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The political war over Hurricane Helene is heating up. Elon Musk is accusing FEMA of blocking his attempts to deliver Starlinks to areas affected by the disaster. Right-wing Twitter/X is full of talk about various incidents in which purportedly people coming to the area to try to help and/or deliver supplies are being turned away by FEMA. Also full of talk about FEMA using money to support illegal immigrants. Some people are pushing theories that FEMA is deliberately withholding help.
How credible is any of this?
My guess is that FEMA is a typical semi-competent government agency that makes many blunders. It might be bad at coordinating with random people who want to help but are not government employees and it might thus institutionally prefer to just block off the area and try to handle everything without random people's assistance. This policy then causes the various incidents that are being talked about.
I doubt that FEMA is deliberately withholding aid, if for no other reason than that I do not see how withholding aid would benefit the Democrats politically.
What do you make of it?
I can't speak to the state of actual relief efforts, but there does seem to be a bit of an effort to manufacture this as a mirror image to Bush's Katrina response, which dragged on Republicans for a long time: see Kanye's infamous "George Bush doesn't care about Black people" line.
Which is funny to me because in hindsight it's less clear that it was purely the Bush administration's doing. Much can be said about the (blue!) city and state leadership not taking the imminent storm seriously even as the National Weather Service issued extremely dire warnings, but Mike Brown's leadership of FEMA wasn't exactly a "heckuva job" either.
At least that's how I see it under the "politics is unprincipled conflict" lens. I suspect there are real challenges to providing useful aid with so many roads inaccessible (as there were in 2005), and I doubt anyone is actually slow-walking aid, even if they are trying to play political football ("FEMA is running out of funds" "that's because you spent it all on migrants"). Personally, I don't know much more to do than pray, although I'm open to suggestions.
Now adays, any time there is a disaster in the United States, you should assume that there is a Russian social media effort to try and inflame and twist it. Sometimes a disaster doesn't even have to actually occur, and they'll just fake-news one. This is just one of the things they do, independent of any truth to any criticsm.
This is underselling the culpability of the democratic city and state leadership. There wasn't merely a 'not taking the imminent storm threat seriously', but actively delaying and hindering federal support responses including by not actually asking for various types of assistance from the federal and other states until days later, instigating a posse comitatus policy freeze disrupting federal military assistance, and of course the police not merely abandoning duty roles but partaking in the looting.
When the local police are joined in on the looting and a state senator is diverting national guard assets to get material from his personal home, there's not terribly much an organization like FEMA can do.
The steelman is that airspace is dangerous if uncontrolled, and so in a disaster a government doesn't want to be competing with airspace. This is especially true when rescue agencies would be further diverted if they had to rerout resources to help someone who got themselves into a mess- like, say, by crashing aircraft into a town.
On the other hand, this administration is the heir to the one that repeatedly targeted religious medical charities if they didn't support abortion-enabling policies. There is an established vein of 'our way or not at all' in some parts of the US government.
I have no insight into this specific circumstance, but 'stop getting in our way as you try to help' is a real, and sometimes even valid, thing.
On the other hand, it’s a very very useful tool to hide incompetence and grift. Everything the government doesn’t want people talking about seems to be “Russian Trolls” and it’s become a sort of go to excuse for why people are saying things the government doesn’t want to hear on social media. Sure, sometimes it’s trolls, but by this point, enough ultimately true stories were officially dismissed as misinformation until they were shown to actually have happened that I no longer find the “Russian Trolls” story to be a sensible hypothesis. In fact, I’m trying to think of a story told in the past 2-3 years where it’s actually traced back to a real Russian whether working for the government or not.
I’m mostly with the steelman here. People who don’t know what they’re doing wandering about a disaster area are more likely to create situations where they need rescue than to do substantial good — unless they have enough knowledge to know what they’re doing. A bunch of rednecks coming in and sawing through things or chopping down trees or whatever might well injure people or need rescue themselves. Disaster areas tend to be dangerous and the dangers aren’t always obvious. Taking your John boat over downed power lines is pretty dangerous. So the government probably is turning people away because they don’t want to rescue the redneck brigades who have no experience rescuing people.
It's always extremely easy to be intellectually lazy and unconsciously fall victim to propaganda. Britain and the US invented the modern public relations and propaganda industry and have been very successful at convincing the average person who had never even heard of places like Donetsk and Luhansk up until a few years ago, that they're on the right side of an issue they know nothing about.
I remember awhile ago getting into a debate with someone in the /r/geopolitics subreddit, who literally said to me that if Russia only spent more money on it's domestic social programs to take care of its people, NATO wouldn't expand into Ukraine. And that is not hyperbole. This is the quality and caliber of the average person who takes great pride in having very strong opinions about something they know absolutely nothing about. Americans in general are not very good when it comes to putting themselves in the shoes of other people, and when you combine that with someone who mistakes the philosophy subreddit for the geopolitics one when it comes to understanding international affairs, riding a bike on the highway isn't your only problem when you're also going the wrong direction.
If you don't understand what's really going on, then you can't even represent the other accurately enough to have a sensible disagreement with it.
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