Hide From Wind, Run From Water

Hurricane Helene and the sinking of the American Dream

Lake Lure, North Carolina after Helene

A week after Hurricane Helene tore across the southeastern United States, many of its victims remain yet to be accounted for. Many of the roads which connected small mountain communities have been washed away. The official death toll as of this time has reached 215, and is likely to go much higher as rescuers make their way into remote communities.

One of the most important roles of any leader is to inspire confidence in times of trouble. By that standard, US federal officials have failed miserably. After spending lavishly on foreign wars and immigrant housing, they have shown little interest in a domestic catastrophe. As Senator Lindsay Graham (R-SC) put it when asked about flooding in his home state.

I’ve been going all over South Carolina, like most people I haven’t slept much. But look what’s going on in Israel. We have to help our friends to keep the war over there from coming here.

The unconcern of our politicians is matched only by the indifference of our journalists. For Fox News and right-leaning outlets, Appalachia’s suffering primarily served as a great campaign ad for Donald Trump. On today’s Fox News front page we find:

• Reporters ask zero questions about historic disaster when given rare access to Biden by Alexa Multivelis (top article)

• Man stranded in Helene devastation recounts story of survival: ‘Increased my faith’ by Jasmine Baehr

• Dolly Parton announces eye-popping donation for Helene relief: ‘These are my people’ by Lauryn Overhultz

• Volunteers who saved an 11-day-old baby from Helene devastation slam government by Bailee Hill

• North Carolina community 'hunting' for missing teachers in 'devastating' aftermath of Hurricane Helene by Bailee Hill

As for left-leaning mainstream media, let’s take a look at the current front page for MSNBC.com. The top of the page has nothing to say about Hurricane Helene or the plight of flood survivors. When we scroll down, we find just two entries:

• “President surveys Hurricane Helene damage as death toll tops 200” by Chris Jansing

• “North Carolinians need help. Trump is feeding them lies” by Billy Ball.

America’s partisan media has become an international embarrassment, and Helene has not improved matters. Our journalist and PMC apparatchiks have little interest in the lives of those who live in what they disparagingly call “Flyover Country.” As our friend and recent podcast guest Malcom Kyeyune says in his latest Unherd article:

Trying to get a sense of the attitude in Washington, D.C. about the very worrying state of the Helene relief effort, I asked friends there to tell me what people were saying about it. Without exception, the response from everyone turned out to be the same: there was no talk. Helene wasn’t even on the radar; it was, after all, just a storm. Besides, hadn’t the situation already been handled? There were 6,000 guardsmen on the scene; that ought to be more than enough.

For years the Left has worked hard to shut down “disinformation.” They have grown accustomed to silencing inconvenient facts, and have decided to downplay this catastrophe. PMCs who weren’t in Helene’s path have little at stake in the issue. They do, however, want very much to present themselves as good people with good opinions. Speaking up for LGBT+ books in children’s libraries garners likes and upvotes. Complaining about the Biden administration’s response to a faraway flood can only bring trouble.

On CNN, “fact checker” David Dale warns viewers that “Amid bipartisan praise for Biden hurricane response, Trump falsely claims reviews are ‘universally’ negative.” For these people, that’s enough to dismiss any commentary as Trumpist propaganda. And so this watery but mostly peaceful catastrophe has largely gone ignored by the IN THIS HOUSE WE BELIEVE crowd. Meanwhile those who distrust the mainstream media have turned to other sources.

On October 2 Chris Martenson of Peak Prosperity posted this PM conversation from a Peak Prosperity member:

Them: I can’t post this online because it’s not quite public yet, but government officials had a town meeting with all of the residents of Chimney Rock and basically told them the town was being bulldozed, bodies and all and the land was being seized by the federal government they would not be able to move back and basically their homes the ones that were standing were no longer theirs and the federal government owned it all.

I don’t know what crazy play for land this is, but there’s a lot of conspiracy about lithium mines and let me just tell you, as someone who lives in Charlotte and has friends who live in the area of Western North Carolina, they are not being helped and this is actually being a stand down operation by federal government

Me: What the heck…? That's quite disturbing. Is this first-hand, second-hand, or more distant info?

Them: Our friend owns an Airbnb in Chimney Rock. They had a town meeting yesterday and someone from the federal government told them all of those things in the town meeting, but doesn’t want the information getting out. Also, 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.

Me: I…can't…even. I'm stunned. This is beyond anything I could have imagined even very recently. You always pick up and bury the dead. It's what humans do. They are violating every possible custom … on purpose. Thank you for keeping me informed. People need to know about this. Let me know when you'd be comfortable with me posting to our forums in an anonymized fashion, of course.

Them: You can post it the message needs to get out. Something evil is going on in the NC mountains. I just didn’t want to be identified. Just today we filled up a trailer for a shelter in Hendersonville NC that had no food for tons of moms and babies. All the stores round are empty or locked. In Chandler NC 2000 people haven’t eaten anything or drank in 6 days and just got an SOS message out for help.

I’m trying to tag the Cajun Navy and Operation Airdrop but people are dying by the minute. Multiple truckers have reported having tires slashed. Our friends from Chimney Rock said they have heard multiple stories of people being robbed at gunpoint making supply runs. Two people that drove down to Charlotte yesterday and today one that we helped said bodies in trees, all over ditches in major roads back.

Something weird is going on here in NC.

On October 3 Rutherford County officials posted a response to their Facebook page, acknowledging that there was a town meeting with state and local officials but denying that the town was going to be bulldozed or that there were “bodies everywhere.” On October 4 Stephen G. Duncan, Chimney Rock’s Village Administrator, issued a further denial. But those official comments have done little to slow down the spread of this or other rumors.

Earlier this year lithium producer Albemarle announced plans to reopen the resource-rich lithium Kings Mountain mine. Their efforts have encountered resistance from environmentalists and indigenous groups. North Carolina’s Spruce Pine mine, which is currently flooded, provides ultrapure quartz to semiconductor makers worldwide. Were the government to seize eminent domain in these areas, they would gain access to those resources without worrisome complaints from the now-evicted locals.

Or so the story goes.

In an X post with almost 100k views, TRUTH NOW! exclaimed:

If HAARP was used to get rid of people for lithium deposits, it’s a CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY! They will be held accountable!

He offered as assistance a “Friend from Asheville” who appears to live in Charlotte (several hours east of Asheville) and who stated:

The storm wasn’t crazy here. Yes we had some wind and rain, but how do you explain massive floods in a mountain area that doesn’t immediately flow down the mountain? Flooding doesn’t last because it’s a mountain.

Our neighborhood in Charlotte is graded specifically for flooding because we’re in the foothills of the mountains and we get the runoff waters… what happened there does not make sense naturally.

North Carolina gets hit frequently with hurricanes, but mostly on the outer banks, occasionally inland within 1-2 hours of the coast. This somehow hit 5 hours from the coast and dumped more water in the mountains than it did anywhere else along its path although hurricanes are known to weaken over land?! You don’t have to be a meteorologist to say this was not natural.

I do not know enough about HAARP to form a strong opinion one way or the other as to whether these claims are true. I know that fact-checkers claim that the radio waves emitted by HAARP have no impact on our weather. I also know that in 1996 the US Air Force released a paper entitled “Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025” and that in that paper they talked about manipulating the ionosphere. However, I will say that while the claims about HAARP may or may not be true, they are not necessary.

Johann George Trautmann, “The Fall of Troy” (before 1769)

As esteemed writer and DOOM-Meister John Michael Greer noted in our most recent podcast, we are living in the twilight days of the Global American Empire. We no longer have a military that can fight on multiple fronts. We are no longer able to maintain our infrastructure. We’re saddled by debts that can never be paid. We are not the first empire to crumble, nor will we be the last.

You typically see what Oswald Spengler called a “Second Religiosity” in declining empires. In the Second Religiosity, empires try to stage a return to the piety of the early empire. But these ideas no longer hold the vitality they once did. Instead of faith, we have rote recitals of prayers we no longer understand. The American Left sought a return to the prosperity of the Civil Rights era in its religion of Wokeness. It looked to the triumphs of the Space Age every time it trusted the science. Meanwhile, the beleaguered citizens on the Right sought to Make America Great Again by returning to a populism that never existed.

As empires fall, their leaders engage in increasingly desperate contortions to hold things together. That which they cannot fix they ignore for as long as possible. So long as they are wealthy enough to remain shielded, this is a workable solution. But as revenues decline — and in declining empires they always do — reality starts intruding on those fantasies. Then they begin lashing out against their increasingly restive subjects.

American politicians are showing a growing contempt for the Constitution and Bill of Rights that would have been unthinkable only a few decades ago. We’re also seeing petty bureaucrats grow increasingly arrogant and unhinged. During this crisis, we’ve seen FEMA officials turn away supplies and assistant fire chiefs threaten helicopter pilots with arrest for rescuing people. But hard power is expensive and breeds resentment. It leads to civil unrest and, ultimately, regime changes. Helene may well be for Harris and Walz what the failed Iranian Embassy rescue was for Jimmy Carter’s 1980 campaign. Or they may manage to hold onto power through electoral shenanigans that transform our current cold civil war into a hot one.

Weather events often presage the fall of empires. The Late Bronze Age Collapse was sparked by a severe drought. Even at America’s zenith we would have been hard-pressed to deal with Helene. We are no longer at our zenith. Our government is not ignoring the Helene victims because it hates them, though many PMCs do indeed hate them. They ignore them because they can no longer do anything else.

Is this all part of a clever scheme to drive these townspeople off their land? I couldn’t say for sure, but it might as well be. Those Carolina roads are not washed out, they’ve been washed away altogether. Building them back will require money and manpower we no longer have. Decades from now people may ride mules down the trails that once were roads. For now those who lost everything will be finding shelter wherever they can and lamenting what they have lost. And, as it has been since before Babylon, the ruins will soon be overgrown and forgotten.