Texas flood exposed America’s warped priorities | Will Bunch Newsletter

I’ve always believed there’s a lifetime limit on excitement from fireworks — even on July 4 — and that I passed mine many years ago. Maybe that’s why I volunteered to pick up a family member at New York’s JFK Airport last Friday night — a 7 hour slog of driving up, waiting, and heading home. Little did I expect the trip back would produce a glorious 90-minute movable feast of pyrotechnics, from the Anora ‘hood in South Brooklyn to the cop palaces of Staten Island to the illuminated suburbs of North Jersey, a red, white, and blue explosion of hope on a dark night. Well done, America!

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Few myths are more pervasive in American life than the notion of Texas as a bastion of “rugged individualism” — the idea born of lonesome cowboys and wildcat oil drillers that the Lone Star State is a magnet for larger-than-life heroes...and allergic to Big Government.

For several unbearable hours in the grey dawn of the July 4 holiday, a few brave souls proved there is, in fact, something to this idea. A kind of storm that even a swath of the central Texas Hill Country known as Flash Flood Alley had never seen before — causing the Guadalupe River to rise an unthinkable 30 feet in about an hour — sent floodwaters racing through rural homes and into the cabins of a storied campground for young girls.

At Camp Mystic, night watchman Glenn Juenke rushed into a building known as the Wiggle Inn and dragged out wet, terrified girls on soggy mattresses. Nearby, according to a mother of one of the girls, three camp counselors formed a human chain and braced themselves in the fast-moving water to pull young campers to dry land. But not everyone was as fortunate. Camp Mystic’s owner of more than 50 years, Dick Eastland, died attempting to rescue more girls.

Eastland is just one of 104 confirmed fatalities in Friday morning’s disaster, making it the deadliest U.S. non-hurricane flood of the 21st century. The displays of individual courage that occurred on America’s 249th birthday were yet another reminder that even in a dark night of the national soul, the goodness and humanity of its citizens who risked their lives for others can shine brightly.

But any well-deserved tribute to individual heroism shouldn’t obscure what in many ways was a collective failure for an American society that increasingly falls short on protecting its own people. We’ll never know exactly how many Texas flooding deaths could have been avoided if a generation of state leaders and a new regime in Washington had taken the evidence of rapid climate change seriously and planned better for its inevitable disasters. Or if they viewed the banal necessities of public safety infrastructure and scientific research as something that was as important as wasting billions of dollars to fight a pretend “invasion” at the border with Mexico.

This weekend, a lot of politically obsessed folks moved quickly from mourning the dead to asking pointed questions, especially when initial comments from local officials in hardest-hit Kerr County seemed to confirm fears that widely reported layoffs and early retirements at the National Weather Service — forced by the Elon Musk-led project called the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE — led to late and inadequate forecasts of flash flooding.

The reality is more complicated. The downsized but hard-working folks at NWS — rugged individuals themselves — did issue a flash-flood watch Thursday afternoon, followed by a more urgent flood warning at 1 a.m. Friday as the storm hit, with additional updates through the night. However, the agency’s office that serves central Texas did lose several key staffers under the DOGE cuts from Musk and President Donald Trump, including a Warning and Coordination Meteorologist, who works with local emergency management to make sure the public is informed about dangerous weather. Those warnings clearly didn’t happen on July 4 to the extent they should have.

But the root causes of a Texas tragedy won’t be easily found in one flawed budget cut. Rather, it took a series of bad decisions that sprung from harmful and overlapping ideas all rooted in a loss of faith in science, in expertise, and in the almost quaint notion that government can make people’s lives better — and save them if necessary.

The original sin is climate-change denial. In its radical right-wing 2014 platform, the Texas Republican Party declared: “‘Climate change’ is a political agenda which attempts to control every aspect of our lives. We urge government at all levels to ignore any plea for money to fund global climate change or ‘climate justice’ initiatives.”

Promises made, promises kept. In GOP-dominated Texas, state and local governments haven’t just promoted the interests of Big Oil and Gas, but there’s also been little or no emphasis on planning for weather emergencies intensified by global warming, because why spend money on preparing for a problem they believe doesn’t exist?

But Mother Nature, pumped up on the steroids of carbon pollution, obviously didn’t read the Texas GOP platform. Friday’s intense downpour, which dumped a half year’s worth of rain in a few hours in some communities, was superpowered by moisture from a hotter-than-usual Gulf of Mexico, lingered because of an absent gulfstream, and surged through steep river banks made harder than usual by months of drought during one of Earth’s hottest years, so far.

The painful irony is that these deadly stormwaters hit on the same day that Trump signed his presidency-defining “Big Beautiful Bill” that ends $500 billion in tax credits for clean energy and electric vehicles while boosting profits and rolling back anti-pollution curbs for the fossil fuel industry.

But that’s part of a broader MAGA war on science that — among other things — will make it harder to predict the next deadly flood on the Guadalupe River. Trump’s 2026 federal budget proposal would close the National Atmospheric and Oceanic Agency (NOAA)’s National Severe Storms Lab in Norman, Okla., which, according to a CNN report, “works to improve flash flood forecasting among other hazards from severe thunderstorms.”

That sure seems like the kind of thing that a good government should be doing for its people. But in the current MAGA moment, it’s hard to know where climate denial ends and rank hostility toward government programs for what used to be called “the public good” begins. And that extends to all levels of government.

In the late 2010s, Kerr County, where Camp Mystic is located, lost out on a $1 million grant proposal for an early warning system of flood gauges and sirens after it decided not to ask taxpayers to finance it; one conservative commissioner, in rejecting a $50,000 engineering study, said: ““I think this whole thing is a little extravagant for Kerr County, with sirens and such.”

Earlier this year, state lawmakers in Texas rejected a broad proposal to improve disaster response, including enhanced warning systems. Once again, GOP legislators said the measure was too expensive. One of the Republican “no” votes came from the freshman representative from Kerr County, who now says: “I can tell you in hindsight, watching what it takes to deal with a disaster like this, my vote would probably be different now.”

Look, there’s a proper debate to have about fiscal conservatism, especially if it eliminates actual waste or benefits the broad middle class with tax cuts. But that’s not what this penny-pinching on programs to keep Texans alive was all about. Like in Washington, the tight budget constraints in Austin were needed to additionally lower taxes on lucrative corporations and oil billionaires.

What’s more, Texas — again, like the Trump regime — can find plenty of money when the cause is helping big business, not saving lives. For Texas Gov. Greg Abbott. that meant spending a whopping $11 billion and counting on Operation Lone Star, which deploys Texas National Guard troops on a militarized mission to control migrant crossings at the southern border. The money that could have reached every household in Kerr County with a 1 a.m. siren blast instead went to buying razor wire that slashed pregnant moms in the Rio Grande or busing migrants to Chicago. It’s a state government where the cruelty is the point, even if some of Abbott’s voters die in the process.

The rugged individualism of Texans might be more than a myth. But that wasn’t really the lesson for its citizens who woke up on a July 4 they will never forget. The Independence Day message from Kerr County, Texas, and the United States of America is that you are on your own.

Question: How much did the invasion of MacArthur Park cost U.S. taxpayers? — @schwanderer.bsky.social‬ via Bluesky

Answer: We can’t yet answer this question with any specificity, other than to say that even one dime for Monday’s joint federal operation that sent armored personnel carriers and rifle-toting, camouflaged troops into Los Angeles’ normally placid central city park was a total waste of money. The supposed raid that sent ICE agents, Border Patrol cops and National Guard troops, among others, into the park made famous by an over-the-top 1968 pop classic didn’t seem to yield any undocumented immigrant arrests. But it was filmed by a tipped-off Fox News crew and seemed meant to send a message of fascist police-state terror into America’s second-largest city. It was not only a new low point for a nation that many of us no longer recognize, but the show of force offered a stunning contrast to the government’s sluggish response to the deadly Texas flood.

Blame the July 4 holiday, maybe, for a tepid response about New York’s not-tepid mayoral candidate, the democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani. Those who did reply were universally positive, and determined to burst the notion that the winner of NYC’s Democratic primary appeals only to young radicals. “This 70-year-old thinks Mamdani is exactly what the Democratic Party needs,” wrote Cheryl Forte. Added Armen Pandola, a frequent correspondent: “Mamdani is a response to the Democratic Party’s refusal to step up and represent the middle and poorer classes like it promises to do.”

📮 This week’s question: Keeping with a similar theme, I’m curious what readers think of Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle L. Parker after a year and a half in office. Her tenure seems a mix of the good (falling murder rates, at least before a spate of summer shootings), the bad (the ongoing municipal strike) and the weird (the bizarre head fake on a downtown 76ers arena that didn’t happen). What do you think? Please email me your answer and put the exact phrase “Mayor Parker so far” in the subject line.

There’s one thing for which I never criticize Donald Trump: failing to keep his campaign promises — with one exception. After his first shock election in 2016, I wanted him to keep his word about releasing the last non-public files about the 1963 John F. Kennedy assassination. Trump’s contempt for what he calls “the Deep State” actually overlapped with my belief the American people never got the whole truth about what happened in Dallas nearly 62 years ago. It took eight years and an even more unbound Trump 47 for the document dumps to happen, but it might have been worth the wait. A new release —prompted by a lawsuit from longtime, respected researcher Jefferson Morley — confirms that the Central Intelligence Agency has been lying to you for decades.

The key figure is a CIA agent named George Joannides, who in the early 1960s was the No. 2 official in the agency’s Miami office at the height of anti-Fidel-Castro activism there by CIA-backed Cuban rebels. He was also an expert in psychological warfare. That’s intriguing, but Morley had long suspected that Joannidies also led a double life in organizing young Castro opponents using the alias “Howard Gebler.” After the JFK assassination, Joannides had denied even knowing a “Gebler,” but personnel records released last week confirm they were indeed the same man.

So what? For one thing, the group that “Gebler” worked with, the Cuban Student Directorate, came into close contact with Lee Harvey Oswald, JFK’s alleged assassin, and even debated him on local TV, raising Oswald’s profile as a supposed Communist sympathizer in the weeks before the murder. Even more eyebrow raising: It was Joannides whom the CIA brass appointed in the mid-1970s as a liaison to the House committee probing assassinations. Before he died in 1990, the CIA awarded Joannides a medal: for lying about the Cuban operation and for lying about that — and God only knows what else — to Congress. So why was the CIA so afraid of the truth about its 1963 contacts with Oswald?

To be sure, the disclosures aren’t a “smoking gun” proving CIA involvement in the murder of the 35th president, or that Oswald wasn’t the lone gunman. But this confirmation that the CIA was lying to the American public — and in a significant way — matters. That’s because the public’s sense we weren’t getting the full truth about what went down in Dealey Plaza kicked off a long slide of mistrust in U.S. institutions that brought us to the mess we find ourselves in today.

It was beyond ironic that the JFK scoop came on the same holiday weekend that Trump’s Justice Department claimed there’s no secret sex-client list for the late disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein — friend to luminaries like Trump and Bill Clinton — and that his jailhouse death was suicide, not murder. Attorney General Pam Bondi claimed earlier this year that she had Epstein’s client list on her desk, so somebody was lying then, or is lying now. Same as it ever was.

Sometimes it’s worth remembering that Donald Trump didn’t invent xenophobia, but came down his golden escalator to capitalize on it. On this date 11 years ago, I wrote about the U.S. reaction to a surge in border crossings by Central Americans, and ugly scenes in a California town called Murrieta, where angry mobs were harassing buses packed with detained refugee moms and their children. I wrote that " we can do a lot better as a people than yelling and blocking buses of moms and kids, and we can expect a lot better from our politicians beyond warehousing them in substandard facilities before racing them back to neighborhoods where they may be killed." I didn’t realize then how much worse we could do. Read the rest: “The children of God and the ugly grown-ups of Murrieta.”

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