Your correspondent has spent the last several hours scouring the internet and asking friends and sources for information in trying to ascertain whether, and to what extent, the crisis unfolding in western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee is the product of government incompetence or, even, malice.

And we very much regret to say that the answer seems to be: it's hard to tell.

X dot com has been aflame with claims that the emergency response to those areas has not been sufficient because these areas happen to be peopled with the wrong kind of people, the kind of people coastal elite and liberal Democrats don't like.

It's certainly not impossible.

We have seen many claims that the National Guard in the relevant states hasn't been mobilized, or that if it has been, its helicopters aren't in the air. Quick X dot com searches appear to show these claims to be false.

Ironically, the claim about how people in those areas aren't being helped because they're hillbillies who are resented by distant coastal elites appear, themselves, to show a kind of "World from 8th Avenue" blindness, as the center of the damage is Asheville, NC and, as North Carolinians know, Asheville is a super-liberal college town. (For the record, the first time your opponent saw an actual gender-neutral bathroom in the wild, many many years ago, was in Asheville.)

The other thing you should know about western North Carolina is that it is truly Appalachia, not only in the socioeconomic sense, but in the literal, topographical sense. It's a region of steep hills and hollows and very tricky driving. It's not at all hard to imagine that unexpected flooding could make all sorts of transportation impossible overnight. There's only so much helicopters can accomplish, and even the combined national guards of North Carolina and neighboring states only have so many helicopters.

Is it true that FEMA brags about its DEI policies, and that DEI makes it more incompetent? Almost certainly yes.

Is it true that bureaucracies in general are usually more lethargic and less efficient than an organization could be if placed under better leadership? Why, yes.

Should we put FEMA under Elon Musk's future Department Of Government Efficiency? Probably.

But beyond these platitudes, the policy analyst finds himself confronted by a professionally unpleasant reality: not every problem has been caused by policy, nor does every catastrophe have a policy solution. This, also, is a conservative insight.

We will keep investigating for any policy angles we have missed to this story. In the meantime, our thoughts and prayers are with those affected.

Policy News You Need To Know

#Immigration — Ok, here's one flood-related policy failure: "Eight men, all migrants, have been arrested for allegedly looting and burglarizing flood-ravaged victims in eastern Tennessee," Andy Ngo reports.

#Communications — Another flood-related policy failure: "North Carolina would have 19,522 working Starlink kits available today after Hurricane Helene had the FCC not revoked in bad faith the grant that was awarded to SpaceX as the winning bidder." (Via) Another related point: even if all these households had the fiber connections the Federal government promised, those would no longer work, as the fiber relays would be flooded, whereas if they had Starlink (for as long as they had battery power anyway) they would still have communications.

#GlobalMacro — We recently warned you about a distressingly plausible scenario where France's disastrous budget situation is the first domino to fall on the way to global economical collapse. In that context, the following headline, "Germany Set to Abandon Forecast For Economic Growth This Year," is not exactly reassuring. Germany's disastrous energy policy is destroying its economy and, unlike 2011-2015, if Europe has a new debt crisis, Germany may not be able to bail out its neighbors.

#AmericanManufacturing #Chyna — Excellent, important report from the WSJ: “Defense startups developing weapons to counter China have a problem. They depend on the country for parts.” Via Elbridge Colby, who points out: "This seems like a crystal clear place to start an aggressive reindustrialization/deregulation effort."

#Space — We spent a lot of energy reporting on how the combination of Boeing incompetence and political hostility from the Biden Administration to Elon Musk kept American astronauts stranded on the ISS. So we should be remiss not to share this beautiful video of SpaceX's capsule finally arriving at the ISS to take the astronauts home. American dynamism is so great when we create the right conditions for it to happen.

#Science — Good news of the day: for the first time, type 1 diabetes has been reversed, with the use of reprogrammed stem cells, the journal Nature reports. It's in China, so it may not be true, but let's hope it is.

#Politics — The Harris transition team is considering keeping the current cabinet if, as is likely, Republicans win the Senate this year, NBC reports. This would be a big tell of the Administration's future policy direction.

#Energy — In his newsletter today, Bloomberg's excellent economics columnist Joe Weisenthal points out that the stockmarket likes nuclear energy. This is obviously a good sign for those of us who want to see more nuclear.

#LGBT — You may know Jamie Reed as the brave whistleblower who exposed the horrifying trans surgeries happening at the Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital. What you may not know is that her "husband" is actually a trans-identifying woman. And, she announces in a powerful essay for The Free Press, she has now decided to "detransition" and live as a woman again. This is the issue with the trans cult: once you start pulling on a thread, whether it's "trans kids" or autogynephilia or men in women's locker rooms, pretty soon the entire thing unravels. Which is why proponents of this ideology need to bully and suppress speech that exposes them.

#Immigration — "According to a new Finnish study, 61% of the Finnish schoolchildren with immigration background lack the academic and cognitive skills needed to participate in the Finnish society, find employment or graduate from secondary school."