in the FEMA disaster declaration, most rural.
“People are asking why don't we use animals or four wheelers and stuff like that,” posted Army specialist Breona Bryant. “There's literally nothing I can do. I hear you. I hear your frustration. I get it. They’re not gonna let us.”
Worse, some pilots who are trying to fly in supplies on helicopters and truckers bringing them by roads are being threatened with arrest. A South Carolina pilot went with his son to rescue those whose cries for help are all over Social Media. He dropped off one woman in a landing zone in Lake Lure, and intended to go back for her husband. A fire chief told him that if he went “back up the mountain,” he’d be arrested. “You’re interfering with my mission.” Despite no sightings of federal search and rescue operations, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg ordered private drones grounded because they could interfere.
Responding to a backlash of criticism, FEMA is now requiring all those who want to help to obtain permits. Typical response by government bureaucracies — more paperwork. It further angered those on the ground, including one woman who posted, “A permit to help people? That’s insane. That’s insane.”
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas announced the other day that FEMA has run out of money. The agency’s budget has been pilloried for missions not in its portfolio — resettling illegal immigrants and hiring DEI directors.
That was our money. That was our investment. That was our national sovereignty.
All of this is fraying trust in government.
“Where’s our f***ing government?” asked a young man on a TikTok video. An “avid supporter” of Dems, he added, “Kamala Harris, you broke my heart.”
And so they are, a civilian army of private charities, volunteer pilots, real heroes. churches, Americans are doing what they have always done — helping each other in an emergency. In the absence of help from the federal government, wrote one resident, private citizens have been stepping up. “What there is, is lines of private planes that have landed and are taking off; they have dropped off supplies and personnel,” he said. “See, America is responding. The government is telling us there’s no way to get in, but America is not listening. And God bless America.”
US Rep. Cory Mills (R-FL) is one of 100 combat veterans serving in Congress. Once, he led rescue missions in Afghanistan and Haiti. Now he is using helicopters provided by Glenn Beck’s Mercury One to deliver supplies and Starlink terminals to the zone.
Ivanka Trump joined the Hurricane Helene relief effort in Hickory, NC, where she also helped hand out 300 Starlink units donated by Elon Musk’s Space X and flown in by the Love and Light Foundation as well as food donated by Planet Harvest. All over the Carolinas, drop off zones are attracting massive amounts of supplies, to be delivered by Operation Air Drop, a Texas-based charity that flies into disasters.
For his part, Musk has been a guardian angel, or anyway one with righteous anger.
Three years ago the FCC awarded Musk’s Starlink satellite service $886 million to provide high-speed internet service to some 640,000 rural homes and businesses in 35 states. But last year, once a 3-2 Democrat majority was assembled, the new FCC scrapped a $950 million subsidy for the plan. Biden-Harris didn’t like his politics.
Teaming up with Republican State Sen. Danny Britt, this week he now put terminals in some of the most severely damaged areas of TN & NC. And he did it all in the same week he sent his Space X to outer space, to rescue American astronauts stranded by NASA’s ineptitude and Boeing’s incompetence. See earlier details here.
For her part, VP Kamala Harris sent sympathies, and promised victims $750, each to be delivered 10 days after they apply for it. The same amount she offered burn victims of the Maui fires. As Steven Crowder put it, “Do the math: Kamala Harris brags about giving hurricane victims $750 after Ukraine got $2900 per person.”
In 2017, Harris said she thinks people of color should be prioritized in dispersal of federal disaster aid, because “they are most impacted by these extreme conditions.” No one has asked her now if she still believes that. One reason: in addition to the federal government being MIA in the disaster zones, so has the mass media.
One Democrat in Georgia did go on X to celebrate the loss of life, claiming that the folks in all these rural areas are racist. She praised Jesus for their deaths. Within one day, she was fired. This is what happens when Hillary Clinton, who never recovered psychologically from her 2016 loss, demonizes fellow Americans as “deplorables.”
Perhaps a cynical White House has written off western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee because their speedy recovery might win votes for Donald Trump in these Republican areas. No doubt, disruptions to postal service, damage to polling places, and the loss of personal IDs could all upend voting with just 34 days until the election.
But the hopeful lesson of this horrific tragedy is that American spirit will prevail.
“I just did what any Dad would do,” said David Jones, a South Carolina father who drove, walked, and hitchhiked his way through Hurricane Helene to make it to his daughter’s wedding in Tennessee. Normally it’s a two hour drive. As many reported:
He drove out on the night of September 27, but at 2 a.m. he came across a bridge in Eastern Tennessee that was completely demolished. A marathon runner, he figured he could walk the remaining 27 miles. After falling up to his waist in sand, losing his shoe, and climbing over roots, he came across state troopers. They told him to turn around. He said, “My daughter’s getting married at 11:00, and I’m going to be there to walk her down the aisle.” He walked for another 17 miles. Then he “hitched a ride from a trooper and a passerby for the remaining 10 miles, finally arriving at the church at 7:30 a.m.,” making it in plenty of time before the wedding.
