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Washed-out section of the Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina in the wake of Hurricane Helene. Image source: National Park Service

Last week I spoke of my morose dread that when Hurricane Helene passed through the Atlanta suburbs, my house would be uprooted and start spinning in the air Wizard of Oz-style, but we survived with little more than a thorough soaking.

To nearly everyone’s surprise, the area that wound up getting crushed to bits was North Carolina’s western hill country. It used to be that coastal North Carolina towns such as Cape Hatteras and Cape Fear needed to batten down the hatches during hurricane season, but not this time.

One expects flatlanders rather than mountaineers to be most affected by tropical storms. Florida, which has the lowest high point of any state in the Union—some unremarkable geological lump near the Georgia border that manages to rise a piddling 345 feet above sea level—seems to get the worst of it most of the time. Coastal areas along the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean typically bear the brunt of hurricane season.

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But now that the BBC is calling it the “deadliest mainland US hurricane since Katrina in 2005,” I’ve realized Helene was an atypically inland hurricane. Katrina’s trajectory was even further inland.

When I asked ChatGPT what town Helene hit hardest, it answered:

The town that suffered the most casualties from Hurricane Helene last week was Asheville, North Carolina, where catastrophic flooding caused widespread devastation. The death toll in the Asheville area, particularly in Buncombe County, has reached at least 72 people, with more than 200 still unaccounted for. The flooding there surpassed records set in previous disasters and caused significant destruction to infrastructure and homes.

In an article called “50 States in 50 Lines,” I described North Carolina thusly:

Rolling hills and friendly hill folk—except for Asheville, where the hippie-hipsters walk around as if they have dreamcatchers lodged in their rectums.

Asheville is an Appalachian anomaly, as if someone had surreptitiously dumped a mini-Portland amid hillbilly country. It boasts of an all-female city council—four whites and three blacks. Although still only 10% black as of 2020, the town has been pursuing slavery reparations for years now. Not to be outdone by larger and blacker cities, last year Asheville had its very own shooting at a Juneteenth festival.

The federal response to the devastation in western North Carolina became last week’s political hot potato. Right-leaning observers compared it unfavorably to the feds’ response to Hurricane Katrina, while leftist media apologists scurried to “debunk” those claims.

Gregory Hood in American Renaissance:

Western North Carolina and other areas of Appalachia have been devastated by flooding, with more than 1,000 people reported missing. President Donald Trump headed to the area to provide aid and draw attention to the residents’ plight — something the national media is hardly doing. It is quite a contrast to Hurricane Katrina, which crippled the Bush Presidency and became an excuse for the media to berate whites about racism. However, when white people are most of the victims, it seems that silence (at best) is the rule.

A typical response article came from David Klepper, who has also written about “antisemitism” for the Times of Israel and “transphobic Texas shooting conspiracies” for People’s World. But in this case, he’s writing for the Associated Press in what was not marked as an opinion piece, so we can take solace in the knowledge that his essay is fair and objective rather than a brick-hard fecalith of gaslighting. Mr. Klepper’s article is titled “After the deluge, the lies: Misinformation and hoaxes about Helene cloud the recovery.” It has a subhead titled “Debunking conspiracy theories takes time away from recovery efforts.” He prattles about “extremist groups” and the “hucksters” who “spread false claims,” about “Far-out tales of space lasers, fake snow and weather control technology — sometimes tinged with antisemitism.”

Of course he squeezed “antisemitism” in there. It’s like he couldn’t help it. How many Jews are there in western North Carolina’s hill country, anyway? Five? Do they even know about Semites out there?

Interestingly, the word “debunk” has its roots in North Carolina’s western hills. Asheville is the seat of Buncombe County, NC. The word “buncombe” was a favorite of H. L. Mencken’s. Pronounced “bunkum,” it became synonymous with “hogwash” or “nonsense”—or, if you’re more crudely inclined, “bullshit.” It gradually became spelled “bunkum” and was then attenuated to “bunk.”

I’m not a mind-reader, nor am I what you might call politically savvy. Sometimes I even struggle to decide what to eat for breakfast. I don’t know enough about FEMA or hurricanes or logistical challenges when hurricanes hit hillbilly country to have a solid opinion on whether the feds deliberately withheld aid from devastated white Appalachians. But I agree with Gregory Hood that the establishment press attacked the federal management of majority-black New Orleans during Katrina, while they ran cover for the feds’ handling of majority-white western North Carolina during Helene.

I’ve spent the better part of the last three decades noting how nearly all the media, regardless of political leanings, regard southern Appalachia’s white hillbillies as contemptible subhumanoids. The 1913 book Our Southern Highlanders presented the region’s wild and woolly whites as an exotic and uncivilized species. So I was saddened to find that Helene took out large chunks of the Blue Ridge Parkway. Starting just south of Asheville and running nearly 500 miles up into Virgini