Glenn Beck is on the ground in North Carolina, where he is reporting on some truly “stunning” failures by the Biden-Harris administration to rescue residents stranded in some of the state’s most mountainous and hard-to-reach regions.
Speaking by phone with a Blaze TV reporter, Beck, the luminary conservative media figure who shot to fame after a brief stint at Fox News, documented his encounters with hapless FEMA officials that he said don’t inspire much confidence in the federal government’s disaster relief efforts. “I’ve seen one FEMA truck. I just interviewed them. They arrived last night,” he said, nearly a week after Hurricane Helene first made landfall. “They’ve got a communications truck, so they’ve got a big satellite so they can, you know, talk to people on TV.”
Beck was the only one among a caravan of eight or nine who noticed the FEMA vehicle “tucked away” off a roadside. “I said ‘What are you doing here?’ They were all sitting at a card table with one computer, and they said ‘Well, we need to be where the people are.’ And I thought, ‘Well, the people aren’t here,’ and they’re getting them registered so they can sign up for government aid. It is absolutely ridiculous what the federal government is doing.” In contrast, the Blaze founder went on, he sees “hope” from the people who are fighting to save friends, neighbors, and loved ones when their faith in the government didn’t pan out. “It’s all being done by special forces. The Harley-Davidson dealer is doing it here, and one American after another coming in and just helping,” he stated.
“What I’m seeing is no action from the federal government,” Beck added, promising a “well-sourced” story about “when FEMA does arrive, what they do.” Among the examples he teases are FEMA officers confiscating food from individuals and trying to shut down a makeshift helicopter field because independent pilots don’t have approval from the Federal Aviation Administration. Beck’s reporting confirms an earlier report that Americans who jumped into the fray without FEMA’s approval have been threatened with arrest.
South Carolina helicopter pilot Jordan Seidhom said he was warned to quit running rescue missions through the South Carolina mountains or be imprisoned. “I thought, I have a helicopter, maybe I can help,” he told a local outlet. After dropping off several survivors and prepping to return for more, a local official ordered him to stand down, he said. “I explained to him that I left my son on the side of the mountain, and I left another victim. I was going to go back and bring them, it was already set up for the landing spot and then I would get out of his area. He told me I wasn’t going to go back up the mountain to get them, I was going to leave them there,” he said.
A similar situation unfolded in Asheville, North Carolina where bystander video shows police appearing to threaten residents with arrest if they attempted to return to their homes to collect belongings. “You guys have already got ample amount of time,” an officer can be heard saying in the shaky video. “I’m giving you guys a warning… If I have to come back out over here, — The jail is processing, all right?”
Harris and President Joe Biden traveled to Georgia on Thursday where they met with local officials, some of whom have publicly ripped the Democrats for abdicating rescue efforts emanating from the country’s worst hurricane disaster in over a decade. Governor Brian Kemp, speaking with local outlet WRDW, said he was “outraged” about having to call the White House for emergency disaster relief assistance after only 11 of the state’s 90 counties were designated as disaster zones. “A lot of people were outraged, including me, because there was such devastation. You know, up to 90 counties. So we called the White House, spoke to the president’s chief of staff, the FEMA administrator, and said ‘Look, you’re sending the signal that you’re not paying attention.’”
