Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor - The Savagery of Katrina

Sept. 1, 2025 - Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor

01:04:02

The Savagery of Katrina — 20 Years Later

Jared Taylor and Paul Kersey give you the straight scoop on how quickly black-run, black-"policed," majority-black New Orleans fell into barbarism when the hurricane hit. Needless to say, it was the fault of white people. Thumbnail credit: © Khampha Bouaphanh/TNS via ZUMA Press Wire

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	Ladies and gentlemen, dear listeners, August 29th was the 20th anniversary of the landfall of Hurricane Katrina.
	It hit the Gulf Coast August 29th, 2005, and by the time it hit, it was still a Category 3 hurricane with sustained winds of 125 miles per hour.
	Actually, it had started out as a Category 5 hurricane.
	Its peak intensity while it was over the Gulf of Mexico had winds of 175 miles per hour.
	So you can imagine the kind of terrible damage it might have done had it hit the Gulf Coast at top peak intensity of category five.
	With me on this occasion to discuss this on its 20th anniversary is my indispensable co-host, Paul Kersey, who is very well informed about Hurricane Katrina.
	Now, Mr. Kersey, I gather you've done some research since the time of the landfall and the devastation of Katrina.
	You've looked into a number of books and articles, and is that correct?
	I'm probably one of the few people in the country who actually read Ray Nagan, the mayor at the time of Katrina, who famously talked about the city on Oprah, who was one of the originators of a lot of the claims that the media then spent the past few decades actually trying to debunk about the lawlessness that happened.
	And I've read his book.
	I've read the book by his chief of communications, Sally Foreman, book called Eye of the Storm inside City Hall during Katrina.
	And I've read left-wing books by one of your favorite college professors, Michael Eric Dyson, wrote a book called Hell or High Water, Hurricane Katrina, and the Color of Disaster.
	Oh, yeah.
	I've read a lot.
	Wow, you are well informed.
	Well, I wrote an article very shortly after the hurricane.
	It was called Africa in Our Midst.
	And you can understand why I gave it that title.
	I was going off of news reports at the time.
	Some of the news reports have since been contested.
	But I would like to read some of the passages from this.
	And you can, as I read them, you can elaborate on what happened.
	Because I think it's very interesting that Ray Nagin, a black mayor, was now, I guess, subsequently accused of exaggerating the black misbehavior in the the black mayhem whereas now the liberal media are saying oh no no no it wasn't nearly as bad as those vicious white people say it was and that it's all really the fault of white people anyway.
	But at the time, as I said in my article, New Orleans was 67% black, and about half of the blacks were poor.
	And of the city's 480,000 people, all but an estimated 80 to 100,000 left before the hurricane struck.
	And they had been warned it's going to be bad.
	clear out but this means that aside from patients in hospitals and a few eccentrics in the french quarter most of the people stayed behind were not just blacks but but lower class blacks without the means or the foresight to leave.
	And you've looked into some of the other motivations for why they did not leave, right?
	I have.
	There are actually a number of studies.
	The University of South Carolina put out a study in 2007 where they examined why blacks didn't evacuate in the face of Katrina.
	One of the reasons that they gave, they interviewed a number of people.
	uh these academicians and it turns out that a lot of the blacks in these lower income government subsidized communities uh particularly the the lower ninth ward and other heavily black areas.
	Just for international listeners and for people who might not be familiar with New Orleans, it's one of America's most segregated cities.
	It was heavily white, about 65% white up until the 1964 Civil Rights Act made it untenable for white families to remain within the city with segregation ending and the integration of schools.
	So you have all of these pockets of older, older communities.
	that were white, but then you have this just massive black underclass.
	And this study actually says that a number of blacks stayed behind because as you mentioned, as you mentioned, sir, that date is important, August 29th, at that point there weren't direct deposits for government assistance, for welfare, for SNAP, EBT.
	You would get checks in the mail.
	And so believe it or not, what they found were a lot of people that they interviewed were worried that they wouldn't get their government assistance.
	My goodness.
	In other words, the check would come while they were out of town.
	Exactly.
	And they were fearful that there'd be crime.
	They would, that people would ransack their mailbox.
	But a lot of the, a lot of the blacks who were interviewed as to why they didn't leave, they were worried about crime, about looting taking place within their community from the blacks who stayed behind.
	I had never seen this study.
	I just, somebody mentioned this on Twitter on X, sir.
	And at first I didn't believe it.
	So I had to go try and find a source that actually verified it.
	And like I said, lo and behold, the University of South Carolina, the flagship University of South Carolina, did a study in 07.
	Quite remarkable, quite remarkable that they published such straightforward and unflattering results.
	But so a lot of the poor blacks stayed behind because they knew perfectly well the place was going to descend into mayhem and they wanted to stay behind and protect their property.
	And also they wanted to make sure.
	that their welfare check would come and not be stolen or washed away in the flood or whatever it was.
	Very, very interesting.
	And it's really interesting.
	I'd like to point out that the white community, we're going to talk about this later, but I think it's important to juxtapose why the city, all the pictures we saw and the video we saw, it was just a sea of black individuals at the Superdome and at the Convention Center.
	And it's important because the white people, you know.
	And if you're from the south, if you're from that region, hurricanes do hit and there are evacuations and people will flee.
	They'll go to an area, you know, hundreds of miles away, go be with family.
	And what's fascinating, the left got really interested in the fact that the Israeli security, it's called ISI, they were there immediately on the 29th to guard heavily Jewish areas.
	New Orleans has a very sizable Jewish population.
	And ISI was contracted to come in to guard private homes from looting.
	And Blackwater was brought in right away.
	And in fact, that was one of the first times that I encountered back in 05 reading about Blackwater.
	So did they show up on the 29th itself, the day of landfall?
	Yes, they showed up immediately.
	There's an article, there's some amazing articles from the Nation and Mother Jones.
	ProPublica spent a number of years researching to try and find out, you know, what actually happened.
	And ISI was contracted to guard gated Jewish communities and Blackwater was brought in to guard the assets, the homeschools.
	homes that white people uh left behind that they wanted to make sure weren't ransacked and this was immediate this was before the chaos came this was right this was immediately done to try and preserve the the assets that were left behind so they were thinking ahead more intelligently than FEMA or the U.S. government was, or more importantly, the city government, the black city government of New Orleans and the almost entirely black bureaucracy.
	Well, my recollection, I remember seeing photographs of this, is that some of the transport facilities that were supposed to be available for black people to leave and clear out if they wanted to were school buses, but they were just all left behind.
	I remember seeing aerial photographs of it looked like scores of school buses parked bumper to bumper with water up to the tops of their wheels.
	Yeah, those were very important photos that circulated on the onset of the chaos that was unfolding for the entire world to see because you said that no one was prepared, but people had already been evacuating when the news of what was a category five hurricane before we searched the podcast, we had to verify initially Katrina was,
	I remember I had some fraternity brothers whose family was from one of the Jefferson parish and they actually came up to where we were living to stay in my college town where I went to school and it was like, oh my gosh, you guys got out and it was fascinating as they got word that their home had been flooded, their business had been absolutely flooded and just hearing just the utter chaos then.
	Well, you know, I guess I was just maligning FEMA because the Superdome, that's a 70,000 seat football stadium.
	It had been officially designated as the public shelter before the hurricane.
	And several thousand people had already got there before the storm.
	And it had been stocked with a certain amount of food and medical supplies.
	But when the waters began to rise, people just poured in from all around and swelled its numbers to approximately 25,000 people.
	That's estimated the number of people who were there.
	And people came, some because their houses were underwater, but others because New Orleans would just quickly collapse into banditry.
	And the problem, of course, the reason for the flooding was that much of New Orleans had been built below sea level, if I'm not mistaken, or pretty much right at sea level.
	And it was protected from rising waters by levees that had been built by the Army Corps of Engineers or that were supposed to be maintained by the Army Corps of Engineers.
	Well, tell me more about what the dynamic there was with the levees and with the flooding.
	Well, New Orleans is a city that – I remember in high school, one of my teachers, he was from Mississippi, Louisiana.
	He went to University of Mississippi.
	And we were learning one day about cataclysms and what could happen.
	This was in the late, early, early 2000s.
	And he said, at some point, New Orleans is going to get hit with a hurricane.
	And it's going to be very bad for the city because of this is where the Mississippi ends, enters the Gulf, and large portions of the city are built below sea level.
	If there's a surge, this is going to be devastating for the city.
	And he then started talking about, this is the first time I even thought about the antiquated nature of the America infrastructure.
	And he said, you know, he had been in the army and he was like, you know, we've spent the 90s, we're off rebuilding all these countries.
	You know, we're doing this, we're getting ready to do this now in Iraq.
	You know, and we're not worried about our infrastructure.
	And the American infrastructure is antiquated.
	And that was-Well, it sure is.
	That was one of the first examples he came up with that.
	I just remember being just being like, oh man, that would be fascinating if-I would just hate to be there if that storm hit.
	on netflix right now uh spike lee gosh about about 15 years ago, Spike Lee came out with this DVD series about Katrina.
	And of course, you know, this was five, six years after Katrina.
	And one of the conspiracy theories I heard.
	it through the grapevine ideas that is predominant in the black community, sir, is that the levees there in the lower ninth ward, which it's a heavily, it's probably the blackest area of New Orleans, those were deliberately destroyed.
	And I've watched the documentary.
	I have not watched the one on Netflix yet, but I remember buying the documentary DVD he did.
	uh like i said 12 13 years ago and it's all about how you heard these boom boom boom and everybody that's interviewed is assures you that this was deliberately done to displace and drive out the area of New Orleans, that pretty much most of the crime happens, that it's like a no-go area.
	You know, it's remarkable that they still believe that.
	It's like the idea that white people invented AIDS so that black people would get it and die, and that black doctors were deliberately infecting black babies with AIDS as soon as they were born.
	All of these cuckoo things.
	This food or that drink is laced with some kind of contraceptive that will sterilize black men only.
	All of these utterly cuckoo ideas.
	But the idea that, yes, white people somehow blew up the levees to kill black people or to clear them out of the city.
	Yes, but in any case, the flood waters did rise.
	And the result was just so much widespread looting.
	And these days people say, well, you know, they had to go get food.
	But I remember very distinctly videos, video clips of blacks happily wading through waist-deep water, holding big-screen television sets over their heads.
	And there was a video of in the Walmart in the lower garden district, people grabbing things just as quick as they can, smashing over jewelry cabinets, scooping up double handfuls.
	One man packed his van so full of electronic equipment he couldn't even shutut the door.
	And then there was some teenage girl who passed out face down.
	And you can see people just stepping over her.
	And a man stopped to roll her over onto her back and she vomited some kind of pink stuff.
	But also an NDC correspondent was filming black uniformed police officers strolling through the aisles, filming shopping carts.
	I guess they didn't have that much water there.
	And one store.
	A policeman broke the glass on the DVD case very kindly so that civilians would not cut themselves trying to break it.
	But then one woman is stocking up on makeup.
	up you know that's an absolute necessity when you're starving to death you got to have makeup you know if you can starve you got to look good have nice false eyelashes and she says this is also on video she says wow the police are looting too so it must be legal great great stuff of course on September 1st so that would have been yes that would have been two days it would have been two days after landfall Mayor Ray Nagan,
	he called the entire police force off of rescue work and ordered to secure the city because everything was so bad.
	But you'll recall how the force responded, an estimated 200 officers just walked off the job.
	They said they'd lost everything.
	They didn't feel like it was worth going back to take fire from looters and maybe lose their lives.
	That's what the chief of the Louisiana State Police explained.
	And a London Times, the London Times estimated that one in five officers just walked off the job.
	And some of them who stayed on were pretty useless.
	When Debbie Durso, a tourist from Michigan, asked a police officer for help, he told her, go to hell.
	It's every man for himself here.
	And what's interesting, Mr. Taylor, as you're telling the story about what happened as the water started to rise, it wasn't as if people didn't know that there was a crisis waiting to happen in New Orleans.
	One of the fascinating things in Michael Eric Dyson's book, Come Hell or High Water, which again is basically a polemic against white people for not doing enough to help blacks out, he points out, sir, that in 2001, a FEMA report concluded that a catastrophic hurricane in New Orleans was among the three likeliest disasters facing the country.
	Wow.
	There had been in December of.
	2001, Scientific America wrote an article saying that a major hurricane could swamp New Orleans under 20 feet of water, killing thousands.
	In December of 2001, the Houston Chronicle ran a story titled Keeping its head above water, New Orleans faces doom day scenario in which a severe hurricane would strand 250,000 people or more.
	probably kill one of the 10 left behind as the city drowned under 20 feet of water.
	And then it accurately predicted that thousands of refugees would end up in Houston, as is what happened.
	I mean, one of the things about Katrina.
	that is you're telling the story about what happened when it reached landfall, a lot of the refugees that were at the Superdome and also at the Ernest Moriel Convention Center, I believe that was the first black mayor that the convention center is named after in New Orleans.
	Oh, yes.
	Moriel.
	That's right.
	They were then sent to Houston, to the Astrodome.
	The Astrodome was at one point considered the eighth wonder of the world.
	It was one of the biggest indoor.
	football facilities.
	I think that's where the Houston Orioles and the Houston Astros of the Major League Baseball played.
	That was an area for evacuees where they set up a massive facility for displaced people from not just New Orleans, but also Mississippi, which was the hardest hit area.
	And Barbara Bush, real quick, this is a funny story.
	Barbara Bush was touring the Astros, the Astrodome, and she said something kind of pretentious, sanctimonious.
	She said, I bet these accommodations are better than what they knew at home.
	Do you remember that?
	No, I didn't remember that.
	That's when people, that's when people, the blacks who had left New Orleans were being put up there.
	No, I don't remember that.
	They were put up at the Astrodome.
	And she said something just really awful.
	But it was just like, oof, that's probably the worst thing that the Bush family said.
	Well, you know, as far as the levies are concerned.
	There were more than 80 miles of levees and flood walls in various places around the city.
	And the primary responsibility for design, construction, and maintenance was the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
	Correct.
	Now, apparently, the local New Orleans district that has a levee board and a sewage and water board managed some of the smaller levees and drainage canals and pumps and things like that.
	But the main thing was the federal government.
	So if those levees did not hold, and as you say, it had been predicted for years that this was a possible major catastrophe, I guess responsibility for that really, you have to.
	hang that around the neck of the united states government well i'll tell you michael michael uh michael eric dyson in his book chapter called levies and lies he talks about uh how much money had been allocated to fix these levees and they had spent a quarter of a billion dollars in the early part of 2000 to try and uh reinforce them for a new pumping station but most importantly a 750 million dollar project for Lake Pontchatran.
	That was the lake that basically capsized.
	And then.
	Capsized.
	You – It overflowed?
	It overflowed the crisis.
	And it turned the city into a bowl basically where all the water just over – just flooded in.
	Forgive the momentary breach and nomenclature.
	Gosh, you sounded like that congressman who was afraid that the island of Guam would capsize it.
	He loaded up too many soldiers and trucks on it.
	The infrastructure did not – was not properly maintained because as – Dyson claims, a lot of the money was diverted to the GWOT, the Global War on Terror.
	Because at that point, you have to remember this is.
	a different era in the United States, guys, ladies and gentlemen.
	I don't know how different.
	Well, we're off nation building abroad while this was one of the fascinating things that we're going to talk about in this podcast because you had so many contractors within the, who had been serving, National Guardsmen who had been over in Fallujah and Baghdad.
	And then all of a sudden, they are.
	They're now in New Orleans.
	They're now in America and they're seeing the conditions of an American city in utter chaos.
	Well, for what?
	For whatever reason, and it really is a black eye for the Army Corps of Engineers that they did not maintain these levees, although who knows?
	Maybe it was like the surge in Japan after the tsunami when the nuclear centers, they had protective walls, but they had just never thought that they would ever get a surge of that kind.
	So maybe it was one of those things that just hadn't thought about sufficiently.
	In any case, it was the U.S. government's job to maintain these levees.
	They didn't.
	So the water comes up.
	And one of the news articles that I remember seeing at the time was a guy, a Brit from Liverpool, told the BBC News, a bunch of stranded women were stuck on a rooftop.
	This is a flooded hotel.
	And they saw a group of black officers sort of boating along.
	And they said, help us, help us out, help us get away.
	And they told the BBC, the response from down below was, well, show us what you got.
	And they did signs for them to lift up their shirts and show their breasts.
	And when the girls said, no, no, wait, they said, okay, that's fine.
	And they just kept off on down the road.
	That's the sort of help that they got from the authorities.
	Well, part of the problems is that New Orleans had had only black mayors ever since 1978.
	That's right.
	And I guess that was Mayor Morial.
	He is the famous first black mayor of New Orleans.
	That's right.
	And they had spent decades making the police force as black as possible.
	And it established a city residency requirement.
	And this would keep suburban whites from applying for jobs.
	And they, of course, because whites weren't applying anymore, they lowered the recruitment standards.
	And Katrina blew away any pretense that the force they ended up with was competent at all.
	So this is what you get from these black affirmative action police officers that said one in five just walked off the job and said, hell with this.
	And that's the way some of them behaved when people were in distress.
	And nice guys.
	An important point to buttress what you're saying, sir, is that the police chief at the time was a gentleman by the name of Eddie Compass.
	He was a black, a black male.
	Yeah.
	And he was one of the people, along with Ray Nagan, who was being interviewed ad nauseam by the national and international media.
	And he was telling people about the horrors that were ongoing at the convention center and at the superdome.
	I mean, this is where the refugees were.
	Exactly.
	This is where the displaced.
	And again, it's really important to go back and talk about the people who stayed behind.
	It was largely the black underclass of New Orleans, which is sizable.
	I mean, again, this is a city with a lot of poverty and the lower ninth ward.
	had about 20,000 residents.
	36% lived under the poverty line.
	These were people who worked in the hotel industry.
	Because at this point, a lot of them didn't work at all they want a lot of them did not work at all but the important point about new orleans in 2005 is that it was pretty much a white black city like a lot of the south was at that point you know you didn't have there wasn't as much construction going on so there wasn't a need for hispanic uh illegal alien labor as would come in 2006 when ray nagan the mayor famously said we got to make sure that new orleans remains a chocolate
	city because there were so many illegals coming in who were doing it.
	Even a whole bunch of Hispanics came in, a certain number of whites too.
	And he didn't want to hear about that.
	The brothers have got to get these jobs.
	Well, the brothers were not prepared to do the jobs.
	These were some jobs that they weren't going to do.
	So these were the people who were seeking shelter at the Superdome.
	And initially, the stories that we start to hear were of unspeakable horrors, that there were bodies everywhere.
	Eddie Compass, he goes on Oprah.
	And this is still available on Oprah.com, which I cannot believe.
	But I found this because Oprah basically did a travel dialogue.
	She was one of the main people who in the media at the time was, she had the megaphone and she was saying we got to help these poor black people out and the police chief who hadn't slept in five days she's down there she said that uh he said that 80 of the force is homeless the police because as you said well 80 of the of the force i see that they're their houses they can't uh because as you said correctly um for those who aren't familiar with louisiana there are parishes not cities uh not counties that's incorrect
	and Orleans parish.
	So you had to live in Orleans parish.
	A lot of the other parishes, as we'll talk about, they basically formed, I don't want to say vigilante groups, but the leader, the sheriffss of these parishes they were hearing these horror stories about what was happening in orleans parish in downtown new orleans and they blockaded the roads for people trying to get in because they were terrified of looting of violence of criminal acts that we were being told were happening throughout the lawless city of new orleans by mayor nagan and
	by chief compass and chief compass he tells uh he tells oprah just hours earlier after one of his officers had committed suicide he said he escorted us into the city and he said prepare yourself for the worst opra Oprah.
	He said he believes there are easily thousands of dead people in the city.
	He's especially disturbed by what he saw inside the Superdome.
	The horrors there will haunt him for the rest of his life.
	Quote, we had little babies in there, little babies getting raped.
	You know how frustrating it is to be the chief of police knowing inside these things are being done and you don't have enough manpower to go in there, end quote.
	Mr. Taylor, this is still available on Oprah.com.
	Well, people dispute that now, and I'm not sure it was as bad as that.
	We published another article besides the one that I wrote.
	It was called Katrina Diary.
	It was by a guy who did go to the Super Bowl.
	I'm sorry, to the Superdome.
	The Superdome.
	Excuse me.
	And he wrote about everything that he saw.
	And one of the things he did see was some guy committed suicide by taking a swan dive off one of the very top tiers and went kosplat.
	That is a well-established fact.
	But apparently the first refugees...
	That was to say on Sunday of August 28.
	And the last finally left on Saturday, September 3.
	So some people spent nearly a week there.
	And of course, everything was looted, destroyed, the toilets overflowed to the point where the place was known as the sewer dome.
	And these were some really, apparently there were a number of whites there, but very few American whites.
	The whites that you hear about were tourists who got stuck.
	And a group of about 30 British students were among the very small number of whites.
	And they spent four harrowing days.
	Jamie Trout, he's 22 years old at the time.
	He was an economics major and he said it was something like out of the Lord of the Flies., with people insulting us and shouting racial abuse because we were white.
	All the girls sat in the middle, while the boys sat on the outside with chairs as protection.
	And we were absolutely terrified.
	And a National Guardsman finally recognized how dangerous the threat was to white people and moved these British under guard to the baseball area, which for whatever reason was safer.
	And one of them says the army warned us to keep our bags close and grip them tight, one of the Brits said, as they were escorted out 20-year-old Jane Wheeled and credited one man in particular and I believe you tried to track this guy down said Sergeant Garland Ogden with getting the British safely out he went against a lot of the rules to get us moved she said is that the guy that you were trying to try to find this is one of those sad stories because when all this was happening I
	was reading going back to 2005, the best coverage of what was happening in New Orleans was in The Mirror and and in other foreign press, The Independent.
	That's still the way.
	Still the way.
	Yeah.
	And I don't remember the Australian press.
	press but because you had this again new orleans is a place that people go ladies and gentlemen you go to party you go to bourbon street you go to the french quarter laissez les bon however you say uh laissez les bon temps rouler there you go let the good times roll les bon rouler okay let the good times roll that's what goes down and down in new orleans i have been there at the start of 2005 and had a great time.
	And so that's why it was so fascinating to watch all the news reporters being like, oh, I just been down there.
	I was in that same spot.
	But the foreign press was particularly interested in this very small container.
	Very small contingent, sir, of white Europeans, white Australians who had formed a contingent at the Superdome to protect themselves.
	And I think in your article, African Ormits, you wrote about how they formed a perimeter around them.
	That's right.
	Yeah.
	There was one of them.
	He says this, a 32-year-old man from Kangaroo Point in Brisbane.
	His name was Bud Hopes.
	He said there were 65 of us all together.
	So we were able to look after each other, especially the girls who were being grabbed and threatened.
	They organized escorts for the women who had to go to the toilet or for food and they set up a roster of men to stand guard while the others slept we sat through the night just watching each other not knowing if we would be alive in the morning this guy hope says 98 of the people around the world are good in that place 98 of the people were bad.
	So, yeah, Bud was the ringleader of this international, and there were some American, there were some whites from America that were there.
	In fact, one of the guys who was part of that contingent, it became known as the Section 113 Group.
	That's where they hold up at the Superdome.
	dome is a guy named uh paul harris he he ended up that was an american was an american this this whippy white liberal who wrote a book called diary from the dome reflections on fear and privilege during katana and he wrote about how bud was the leader the gentleman you just alluded to yes okay that quote and bud befriended this this this national guardsman who had been the military for 30 years, Garland Hodgton.
	And Garland, like you said, he pulled a lot of strings.
	And the other day, I was just looking online to see if I could find some stuff about him.
	And I found these photos of the contingent of white people who had survived the Superdome along with their hero Garland Ogiton and kind of teared up a little bit thinking about that episode because he went against orders to get these whites out of the Superdome.
	I guess that was in effect special, it was special treatment.
	got them out before their time, but he realized what terrible danger they were in from all of these blacks.
	Well, I always wanted to know because...
	So about 10 years ago, I encountered a story and it was about Bud and Garland Ogden reuniting in New Orleans.
	And it was just this really sweet story published in the Australian press.
	So before we started, I decided to look him up and he regrettably passed away in 2023 and he never told his story.
	And it's a simple question, sir.
	What did you see?
	What did you encounter within your time there as a National Guardsman at the Superdome that compelled you to get these people out?
	Well, I think we can imagine.
	But of course, this is a terrible indictment of the American press, nobody ever wanted to hear his story.
	I'm sure they were terrified of the prospect of having to listen to what that guy would say.
	But oh, that's part of it.
	We just brush under the carpet.
	Absolutely brush under the carpet.
	Of course, the news reports were, of course, that when the National Guard did come in, there was, you know, they had some of them had been in Iraq and let's see here's one the Army Times on September 2nd second the headline of the issue that day was troops begin combat operations
	in New Orleans I'll never forget that headline I will yes you never forget that headline because it's like wait a second what yes and the article was about the Louisiana National Guard massing near the Superdome in preparation for a citywide security mission this place is going to look like little Somalia said Brigadier General Gary Jones.
	And another guy, he was with the 527th Engineering Battalion.
	He said, I never thought that as a National Guardsman, I would be shot at by other Americans.
	I never thought I'd have to carry a rifle when on a hurricane relief mission.
	This is a disgrace.
	Another guard, Cliff Ferguson, he said, you have to think about whether it's worth risking your life for someone who will turn around and shoot you.
	We didn't come here to fight a war.
	We came here to help.
	And that's the kind of reception they got from black people in New Orleans.
	What's fascinating, Mr. Taylor, is not only do you have combat operations taking place from the federal government response, but as an article.
	in The Guardian that was published on September 11, 2005 made clear, the title is Mercenaries Guard Homes of the Rich in New Orleans.
	Hundreds of mercenaries have descended on New Orleans to guard the property of the city's millionaires from looters.
	This was ISI from Israel.
	This was Blackwater.
	And this quote is really interesting to contemplate David Reagan, 52, a semi-retired U.S. Army colonel from Huntsville, Alabama, who fought in the first Gulf War and is commander of Blackwater's operations in the city, refused to say how many men he had in New Orleans, but indicated it was in the hundreds.
	Wow.
	Hundreds asked if they had encountered many looters so far.
	Mr. Reagan said the sight of his heavily armed men, a pump action shotgun was propped up against the wall near to where he was standing, was enough to put most people off.
	I mean, this article, I had never actually read this article until this morning.
	And to understand how quickly Blackwater was able to set up operations within the city before, mind you, those so-called combat operations began, it made me think that it was a very difficult time.
	makes you aware of the lawlessness and it puts into proper perspective, I think, what Eddie Compass and what Ray Nagan, what they were talking.
	about, what they were seeing as they're going on national TV begging for help because as you said, the police, the heavily black police force walked off their jobs to join the looting.
	Yeah.
	Well, you know, on Wednesday along a stretch of Highway 10, there were hundreds of volunteer firefighters, auxiliary coast guardsmen.
	and local citizens with boats ready to reach people and save them, but they could not set out because of sniper fire.
	Mayor Joy Broussard, I'm sorry, Major Joy Broussard, the Louisiana State Fisheries and Wildlife Division, he said, we're trying to do our job here, but we can't if they're shooting at us.
	We don't know who and we don't know why, but we don't want to get in a situation of having to return fire.
	Now, these are some of the reports that Lefties have since tried to poop-poo or downplay or say were imaginary.
	But this guy, Major Joy Broussard, he says, we're not going.
	because people are shooting at us.
	I don't think he made that up.
	No, and there are two books actually that were published about the – And they're very heroic reading.
	I've got them somewhere.
	I haven't read them in about a decade, but they talk about the security measures that needed to be put in place to protect the hospitals from being looted, obviously because of the surplus of medicine that existed, of pills, and just the danger of trying to evacuate those who were on life support.
	Because at the time, it's important to point this out.
	The city lost power.
	The city hall to maintain a proper form of chain of command and government, they had to abandon City Hall and go to the Hyatt, one of the only places that had power for the first few nights.
	I remember watching Fox News and, oh my gosh, that Shepard Smith, I think, was down there.
	And he kept talking about how, yeah, the Hyatt, this is pretty much the only place that's safe in New Orleans right now because we've got police everywhere.
	It's where City Hall has temporarily been relocated.
	And we, a lot of the initial stories were about trying to get help.
	to get those who were at the hospitals out of the city to where they could go, where they could actually get life-sustaining help because you just, you were running out of power at the time where there's still flood water.
	Well, apparently they made a public announcement at the Superdome and they said, be prepared for blackouts coming.
	And these British people that I was talking about earlier and the Australians, they reported when they heard that, they figured, this is curtains.
	We are finished.
	Some of them got down on their knees and prayed and their prayers were answered and there was not a blackout after all.
	But even with the lights on, they were terrified.
	They had absolutely no idea what was going to happen if the lights went out in the Superdome.
	I guess they had some sort of independent power supply.
	In any case, apparently the lights never went out there.
	If they did, they just flickered off and they flickered back on.
	Yeah, you know, a lot of the crazier stories, though, sir, and I don't know how much you want to get into this because, as I said, the role of the national press in September was to spend as much resources trying to retcon what happened.
	And they talked about how, oh, the death was exaggerated.
	The violence was exaggerated.
	It was just all these poor beleaguered blacks left behind who were had an insufficient amount of white privilege to protect them.
	That's all images you're seeing.
	Whereas at the end of, at the end of.
	2005, I remember reading an article, let me pull it up here for you, and it was published in NPR.
	And it was December 21st, 2005, more stories emerge of rapes in post-Katrina chaos.
	And it starts off, it says, law enforcement authorities dismissed early reports of widespread rapes in New Orleans during the lawless days following Katrina.
	But a growing body of evidence suggests there were more storm-related sexual assaults than previously known.
	And the rest of the article talked about people being afraid to come forward, about what had transpired.
	Again, because he said, for a few days before the federal government shows up, before FEMA shows up, the police were engaging in the looting and rioting.
	Yes.
	There's a famous video where a white reporter is actually talking to a black female cop who's participating in the looting.
	And he's just incredulous.
	He's looking at her like, what do you got there?
	What are you doing?
	Aren't you supposed to be maintaining law and order?
	And the woman doesn't say anything.
	And you wonder, gosh, did she get that trip to Las Vegas?
	Well, we haven't talked about that yet, have we?
	You did mention it.
	You did mention it.
	But going back to the convention center, I think it's very important to point out that a lot of the initial stories that were percolating online about how bad things were were that they were finding these refrigerator units full of bodies.
	And these stories then just disappear.
	Well, you know, that seems to be the case.
	I did a little research about deaths at the convention center.
	That was a place that was not set up originally for refugees, but it was above high water.
	And they also, it was a place that.
	was fairly sheltered and protected.
	A lot of people showed up there.
	But initially, there were all kinds of stories about massive rapes and killings and shootings.
	But then all of that sort of faded away.
	And I remember reading an article in which a refrigerator truck had to pull up in front of the convention center and load it up with bodies.
	And somebody saying to a National Guardsman, this is a reporter, could I go in and see what you're doing?
	He says, nope, nope, no photographs allowed here.
	So who knows what really happened?
	But according to reports, official reports later, there was only one death.
	And who knows how many rapes?
	Only one death in the convention center.
	And it was thought to be a death of natural causes.
	No, I beg your pardon.
	There were five deaths.
	One was a homicide.
	One was a confirmed homicide.
	And the rest were of natural causes.
	Now, did I talk about Reagan's offer to pay for the entire police force to go on vacation just a week after?
	I did.
	Okay.
	All right.
	I'm getting senile.
	He even asked FEMA to pay for it.
	FEMA said, not on your life.
	But anyway, yes, these – it – Now, to me, I would argue this.
	Even if some of the things reported turned out not to be true, the American media, and we know, the American media is certainly not primed to write unflattering things about blacks.
	The American media certainly reported this stuff as if it were entirely true because it was, let's face it, it was plausible.
	I think that's an important aspect of this too.
	Now, of course, people are going to say, oh, the American media are a bunch of fascists and white racists, and that's why they passed along these untrue rumors as fact.
	Well, no, they would be the last people to try to pass along something that makes black people look bad, but they figured, well, you leave them alone in a crisis like this.
	I can believe just about anything bad that could have gone wrong.
	You know, it's fascinating to go back and think about the few thought criminals at the time, yourself writing African or Myths.
	Steve Saylor wrote a piece that he noticed way too much in regards to what happened in New Orleans.
	Yeah.
	I'd like you just read a couple lines that he has from his piece, because it's very interesting.
	He said, judging from their economic and educational statistics, New Orleans blacks are not even an above average group of African Americans, such as you find in Atlanta or Seattle, but more like Miami or Milwaukee's.
	About half or below the poverty line, with the national black average IQ around 85, New Orleans mean black IQ.
	would probably be in the lower 80s or upper 70s.
	What's funny is I can see Steve writing that without even realizing what he's writing.
	So well, not quite realizing how poisonous and what this metro glitter is that you just wrote.
	this.
	This is in the next paragraph.
	And of course, nobody, despite what they may say, is all that much startled that when the city's whites and more prosperous and or foresightful blacks left, New Orleans quickly turned into its demographic analogue, Haiti.
	where 2004's tropical storm Gene unleashed similar mayhem and chaos.
	Bill Quigley, a law professor at Loyola of New Orleans, who represents political prisoners in Haiti, stayed behind with his wife, who is a nurse.
	He noted, quote, I had always hoped that Haiti would become more like New Orleans.
	But what happened is New Orleans has become more like Haiti here recently end quote.
	Wow.
	And I think that I think that is that encapsulates so much of what we saw happening in a city.
	And it's why what you wrote in Africa in our Mist is so important because you had, as you said, since 1978, you had an entrenched and ensconced black political machine basically running the city of New Orleans.
	You had this detente with the white business interests within the city who they all fled.
	And the first thing that they do when they make it to their safe lodgings is they contract out ISI in Blackwater to go guard their property, whether it's their residential or their business interests within the city.
	Because they're watching and they're seeing the people who are going in the Superdome.
	They're seeing the people who are going in the convention center, sir.
	And you're realizing, ooh, this is the people who live in the New York.
	the lower ninth ward we never go near um they're now the primary inhabitants of a city that is now being supposed to be protected by this black political machine that has done everything they can to make the city blacker, blacker, blacker in terms of political clout.
	Well, you know, one of the things that was repeated over and over and over again was that to the extent that there was a rescue effort, federal or local, it was biased in favor of whites who had white privilege and it was the black people who suffered worst.
	And this is all a spectacularly horrible, racist, white act of viciousness against the black people of Louisiana.
	However, I remember hearing about this sometime afterwards and I looked it up to confirm it just today.
	And there is an official death toll for the Louisiana state as a whole.
	It was 1,577, which is not, you know, I not all that, I mean, that's a lot of dead people, but it's not as bad as sometimes people might have thought who were reading about the news at the time.
	In the case of New Orleans, New Orleans alone, the official death toll was 682.
	67% of those who died were black.
	Now, guess what the percentage of the population that was black at the time?
	Well, you know, so it's no suspense to you, but...
	29% of the people who died were white, and about 28% of the people who lived there were white.
	So the deaths per capita by race are almost exactly what you would expect.
	Despite the fact that, as we were talking about earlier, the people who stayed behind were all of these black people in the poor quarter who were living in the lower part where they had most of the flooding.
	So if there was a disproportionate effort to save people, if it ends up that on a per capita basis, whites are just as likely to die as black, you can hardly accuse the rescue effort of having been racist.
	I think this is a very important thing.
	White people were just as likely in the city of New Orleans to die as a part of the problem here in this Katrina as black people were.
	This completely refutes the idea that black people were just left behind and nobody cared about them.
	No, and I mean, it's so important to go back and look at the people who were left behind.
	And I mean, that's why your piece was so important and just the lessons of what we learned about the complete breakdown in civility that happened virtually overnight.
	I mean, that's the left.
	still functions under this idea that, you know, race is a social construct when in reality it's equality.
	And you look at the way that Mother Jones, you know, your friends from ProPublica, and I say that with tongues of ironic means.
	Ironically, yes, sardonically.
	They spent a couple years researching everything that they could about what Blackwater did.
	And again, Blackwater is there the night the storm hits.
	And they're there.
	They set up a headquarters in downtown New Orleans, as Mother Jones wrote.
	armed as they would be in Iraq with automatic rifles, guns strapped to their legs and pockets overflowing with ammo.
	They, uh, contractors drove around in SUVs and unmarked cars with no license plate.
	When asked what authority they were operating under, one.
	One guy said, we're on contract with the Department of Homeland Security.
	Then pointing out to one of his comrades, he said, he was even deputized by the governor of the state of Louisiana.
	We can make arrest and use lethal force if we deem it necessary.
	The man then held up the gold Louisiana law enforcement badge he wore around his neck.
	This was from a piece called The Secret History of Hurricane Katrina, published August 28, 2009.
	You think that was true or was this guy just giving him the robo-dope?
	You know, again, I mean, it's what I would say if somebody challenged.
	I mean, it could just be a piece of paper that he had laminated at a Walmart, you know, in Baton Rouge or something.
	and just made it as a joke.
	But the point is, we know from that other article that we just mentioned from the Nation that there were at best hundreds of Blackwater operatives and ISI was there patrolling the gated Jewish communities.
	But what Steve Saylor writes in this piece, and again, you know, Steve, famous for noticing, he's got that book out noticing.
	His piece is actually very interesting to read because he just comes out and says some fascinating things.
	I'd like to read from this piece.
	By all means.
	Yeah, he says, nor is it surprising that the black refugees of the Superdome and the Convention Center failed to get themselves organized to make conditions more livable.
	Poor black people seldom cooperate well with each other because they don't trust other blacks much for the perfectly rational reason that they commit large numbers of crimes against each other.
	Again, as he's writing that, I'm wondering if he realizes what he's writing.
	I mean, he's basically excoring, he's basically waging war on what we're mandated to believe and what our lying eyes aren't showing us transpire.
	And this was one of the reasons why John Porhoritz came out and why Videre, in a lot of ways in 2005, became persona non grata because of what he writes next.
	But if all these disasters in New Orleans should have been expected.
	As I mentioned earlier, it was known in the early 2000s that a hurricane would be devastating.
	He then writes, why did nobody at any level of government act as if they expected them?
	Because to anticipate the problems would require noticing that racial differences are relevant.
	And that can ruin one's career.
	Government bodies naturally decay rapidly in competence, especially when free discussion of unpleasant realities is suppressed.
	New Orleans should remind us all that we still live in a harsh world.
	The make-believe that passes for public discourse, even at the elite level, simply isn't adequate for protecting American citizens.
	Taylor, I think that's why you had that just almost caustic headline of they are preparing for combat operations in New Orleans.
	And you're reading that too.
	Well, why?
	Because, again, we refuse to admit the racial realities that govern independently from the way that the media and the way that our political leaders want us to believe.
	That's why all these white people immediately hired Israeli or Blackwater security to go in and protect their assets.
	that's very interesting because any Jewish casualties would have been classified as white but you have
	you know, that's very interesting that that sailor points out something that is absolutely 100% true.
	If the authorities refuse to understand the realities of race, they simply cannot govern.
	As I've often said, trying to build a multi-racial society without understanding race differences is like trying to go to the moon and pretending that there's no such thing as gravity.
	It's just going to be a failure right from the start.
	And of course, in writing about this hurricane and in the article that came out, my conclusion, and this is my conclusion, I stated things perhaps even more harshly than Steve Saylor did because I'm not quite as kid glove as Steve Saylor.
	But I said, the story is.
	The races are different.
	Blacks and whites are different.
	When blacks are left entirely to their own devices, Western civilization, any kind of civilization, disappears.
	And in a crisis, it disappears overnight.
	And I believe, and I sometimes regret having said something as harsh as that, because this is the quotation that's hung around my neck every time somebody says, oh, that Taylor, he's a wicked.
	hater of black people.
	I stand by that.
	I mean, without some kind of civilizational armature around them, American blacks or Haitian blacks, or where do you find them, African blacks, there's nothing that you could call civilization.
	And if there is an armature that supports things and keeps things running along more or less in Detroit or in Memphis, whatever it is you have a large number of blacks, if the white presence disappears and then there's a crisis, you get exactly what happened in New Orleans.
	I stand by that observation and I think it's 100% true.
	Yeah, I think the ultimate lesson of Katrina also is seeing how many of the private contractors came in.
	I just was glancing at another NPR article that was lamenting that the police force completely failed.
	And only because Blackwater was brought in.
	And at one point, there were more than 600 Blackwater operatives who were guarding the Sheridan, who were guarding the Hyatt, who were retaking the city, basically.
	600?
	600 Blackwater?
	600 Blackwater operatives.
	And I know this was from an article published by NPR.
	It was called Blackwater Eyes Domestic Contracts in the U.S. from September 26, 2007.
	And they landed a $73 million contract from 2007.
	fema to uh to do recovery operations throughout the area well wait wait when they came when blackwater came in before the hurricane stru's truck, were they hired by FEMA?
	They were in fact hired by FEMA because I got the impression that at least they eventually land the contract because they were helping fish people out of the water, off the rooftops.
	They were going around.
	They had their own Blackhawk fleet.
	They were the ones who were going around surveying the city.
	They actually took Oprah up in a Blackhawk helicopter to show her the devastation.
	And I'm sure you remember that famous photo of George W. Bush in Air Force One as he's looking down at the city.
	He's staring out the window.
	He's staring down the city.
	And I've long hoped that he thought in his deepest recesses of his brains, you know, that Madison Grant, that Carlton Putnam, they were white.
	Mr. Kersey, keep dreaming.
	Keep dreaming.
	You know, nobody has never heard of Madison Grant.
	He's never heard of Carlton Putnam.
	They do have a power of good to read some of that stuff.
	No, no, that guy, that guy.
	I think there's not much going on between his ears.
	as you said, I mean, to this day, George W. Bush said, I think one of the definitive, definitive ways to close up a conversation about Katrina, because George W. Bush presided over some really harrowing things in his presidency.
	9-11, of course, in September of 2001, but during a telethon, during a television program to raise money for Katrina, sir, Michael Myers, the comedian and actor, and Kanye West were pleading with people to donate to help out those impacted by Hurricane Katrina.
	And then Kanye West famously dead pans, George W. Bush doesn't care about black people.
	And as I'm sure you may recall, George W. Bush said later that that was the worst moment of his presidency.
	That was in 2010.
	he was promoting his book of memoirs.
	He was out of office by then.
	And he says, yes, having Kanye West.
	I mean, at that time, who cared to give a hoot about Kanye West?
	He's this tin pot black stand-up performer.
	And Kanye West says he doesn't care about black people.
	And George W. Bush.
	That guy, during his presidency, he presided over two invasions, Afghanistan in 2001, Iraq in 2000 and 2003, which lasted for 20 years and was a complete disaster.
	And in 2007, 2008, we had the housing and the financial crisis, the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.
	We had the torture scandal in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and nobody talks about it anymore, but that was a pretty big scandal at the time.
	And as you said, September 11, 3,000 Americans die in this astonishing attack.
	And for George W. Bush, the worst moment of his presidency was when this black guy says, George Bush doesn't care about black people.
	Now this, this is a breathtaking admission of the kind of psychological capitulation that infects, I think, every stratum of our elites and our rulingers in this society today.
	It's just an extraordinary omission of how psychologically emasculated white people are.
	You know, Mr. Taylor, as we wrap it up here, I'd like to ask, as I think you wrote inarguably one of the definitive takes on Katrina, African or Myths.
	And here we are, African or Myths 20 years later.
	What would you say are the ultimate lessons of Katrina that people need to realize and more importantly accept?
	Well, I don't want to repeat myself again, but the races are different.
	The races are not only different, but 20 years later, and I suspect 40 years years later, 60 years later, it's not going to be any different.
	And I've been saying this for some time.
	The only solution is for we as white people to go our own way.
	We have to hold our destiny in our hands and stop letting non-whites blame us for their failures when we are not by any means responsible.
	Do you have any parting words?
	Yes, our time's about up here.
	How would you conclude this session on Katrina?
	I think one of the most important things is to look at how the left tried to define the restoration of order and the outcomes.
	And as the government of New Orleans collapsed and descended into, let's just say it was black chaos, it was Haiti, they said, we're going to protect our people.
	That's what the government, that's what the government bodies, that's what the sheriff did of the outlying parishes.
	And the left called that a race war.
	And in reality, it was the leadership of these communities banding together and saying, no, we're not going to let this happen here.
	And well, yes, I remember.
	in the Rodney King riots 1992, Hollywood Hills, all of a sudden, all these liberals who are for gun control for everybody else in America, they show up in their neighborhoods with rifles and pistols.
	When push comes to shove, even the most deluded cuckoo white people know what's dangerous.
	You know, it's funny you say that because Charlton Heston, the former NRA president actor, the late Charlton Heston, he got a couple calls from some of his buddies.
	And they said, hey, Charlie, do you have any guns I could borrow?
	from the LA riots.
	And he said, and he said in his famous voice, no, I'm sorry.
	They're all in use.
	Wow.
	Well, Mr. Kersey, always a pleasure.
	Thank you very much for taking this time on this holiday.
	This is Memorial, I'm sorry, this is Labor Day, and I suspect this won't go up until tomorrow, but thank you so much for all of your insights and all of your knowledge about this very, very important subject that, as you say, is in retrospect being turned upside down and inside out to make us believe things that are absolutely not true.

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