I’m gaining a little more data this morning about why I was having to listen to bullshit about FEMA’s hurricane response yesterday while I was trying to eat my Texas Roadhouse dinner.  This excerpt from an article in The Atlantic came across my Bluesky feed just now…

“Elon Musk…claimed…FEMA was ‘actively blocking shipments and seizing goods and services locally and locking them away to state they are their own. It’s very real and scary how much they have taken control to stop people helping.’ That post has been viewed more than 40 million times. ”

When I tried to view the article I discovered that it was subscriber only. I am already over subscribed to various news sources so I had to pass this one up. Here’s the banner:

I’m Running Out of Ways to Explain How Bad This Is
What’s happening in America today is something darker than a misinformation crisis.

By Charlie Warzel

Good thing it’s not so bad you can still hide it behind a paywall.

I did a little digging for that Elon Musk post and could not find it on his Twitter feed. But this is one of the Google results I got for it.

FEMA is actively hindering relief efforts. Moreover, they’re claiming the Starlinks that I’ve personally delivered as ones THEY’VE delivered.

You follow the link and you see that Musk has deleted the text of that tweet and replaced it with an angry emoji. 

But then there is this tweet which is still up:

SpaceX engineers are trying to deliver Starlink terminals & supplies to devastated areas in North Carolina right now and @FEMAis both failing to help AND won’t let others help. This is unconscionable!!

They just took this video a few hours ago, where you can see the level of devastation: roads, houses, electricity, water supply and ground Internet connections completely destroyed.

@FEMA wouldn’t let them land to deliver critical supplies … my blood is boiling …

This tweet is still up despite that (according to Politico) Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg talked by phone to Musk and walked him through how flight restrictions in an emergency zone and airport closures work, after which Musk agreed that the Secretary was “on the ball”.

This Politico article gives a pretty good overview of the situation with Musk’s disinformation campaign against FEMA. It ends with this:

In the U.S., some Republican state lawmakers have pleaded for conservative influencers to resist spreading falsehoods.

“PLEASE help stop this junk,” GOP North Carolina state Sen. Kevin Corbin implored his Facebook followers on Oct. 3, citing false stories such as Antarctic weather control, land grabs over lithium and FEMA stealing donations.

A fellow lawmaker had received 15 calls in one day about untrue rumors, he added. “I’m growing a bit weary of intentional distractions,” Corbin said.

The next day, Musk reposted some of those same falsehoods to his 200 million followers, with one word: “Wow.”

Go read the whole thing.  Or for an even better insight into the toxic waste dump that’s this man’s nature, go buy a copy of Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter.

What is the cost of lies? Last night I was watching a documentary on the last stages of WWII and the taking of Okinawa. Towards the end of the documentary, as the Japanese military is falling apart, and the ragged, brutalized people of the island are finally emerging from the caves where they’d either been hiding or held in captivity, we learn the people were terrified to seek help from the American soldiers because Japanese propaganda told them the Americans would rape and kill them, and that it was better to commit suicide than be captured by the Americans.

You wonder how many of them did just that, but what you saw in the footage were a lot of trembling, terrified people, including children and the elderly, physically emaciated and desperately needing care that the Americans were always willing to give to them…and also to the enemy, provided they put down their weapons and surrendered.

This morning I’m reading this:

Keith Turi, FEMA’s acting associate administrator for response and recovery, ticked through false rumors — that FEMA was “confiscating supplies” or only providing $750 in total assistance to storm victims — that he said are already harming the agency’s ability to help survivors.

“The misinformation is extremely damaging to the response efforts from Helene and from any disaster,” he said. “It is reducing the likelihood that survivors will come to FEMA in a trusting way to register for assistance.”

…and this:

A man identifying himself only as Anthony called into Sirius XM’s “Dan Abrams Show” this week to share the story of his father-in-law, whose property near Ashville, North Carolina, was badly damaged by Helene. Despite the destruction, Anthony said his father-in-law is unwilling to accept assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

“He has refused all FEMA help because he’s a hardcore Trumper,” Anthony told Abrams. “He literally believes that if he accepts anything from FEMA, they’re going to take his house.”

This is a twisted lie about a good FEMA program that will let FEMA buy your flooded out house if it’s been flooded out four years in a row and they and you can agree on a fair market price.

This narrative that they’re going to take your home — what does that do? Well, it makes people very nervous about leaving their home. And so you hear people now saying, “I’m not going to leave, because if I leave my home, the government’s going to take it.” Those are the real-world impacts of all of these lies.

So people are afraid the government is going to take their house and decide to stay instead of evacuate. How many lives were lost because of this lie, we may never know because the dead can’t explain why they chose not to leave.

On VOX I see this snippet of conversation:

Sean Rameswaram: Back during Hurricane Sandy, I distinctly remember social media being useful for people. It was useful for people going through Sandy, it was useful for government agencies to get out information. Is that era of social media being a helpful tool in a disaster over?

Juliette Kayyem: It’s over. Elon Musk broke “Disaster Twitter.”

You still occasionally hear Musk referred to as a libertarian, but that was never the case. He badly wants Trump to win this coming election because he’s all in on the culture war and what he ridiculously calls the “woke mind virus”. I was a libertarian once. Reagan cured me of it, but I was there. No actual libertarian would ever come near to wanting a man like Trump having the levers of government in his hands. Musk  is decidedly Not in favor of small, or even limited government. He is that angry drunk at the end of the bar babbling about socialism and mind viruses but with billions of dollars at his disposal to impose his pink elephants on the rest of us.

So many of us have forgotten since Reagan coined his infamous nine most terrifying words is that helping the American people cope with emergencies is what government does. Democracy, as Lincoln once put it, is government of the people, by the people, for the people. Government is the mechanism by which we, the people, help our neighbors in times of need. Those FEMA workers they are being taught to demonize are their fellow Americans. They want to help. They are risking life and limb to help. And Musk and Trump are spitting in their faces, and also the faces of those they want to help.

It is not FEMA that’s getting between the survivors of Helene and the help they need. It’s Musk. It’s Trump. It’s Fox News. It’s the MAGA noise machine. It’s what they Have to do, regardless of who it hurts, even if it’s their own voters.

Because once people realize that those men and women from the government really are there help, it might lead them into thinking that maybe big government isn’t the problem after all, that the problem is only how to make government work better for everyone.

And then the game is up.