By WAFAA SHURAFA, JULIA FRANKEL and SALLY ABOU ALJOUD, Associated Press

DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip (AP) — As artillery and bombs pound around Gaza’s largest city and Israel promises a punishing new offensive, Palestinians in the city are paralyzed with fear — unsure where to go, when to leave and if they will ever return.

Israel has declared Gaza City, in the north of the territory, to be a combat zone while the military moves forward with plans to overtake it in a campaign to push Hamas into submission. Parts of the city are already considered “red zones,” where Palestinians have been ordered to evacuate ahead of expected heavy fighting. Hamas has been designated as a terrorist organization by the United States, Canada and the European Union.

That has left residents on edge, including many who returned after fleeing the city in the initial stages of the Israel-Hamas war. With Israeli bulldozers razing the ground in occupied neighborhoods and Israeli leaders supporting the mass relocation of Palestinians from Gaza, departing the city now could mean leaving for good. Moving costs thousands of dollars and finding space in the overcrowded south to pitch a tent feels impossible. But staying behind, they say, could be deadly.

“The Israeli forces, when they mark any area by red color and they request the people to leave, they really will destroy it,” said Mohammed Alkurdi, who is sheltering in Gaza City along with hundreds of thousands of other Palestinians.

“So it’s like you decide whether to live or die. It’s very simple like that.”

An impossible choice between staying and fleeing

Since Israel declared the area a combat zone on Friday, a small fraction — some 14,840 Palestinians of the nearly 1 million the U.N. estimates are in Gaza City — have left their homes in the city as of Monday, most to flee south, according to the Site Management Cluster, a joint humanitarian body that coordinates assistance for people in displacement sites.

A fraction of them, about 2,200, have moved to new places within Gaza City after being displaced by Israeli attacks.

Alkurdi, a project manager and consultant, said he can hear Israeli forces from the apartment where he’s sheltering as they “erase the area completely.”

Zeitoun was once Gaza City’s largest neighborhood, filled with markets, schools and clinics. Over the last month, large swaths of it and the neighboring area of Sabra have been flattened, according to satellite photos reviewed by The Associated Press from early August and early September. The photos show that entire blocks that have been pummeled or bulldozed into empty, sandy lots.

“It’s not something partial like before. It’s 100%,” he said. “The house, I’m telling my friends, it keeps dancing all the day. It keeps dancing, going right and left like an earthquake.”

Many of the people in the city moved back to the north during a ceasefire in January, hoping to find their homes intact. Alkurdi’s home was completely destroyed, so he’s now living alone in a western area of the city. His children and wife were able to leave Gaza last year. He said he would flee south if his home fell under an evacuation order.

Amjad Shawa, the director of the Palestinian NGO network, left his home in the upscale Rimal neighborhood in the early days of the war and also returned there with his family in January. He, like Al Kurdi, said his family would likely leave Gaza City if their area receives an evacuation order.

But leaving this time would be different, he said. “Gaza will be leveled and destroyed. Last time, I had my car. There was fuel. Everyone had his income, his money.”

Back then, the cities of Rafah and Khan Younis still stood in southern Gaza.

Now, after months of bombardment, “there is no Rafah. Almost no Khan Younis,” Shawa said.

Leaving is nearly impossible for some

For others — medical workers, older and sick people — leaving Gaza City is nearly impossible.

“The elders, they’re saying we will die here,” Shawa said. “This has pushed the other members of the family to stay, not to leave.”

“My aunt is elderly and can’t walk, and my mother also struggles with mobility. We have so many belongings and no way to manage them. It feels unthinkable,” said Norhan Almuzaini, medical program officer in northern Gaza for the group Medical Aid for Palestinians.

Related Articles

Israel starts calling up reservists as it pushes into initial stages of Gaza City offensive

Leading genocide scholars organization says Israel is committing genocide in Gaza

Trump administration restrictions on Palestinian visa applicants means nearly all would be refused

Israel declares Gaza’s largest city a combat zone as death toll surpasses 63,000

Here’s a look at why it is so hard to end the war in Gaza

Amal Seyam is the general director of the Women’s Affairs Center in Gaza. Originally from the Tuffah neighborhood in eastern Gaza City, her home was destroyed by bombardment. For nearly four months, she has been sheltering in the Nasr neighborhood in the city’s west, where she stays alongside her colleagues inside the women’s center.

Seyam has been displaced five times since the war began — three times within the city and twice to the south, in Rafah and Khan Younis. Each time, she fled with nothing.

When asked if she would consider leaving Gaza City, she said: “I will only leave when everyone who needs me here leaves. As long as there’s a woman who needs me, I am staying. All of Gaza feels like it’s in the red zone now anyway. The bombing is happening meters from us, not kilometers.”

She paused, her voice breaking into tears.

“Many people have started packing. Many have already left. Do you know what displacement means? It means moving once again, building your life once again, buying new things, blankets, tents, all over again.”

This combination of satellite photos from Planet Labs PBC shows the neighborhoods of Zeitoun and Sabra in Gaza City on Jan. 1, 2025, Aug. 1, 2025, and Sept. 2, 2025. (Planet Labs PBC via AP)

Dire conditions persist throughout Gaza

Those who have left Gaza City over the past few months have found dire conditions elsewhere in Gaza. Their arrival has crowded already overflowing tent camps and sent prices of basic goods up.

Iman El-Naya, from Khan Younis, fled Gaza City three months ago. “The beach is crowded. Everywhere is crowded. There’s no hygiene. It’s a struggle to get water and food.”

“I go and stand in line for water. Getting bread is a struggle. Everything is even more expensive after the people from the north came here.”

Shorouk Abu Eid, a pregnant woman from Gaza City, was displaced to Khan Younis four months ago. She said the arrival of more people from the north is creating an even more tragic situation.

“There is no privacy, no peace of mind. Places I used to walk to in five or 10 minutes are taking me around an hour now because of the congestion. There’s barely 10 centimeters between tents.”

Jamal Abu Reily lamented that the bathrooms are overflowing and that there’s so little room for new arrivals.

“How are we going to all fit here? he asked. ”Where are they going to stay? In the sea?”

Frankel reported from Jerusalem and Abou Aljoud from Beirut.

By WAFAA SHURAFA, JULIA FRANKEL and SALLY ABOU ALJOUD, Associated Press

DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip (AP) — As artillery and bombs pound around Gaza’s largest city and Israel promises a punishing new offensive, Palestinians in the city are paralyzed with fear — unsure where to go, when to leave and if they will ever return.

Israel has declared Gaza City, in the north of the territory, to be a combat zone while the military moves forward with plans to overtake it in a campaign to push Hamas into submission. Parts of the city are already considered “red zones,” where Palestinians have been ordered to evacuate ahead of expected heavy fighting. Hamas has been designated as a terrorist organization by the United States, Canada and the European Union.

That has left residents on edge, including many who returned after fleeing the city in the initial stages of the Israel-Hamas war. With Israeli bulldozers razing the ground in occupied neighborhoods and Israeli leaders supporting the mass relocation of Palestinians from Gaza, departing the city now could mean leaving for good. Moving costs thousands of dollars and finding space in the overcrowded south to pitch a tent feels impossible. But staying behind, they say, could be deadly.

“The Israeli forces, when they mark any area by red color and they request the people to leave, they really will destroy it,” said Mohammed Alkurdi, who is sheltering in Gaza City along with hundreds of thousands of other Palestinians.

“So it’s like you decide whether to live or die. It’s very simple like that.”

An impossible choice between staying and fleeing

Since Israel declared the area a combat zone on Friday, a small fraction — some 14,840 Palestinians of the nearly 1 million the U.N. estimates are in Gaza City — have left their homes in the city as of Monday, most to flee south, according to the Site Management Cluster, a joint humanitarian body that coordinates assistance for people in displacement sites.

A fraction of them, about 2,200, have moved to new places within Gaza City after being displaced by Israeli attacks.

Alkurdi, a project manager and consultant, said he can hear Israeli forces from the apartment where he’s sheltering as they “erase the area completely.”

Zeitoun was once Gaza City’s largest neighborhood, filled with markets, schools and clinics. Over the last month, large swaths of it and the neighboring area of Sabra have been flattened, according to satellite photos reviewed by The Associated Press from early August and early September. The photos show that entire blocks that have been pummeled or bulldozed into empty, sandy lots.

“It’s not something partial like before. It’s 100%,” he said. “The house, I’m telling my friends, it keeps dancing all the day. It keeps dancing, going right and left like an earthquake.”

Many of the people in the city moved back to the north during a ceasefire in January, hoping to find their homes intact. Alkurdi’s home was completely destroyed, so he’s now living alone in a western area of the city. His children and wife were able to leave Gaza last year. He said he would flee south if his home fell under an evacuation order.

Amjad Shawa, the director of the Palestinian NGO network, left his home in the upscale Rimal neighborhood in the early days of the war and also returned there with his family in January. He, like Al Kurdi, said his family would likely leave Gaza City if their area receives an evacuation order.

But leaving this time would be different, he said. “Gaza will be leveled and destroyed. Last time, I had my car. There was fuel. Everyone had his income, his money.”

Back then, the cities of Rafah and Khan Younis still stood in southern Gaza.

Now, after months of bombardment, “there is no Rafah. Almost no Khan Younis,” Shawa said.

Leaving is nearly impossible for some

For others — medical workers, older and sick people — leaving Gaza City is nearly impossible.

“The elders, they’re saying we will die here,” Shawa said. “This has pushed the other members of the family to stay, not to leave.”

“My aunt is elderly and can’t walk, and my mother also struggles with mobility. We have so many belongings and no way to manage them. It feels unthinkable,” said Norhan Almuzaini, medical program officer in northern Gaza for the group Medical Aid for Palestinians.

Related Articles

Israel starts calling up reservists as it pushes into initial stages of Gaza City offensive

Leading genocide scholars organization says Israel is committing genocide in Gaza

Trump administration restrictions on Palestinian visa applicants means nearly all would be refused

Israel declares Gaza’s largest city a combat zone as death toll surpasses 63,000

Here’s a look at why it is so hard to end the war in Gaza

Amal Seyam is the general director of the Women’s Affairs Center in Gaza. Originally from the Tuffah neighborhood in eastern Gaza City, her home was destroyed by bombardment. For nearly four months, she has been sheltering in the Nasr neighborhood in the city’s west, where she stays alongside her colleagues inside the women’s center.

Seyam has been displaced five times since the war began — three times within the city and twice to the south, in Rafah and Khan Younis. Each time, she fled with nothing.

When asked if she would consider leaving Gaza City, she said: “I will only leave when everyone who needs me here leaves. As long as there’s a woman who needs me, I am staying. All of Gaza feels like it’s in the red zone now anyway. The bombing is happening meters from us, not kilometers.”

She paused, her voice breaking into tears.

“Many people have started packing. Many have already left. Do you know what displacement means? It means moving once again, building your life once again, buying new things, blankets, tents, all over again.”

This combination of satellite photos from Planet Labs PBC shows the neighborhoods of Zeitoun and Sabra in Gaza City on Jan. 1, 2025, Aug. 1, 2025, and Sept. 2, 2025. (Planet Labs PBC via AP)

Dire conditions persist throughout Gaza

Those who have left Gaza City over the past few months have found dire conditions elsewhere in Gaza. Their arrival has crowded already overflowing tent camps and sent prices of basic goods up.

Iman El-Naya, from Khan Younis, fled Gaza City three months ago. “The beach is crowded. Everywhere is crowded. There’s no hygiene. It’s a struggle to get water and food.”

“I go and stand in line for water. Getting bread is a struggle. Everything is even more expensive after the people from the north came here.”

Shorouk Abu Eid, a pregnant woman from Gaza City, was displaced to Khan Younis four months ago. She said the arrival of more people from the north is creating an even more tragic situation.

“There is no privacy, no peace of mind. Places I used to walk to in five or 10 minutes are taking me around an hour now because of the congestion. There’s barely 10 centimeters between tents.”

Jamal Abu Reily lamented that the bathrooms are overflowing and that there’s so little room for new arrivals.

“How are we going to all fit here? he asked. ”Where are they going to stay? In the sea?”

Frankel reported from Jerusalem and Abou Aljoud from Beirut.

Every time Texas Democrats have a bad election (read: every two years), blame reasonably finds its way to a person whose title suggests quite a lot of culpability—the chair of something called the Texas Democratic Party. 

In reality, this person has little control over what most critics are likely focused on: the selection of individual candidates and their ensuing policy preferences and general quality. Nor does he (lately, it has been a he) hold much sway over the forces that seem to swing modern elections. Presidential politics, the rapidity of human aging, hemispheric economic inequality, Joe Rogan. 

What the state party chair does is tend the infrastructure that underlies a cycle’s more news-making aspects—administering the party’s primary elections, data operations, voter registration efforts, and other nuts and bolts. He may also attempt to set a messaging tone for the party, though, again, with minimal control over candidates and generally a duty to support nominees regardless of ideology.

Into this role of perhaps more responsibility than power steps Kendall Scudder, a 35-year-old Dallasite who handily won the job in a party election this March. Scudder replaces Gilberto Hinojosa, who chaired the party through a 12-year period of brief-lived hope punctuated by profound disappointment. Hinojosa, whose native South Texas veered toward Trump last fall, resigned his position midterm.

Scudder bills himself as both a progressive firebrand and a self-sacrificing devotee of the party. His electoral history includes a successful bid for the Dallas County Appraisal District board last year (a role he resigned to run for party chair), preceded by unsuccessful runs for a solid-blue Dallas state House district, a deep-red Texas Senate seat, and positions on the Huntsville City Council (thrice). Raised in rural northeast Texas by two moms, he was drawn early to politics by attacks on families like his. After college at Sam Houston State, he worked in affordable housing, real estate analytics, and campaign consulting.

The Texas Observer spoke with him in mid-July about Bernie Sanders, the Hill Country flood, and diversity. 

Kendall Scudder addresses attendees at an event in Brownsville on April 12. (Michael Gonzalez/Texas Observer)

TO: What are two specific things you’re doing differently than Gilberto Hinojosa, who ran the party for so long before you?

Well, Gilberto’s a very nice man, and I think you would be hard-pressed to find someone who disagreed with that. He did a great service to the party for a long time. I’m a 35-year-old who sees the role a little bit differently than some of the political establishment. I think that we have done a real disservice to our grass roots. We right now have half of our precinct chair spots in the state of Texas vacant. We have more than 20 percent of our counties without a county chair. If we’re not even walking in the door in these communities, then don’t put your jaw on the floor and be shocked when you start losing there. So I’d say number one is I believe that we have to build a grassroots apparatus in every corner of the state, and that is challenging in Texas because we have 40 midsize cities with 100,000 people in them.

Number two, I believe that the way we unite each other as a party is landing on a message that impacts every single member of our coalition. And so what is a message that resonates with every single person in our coalition? Well, I believe it’s that they all pay bills and they’re all struggling right now to get ahead. When I look at the party that I grew up in, it’s a party for the little people, the working poor. That’s what Sam Rayburn and Lyndon Johnson—the party that put together big, bold progressive ideas to help working people, that is who we are. And we’ve lost sight of that. That’s where I see myself as different from the status quo of the party, that I have a laser focus on what we do every single day to help working people get ahead. And if that means taking on banks and taking on billionaires and doing whatever we have to do to flip the table, I don’t mind disrupting systems to help the little guy.

You recently participated in Bernie Sanders’ “Fighting Oligarchy” tour, and your comments focused on that economic populist message. Looking back, do you think primary voters and party elites made a mistake in not nominating Sanders for the presidency in 2020 or 2016?

You know, I think primaries are snapshots of where people’s heads are in a moment in time. And I think if there were a primary happening today in this country, Bernie Sanders would be doing really well. And I speak as a kid from a small farm town in East Texas. It was just known that if you were a working-class person, you were a Democrat because they were the only party that fought for you, and I think we’ve gotten away from it. Bernie’s done a really good job of staying on that message. Even if you don’t love Bernie, I don’t think you’d argue he didn’t have really good message discipline, and we could benefit from that as a party.

I did read that you worked for the Michael Bloomberg campaign in 2020. Is that who you voted for then, and have your politics shifted since?

No, and I left the Bloomberg campaign whenever I saw the education platform that he put out at that point.

So you did, but it was brief and you left based on policy? 

Yeah, it was very brief, and I think at that point in time, a lot of people were very anxious about Donald Trump and trying to figure out what’s the path out. And there were a lot of us—you know, admit your wrongs—that were looking at this thinking, “Here’s a guy who could probably help fund this and end some of the cash disparity that we’re going to have in resourcing this election.” And then it just became very clear to me that that was not something I was going to be able to stomach.

With this recent reconciliation bill out of Congress, President Donald Trump goes and slashes Medicaid and taxes for billionaires. But there’s another huge portion of the spending that is border and immigration policy. A historic expansion of ICE’s budget, probably enough money to wall off the entire border and put razor buoys in the entire Rio Grande. What should be the state party’s message to the millions of undocumented people and voting family members of undocumented people in Texas?

We are a party that believes that every person should be treated with dignity and respect, doesn’t matter how little they are. Whether that means you are a doctor or a janitor, or you have shown up on the border carrying a baby a thousand miles across the desert on your back, you deserve to be treated with dignity and respect. That’s what this country is built on, this idea of people having an opportunity to pursue a better life. That doesn’t mean we have this open-borders policy where absolutely anyone can come in at any time. But what it does mean is that if you have situations where people are denied entry, they’re treated with respect. It means if you have people who have been living here for years that haven’t been breaking the law, that have been contributing members of our society, we should do what we can to make sure they’re able to stay here because we want them here. We do not want to turn away people who are the quintessential American citizen that we’re all striving to become. 

This may sound basic, but do you think the Texas Democratic Party should still be celebrating racial and ethnic and linguistic diversity in Texas as a value in itself?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that’s what makes Texas great. Texas is, like, like six different states with a whole bunch of different cultures in it. That diversity is what has not only made Texas this fascinating endeavor, but it’s also what has made Texas so successful. You build successful, robust economies with diversity.

To close this out, because it’s going on while we’re talking, do you have any comment on the Hill Country floods?

I think time is going to shine a really bright spotlight on the mismanagement of Republicans, not just in this one instance, but in a period of time, a cycle of bad decisions that they’ve made. From the courthouse to the White House, where they have fought to dismantle government and lost sight of the reality that those governmental systems existed because people were depending on them to save their lives in moments like this. And when you continue to do this over and over, there are going to be repercussions. We’re not talking about blame; we’re talking about accountability. We are doing a disservice to every one of those families and to everyone in the state when we sit around and say that this isn’t about politics. I’m sorry, it is about politics. 

This happened because a bunch of politicians put a message they could put on their campaign mailer ahead of protecting people’s lives. We can use this moment as a pivot point to make sure that doesn’t happen again. Democrats are happy to work with Republicans to do that—or they can spend this moment all on self-preservation, talking about how they aren’t to blame and changing absolutely nothing in the way that they operate. That’s what I suspect they’re going to do. But I just think it’s shortsighted, and it is a huge disservice to Texans.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The post 🎶It’s His Party and He’ll…🎶 appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Every time Texas Democrats have a bad election (read: every two years), blame reasonably finds its way to a person whose title suggests quite a lot of culpability—the chair of something called the Texas Democratic Party. 

In reality, this person has little control over what most critics are likely focused on: the selection of individual candidates and their ensuing policy preferences and general quality. Nor does he (lately, it has been a he) hold much sway over the forces that seem to swing modern elections. Presidential politics, the rapidity of human aging, hemispheric economic inequality, Joe Rogan. 

What the state party chair does is tend the infrastructure that underlies a cycle’s more news-making aspects—administering the party’s primary elections, data operations, voter registration efforts, and other nuts and bolts. He may also attempt to set a messaging tone for the party, though, again, with minimal control over candidates and generally a duty to support nominees regardless of ideology.

Into this role of perhaps more responsibility than power steps Kendall Scudder, a 35-year-old Dallasite who handily won the job in a party election this March. Scudder replaces Gilberto Hinojosa, who chaired the party through a 12-year period of brief-lived hope punctuated by profound disappointment. Hinojosa, whose native South Texas veered toward Trump last fall, resigned his position midterm.

Scudder bills himself as both a progressive firebrand and a self-sacrificing devotee of the party. His electoral history includes a successful bid for the Dallas County Appraisal District board last year (a role he resigned to run for party chair), preceded by unsuccessful runs for a solid-blue Dallas state House district, a deep-red Texas Senate seat, and positions on the Huntsville City Council (thrice). Raised in rural northeast Texas by two moms, he was drawn early to politics by attacks on families like his. After college at Sam Houston State, he worked in affordable housing, real estate analytics, and campaign consulting.

The Texas Observer spoke with him in mid-July about Bernie Sanders, the Hill Country flood, and diversity. 

Kendall Scudder addresses attendees at an event in Brownsville on April 12. (Michael Gonzalez/Texas Observer)

TO: What are two specific things you’re doing differently than Gilberto Hinojosa, who ran the party for so long before you?

Well, Gilberto’s a very nice man, and I think you would be hard-pressed to find someone who disagreed with that. He did a great service to the party for a long time. I’m a 35-year-old who sees the role a little bit differently than some of the political establishment. I think that we have done a real disservice to our grass roots. We right now have half of our precinct chair spots in the state of Texas vacant. We have more than 20 percent of our counties without a county chair. If we’re not even walking in the door in these communities, then don’t put your jaw on the floor and be shocked when you start losing there. So I’d say number one is I believe that we have to build a grassroots apparatus in every corner of the state, and that is challenging in Texas because we have 40 midsize cities with 100,000 people in them.

Number two, I believe that the way we unite each other as a party is landing on a message that impacts every single member of our coalition. And so what is a message that resonates with every single person in our coalition? Well, I believe it’s that they all pay bills and they’re all struggling right now to get ahead. When I look at the party that I grew up in, it’s a party for the little people, the working poor. That’s what Sam Rayburn and Lyndon Johnson—the party that put together big, bold progressive ideas to help working people, that is who we are. And we’ve lost sight of that. That’s where I see myself as different from the status quo of the party, that I have a laser focus on what we do every single day to help working people get ahead. And if that means taking on banks and taking on billionaires and doing whatever we have to do to flip the table, I don’t mind disrupting systems to help the little guy.

You recently participated in Bernie Sanders’ “Fighting Oligarchy” tour, and your comments focused on that economic populist message. Looking back, do you think primary voters and party elites made a mistake in not nominating Sanders for the presidency in 2020 or 2016?

You know, I think primaries are snapshots of where people’s heads are in a moment in time. And I think if there were a primary happening today in this country, Bernie Sanders would be doing really well. And I speak as a kid from a small farm town in East Texas. It was just known that if you were a working-class person, you were a Democrat because they were the only party that fought for you, and I think we’ve gotten away from it. Bernie’s done a really good job of staying on that message. Even if you don’t love Bernie, I don’t think you’d argue he didn’t have really good message discipline, and we could benefit from that as a party.

I did read that you worked for the Michael Bloomberg campaign in 2020. Is that who you voted for then, and have your politics shifted since?

No, and I left the Bloomberg campaign whenever I saw the education platform that he put out at that point.

So you did, but it was brief and you left based on policy? 

Yeah, it was very brief, and I think at that point in time, a lot of people were very anxious about Donald Trump and trying to figure out what’s the path out. And there were a lot of us—you know, admit your wrongs—that were looking at this thinking, “Here’s a guy who could probably help fund this and end some of the cash disparity that we’re going to have in resourcing this election.” And then it just became very clear to me that that was not something I was going to be able to stomach.

With this recent reconciliation bill out of Congress, President Donald Trump goes and slashes Medicaid and taxes for billionaires. But there’s another huge portion of the spending that is border and immigration policy. A historic expansion of ICE’s budget, probably enough money to wall off the entire border and put razor buoys in the entire Rio Grande. What should be the state party’s message to the millions of undocumented people and voting family members of undocumented people in Texas?

We are a party that believes that every person should be treated with dignity and respect, doesn’t matter how little they are. Whether that means you are a doctor or a janitor, or you have shown up on the border carrying a baby a thousand miles across the desert on your back, you deserve to be treated with dignity and respect. That’s what this country is built on, this idea of people having an opportunity to pursue a better life. That doesn’t mean we have this open-borders policy where absolutely anyone can come in at any time. But what it does mean is that if you have situations where people are denied entry, they’re treated with respect. It means if you have people who have been living here for years that haven’t been breaking the law, that have been contributing members of our society, we should do what we can to make sure they’re able to stay here because we want them here. We do not want to turn away people who are the quintessential American citizen that we’re all striving to become. 

This may sound basic, but do you think the Texas Democratic Party should still be celebrating racial and ethnic and linguistic diversity in Texas as a value in itself?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that’s what makes Texas great. Texas is, like, like six different states with a whole bunch of different cultures in it. That diversity is what has not only made Texas this fascinating endeavor, but it’s also what has made Texas so successful. You build successful, robust economies with diversity.

To close this out, because it’s going on while we’re talking, do you have any comment on the Hill Country floods?

I think time is going to shine a really bright spotlight on the mismanagement of Republicans, not just in this one instance, but in a period of time, a cycle of bad decisions that they’ve made. From the courthouse to the White House, where they have fought to dismantle government and lost sight of the reality that those governmental systems existed because people were depending on them to save their lives in moments like this. And when you continue to do this over and over, there are going to be repercussions. We’re not talking about blame; we’re talking about accountability. We are doing a disservice to every one of those families and to everyone in the state when we sit around and say that this isn’t about politics. I’m sorry, it is about politics. 

This happened because a bunch of politicians put a message they could put on their campaign mailer ahead of protecting people’s lives. We can use this moment as a pivot point to make sure that doesn’t happen again. Democrats are happy to work with Republicans to do that—or they can spend this moment all on self-preservation, talking about how they aren’t to blame and changing absolutely nothing in the way that they operate. That’s what I suspect they’re going to do. But I just think it’s shortsighted, and it is a huge disservice to Texans.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The post 🎶It’s His Party and He’ll…🎶 appeared first on The Texas Observer.