Kamala Harris doesn't care about white people

Way back in 2005, just days after Hurricane Katrina made landfall near New Orleans, a young Kanye West blurted out on live television during a fundraiser with comedian Mike Meyers: “George Bush doesn’t care about black people .”

It may have been an early sign of West's mental instability, but at the time it ultimately defined the media narrative about Katrina and Bush, who were criticized by the media for being indifferent to the fate of New Orleans because it was mostly poor black people, those who affected the fate of New Orleans had been killed or displaced by the storm.

It didn't matter that the root cause of New Orleans' problems during and immediately after Katrina—lack of evacuation, widespread looting, poor emergency response and coordination—was local and state corruption, not FEMA's incompetence. (New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin was later indicted and convicted in federal court on multiple corruption charges.)

But at the moment it didn't matter. The national news media wrongly blamed President Bush. Every major media outlet published a now-infamous photo of him looking out the window of Air Force One at hurricane-ravaged New Orleans, reinforcing the narrative that the president was distant and indifferent to events on the ground.

It became known as Bush's “Katrina moment” and signaled the virtual end of his administration. Democrats won a huge victory in the 2006 midterm elections by relying on Bush's supposedly bland Katrina response and the unpopular war in Iraq, which left the president powerless for his final two years in office.

I bring all this up because what's happening in North Carolina after Hurricane Helene should be Kamala Harris's “Katrina moment.” Her staged photo of her pretending to be working on disaster relief (earbuds not even plugged into phone, notes taken on a blank sheet of paper), along with the lack of FEMA or other government assistance to the storm-ravaged areas in the Western North Carolina Georgia should end its presidential campaign.

While Harris spent the weekend at glitzy campaign events in Las Vegas and Los Angeles and Biden napped on a beach in Delaware, communities in the path of Hurricane Helene were hit by rain and flooding in six southeastern states, the worst such flooding on record ever there were some areas. More than a hundred are dead and thousands are missing. Entire cities were washed away. Millions are without electricity. Across the region, roads and bridges have been washed out, making it difficult to provide clean water and food to stranded communities.

Of course, natural disasters like Hurricane Helene, a Category 4 storm, will definitely cause massive damage and devastation. But it didn't have to be as bad as it got without timely federal aid from the Biden-Harris administration. Military assets could have been stationed from Fort Bragg (recently renamed “Fort Liberty” by the awakened U.S. military) in North Carolina, just a few hundred miles from the hardest-hit areas. Fort Bragg has supported domestic disaster relief efforts for decades. Why isn't it happening now? Why isn't every military helicopter within 500 miles of the affected areas currently in the air?

To be clear: What the people of North Carolina, Georgia and Tennessee need now is evacuation, food and water, shelter – the kinds of things the U.S. military, National Guard and FEMA are best equipped to do. But so far none of this seems to be happening. Why?

Aside from failing to prepare ahead of time for the massive flooding the hurricane would bring to these areas, the question is: why did it take Biden and Harris so long to address the disaster, and why? did they do this in an extremely superficial and dismissive manner? Asked by a reporter on Monday why he and Harris were not in Washington over the weekend to coordinate and command the emergency response, Biden shockingly replied: “I took command. I spent at least two hours on the phone yesterday and the day before.”

This retort, “I've been on the phone for at least two hours,” while Americans are drowning and starving in massive floods, should go down in our history as one of the most callous and shameful statements by an American president.

But at least Biden said something. As of Monday afternoon, Harris hadn't said a word.

It is not lost on anyone that the victims of the flood are overwhelmingly poor white people in Appalachia. Given this fact and Harris and Biden's shocking lack of concern, there is currently far more reason to claim that Harris doesn't care about whites than there ever was to claim that Bush doesn't care about blacks.

Unlike in 2005, you won't hear this from the media. In fact, corporate outlets are far more likely to attack Trump for “making it political” by traveling to Georgia on Monday to help with aid distribution and relief efforts. Delivering comments to the state's media on Monday, Trump announced that he is working with Elon Musk to make the Starlink satellite internet service available to storm-ravaged areas that currently lack communications.

It Is political, and Harris' political message is clear: the victims of Hurricane Helene are white Trump supporters from a red state, so she doesn't actually care what happens to them.