Chapter 1: What is the history and origin of the Cajun Navy?
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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here too. And we are saving the day here on Stuff You Should Know. That's right. Chuck, I guess I just said that we're here to save the day, and we are. We're going to talk about the Cajun Navy in a second. But before we do, we just got back from tour, and you did something that I didn't do, and I want to hear about it.
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Chapter 2: How did the Cajun Navy evolve during the Louisiana floods of 2016?
Yeah.
Oh, she could have been there. That was the only thing missing was you.
I wish I could have, too. And thank you for saying that. That's nice. But thanks for telling me all about it. And congrats on a great showing at the what is it?
Hanging with Dr. Z. Hanging with Dr. Z. Dana's the best. He's so funny. Is it anywhere like somebody can see it online? I don't know if they I don't think they shot video for this. I'm curious. But go watch episodes of Hanging with Dr. Z. It's a lot of fun.
OK, cool. Cool. Well, that was great. Thank you for telling everybody about it. And I guess now you want to start the episode about the Cajun Navy?
Yeah, for sure. Not too long ago in an episode, we had a listener mail that referenced the Cajun Navy. It is not something that I had heard of, even though it has been sort of all over the news. But I don't watch news with my eyes and ears. I generally read stuff. And I guess I just had never read anything about this, even though the Cajun Navy seems like have done a lot of great things.
But there's also some criticism.
Yeah. It's a good example of how absolutely everything in the United States can become politicized.
Good point.
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Chapter 3: What are the main roles and responsibilities of the Cajun Navy?
And so he kind of headed up a lot of this and ended up one of the actual founders of the United Cajun Navy, like I said.
Yeah, and United Cajun Navy is one of the big ones, maybe the biggest, definitely the most professionalized, and they are a 501c3 nonprofit. But the Cajun Navy moniker itself is shared by a number of different groups, like you said. And there's something about these people in particular that make them, they have a very specific set of skills, I guess you could say.
One, a lot of them are Cajun and grew up, spent their whole lives and still spend a lot of their time out on the bayou in boats that are designed to navigate obstacles in very shallow water.
Right.
That is to say airboats? Airboats, P-Rogues. Okay. Yeah. Well, those two. I think bass boats also. They use a lot of bass boats. So not only are there boats designed for this, they have a lot of experience, say, getting around a dumpster, but say in the form of like a cypress tree and all of the knees. Like they know what they're doing. They're expert boatmen and boat people. How about that?
And so there's a really like big incentive to welcome these people because they know what they're doing. The issue is, as we'll see again and again, they are expert boat people. They don't necessarily have search and rescue training. And that's one of the probably the biggest, most legitimate criticisms of the whole thing.
Yeah, for sure. Even though it was born in Katrina, I believe you kind of hinted that 2016, during the thousand-year flood of Louisiana, when 31 inches of rain fell on Baton Rouge over the course of 24 hours.
Insane.
It was an incredible amount of rain, completely devastating. The first, you know, when Katrina happened, that was pre-smartphone. 2016, that was the difference, was all of a sudden you had 56 of Louisiana's 64 parishes were declared federal disaster areas, and you had a Cajun Navy at work with smartphones and social media that could ā
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Chapter 4: What criticisms does the Cajun Navy face regarding their operations?
If you could control the behavior of anybody around you what kind of life would you have? Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car? When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings. Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you? I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused. Can you get someone to join your cult?
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Hey, I'm Jay Shetty, host of the On Purpose podcast. On a recent episode, I sat down with Nick Jonas, singer, songwriter, actor, and global superstar.
The thing I would say to my younger self is congratulations. You get to marry Priyanka Chopra Jonas. And also, you know, your daughter is incredible.
That's beautiful, man. Yeah. Thank you. That's so beautiful. I can see that got you a little.
Yeah, for sure. Our daughter, she came to the world under sort of very intense circumstances, which I've not really talked about ever.
Growing up on Disney in front of millions, how did that shape your sense of self?
I went blank. I hit a bad note and then I couldn't recover. And I built up this idea that music and being a musician was my whole identity. I had to sort of relearn who I was if you took this thing away. Who am I?
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Chapter 5: How does the Cajun Navy coordinate with official emergency services?
And then thirdly... These Cajun Navy guys showed up. They don't have like ID cards that say Cajun Navy signed by the governor of Louisiana. They're just some dudes that showed up, one of which pulled a gun on the director of the nursing home and said, we're getting these old people who you're responsible for out of here. Get out of our way or we're going to beat you up and shoot you. So.
Like, the Cajun Navy is just such a great flashpoint because it's so easy to almost cartoonize what they're doing for better or worse and just completely ignore the reality of the situation. And I think in that sense, it's just so worth talking about because it's an exercise in how how much emotion and just dumbness we put into evaluating stuff and how tribal that stuff makes us.
And that this is a great example of saying, here's something people are doing. Here's the problems with it. Let's figure out how to work everything out together so that they can still save lives without the downsides that are clearly inherently posed in this. That's why this Cajun Navy story is so, I find, important.
Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, as far as kind of seeing it both ways, that happened all the way up to the top of the ladder. Donald Trump became very sort of, I guess, briefly attached to John Bridgers, the founder of the Cajun Navy, specifically Cajun Navy 2016, which is its own group.
Invited him to the State of the Union address in 2018, had him up there when the Houston Astros visited the White House after they won the World Series. He called out the incredible Cajun Navy. And then, you know, on the other hand, was quoted as sort of saying like, hey, you know, stay in your boats.
Like these guys are out here trying to impress their wives and let the professionals do their work. And I think that just kind of illustrates how how each side has a leg to stand on, you know. Right. Like, sure, you want to you want to rescue people. But as we'll see, you know, rules and regulations are there for a reason, but sometimes it's just dumb red tape.
It's like it's hard to kind of come down for me on hard on one side or the other, because on one hand, you have a group that a lot of this comes from sort of an anti-government sentiment. If not anti-government, maybe be very distrustful of the response to natural disasters. But then when you see botched responses, you can see where they're coming from.
Yeah. I mean, as far as how these people's direct experience with FEMA was in Katrina, I think George W. Bush put it best when he said, fool me once, shame on, shame on you. Fool me, you can't get fooled again. And that's essentially what happened. FEMA fooled them once and they have never forgotten it.
I thought that was Roger Daltrey.
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Chapter 6: What are the safety concerns associated with the Cajun Navy's actions?
Yeah, for sure. Our daughter, she came to the world under sort of very intense circumstances, which I've not really talked about ever.
Growing up on Disney in front of millions, how did that shape your sense of self?
I went blank. I hit a bad note and then I couldn't recover. And I built up this idea that music and being a musician was my whole identity. I had to sort of relearn who I was if you took this thing away. Who am I?
Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
So, Chuck, I think you mentioned that 2016 was a really pivotal time, those floods in Baton Rouge, where a bunch of different groups that present themselves as Cajun Navy groups formed. And as some of these groups really started to emerge, in particular Cajun Navy Relief and United Cajun Navy groups, They started to organize.
They started to form 501C3s and accept donations and show up more and more frequently at natural disasters. They started to get more pushback. It went from just some guys with boats to this is an actual organization showing up. Right.
And what they're, you know, they're organizing, they're helping, but they're still, as far as we, the people who are professionals at this stuff, are concerned, just some guys with boats. And there was, you know, I guess tension that started to arise.
Yeah, for sure. Amanda Faulkner was a spokesperson for the Coast Guard, I believe, that said, you know, we have plenty of boats. We don't need more boats. The Coast Guard has all the boats that we need. We know when it's safe to get them out in the water. At one point, Do you become a liability is basically what people started asking, or when are you in the way?
When are you creating an unsafe situation? Or like you said, with the people in the retirement home, like maybe, you know, if there were 15 of them, maybe 13 of them, it was great to get them out of there. But what if two of them had very adverse health outcomes because of that rescue?
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Chapter 7: How does social media impact the Cajun Navy's effectiveness?
In just the same way that stories about everyday people joining the Cajun Navy, saving other everyday people, saving their lives literally. They give you like a reaffirming faith in humanity. If FEMA had showed up and saved everyone in Katrina, that would have given everybody a reaffirmed faith in like the collective good of, say, like an organized government. Right.
Right.
Or maybe even like a sense of patriotism. That's not what's been happening. Right. So that's where the breakdown is. I think that Markowitz is saying is that our government's failing. And then the presence of the Cajun Navy is just pointing this out even worse. And then worse than that, if we come to rely on essentially crowdsourced or vigilante forms of
like, supportive efforts, whether it be, say, a fire department, you know, that just basically is a bunch of guys who come out on Saturday nights, but not on Tuesday night if your house is on fire, to, say, like, the Cajun Navy, who may or may not make it out to the natural disaster in your neck of the woods. Like, you just can't. You can't rely on people. These people have jobs.
They have families. They have stuff they have to do. They're not getting paid for this. So you inherently can't rely on them. Even though they are reliable people, you can't rely on them in every situation. That's why we have these institutions. That's why these institutions have to be, like you said, shored up and step up so that we don't need the Cajun Navy.
Yeah, I mean, one of the criticisms or potential criticisms is that it might discourage evacuation if the storm is impending and people knew from the news or social media that like, hey, man, you're on your roof, the Cajun Navy will be there, toot sweet, get you out of there with a bottle of water in their hand.
A lot of people might like not follow evacuation orders because they're reliant on something that may happen, but it may not. But you could also say the same for the government institutions, you know?
Yeah, apparently you really, as a government spokesperson, shouldn't say, like, it's going to be worse than this last storm or it's as bad as, say, this last hurricane. Because people will be like, oh, well, I didn't evacuate for that and I made it through fine. So, yeah, you can definitely misstep. I think getting people to evacuate has got to be one of the harder things you could possibly do.
Yeah.
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Chapter 8: What are the future implications for the Cajun Navy and similar organizations?
There's some that are nonprofit. And two rise to the top, again, United Cajun Navy and Cajun Navy Relief. On Charity Navigator, they have an 85 and an 87 rating, respectively, which is pretty good. Charity Navigator says you can donate to these groups with confidence, right, that they're going to use your money wisely. I didn't see on Cajun Navy Relief, but I'm guessing it's the same.
United Cajun Navy, their officers, the people who run the show, get $0 compensation. There are groups of these people who are genuinely dedicated to this, who are doing it right. Then there are others who are like getting arrested for fraud. So do your homework before you like make a donation. But if you feel moved to donate, go donate. But just do a little bit of research first.
Don't listen to somebody on the Internet who says, you know, stay away from this group because this group's better. Go do your own research. And Charity Navigator is usually a pretty good place to start.
Yeah, totally. You got anything else? I got nothing else. This is a rare shortish long or an extra-sized short.
Nice. Well put, Chuck. Yeah. Since Chuck said what he just said, I think it's time for Listener Mail.
Yeah, we're going to forego Listener Mail this week just because we wanted to take a quick moment. We just got back from our first tour in a year and a half. Back out on the road doing shows in Denver and Seattle, Washington, and San Francisco, California. So great.
Yeah.
Just want to thank everybody at the Paramount Theater in Denver, the Paramount in Seattle, and the Sidney Goldstein, and SF Sketch Fest, who always does such a great job. I feel like we don't often thank the people there that put these shows on. And the crews were all great. the people that came out to see us. Thank you so much. It's hard to part with the dollar these days.
I know times are tight. So we really, really, really means a lot that you would spend some of your money to come out and hear us talk for a couple of hours.
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