Transcript - America This Week, October 4, 2024: "Biden's Hurricane Katrina?"
Elite America responded with sympathy to the revelations of Hurricane Katrina. Is it the same this time? Also, "My First Goose," by Isaac Babel
Matt Taibbi: All right, welcome to America This Week. I’m Matt Taibbi.
Walter Kirn: And I’m Walter Kirn.
Matt Taibbi: How are you doing, Walter?
Walter Kirn: I’m good. It’s my privilege today to be having a bad hair day. I couldn’t seem to comb it in place and it’s sticking up all over, but I say it’s my privilege because there are people out there who are having real problems.
Matt Taibbi: Right. Also, by the way, there’s no such thing as a bad hair day from the perspective of some, so-
Walter Kirn: Oh, if you have hair.
Matt Taibbi: It’s always good. So we’re near the end of the week. We’re recording this on a Thursday and God knows how the world is going to change between today and tomorrow, but we’re having a major natural disaster and this is raising all sorts of issues about class, but also the intersection of class and censorship and politics, and whether we’re actually getting the right story about Hurricane Helene. There’s a lot to talk about here. Some of it’s really infuriating, but why don’t we just start with some basics. As in most cases, the local reportage seems more reliable and more forthright than the national stuff. So let’s just take a look at some of the local affiliates and what they’re saying.
Speaker 1: Our team coverage continues this morning to keep ...
Matt Taibbi: WFMY.
Lauren Coleman: ... as Helene hits the Carolinas hard. Teams in Randolph County and down in Asheville. Let’s start in Asheville with WFMY News, Amber Lake. Amber, just minutes ago during the break, we saw a car that was floating in your live truck, your live shot.
Amber Lake: I didn’t get a cue in my ear, guys, so I’m hoping that I am on TV right now. This entire situation is absolutely insane. We’ve been out here for just a little bit here in Biltmore Village and you can see all of this water behind me, it’s not supposed to be there. This is all a part of the Swannanoa River that has just overflowed into this area. If you can see that white car down there, that’s not where it started. The white car was about two blocks behind us and it has moved down the river because these waters are so quick and they’re so strong. You can see the barriers are moving down the waters as well. This is a very unsafe area here in Asheville, again here in Biltmore Village.
Matt Taibbi: Let’s look at Lake Lure.
Holly Headrick: Chimney Rock in Lake Lure suffered some of the most severe damage from Helene. Brotherhood County continues to take missing persons reports after evacuating more than 100 residents. Traffic in the area is limited. News 13, Jennifer Emert was in Lake Lure today.
Jennifer Emert: This is as far as we can go into the Lake Lure area along 64/74 near the Pool Creek Picnic Park on Lake Lure. If you take a look behind me, the Lakeside Chapel on Saturday, it was underwater all the way up to the cross.
Dale Shields: When you get there, you’re just like, you want to cry. It’s like, “What do you do? Where do you go?” You just stay and look around. There’s just stuff laying everywhere.
Jennifer Emert: Dale Shields has hauled truckload after truckload of debris from Lake Lure. A bird’s eye view reveals the devastation.
Dale Shields: When you get to right above the Chimney Rock Park entrance, the river’s about 300-foot wide. There’s no road. It’s gone. All the houses from there up is gone. The bridge, the Flowering bridge gone.
Jennifer Emert: Government agencies with the help of Shields, other contractors and community volunteers like William Smith are slowly clearing Rutherford and Polk County roads.
William Smith: You might go 10 feet and cut.
Matt Taibbi: So this story already on its surface is a lot like the Katrina story, where if you weren’t there at the beginning of the storm, it became very difficult to get there to report on it. So what’s happening inside is a little bit of a black box to national media, because as that one local reporter said, there’s kind of a limit to where you can get to if you didn’t start in the middle of the destruction. Now the reports on how many deaths there are and how bad the destruction is have been highly variable. As of this broadcast, the last thing I saw was 189 deaths, but I hear from a few people that might be undercovered.
This is another local affiliate, an ABC affiliate, saying it’s 189 and making it the deadliest storm since Katrina. We’re probably going to hear that that number is going to go up, and then of course, we haven’t even begun to calculate the financial damage because it looks like a lot of infrastructure is gone. But, Walter, what are your first impressions about the story and, a, how it’s been reported and what you think the impact of it might be?
Walter Kirn: Well, it’s part of the country that I most recently visited a few years ago and it’s hard to get around on a normal day. Appalachia and the mountains of that area are filled with valleys, hollows, little canyons and so on and I can’t think of a worst place, worst place for this to happen because accessibility is going to be completely limited. But is Anderson Cooper there? Is he? I don’t know. I’m asking. Are the networks there? I remember the Katrina coverage. I remember people standing up to their waist.
Matt Taibbi: Well, I know Anderson was there because I stole his boat.
Walter Kirn: But are they there now? There is a perception that this is a political embarrassment to the administration, that they have mishandled the response so far. That’s not something I’m getting from conservative media. It’s something I’m getting from TikTok videos and X videos and people affected who are saying, “Where is the help?” I’ve seen people complaining that their airspace shutdown for the presidential visit at a time when it was necessary to bring helicopters up to look for survivors and so on. And then we saw this story yesterday of Kamala saying that they were going to give $750 a person to the victims or something.
Matt Taibbi: Let’s get to that in a second because there were two things that I think were a little bit tone-deaf. And if you remember, so I was at Katrina and there were a lot of stories that came out of Katrina that were unexpected byproducts of the conventional natural disaster story. First of all, for the first time in forever, America got to see exactly what a place like the Ninth Ward looked like because we consciously don’t put those places on television. If you’ve worked in television, you know that advertisers do not like scenes of poverty on the air and they will do just about anything to make sure that you don’t see that because it depresses your instinct to consume.
So for instance, I had a story about a reporter I knew who interviewed people in a poor neighborhood and was asked to recut it and summarize through standups because it’s more comfortable for affluent viewers to see the polished reporter with the hair as opposed to the people without teeth and that sort of thing. So for a long time, Cops was the only show that actually showed poor people on TV. And that was very shocking during Katrina because we got to see exactly how screwed up those neighborhoods were. In this case, what we’re going to find out is that there’s a massive deficit in perception between ...
In that case, it was Republicans who had to be educated maybe a little bit about how bad the inner cities are. In this case, I think it’s the reverse, right? There’s going to be a lot of outrage about how little people know about how hard it is in some of these places, and we can get into some of the statistics and other things in a minute, but do you think the stories are similar in that respect at all?
Walter Kirn: Well, natural disasters, it seems, are particular plague to the poor. I don’t know why, but tornadoes in the Midwest, which is where I grew up, always seem to affect people in less hardy housing, people in trailer parks, for example.
Matt Taibbi: Well, there’s one very good reason for that, I’m sorry to interrupt, which is that the property, the lower you go in elevation, the cheaper the property is. So in New Orleans, for instance, the rich neighborhoods did fine. It’s the poor neighborhoods that got washed out for the most part.
Walter Kirn: Right. Well, so I guess, what’s the original question? I forgot.
Matt Taibbi: Does this remind you of Katrina at all in that sense?
Walter Kirn: Oh, yeah. So it reminds me of that in the way that you stated, it’s revealing the actual conditions of a large number of people who are totally ignored in the media. But then America is totally ignored in the media almost across the board. I published this paper, County Highway, with a partner and it’s devoted to what goes on between the coasts, let’s say, and it’s just astonishing, the level of stories that we’re able to report that I never see reported elsewhere. In other words, it’s like we’ve got the field to ourself just because we decided not to focus on New York, DC And LA.
Matt Taibbi: Right.
Walter Kirn: And here though, there’s an added problem, which is that we’re 33 days from an election. The administration in power and the semi-incumbent Harris are being criticized generally for how much money they’re sending abroad to foreign wars ...
Matt Taibbi: We’re going to get to that.
Walter Kirn: ... and so on. And here, we’re getting a story about FEMA being out of money, but also, this seems to coincide with the migrant issue because I guess FEMA is now somewhat devoted to the resettlement or the settlement, I guess, of migrants. It’s quite-
Matt Taibbi: Let’s take a look at that because there’s some interesting stuff about that. So first, let’s look at the FEMA’s Shelter and Services Program, right? So this is for this year and you can see that they have this thing called the Shelter and Services Program. They spent $640 million to enable nonfederal entities for services associated with noncitizen migrant arrivals in their communities, right? And look, I don’t have any particular issue with aid to migrant arrivals in their communities, but this is being now weighed against the fact that there’s very limited resources for people for FEMA in this disaster. All of these statistics, and this isn’t the only migrant program that we have out there, we have plenty of others. We have matching grants to states and things like that, but here’s a video of Kamala Harris talking about how much is going to be given to residents of that area.
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