By Michael Rectenwald and John-Michael Rectenwald
The devastation and human toll wreaked by hurricanes Helene represent this election season’s October Surprise. October is also World Series season. What do the two have in common you ask?
Legendary sportscaster Vin Scully was once the voice of baseball. He narrated the distinctly American game for fans over the better part of seven decades. Scully is arguably most famous for his intuitive gesture during the hoopla following the Los Angeles Dodgers’ most iconic moment, the 68 seconds of airtime silence he observed after Kirk Gibson’s World Series game-winning homerun in October of 1988. “Let the moment speak for itself” was the idea behind Scully’s broadcast discretion. Scully finally broke the silence with the words, “In a year that has been so improbable, the impossible has happened!” Gibson, you see, stood in the batter’s box, and faced pitcher Dennis Eckersley, with both legs severely injured.
Likewise, this October, the legacy media has made the same call on behalf of the regime. They have let the moment speak for itself. Only in this case, the silence is not total or celebratory. It consists of denial. It is not due to reverence for a game or the beauty of adult men skipping along the chalk lines of their childhood dreams. Rather, it reveals contempt for the common players—those with lost loved ones, injuries, broken lives, and the threat their predicament poses to the totalitarians’ Will To Power.
As of October 9, Hurricane Helene was responsible for the deaths of 230 souls, while at least 75 individuals remain missing. Videos on TikTok and other platforms, posted by apparent residents of North Carolina, claim the death toll to be vastly underreported. And with Milton slamming Florida’s Gulf Coast, it looks like Paradise Lost redoubled.
At least in the case of Helene, the federal response to the hurricane has proven to be a disaster in its own right. But the media cabalists, in collusion with the Biden-Harris administration’s press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and others, deny the obvious—that the federal government has other priorities, like funding and manning the wars conducted by and for Israel and Ukraine. They’ve even gone so far as to say that questioning FEMA’s response (or lack thereof) is “dangerous.” It is not the failures of the federal government that costs lives, Biden said today, but rather the “disinformation” on social media.
We will not adjudicate the claims of disinformation regarding the hurricane response — whether, for example, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) diverted funds allocated for existing U.S. residents to incoming and undocumented immigrants, although FEMA’s own webpage for the immigrant Shelter and Services Program suggests as much. Nor, given the paucity of on-the-ground national reporting in the case of Helene, will we solve, at this time, the epistemological crisis that the hurricane represents.
But we will take the regime’s mouthpieces at their word, especially when they are freed from the constraints of pressroom officialdom.
For example, former advisor to Barack Obama and Democratic Party apologist, David Axelrod, said the quiet part out loud on his podcast, Hacks on Tap, when he projected Helene’s impact on the electoral map. Regarding the residents of devastated North Carolina, he said: “Those voters in Asheville are – they’re, you know, the kind of voters that will figure out a way to vote. You know, they’re upscale, kind of liberal voters, and they’re probably going to figure out a way to vote.”
On the other hand, he continued, “I’m not sure a bunch of these folks who’ve had their homes and lives destroyed elsewhere in Western North Carolina, in the mountains there, are going to be as easy to wrangle for the Trump campaign.”
Hacks on Tap is a perfectly apropos moniker for the podcast. Apparently, such hacks are on tap and will go to any lengths to rescue the regime, including quietly celebrating the catastrophe facing down-market voters in a swing state, whose dire precarity is welcomed as a boon to the Democratic ticket. Through the barely concealed disdain betrayed by his remarks, one can almost hear Axelrod calling western North Carolinians “hicks” and “hillbillies.” His remarks represent the scornful elitism that has come to characterize the Democrat-run regime.
No matter where you stand, whether in a new-development condo in TriBeCa attending a high-dollar fundraiser for “middle-class” Kamala Harris, or in a Pentecostal Church in Talking Rock, Georgia—whether on dry land, or perched on a tree limb above 20 feet of flood water—everyone knows the last thing we needed before this toxic, bellicose tournament held every four years was natural disasters of epic proportions. This includes a political class struggling to retain its grip on the levers of the state, whose cynicism could not be more blatant.
The impact of the hurricanes only further aggravates and demonstrates the health and welfare crisis facing the American people. And, under the UniParty regime, this crisis has been utterly ignored. The citizens of the United States, especially those who work for a living and pay taxes, are nothing but fodder fed into the machinery of a State whose priorities have nothing to do with them.
Could it be any clearer that a major sea change is desperately needed in America? The only question is whether our hopes and dreams for a new day are once again dashed against the rocks of time or finally surmount the storms that besiege us.
Look for John-Michael’s Substack, coming soon!
