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In Western North Carolina, the frustration with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has grown to a fever pitch, with locals left in desperate, dire straits, and they aren’t the only ones complaining about it.
President Donald Trump has called out the agency’s leadership and even gone so far as suggesting that it ought to no longer exist, presumably meaning it should be replaced with some kind of direct federal government aid.
Sunday, on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” Vice President JD Vance told host Margaret Brennan, when asked about the need for FEMA’s expertise, that it “has often been a disaster” adding that the agency doesn’t work “well enough with state and local officials to get resources to the people who need it.”
This was the major complaint I got from almost everyone in the Asheville area, as Michael, in his 60s who lives just outside of town, put it, “they just can’t get what we need, where we need it.”
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The whole situation is reminiscent of a World War II saying: some generals know how to read the map, and others know how to read the ground. Those are two very different sets of skills.
When the map readers at HQ like Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery looked at their giant, flat display of France after D-Day, they saw a straight-line east to Germany. But when the guys on the ground, like Gen. Maurice Rose got there, thousands of hedgerows that weren’t on the map stood in the way, even of most tanks.
Rose and others in the tank corps had to use reconnaissance to find new roads and paths. Often this required relying on the local expertise of those they had just liberated from the Nazis.
Thankfully, these men on the ground were given a lot of latitude in finding a way for American Sherman and Stuart tanks to storm to the Rhine.
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Something similar happened in North Carolina, where FEMA seemed completely incapable of dealing with the unique and dangerous mountainous terrain that many local officials know like the back of their hand. Ignoring the locals led to frequent delays and foul-ups.
Likewise, in Florida we saw the horrible situation in which FEMA was accused of skipping houses with Trump signs owing to absurd and bigoted guidance from “experts” in Washington, D.C.
In those situations, one phone call to a local sheriff or police chief and the agency could have known that, unless it was some kind of militia compound, the federal officers had nothing to fear from the locals.
Back in North Carolina, where FEMA has struggled to provide housing, while kicking people out of hotels in the middle of the winter, it is often the locals who are doing the heavy lifting, including on important efforts to winterize campers.
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Incredibly, in her interview with Vance, Brennan insisted that FEMA had special expertise — much like Monty, I suppose — asking, a bit derisively, if “the Mississippis, The Kentuckys, the Alamabas would be able to do this for themselves without federal help.”
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I don’t know if host Margaret Brennan has ever been to the south, but along with the charming accents, they’ve got a lot a trucks down there, and guys who know how to build things, even if they don’t have a Ph.D. in emergency management from The New School, or wherever.
FEMA is a quintessential example of exactly what President Donald Trump was elected to do, to take power out of the hands of federal bureaucrats who know nothing of life outside of a 25-mile radius of the Washington Monument and give it back to “We thePeople.”
From COVID, to inflation, to the border and now to FEMA, the expert class in D.C., born of once fine institutions that are all now captured by progressive ideology, have failed the American people again, and again, and again.
We all know how WWII ended, and it ended that way in large part owing to the fact that while Adolf Hitler stared at a map and demanded his generals do impossible things, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower allowed his generals like Rose, and George Patton, to lead from the ground.
This might all just come down to a fundamental difference in how liberals and conservatives view the American people, the former almost as children who must have constant guidance, and the latter as fully functioning adults, who just need some help.
For now, and for the foreseeable future, the good people of North Carolina will suffer the consequences of FEMA’s top-down dysfunctionality, but Donald Trump and JD Vance have an opportunity to ensure that the next time this happens, it is the people on the ground, not the experts reading maps, who are in charge.
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