ABC's Robin Roberts revisits New Orleans 20 years after the destruction of Hurricane Katrina for a news special on rebuilding after the storm.
— The Associated Press (@apnews.com) August 28, 2025 at 11:00 AM
Revisiting the time she broke down on “Good Morning America” while covering Hurricane Katrina’s destruction of her hometown Pass Christian, Mississippi, Robin Roberts said she feared losing her job.
Only three months after she was named a host of the ABC News show with industry vets Charles Gibson and Diane Sawyer, Roberts had played it straight on the Gulf Coast. That’s what reporters do: they keep a lid on emotions to get the work done. Then Gibson asked, during a live shot, if Roberts had determined that her mother and other family members were safe.
So much for professional reserve…
That clip of a much younger Roberts — still a “Good Morning America” host — is replayed on her ABC News special looking back at Katrina after 20 years. It airs Friday at 8 p.m. Eastern and is streamed on Disney+ and Hulu starting the next day…
New Orleans grieves, issues warnings at Hurricane Katrina second line in Lower 9
Former Vice President Al Gore was among the speakers at the event held to commemorate the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.— Verite News (@veritenews.org) August 29, 2025 at 7:03 PM
===
Thinking about how proud the Times Picayune was to be operating in spite of it all. We don’t have local coverage to help document it all like we did then. And even then, we all knew it was in the middle of a death spiral.
— Clean Observer (@hammbear2024.bsky.social) August 29, 2025 at 11:49 AM
===
Hurricane Katrina: New Orleans mark 20th anniversary
20 years after Katrina, New Orleans’ levees are sinking and short on money | grist.org/extreme-weat…— it's Candy Love (@candylovely.bsky.social) August 30, 2025 at 1:24 AM
===
"Pride and resolve": @trymainelee.bsky.social’s documentary looks at New Orleans 20 years after Katrina
— The Weeknight on MSNBC (@weeknightmsnbc.bsky.social) August 29, 2025 at 10:59 PM
===
A history of extraction and exploitation feels ever-present in New Orleans, but it was perhaps most visible after Hurricane Katrina, which occurred 20 years ago this week.
— The New Yorker (@newyorker.com) August 29, 2025 at 1:04 PM
Everybody loves New Orleans. It’s only the fifty-fourth-largest city in the United States—down from fifth-largest two hundred years ago—but it occupies a much larger place in the national mind than, say, Arlington, Texas, or Mesa, Arizona, where more people live. There’s the food, the neighborhoods, the music, the historic architecture, the Mississippi River, Mardi Gras. But the love for New Orleans stands in contrast to the story that cold, rational statistics tell. It ranks near the bottom on measures such as poverty, murder, and employment.
None of this is new. If one were to propose an origin story for New Orleans as it is today, it might begin in 1795, when a planter named Jean Étienne de Boré held a public demonstration to prove that he could cultivate and process cane sugar on his plantation, which was situated in present-day Audubon Park—just a stone’s throw from where I grew up. This was during the years of the Haitian Revolution, which made the future of slavery on sugar plantations in the Caribbean look uncertain. De Boré’s demonstration set off a boom in sugar production on plantations in southern Louisiana. Within a few years, as a newly acquired part of the United States, New Orleans was on its way to becoming the country’s leading marketplace for the buying and selling of human beings.
This history feels ever-present in New Orleans, but it was perhaps most visible after Hurricane Katrina, which occurred twenty years ago this week. Two documentary film series timed for the anniversary—Traci Curry’s “Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time,” and Geeta Gandbhir, Samantha Knowles, and Spike Lee’s “Katrina: Come Hell and High Water”—make for an excellent reminder not just of the terrible suffering the storm inflicted but also of how it showed New Orleans to be a place not at all like its enchanting reputation. Both series re-create day-by-day details of the week the storm hit, substantially through the testimony of a cohort of eloquent witnesses. They vividly remind us of what we already knew: that, with the notable exception of General Russel Honoré, the head of the military relief effort, public officials—the mayor, the governor, the President, the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency—proved incompetent. New Orleans’s flood-protection was completely inadequate. The order to evacuate the city came far too late. After the storm, attempts to rescue people trapped in their homes and to get them out of town were inexcusably slow…
===
Today marks 20 years since Hurricane Katrina made landfall. One last thing I wanted to share is this video we did as part of Crash Course Black American History that examines the storm and its aftermath.
Thinking about all my New Orleans people today. And always.
youtu.be/VmqZvlj07-w— Clint Smith (@clintsmithiii.bsky.social) August 29, 2025 at 5:08 PM
===
Delta Merner reflects on her time in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, 20 years ago: "Katrina showed me that climate change doesn’t just create disasters; it magnifies the injustices we’ve already allowed to exist."
— Union of Concerned Scientists (@ucs.org) August 29, 2025 at 2:52 PM
===
After the flood and the trauma of Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans was flush with financial resources, big ideas and hope. Two decades later, much of that hope has gone unrealized as residents cope with dysfunction and soaring costs. nyti.ms/4mCyS8e
— The New York Times (@nytimes.com) August 29, 2025 at 1:24 PM
===
“over the past 15 years more than 600 affordable housing units have been scrapped or delayed because of opposition from white-led neighborhood associations …. neighborhood associations in New Orleans are predominantly white and affluent, while the city is majority Black, working class renters”
— micchiato 🍉 (@micchiato.bsky.social) August 30, 2025 at 12:51 AM
===
"In New Orleans, nearly one in three children live in poverty — and for Black children, the rate is 43 percent. In once-thriving Black neighborhoods, schools and libraries never reopened. Bus routes were cut and never restored. Hospitals closed and never came back." www.nytimes.com/2025/08/27/o…
— neilpunkdafunk.bsky.social (@neilpunkdafunk.bsky.social) August 30, 2025 at 2:04 PM
===
The government's colossal failure to respond after Hurricane Katrina led to major reforms at the nation's top disaster agency. Now, the Trump administration has reversed some of those changes.
— NPR (@npr.org) August 30, 2025 at 7:53 AM
===
I was in New Orleans recently. While driving around the city, I noticed that every roofer and landscaper and contractor I saw out working under the blazing sun was Hispanic.
— Aaron Reichlin-Melnick (@reichlinmelnick.bsky.social) August 30, 2025 at 11:14 AM
===
Craziest thing is that Rove thought it’d work and help him.
— Clean Observer (@hammbear2024.bsky.social) August 29, 2025 at 11:00 AM
… Katrina, one of the worst natural disasters in American history, made landfall on Monday, August 29, 2005. The day before, the National Weather Service’s bulletin issued a terrifying, all-caps warning: “Devastating damage expected…Most of the area will be uninhabitable for weeks…perhaps longer.” Winds up to 125 miles per hour battered the Gulf Coast. Storm surges rushed over failing levees and flooded New Orleans. Hundreds of thousands of people across the region left their homes and never returned.
As the disaster unfolded, then-president George W. Bush was in the middle of a lengthy stay at his 1,600-acre Texas ranch. When Katrina made landfall, Bush had been vacationing at the ranch for 27 days, CBS News reported at the time. Bush had taken what his staff called “working vacations” at the Crawford, Texas property throughout his presidency. During the 2005 stay, Bush monitored the situation through aides, signed a disaster declaration, and stayed in contact with disaster officials in Washington. Still, he was planning to go ahead with a trip to California and Arizona.
By the time the sun rose on Aug. 30, Katrina’s devastation became clearer. Nearly 80 percent of New Orleans was underwater. The Superdome, which had been converted to a shelter for nearly 20,000 people, was surrounded by water. Mostly Black New Orleanians begged for aid on television, and images of people standing on rooftops while waving their arms and pleading for rescue were beamed into every household in the nation. Bush, after giving a speech in Coronado, California, announced that he would cut his trip short and return to the White House the next day on Air Force One, with a flyover of the Gulf Coast on the way…
Baud
Thanks, AL.
Hard to imagine a Republican president taking a hit for incompetence these days.
Eric
I’ve watched the first 2 (out of 3) episodes of Katrina – Come Hell and High Water, which is on Netflix. I would definitely recommend, this is done very well and tells a lot of stories that probably haven’t been heard before. It still hurts today to see what people had to go through.
TONYG
And now FEMA has been largely destroyed, thanks to tens of millions of American voters. including the majority of Louisiana voters.
satby
Katrina hit east of New Orleans in Pass Christian, MS. Waveland, the town next to Pass Christian, was where my friends lived, and where they stayed through the storm, despite the calls from family and friends to evacuate. My friend’s elderly mom refused to leave even though they only had to go a few miles inland past I10, where relatives lived, because they couldn’t take the family pets. In one of those ironic twists, the family members in the evacuation zone were inundated by the flood, and swam for their lives to cling to trees until rescue could get there while my friend and her mother in Waveland were able to stay above the flood waters in the house because it all flowed through and down the slope from the slight ridge they lived on.
But no one knew their fate for days, until my friend asked to borrow Anderson Cooper’s satellite phone to call her husband while he was there to report on the devastation.
At the time I was a Red Cross volunteer and was deployed after a few weeks into Texas first, then Louisiana, to do logistics for shelter supplies for the displaced residents. I was able to go to Waveland months later on a second volunteer stint, and will never forget how bad the stench of decay was even after all that time. My friend has never gone back.
Baud
@TONYG:
Most of LA hates New Orleans. NOLA votes blue.
Suzanne
This is a pattern we’re going to see repeat more and more frequently.
I suspect that managed retreat will be necessary, but I think we’ve already lost the will and the capability to build stuff, so I don’t envision this happening peacefully or effectively.
BellyCat
@satby: Can not imagine the experience for those impacted nor you.
This. And there will increasingly be great harm in this and other places as people will not or can not relocate to areas less impacted by the ever growing deadly effects of global warming in the coming decades.
Meanwhile, the current government turns itself into an enrichment mechanism for the powerful and the religiously intolerant. Jesus wept.
Princess
It’s hard for me to believe it’s been 20 years. My husband says for him, it’s part of the distant past like 9-11 but for me, it feels more recent than that. Memory is strange and not objective — public events get strung onto personal timelines.
Anyway, clearly the outcome would be even worse if it happened today.
rikyrah
Good Morning Everyone 😊 😊 😊
BellyCat
@Suzanne: Was simultaneously writing pretty much the same in my comment as you.
Any person voluntarily MOVING TO an area of increased heat/drought/flooding pretty much deserves to get what they want, and good and hard. For those unable to move out of same, there are not enough candles to light for them.
Professor Bigfoot
@Baud: The Gretna Bridge.
Tells us what happens when those inevitable disasters strike.
rikyrah
Still haunted by some of those Katrina images
I still remember saying to myself..
“But this is the United States of America”
The helplessness I felt for my fellow Americans 😢😢😢
rikyrah
@satby:
😢😢😢😢😢
Baud
@rikyrah:
Good morning.
Suzanne
@BellyCat: What just eats me up is that we can see this all coming. We know that climate change will make disasters less survivable and some communities unsustainable. We know that urbanization is happening at breakneck pace, literally the fastest that has ever happened in human history. We know that housing prices/rents and high mortgage rates are making it difficult for people and family units to relocate.
But the solutions are politically difficult, and so we will continue to kick this can down the road. And, of course, the consequences of that will fall hardest on the most vulnerable.
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: The Republicans benefited from Katrina in the long run because the depopulation of New Orleans changed Louisiana from a purple state to a deep red one.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
Louisiana wasn’t going to stay purple, any more than Missouri or Ohio did.
Suzanne
@Matt McIrvin: From that link in the OP:
Same pattern as most everywhere else: hyper-local control is used to make the city whiter.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: We have to thank the purity left for that along with the media.
Baud
@schrodingers_cat:
I don’t know how much influence they have on that score. I attribute it more to the greater urgency in protecting champions of whiteness and maleness.
eclare
I still remember footage of a woman and her baby outside the Superdome. This was early in the disaster, and she said people were hot, but that everyone was helping each other and getting along, waiting for aid to arrive.
We know how that went. A few days later the woman was interviewed again, and she was screaming and crying, “I have a baby here!” She looked and spoke completely different.
Twenty years later, I remember those videos.
Starfish
@satby: This is surprising. Waveland was absolutely devastated by Katrina. Everything was flooded. After a disaster Humanitarian Open Street Maps (hotosm) tries to map where buildings exist, and I was trying to map Waveland, and there were so many buildings that were just gone.
The stench lasted for a long long time. The (former) amusement park known as Jazzland smelled bad a long long time after the storm.
lowtechcyclist
@Professor Bigfoot:
This. I wish I could believe that incident was some sort of abominable outlier in our more recent racial history. This Administration and its supporters testify that it’s not.
Mike E
@Baud: Kanye, while doing a disaster fundraiser alongside Mike Meyers: “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people.” He’s a loon, but that soundbite ought to run while that airplane window picture of W flashes up on the screen.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: You just described Sanders and his cohort. They use economic justice language to cover up their bigotry.
Suzanne
@Mike E: That moment still makes me laugh out loud, oh my God. Mike Myers’ face….. he looks so uncomfortable as he tries to retain his composure.
narya
Because it was written in the aftermath (duringmath?) of Katrina, here’s a link to John Scalzi’s piece (“Being Poor”) and to what he wrote ten years later. This piece is a touchstone for me–it helped me verbalize what I already knew in my bones, that I’d been broke in my life, but not poor. And it helped me think about how close to poor so many of us actually are.
Baud
@schrodingers_cat:
I don’t like Sanders for a lot of reasons, but I don’t see him giving Trump a pass on his incompetence.
lowtechcyclist
@Mike E:
Tru dat.
And 20 years later, a Republican President that merely didn’t care about Black people would be a huge improvement. This one cares about them, alright. 😠
narya
@narya: Read the comments to the original post, too. I still can’t read the piece and comments without tears.
Mike E
@Baud: never mind, Capt Ahab has lashed herself to the Pequod and must destroy her Mobyrnie Dick, heh
Starfish (she/her)
@Mike E: The remix of Gold Digger done for the storm is still a jam.
ia601007.us.archive.org/28/items/George_Bush_Doesnt_Like_Black_People/GeorgeBushDoesntCareAboutBlack…
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: Maybe so. My point was a slightly different one, BS of Vt has always centered whiteness and maleness over everything else. If not for 2016 we wouldn’t be here.
Baud
@schrodingers_cat:
I guess my comment is more about who whites and males see as their champions, and they generally choose Republicans, not Sanders or the left.
Betty
@Princess: There is no reason to believe it may not happen again. Hurricane season is about to ramp up through the month of September. And there’s always next year. When you live in hurricane-prone areas, the threat of a devastating storm doesn’t go away. With climate change, the threat keeps increasing.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
My wife was in NOLA from late Sep to the end of the year immediately after Katrina doing grass-roots animal rescue work. She worked with the group mentioned in this piece:
al.com/live/2010/08/hurricane_katrina_led_to_chang.html
I was down for 3 weeks (somebody had to stay home and hold down the fort). I helped a NOLA cop retrieve dead cats from her wrecked home in the 9th Ward. I helped a lady load her 6 cats into her car (after we sheltered them for over a month–we called them the Friskies crowd because after she went back to her neighborhood, she walked down the street with open cans of the stuff and called for them, 6 outta 7 came out of the wreckage).
She had to do things like that because as people were evacuating, they were told they couldn’t bring their pets. This was told to an overwhelming black population whom we dealt with on a daily basis after setting up shop. They’d be allowed back into the City and would go to the ad-hoc shelters like ours set up (we were in a wrecked middle school–my wife helped restore power to it by flagging down a utility crew driving by).
One good thing that came out of that clusterfuck was this:
bestfriends.org/stories/best-friends-magazine/how-hurricane-katrina-changed-animal-rescue-forever
We were fortunate in that a National Guard unit setup next door to us after the first month. Why was that important? Dog fighting people early on would come pretending to look for their “pet dogs” when in fact they were looking for bait dogs. Dudes armed and intimidating. Once we went next door and asked the Guard to come over with armed people, golly gee, the armed dudes looking for bait dogs literally fled and never came back.
prostratedragon
Some people did anticipate such a thing. In 2002, Daniel Zwerdling did reports for NPR (audio) and Bill Moyers (transcript), on hurricane scenarios that scientists were researching for New Orleans. That’s where I first heard the phrase “city in a bowl.”
As the storm hit, NPR interviewed one of Zwerdling’s main contacts about the damage that could be expected. In the immediate aftermath they also interviewed a participant in a “Hurricane Pam” tabletop exercise on emergency response situations in New Orleans and how they might, or in the event might not, be met. Too many heads buried in too many useless places.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: I agree.
satby
@Starfish: There was a railroad embankment along the coast, and my friend’s house was set north of it, at the end of a street. Behind it was a slope leading to a pond or swampy area (I forget which, but it looked more swampy). Their ranch house flooded to above the counters, which she and her mother had gotten onto, but the water didn’t get higher because it flowed through and down the hill behind. Their house was the only one left standing fully intact on the street.
Her husband’s family in the evacuation zone also had a ranch house. It was completely inundated, and they were on the roof; when something made her father-in-law sense the house was unstable and about to be swept away. They swam to some trees and climbed above the water, where they were rescued later. Her father-in-law’s sister had suffered a heart attack sometime during this, and passed away from complications a few weeks later. My friend and her mom probably would have been lost, her mom because she was frail and my friend had already had a cardiac bypass. Sheer luck.
prostratedragon
@comrade scotts agenda of rage:
looking for bait dogs
Disgustingly entrepreneurial.
satby
@Starfish: and I was working IT support on a commodities trading floor at the time. We had constant news monitoring, and everyone knew I was waiting for word of my friends. When we saw the first flyover of Waveland, I remember the silence, because they all thought I was seeing IRT the news my friend was dead. I did too. The whole town south of the railroad was mostly swept away.
RevRick
I hate to say it, but New Orleans is a doomed place. The levee system, which was designed to protect it, has become an instrument of its destruction. If you look at maps of Louisiana 60 years ago and compare them with those of today, and you’ll see a tremendous loss of land to encroachment by the Gulf of Mexico. Silt from the Mississippi used to flow through the bayous, maintaining the southern parts of Louisiana, but the levee system now channels all that silt straight into the Gulf. Over time, salt water intrusion kills off the vegetation leaving the land vulnerable to the inevitable erosion.
The irony is that the levee system was constructed in response to another natural disaster: the great Mississippi flood of 1927, when it overflowed its banks up to 30 feet in depth and killed between 250 to 500 people.
We cannot manage nature. Eventually, it will win.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@prostratedragon:
My wife was remarking the other day about the overuse anymore of the term “life changing experience” to the point that it’s just another banal statement thrown around like a comma.
Spend 3 months (or just 3 weeks) doing animal rescue work in NOLA immediately after Katrina and we can attest to it being a life changing experience. Dealing with experiences like that one, just one of a gazillion, or getting escorted thru the wreckage of neighborhoods that looked just like photos of German cities at the end of WW2, will change what you do with at least part of your life.
Or the reactions of people who, and this happened maybe 10% of the time, would come to the shelter and lo and behold, we had rescued their dog and gave it shelter in the hopes it’s owner would come back and find it.
People who had literally lost everything would find the innocent in their life, fed and safe, all of which could have been prevented. I still tear up at the memories of those precious few moments down there.
Starfish (she/her)
@satby: I grew up in the region. My mom still lives there. I did not know if she had survived or not for several days. I found a blog where a doctor who had been outside the town I grew up in during the storm was reporting back on things he saw. He said he had seen my mom at the hospital (she is a doctor who will ride out the storms at the hospital), and it was such a relief!
I have only been back a handful of times since, and a number of landmarks from my childhood are gone.
The whole thing was so traumatic.
Years later, a friend posted a picture of her daughter smiling while floating on a mattress in their house during the storm, and I admired the optimism of that child!
Nukular Biskits
Good mornin’, y’all.
As a Hurricane Katrina survivor (at that time, I lived 5 miles north of I-10 exit 50 and I now live in Gulfport), I get really irritable when any discussion of the destruction focuses on New Orleans.
For the record, Katrina came ashore near Pearlington, MS, which is just this side of the MS/LA state line. This meant the entire MS Gulf Coast was on the northeast quadrant of storm, the most destructive. The storm surge extended all the way over into AL and FL, causing damage. Katrina’s wind damage extended all they way up past Jackson and Meridian (my hometown, which is to where we evacuated), resulting in pretty much the entire lower half of the state being without power for days.
The damage and loss of life over in “Nawins” was horrific … but the primary cause of that was the levees failing AFTER Katrina had already come ashore to the east.
Professor Bigfoot
@Baud: Fair point, but you have to also accept that the “white male supremacy” siren song is still attractive to white men who are ostensibly in our coalition; and those white men seem to have inordinate allegiance to Blessid Saint Bernard.
”Populism.”
Professor Bigfoot
@prostratedragon: Enragingly entrepreneurial.
Starfish (she/her)
@Nukular Biskits: Did you see all the memes that Mississippians had on Facebook for this about hurricanes hitting that unnamed land mass between New Orleans, LA and Mobile, LA?
Suzanne
@Betty:
You are correct. In fact, it is wiser to expect that it will happen again. These are things we know. Hindsight is 20/20, but our foresight in this case is also pretty good.
But the solutions are difficult and require political will and resources. Heck, this doesn’t even have to be about building apartments in expensive urban areas and those fights. We could do a far better job building SFH suburbs, but we don’t want to do that, either.
Nukular Biskits
@Starfish (she/her):
That definitely was (and still is) a sore spot for a lot of us here.
Kosh III
Miss Bianca
@Princess: Katrina doesn’t feel like ancient history to me. Neither does 9-11. August 29th was my dad’s birthday, so every time that date rolls around I find myself thinking about both him and Katrina at the same time.
Suzanne
@Kosh III:
I highly recommend the podcast 99% Invisible. They had a mini-series called “Not Built for This”, which had an episode on Gulf Coast flooding, I think they focused on Florida. Another episode was about fire-prone regions. Then there was an episode about Phoenix, AZ, where I lived for over 30 years, and how the city is getting hotter and the rising human toll that takes. The whole series made me very emotional.
Again, this is all foreseeable.
UncleEbeneezer
@Professor Bigfoot: White Men on our side are absolutely obsessed with Bernie. When I ran an Indivisible group from 2017-2020, the vast majority of other white dudes in our group were Bernie-bros. I knew maybe half a dozen guys who openly loved Hillary or Kamala but there was 5-10 x as many who despised them for not being Bernie (or Al Franken). They only begrudgingly supported Biden and I always suspect they would throw him under the bus at the first opportunity (SURPRISE! They did!!). And they only accepted Kamala begrudgingly while bitching and moaning about how Biden should never have run again. When I see a white man in a liberal/progressive space I always assume they have little/no allegiance to our coalition because in my experience that’s the safest assumption and has been proven correct more often than not.
satby
@Starfish (she/her): As worried as I was for my friend of (now) 50 years; I can’t imagine the horror of wondering if your mother was alive. Hugs.
I looked up the rail line that ran on that embankment, it was the old freight line that the Gulf Coast Limited ran on. The second disaster relief trip I was on in the area was in early December the same year. My friend came with to help, we camped in her house. The rails were all twisted and displaced by the force of the storm surge. And that smell, months later, still strong.
Melancholy Jaques
@Baud:
Or corruption, or crimes.
HinTN
@Nukular Biskits: Indeed, the sun was shining while New Orleans flooded. I saw that upstate MS damage when we drove down I-59 in early December. Tornado damage and blue tarps everywhere. I also drove the coast road and the destruction in Waveland was unimaginable if you didn’t see it first hand. We attended the 2006 Jazz and Heritage Festival. The (brown) water lines on the houses and the big Xs that indicated a house had been checked (and what was found) left an indelible mark on me.
Eyeroller
I remember the rumors flying, in particular one about “people” (we know whom they meant) shooting at rescue helicopters and my otherwise-sensible relative swallowing it whole. And that was before social media really swung into gear to spread mis- and disinformation. Other rumors and slurs against the people who took shelter at the Superdome (which apparently did become a horrible situation, but the rumor mill exaggerated it). Plus the infamous news article — which IIRC was actually written by an English-language France-based outlet — where a picture of a white person wading with water bottles was labeled “foraging” and a similar picture of a black person was “looting.”
I have been to New Orleans twice for conventions. Not my preference as a place to visit, but I’m not into cities in general. Once in 2010, next in 2014, and both times riding from the airport to downtown we passed by empty fields that had once been neighborhoods. But I haven’t been back since.
Melancholy Jaques
@UncleEbeneezer:
That’s pretty harsh. A pretty solid 40% of my demographic votes Democratic.
I’m not offended, I come close to saying the same kind of things about people who look like me. There is a lot of anger among our coalition but I think sometimes we may misdirect it. Everyone feels their anger is righteous and it leads to conflict.
All of us pointing in the same direction is essential to our effort to win the midterms. It’s the only thing that matters.
Another Scott
@Suzanne: +1
We know how to solve these problems, and have the national resources to do so. There are even historical examples…
E.g. Raising of Chicago:
167 years ago. Before electricity and internal combustion engines!
At least 1392 people were killed by Katrina. Google tells me that Chicago’s population was either around 30,000 or around 65,000 in 1854, so around 1800-3900 people died there of cholera then. :-/
Thanks.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Starfish (she/her)
@Melancholy Jaques: You really don’t have to put up with the policing of the left that goes on here that has not been reined in by the mods.
A small handful of us went over to Mr. Mix’s blog. The posts are not as regular (or as micro-blogging based), but we can have a diversity of ideas on the left without people being jerks about it.
heymistermix.com/
Professor Bigfoot
@Melancholy Jaques:That’s pretty harsh. A pretty solid 40% of my demographic votes Democratic.
I dunno… it seems to me that while 60% of white men voted for Trump and white male supremacy, that doesn’t mean the other 40% vote for Democrats; and it certainly doesn’t mean that they loudly and enthusiastically support Democrats. Indeed, it seems the majoriy of that 40% spend their time telling us how useless and feckless the Democrats are and how they need to “take the party back.”
At least, that’s how it seems to me.
Obligatory #NotAllWhiteMen
Professor Bigfoot
@Starfish (she/her): Is seeing the whiteness of the “left” the equivalent of “policing” them?
JML
@Another Scott: there’s even a board game based around this now.
boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/330579/raising-chicago
I almost picked up a copy at GenCon earlier this month.
schrodingers_cat
@Professor Bigfoot: As is mentioning their misogyny and antisemitism.
Eyeroller
@Professor Bigfoot: I think there’s a core of reliable white-male supporters that’s a pretty substantial chunk of that 40%, but the ones we most hear about are the Bernie-bro types because they are Extremely Online and very loud. The MSM often seemed to live by Twitter and still loves to platform Beniebro types.
My own demographic (middle-aged to older white women) is only a little better, as we’ve often discussed.
A lot of the white supporters are still pretty clueless about their/our blinders, however.
Starfish (she/her)
@Professor Bigfoot: Sometimes, things exist beyond overly simplistic racial analysis.
The Israel/Palestine discussions are very white-on-white violence.
suzanne
@Another Scott:
We know how to solve lots of problems. All kinds of problems. What we do not have right now is the collective will to do so.
Most of coastal Florida probably needs strategic retreat. We could start that prior to the next disaster, or we could wait for five more.
satby
@Starfish (she/her): I think “diversity of ideas” might be overstating it a bit.
Baud
@Starfish (she/her):
Is TBone still there? Tell her I said hi.
satby
the people who most need to accept that are the people often violently opposed to it. Edit: and as a result, because they’re often well-off white retirees transplanted to Florida, the political will is not likely to change soon.
Miss Bianca
@Starfish (she/her): From what I’ve seen so far of MM *and* his blog, the “diversity of opinion on the left” boils down to: “Democrats who don’t agree with us suck.” Same as what you accuse BJ of. Seems to be a great uniformity of opinion there.
Starfish (she/her)
@Baud: She is half the comments which is a bit too many sometimes.
Mike E
“Sometimes” is doing some heavy lifting here, heh.
Yep, we suck! (I won’t deploy Prof’s notallwhypipo hashtag here, it’s irrefutable, sorry!) White on white greed/violence destroys us all, everywhere.
Mike E
duplicate
Professor Bigfoot
@Starfish (she/her): Two countries that are not the United States and don’t share its history of Enslavement.
Is THAT a fair comparison to what white people do here?
Is THAT a fair analogy to examining the whiteness of the movement that constantly complains about the Black and Jewish and female led Democrats?
Starfish (she/her)
@Miss Bianca:
I am pretty sure that we all agreed that we like you very much, and some of the white on white violence we are having are the YIMBY/NIMBY discussions between me and Scott.
Professor Bigfoot
@Miss Bianca: Dare I mention the demographics at that site?
Miss Bianca
@Starfish (she/her): Oh, ha ha! Boy, can I relate to *that* debate!
ETA: I’m sure it will shock you to realize that it goes on here in the sticks as well!
Baud
@Starfish (she/her):
Haha. At least you’re not wanting for music.
Melancholy Jaques
@Professor Bigfoot:
That’s just ridiculous. Maybe you are spending too much time online
This is an interesting data source that shows, among other things, the percentage of donors to each Democratic candidate broken down by race, gender, and income. It’s not directly related to how many known or assumed to be white people you’ve encountered who spend their time telling us how useless and feckless the Democrats are and how they need to “take the party back,” but it does who fairly healthy support by white people for the whole range of Democrats.
Starfish (she/her)
@Professor Bigfoot: Before I start, I am not familiar with the world view you are trying to communicate and have no clue what the Palestine and Israel discussions have been like at this blog.
The Palestine and Israel discussions in my community are about to tear the community apart. It has been UGLY.
In that last sentence, are you trying to say that Black and Jewish interests are aligned?
In my community, three sitting city council members (two Jewish) have called the only black city council member an anti-semite because she is pro-Palestine, and they are about to lose the votes of people of color for doing this.
But the youth may eat the sitting council members before we get to voting. It is ugly.
Starfish (she/her)
@Professor Bigfoot: Is the demographic data of like ten people really that meaningful?
Miss Bianca
@Starfish (she/her): Ugh, sounds nasty. Remind me, are you in Boulder?
satby
@Starfish (she/her): 😂 I shouldn’t laugh, but no surprise.
Professor Bigfoot
@Starfish (she/her): I’m saying that the I/P conflict has no bearing on how whiteness operates here in America.
Jews escaped pogroms and oppression in the late19th and early 20th centuries in Europe only to come here and find Black people dealing with the exact same thing under Jim Crow; and we have been friends and allies here ever since.
ETA- with that said, I cannot speak to a specific situation among specific people in a city far from my own.
Professor Bigfoot
@Starfish (she/her): Only in understanding just what kind of bubble they are in— but fair point.
Starfish (she/her)
@Miss Bianca: Yup. We have a community of conservative Jewish elders who are flying the flag of Israel downtown every week telling us that they are not afraid (after being firebombed.)
They tried to start a change.org petition to get rid of our only black council member.
There are some young TikTokkers out there yelling at the elders about the deaths in Gaza and calling them Zionists, while the elders are pretending that the youth are interchangeable with that one Egyptian guy who set them on fire.
So they are both afraid and are not leaving the house and not afraid and marching downtown with the flag of Israel, and I just go to another town to have dinner because I absolutely can not.
satby
@Starfish (she/her): TBF, a group of people who decamped because they felt that being called on their arguments out of (edit: their) obvious privilege was intolerable.
Suzanne
@satby:
100%.
We don’t lack skills. We lack good judgment.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Melancholy Jaques:
Yup. I’ve posted a link to a similar analysis:
Piece on where donations came from:
x.com/owasow/status/1930315361976557815
Dems pulling in the majority of people (or maybe households) earning more than $100K but under that, we were in the minority. And many of those under-$100K types used to vote Dem.
Miss Bianca
@Starfish (she/her): I am sorry to hear that that’s the situation there. Unfortunately, leaping from defensive crouch to slavering attack mode seems to be a depressing default setting for an awful lot of us humans. (Not ME, of course! Never ME!)//
Reverse tool order
@UncleEbeneezer: I don’t have the level of political activity and experience that you do. Speaking just as my old white male self, I think Bernie Sanders lacks the judgment and several other attributes to be merely a passable president. Thus, disqualified.
I have happily voted for Hillary and Kamala in CA primaries and general elections because I think they do have those attributes. Including Hillary over Barack in the primary, due to her more extensive experience. My wife went the opposite by the way. No regrets over voting for Shirley Chisholm back in the day either.
I’m wondering two things:
Does the distribution of preferences in Democratic white males differ by region? What is the actual exigency for making broad, firm judgements on the white male subset of Democrats?
Again, I’m coming from a state of relative ignorance. I’m asking for illumination in the visible spectrum rather than infrared.
Melancholy Jaques
@comrade scotts agenda of rage:
It think that might be the college/no-college divide. For reasons we have all discussed, argued, and lamented right here at Balloon Juice, the no college people have decided to be angry at Democrats rather than the Republicans whose policies have made their lives miserable.
Gloria DryGarden
@Starfish (she/her): this situation sounds miserable. Beautiful Boulder..
Gloria DryGarden
@Baud: T bone and I email a fair bit. She asked me to tell you and Professor Bigfoot hello.
Baud
@Gloria DryGarden:
Thank you.
Gloria DryGarden
@Baud: is this a kind of time travel prediction? How did you know ahead, that it would swing red? And how can we know, now, as we try to swing things to blue?
Professor Bigfoot
@Gloria DryGarden: Thank you, and send her my love.
Gloria DryGarden
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: I want to study this data.
meanwhile,OT
The Denver Summer meetup is on. Next Sunday afternoon, at Sure Lurkalots beautiful and amazing backyard. I did the steps you suggested, and I’ll email you about contacting the list you have from the January meetup.
All so very last minute, I recognize this, but it could still come together very nicely.
@Starfish (she/her): It’s great to see you here. I hope you might be able to make it to this sudden impromptu meetup in East Denver. I think I can manage to remember your name, too, this time.
Gloria DryGarden
Anne Laurie,
I went recently to a traveling contemporary art show about/ commemorating, Katrina. I took a bunch of pix. Should I send them in?
it was just at the Denver museum of contemporary art. It’s moving away shortly. On to the next city. . I wonder what city it will travel to next.
Anne Laurie
@Gloria DryGarden: Send them to my email, and I’ll put together a post.
getsmartin
@Nukular Biskits: Well stated. The Mississippi Coast caught the worst effects of Katrina. I live in Long Beach and thankfully, live far enough away from the beach that we were spared the devastation of the storm surge. I recall the expressions of relief by some in New Orleans in the immediate aftermath of the storm – and then the levees failed, and we all know how that saga unfolded. In the days/weeks/months after the storm, I did appreciate Robin Roberts’ diligence in publicizing the plight of the Miss. Coast residents in the spotlight, because, needless to say, the lion’s share of the media coverage was focused on New Orleans. Also, I was goddamned impressed with the volunteers who came to our aid. I can’t imagine how we would have recovered without them!