We go through this virtually every time some tragedy hits. I don’t know about you, but I’m absolutely sick of it. And after what happened in the Texas Hill Country over the July 4 weekend, in which flash flooding claimed a death toll of at least 80 and probably more than 100, many of them children who were at summer camps along the suddenly swollen Guadalupe River, the epidemic of ghoulish behavior among the talking heads and operatives of the Democrat Party and the Left has gone entirely off the rails.
What they want you to believe, in a fashion directly related to the immediate cries for infringement on your gun rights every time some deranged creep loses his cool and conducts a mass shooting, is that the hill country flash floods are President Trump’s fault. Why this is purportedly so is an exercise in magical thinking — the logic is little better than that MAGA has insulted the weather gods, and thus the children have suffered.
@rosie tennis is on #wimbledon #ireland #commonknowledge #sunday #edinburghscotland #fringefestival #aug1-10 #txfloods ♬ original sound – Rosie ODonnell
Trump & Musk gutted the National Weather Service. The result was predictable: A bad forecast leading to the death of children in a horrific flood. https://t.co/OCqTwRSsGi
— Senator Scott Wiener (@Scott_Wiener) July 5, 2025
It’s pretty clear that Trump’s cuts to @NOAA contributed to dozens of deaths in Texas from a under reported on tropical storm. https://t.co/5ReAVmXF22
— Rachel Bitecofer ???????? (@RachelBitecofer) July 5, 2025
And some of it is even worse than that. As the victims of the hill country flooding are mostly white conservatives, some of the river ghouls are having notable difficulty summoning up much sympathy for the dead and their families.
????DISGUSTING: Meet Sade Perkins—former Market Manager of the Freedmen’s Town Farmers Market and a Non-Resident Fellow at Princeton University—who recently posted a vile racist video about Camp Mystic in Texas, in the wake of missing children during the floods. In her rant, she… pic.twitter.com/5tDyDs2LfV
— I Meme Therefore I Am ???????? (@ImMeme0) July 7, 2025
The woman posting that last bit is a pediatrician from Houston who got herself rightly fired from the doctor’s office where she worked.
I’m going to try to steer clear of most of that bile. It isn’t healthy to spend much time inside the heads of loons who are that irrationally hateful toward innocent people they’ve never even met. Suffice it to say that when your life is not spent trying to get into heaven, either because you don’t believe in God or because you worship at the altar of an ideology that promises to deliver heaven right here on earth, you lose all the behavioral speedbumps which would stop you from politicizing and pathologizing every event that can be politicized or pathologized.
No, there is nothing Donald Trump or Kristie Noem could have done to stop the flash floods in Hunt, Ingram, Kerrville, and other towns in central Texas.
Climate change caused the Texas floods that killed at least 27 people, say the media. No, it didn’t. The lack of a flood warning system did. We’ve managed floods for millennia, and deaths from them declined 80% in the last 100 years. Climate reporters are trapped in a weird cult pic.twitter.com/Gvu4PdErDt
— Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) July 5, 2025
That flooding was foreseeable but not predictable, and it hit at precisely the worst time imaginable.
If you’ve spent any time in the Texas Hill Country, you’ve likely driven over the Guadalupe River at several places. And if you have, what you know is it’s not much of a river at all. In places with lots of big rivers, like where I’m from in southern Louisiana, the Guadalupe wouldn’t qualify even as a bayou. It’s more like a creek.
It has a very narrow basin, and it isn’t deep. At its normal stage, in a lot of places, you can wade across it. I don’t think it’s navigable at all in the hill country except for maybe a few areas where recreational boating is possible.
People do vacation along the river, though. There are lots of RV campgrounds and the like in Kerr County.
But there isn’t that much development along the Guadalupe, even in an area people are moving to as fast as they can (which is understandable; the Texas Hill Country is a gorgeous part of the world, and the people are some of the friendliest folks you’ll ever meet). What gets built along the river is usually well back from its normal banks.
Why? Because people in Kerr County, Texas, have long called that part of the world “flash flood alley.” That’s what you get in an area that is mostly dry and gets tons of sun, with lots of changing elevation. When a rainstorm does strike there, the water moves very fast to the lowest point it can find, and the creeks and rivers which are usually highly unimpressive suddenly get very full very fast.
Like for example, in the early morning of July 4.
The Guadalupe rose 26 feet in 45 minutes before sunrise thanks to a major rain event, where a front stalled out over Kerr County and hammered the Texas Hill Country with hard rains all night. That water had to go somewhere, and it all ended up in the same place. The effect was more like a tsunami than an ordinary flash flood.
The National Weather Service has been attacked for not warning the residents of the affected area, but the NWS did warn them — several times — in the hours before the floods hit. But late on Thursday night before the 4th of July holiday, you are not going to get the undivided attention of the public. You just aren’t.
And, contra the idiot Dana Bash on CNN, it isn’t because of Trump budget cuts that the NWS didn’t get the word out. It turned out that the NWS had more forecasters working that storm than normal because they saw there was the potential for a big rain and flash-flooding event. The NWS issued a flood warning on Thursday afternoon around 1:45, almost 14 hours before the tsunami began barrelling through the Guadalupe basin.
Not to mention the “cuts” Trump is being raked over the coals for aren’t actually going to kick in until September.
Friday’s floods were foreseeable but not predictable. A 26-foot river rise in 45 minutes is a freak event by any definition. So while flash flooding is unremarkable, that scale of flash flooding most certainly is not.
The one structural deficiency the weekend floods exposed, which will likely be remedied in response, was a lack of flood-activated emergency sirens in parts of Kerr County where people were carried away. But that isn’t something Donald Trump or even Texas Governor Greg Abbott could be blamed for — that’s chiefly a local failing. Even then, though, the river rose so quickly early Friday morning that those sirens wouldn’t have given much warning to the people who would have needed it.
That’s the reality. The reality is that nature is more powerful than man. Nature proved that fact over the weekend. And politicizing such a demonstration as though what happened in Texas was the wrath of some non-Christian deity for the sins of racism, or MAGA, or whatever, is disgusting.
It’s disgusting. And it can’t be shouted down quickly enough.
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