I’m old enough to remember the criticism of the federal government’s response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The Bush administration bore the brunt of the criticism, especially when the mainstream press pilloried the president for not traveling to the area more quickly to see the damage for himself.
There was a racial component to the criticism, of course, because Bush was a Republican and many of the victims of Katrina were black. The Sunday after the hurricane, Nancy Giles said on CBS This Morning:
After meeting with Louisiana officials last week, Rev. Jesse Jackson said: "Many black people feel that their race, their property conditions, and their voting patterns have been a factor in the response." He continued: "I'm not saying that myself."
Then I'll say it.
If the majority of the hardest hit victims of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans were white people, they would not have gone for days without food and water, forcing many to steal for mere survival.
Their bodies would not have been left to float in putrid water.
They would have been rescued and relocated a hell of a lot faster than this. Period.
Former Atlanta mayor and UN ambassador Andrew Young told the New York Times, “I think the easy answer is to say that these are poor people and black people and so the government doesn't give a damn," and he added that “there might be some truth to that.”
In a survey of hurricane victims shortly after the storm, two-thirds of respondents said that they believed that the response would have been quicker had most of the victims been white. Nearly as many said that they thought the federal government didn’t care about them. Almost all of the survey participants were black.
Fast-forward 19 years, and we have a near-reverse situation: Hurricane Helene devastated portions of Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas. The areas that Helene hit the hardest consist largely of conservative voters, and the radical Biden-Harris administration has dragged its feet. Helene ravaged the Southeast on Sept. 26 and 27. FEMA waited another two days to issue an emergency declaration, and Gov. Brian Kemp (R-Ga.) had to raise Cain to get the agency to add more counties in the Peach State to the original handful of counties in the declaration.
Related: Politicians Are Hindering Rescue Efforts in North Carolina, and One Rescuer Has Had Enough
The administration didn’t activate Fort Bragg’s 82nd Airborne until Oct. 2 — nearly a week after Helene devastated the region. It took another three days to call up more resources for search and rescue. This is bureaucratic foot-dragging of the highest order, yet we’ll never see the current administration get the same treatment Bush received after Katrina.
Erick Erickson pointed out the contrast in a column he wrote on Monday:
The New York Times, five days removed from Katrina, was giving detailed coverage of what it assumed were George W. Bush’s failures. The victims were disproportionately black and the people in charge were white.
In North Carolina, the victims are mostly white. The press has moved on. Using all the conspiracies and lies as an excuse to claim all is actually well, the New York Times went back to January 6th coverage.
Much of the frustration and bottlenecking of the response has come because so many citizens are trying to help. Generous Americans are answering the calls for supplies, and civilian rescue groups are responding in such numbers that they’re crowding the airspace.
Yet Erickson points out:
Bureaucrats are not waiving ordinary rules for the emergency. The professional bureaucracy assumes they know best and the local people who know the land are being slowed from rescuing the stranded and dying.
Military search and rescue needlessly delayed getting in and once in, pushed out competent private operators who were already doing the work.
Of course, we won’t hear about any of this in the media. No one will ask North Carolinians, Floridians, or Georgians if there’s any racial or political component to the government’s response. The networks won't broadcast the heartrending stories of the people of these areas after a few more days (unless the stories can make Republicans look bad).
No, we won’t see the press excoriate Joe Biden or Kamala Harris for the federal response to Helene — or Milton if it’s as bad as the models are predicting — the way the left went after Bush for Katrina. It’s up to all of us — conservative media, social media users, and citizens of all stripes — to call this administration out.
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