By CLINTON FEIN
July 6, 2025

Let’s play a little game of political parity.

If the logic House Speaker Mike Johnson wants to apply to California’s wildfire crisis, that conditional aid or punishment for voting blue is to be taken seriously, then let’s expose the hypocrisy and focus it right on Kerr County, Texas, where flash floods didn’t discriminate by party line when they swept through lives and landscapes this week.

Because if wildfires in California are, as the right-wing echo chamber proclaims, the fault of DEI initiatives (since diversity, equity and inclusion apparently sets forests ablaze now) then surely the floods in Texas are the result of white mediocrity and “patriotic austerity,” that noble Texan tradition of rejecting basic infrastructure in the name of “fiscal responsibility.”

So let’s follow the Republican rubric to its logical, grotesque conclusion:

Should federal aid to Kerr County be contingent on proof that white male County Judge Rob Kelly’s administration wasn’t asleep at the wheel while people drowned? Should Texas be forced to justify every dollar requested for disaster relief by accounting for every dollar not spent on flood warning systems, particularly when those systems were consciously rejected?

If Los Angeles deserves to be punished for prioritizing inclusion, does Kerr County deserve to be punished for prioritizing exclusion and lacking basic emergency preparedness?

Let’s be honest. It was never about forest management, budget priorities, or “natural consequences.” It was about manufacturing excuses to let Democratic states burn and using it as an excuse to deride DEI initiatives.

If we apply Mike Johnson’s “California deserves conditions” standard to Texas, we don’t just attach strings to aid, we take advantage of people at their most vulnerable and devastated. If we apply MAGA logic to Texas, we can attribute Kerr County’s failure to warn its residents to evacuate to white mediocrity.

But does imposing conditions on aid for Texas in their hour of need help the people of Texas? Does anyone want to be like little Mike Johnson and the cruel, vindictive MAGA acolytes that took glee in “owning the libs” as the fires raged?

Climate change doesn’t give a damn about our voter registration. It will torch our ranches as quickly as it floods our cities. And when it does, it will not ask whether our disaster response plan was woke or broke.

Perhaps before we weaponize empathy and politicize tragedy, we should try governing, not by ideology, but by the radical notion that Americans of any state, of any race, of any party, shouldn’t have to die because of politics. Or receive disaster aid based on voter demographics.

However, some legitimate finger-pointing is warranted, and now is the perfect fucking time, not meaningless thoughts and prayers from JD Vance, or prognostications from one of Trump’s taxpayer-funded golf outings, as Texas searches for missing girls, residents, and pets presumed drowned.

FEMA, which under normal circumstances would be spearheading this effort, didn’t just fail abysmally. It was murdered, with premeditation, malice, and a MAGA-branded dagger plunged deep into its gut by those who decided that turning immigrant detention centers into for-profit swamps was somehow more patriotic than flood prevention.

DOGE, the Orwellian named Department of Government Efficiency, has already slashed 20% of FEMA’s staff and frozen its funding, much like Botox has done to Kristi Noem’s face, all under the watchful eye of Trump, who has long made clear his dry dream of dissolving FEMA altogether and dumping disaster relief on states already drowning — both figuratively and, thanks to the Guadalupe River, quite literally.

In June, Trump expounded on his plan to begin phasing out FEMA after the current hurricane season, as if nature schedules catastrophes to coincide with the management of optics.

None of this stopped Texas officials from gaslighting that reached biblical proportions.

Kerrville City Manager Dalton Rice, with all the foresight of Marjorie Taylor Greene at a MENSA reunion, explained that the storm “dumped more rain than what was forecasted.” No shit, Sherlock.

Meanwhile, Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly insisted to CBS News: “We had no reason to believe that this was gonna be anything like what’s happened here.” None whatsoever. Except the climate models. The floodplain maps. The disappearing wetlands. The historical data. The screaming meteorologists. But other than that? Nada.

“There’s going to be a lot of finger-pointing, a lot of second-guessing and Monday morning quarterbacking,” said Republican U.S. Rep. Chip Roy, whose district includes Kerr County. “There’s a lot of people saying ‘why’ and ‘how,’ and I understand that.” We’re so glad you understand. Let’s pretend it didn’t happen, rather than examining why and how, though?

Of course, the National Weather Service (NWS), tasked with giving officials the very “reason to believe” they now claim never existed, has lost nearly 600 employees since January alone. Why? Because the same DOGE that castrated FEMA also defanged the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the parent agency of the NWS.

This isn’t mismanagement. It’s sabotage. It’s Project 2025 with wet boots and blood on its hands. A blueprint from the Heritage Foundation that doesn’t just want to downsize government but disembowel it, particularly the agencies that dare to speak science or save lives.

So when floods surge, when fires rage, when hurricanes barrel through cities, don’t ask where FEMA is. Ask who left it bleeding in an alley to fund abject cruelty to asylum seekers.

And when a child drowns in Kerrville because a warning never came, remember this: It wasn’t rain that killed them. It was a dereliction of the most basic duty of government to protect people. Purposefully. As a matter of policy.