Leave your kids to die. Then call anyone who cares 'evil.'

We don’t exactly have a smoking gun for who is to blame for the horrific loss of life following the flash floods in Texas on July 4th. And that’s probably because there are too many spent gun barrels to inspect.

However, we must inspect them because this kind of indifference to the lives of children is a model for what's to come next.

And don't take my word for it; believe Kristi Noem.

“What you saw happen in Texas was much more how FEMA will look in the future," she said at a press conference last week.

And unfortunately, I believe her.

“There’s a lot to unpack on how poorly the Trump administration’s Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) handled this disaster, as well as the roles the local and state governments had in contributing to the tragedy,” writes Shana Udvardy, a senior climate resilience policy analyst with the Climate & Energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Ufvardy sums up FEMA’s response as “dysfunctional, delinquent, and irresponsible.” And her must-read post, “The Terrible Texas Flood Tragedy Made Worse by Trump Administration’s Dysfunctional FEMA Response,” offers a furious view of the many ways in which that approach will only get worse, intentionally.

That’s because of the Trump regime’s intentional efforts to strip mine everything good our government does to focus all of our scarce collective time, energy, and treasure on building a global concentration camp system to detain people who’d love nothing more than to pay taxes so that our government can do things like save kids from flash floods.

And FEMA’s negligence appears to be compounded by similar malfeasance at the local level, executed by local officials working in the Texas Republican tradition of reducing government services in favor of flooding more money to the wealthy.

If there is a smoking gun—an error that may have cost dozens of campers their lives—it has been identified by John David Trolinger. 

He’s the former information technology director for Kerr County in Texas, and he helped install the area's CodeRED emergency alert system, which evolved into the current alert system that could have been activated at any time. And he was monitoring the response the morning the floods devastated Central Texas.

 The key line: “Someone should have gotten up and been there to go. "Okay, send the code."

I came across Trolinger’s comments while working on the latest episode of The Catturd Deficit, a conversation with Marcy Wheeler about Democrats’ failure to keep pace with the right online. 

Marcy uses the Epstein scandal to talk about Trump’s failing superpower.

His ability to command attention is floundering when it comes to covering up his ties to the century’s most infamous child rapist. But that power has not failed him when it comes to the floods in Texas.

You may remember how Trump responded to any attempt to figure out who was to blame for the inability to evacuate children before flooding that the mostly correct forecasts had shown was clearly on the way.

He called the question “evil.”

Since then, much of the furor surrounding the flood failures has evaporated and been sucked up, perhaps, by the heat of the Epstein mess.

Trump and Fox News targeted Rosie O’Donnell for her pointed comments about the floods.

But only they knew that Trump was distracting from the failures he projects onto anything that requires caring for the most vulnerable. The left and the media were fixated on the question of whether he could take away Rosie’s citizenship.

Mission accomplished.

Now, in Texas, reporters can’t get any answers about the failure to send the alert, which Trolinger says demands the replacement of the local officials who failed the community.

 “I'm telling you on this public information, you're gonna be stonewalled, you're gonna be harassed,” he said. “If you ask questions, you'll receive harassing responses. I don't know what they call it, deflection. I think that's the word I saw somebody use. You will be made to feel guilty just for asking for the information.”

Is this because of local bumbling? Or are these local conservatives covering up FEMA’s negligence, manifested as a delay that left so many to drown?

We may never know. And that’s the plan.

As Shana Udvardy noted in January, before the regime began hollowing out FEMA:

The science is clear, as the planet continues to warm, we will see greater risks of chronic impacts, including higher rising seas, killer heat, and hurricanes that are dumping heavier rainfall.

Disasters will only worsen and become more frequent. And what we saw in Kerr will be the model: a lack of resources combined with willful incompetence multiplied by a frontal assault who attempts to demand any accountability.

“These are the results that we're gonna start to see on a daily basis,” as Rosie said. 

And the Trump regime will disgrace their victims by making sure no one learns anything from their deaths.

Appreciate the work LOLGOP and THE FARCE do? Drop us a tip to support it. 

THE FARCE fights fascism with fearlessness. Subscribe to fuel the Farce—free or paid, your support matters.