Of Conspiracy Theories and Helene

Created by the author using Bing AI Image Generator.

There’s a conspiracy theory making the rounds that goes thusly: The Biden Administration has, at best, slow walked the recovery efforts to Hurricane Helene’s swath of destruction or, at worst, actively obstructed those efforts in an effort to suppress the votes of those displaced in next month’s election; additionally the Government and the media are actively suppressing or intentionally under reporting the state of things on the ground in Appalachia for the same purpose.

A brief aside: I am not aiming this essay at the folks actively trying to recover from the storm, who have far more important things to worry about right now and who, by right of the trauma they are currently experiencing, will form their own opinions and explanations about what went on and why. They have seen memories and histories, family and neighbors washed away. They have the right to process and understand this trauma for themselves. This is not a case of some doofus in New Hampshire telling the victims of Helene what to think.

No, I am addressing those who, like me, are trying to understand what is going on in a fluid situation, knowing that first reports tend to be inaccurate.

Back to the conspiracy theory. First off it is in clear violation of Hanlon’s Razor: That one should never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. Were there a tiny cabal pulling the strings here we would hear whistles being already blown, officials reporting that they’d been ordered to stand down, folks violating orders out of conscience, that sort of thing.

It is much more likely that government forecasters got the storm and its devastating results wrong. Incompetence? Certainly. Dereliction of duty? Entirely possible. Layers of misunderstandings and ignorance of the region and how a hurricane striking there would impact the residents? Probably. A tiny cabal managing to operate in complete secrecy? Almost certainly not.

Let me remind you: We’ve seen this story before. And just like after Helene, Katrina was followed by conspiracy theories, too. I’ll allow Kanye West to elucidate the intricacies of the theory:

Yes, in Anno Domini 2024 we can see this as just and early step in Kanye’s mouth marching him from fame to infamy, but this belief that race was a motivating factor in the government response wasn’t an unaired suggestion at the time.

I can’t claim to have any more than a distant and surface level understanding of either culture – I’ve neither eaten a beignet nor supped at a Waffle House, not by choice but through lack of opportunity –  so I’ll simply say this: It’s my guess that neither New Orleans – now or pre-Katrina – nor Appalachia are monolithic cultures, but rather intricate webs of subcultures, where people can tell what part of town or what county you’re from through subtle dialect differences. Both carry with them a deep sense of, and pride of, place.

To see that place destroyed must be unspeakably traumatic and must result in a deeply felt sense of –excuse the pun – powerlessness.

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere here at Ordinary Times, that’s fertile ground for conspiracy theories.

Both theories combine that powerlessness with a resentment of the occupant of the White House and a misunderstanding of the relationship of causation and correlation. Just because two things or events correlate, doesn’t mean one caused the other.

There’s also a logical flaw which is particularly pronounced when it comes to the Helene response.

Let me set the stage.

We have a tight election going which is, like seemingly every election, the most consequential election of our lifetimes.

It’s a tight race.

The candidate for the party in power is not, shall we say, the best retail politician.

Nor is she a great speaker.

She is up against a candidate who, if nothing else, has proven he can win an election despite what the conventional wisdom, particularly among the cognoscenti, would suggest.¹

Wouldn’t the smarter play – if, in fact, the response was primarily politically motivated; which is possible, but unlikely – be to swoop in with a show of care, concern and competence, winning over the locals?

Like I said: I don’t buy that politics, and the election next month, were the prime motivator here. I think it far more likely that the government response was more due to being underprepared than to being unwilling.

Was it politics that motivated the FAA to restrict the landing of privately owned planes so as to suppress images of the destruction or was it a decision made in good faith that time will sort of the wisdom of?

A map of the Southeastern United States at night, before and after Hurricane Helene. From the Brilliant Maps newsletter by Ian Wright.

It could be either, but for it to be the former I’d be forced to choose whether the media was intentionally underreporting the story or whether the government is keeping the story dark.

Helene is tragic. This is inarguable. It knocked power out for an area longer than the greatest extent of the Western Front in WWI.

Helene was just a Tropical Storm over land, but one traveling over wet land and hot on the heels of  a previous flooding event. Knox News reports that, according to Tennessee Valley Authority spokesperson Scott Brooks, “The Nolichucky River watershed got rainfall ‘equal to about a 1-in-5,000-years rain event’.”

This was a Black Swan² event, not something FEMA planners prepared and drilled for.

It is understandable that the victims of Helene may not be looking at the situation with cool rationality.

But those of us who do have that luxury should, in my opinion, take advantage of it. Let the facts develop. Contribute to those organizations dedicating themselves to search, rescue and recovery and if nothing else, keep the folks in Appalachia right now it our thoughts and prayers.

1. In the original post I wrongly suggested that Coal Country’s pivot to the GOP beginning in the nineties was a wider phenomenon than it was. This has been removed. Thank you to commenters for pointing out the error.
2. The term, coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book of the same name, refers to an event which is extremely unlikely in the short term but certain to happen in the long term. These events appear, because we lack either the anticipation of the event or are ignorant that is a possibility. A turkey being slaughter by the same hand that fattened him is a Black Swan event to the turkey, because he didn’t know it could happen.