This article was originally published by William L. Anderson at The Mises Institute.
Even while the search for missing people in flood-ravaged Texas continues, the politicized invective has come from the Left. Perhaps the most shocking comments came from Dr. Christina B. Propst—a Houston-based pediatrician who mocked the victims and their families because she perceived some of them might have voted for Donald Trump. Propst—who was fired by her employer—posted on Facebook:
May all visitors, children, non-MAGA voters and pets be safe and dry. Kerr County MAGA voted to gut FEMA. They deny climate change. May they get what they voted for. Bless their hearts.
Sade Perkins—who had been appointed to her position by Houston’s former mayor—posted the following quote on social media:
I know I’m going to get cancelled for this, but Camp Mystic is a white-only girls’ Christian camp. They don’t even have a token Asian. They don’t have a token Black person. It’s an all-white, white-only conservative Christian camp. If you ain’t white you ain’t right, you ain’t gettin’ in, you ain’t goin’. Period.
(Actually, a look at the Camp Mystic website shows that the camp has black camp counselors, and counselors often are drawn from former campers. No doubt, when the camp was founded 99 years ago, it would have been all-white, but the camp has changed with the times, as one would expect.)
Besides cheering on the multitude of deaths, others on the Left blamed the Trump administration, claiming that recent cuts in National Weather Service staff left people vulnerable to the floods by not giving them enough warning, something Connor O’Keeffe covered in a recent article. All of this leads to the question of why people are politicizing natural disasters, and the politicization is not limited to the Left. For example, during the Los Angeles wildfires early this year, many conservatives blamed DEI for the carnage without taking into account the many factors that led to the out-of-control fires in the first place.
In the past, political accusations were made about the government’s response to the natural disaster once it happened. In August 1992, during the presidential campaign, Hurricane Andrew, the “strongest and most devastating hurricane on record to hit South Florida,” Democratic Candidate Bill Clinton immediately accused the George H.W. Bush administration of malfeasance by not doing enough to help Andrew’s victims. Given that the federal government’s emergency agency, FEMA, was not set up to do mass relief, one can imagine the confusion that followed the Bush administration’s attempts to provide relief. Clinton, not surprisingly, won Florida and the presidential election.
(James Bovard, in his book about the Clinton years, Feeling Your Pain, devotes a chapter to how Clinton used FEMA to score political points and to buy votes. If there is ground zero for politicizing natural disasters, it would be the Clinton presidency.)
When Hurricane Katrina slammed into New Orleans and other Gulf Coast cities and communities, the public had come to believe that the federal government—and only the federal government—could rescue an entire city and its inhabitants. The efforts of the George W. Bush administration would never have been successful even had FEMA done everything right, as the task was too large for a single government agency. However, even by the Bush administration’s low standards, the response to Katrina was abysmal and destroyed President Bush’s political reputation.
But Katrina unleashed another kind of political infestation dealing with natural disasters: the role of climate change. While he didn’t directly claim Katrina was the result of global warming, former Vice-President Al Gore intimated it was in his documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth.” The introduction of climate change into American politics has been the catalyst in the modern politicization of natural disasters, and especially weather events.
Accompanying the modern doctrines of climate change is the underlying belief that there is a state solution to this supposed problem. Furthermore, every major weather event—from the flooding in Western North Carolina and East Tennessee last year to the deadly flooding on the Guadalupe River in Texas—is claimed to be the result of climate change, so those who might question this narrative are deemed responsible for it happening.
As one who has followed every US presidential election since 1960, there was a time when someone running for president and promising to create conditions conducive to creating better weather would have been laughed off the podium. Today, (as we saw with Christina B. Propst’s unfortunate social media post) those who might support political candidates who show some skepticism about the apocalyptic claims made by environmentalists are worthy of death—and plenty of people will cheer on your demise.
For that matter, climate change is not only blamed for rain-fueled disasters, but also for disasters that occur when there is too little rain, such as last January’s wildfires in Los Angeles that devastated whole communities. To doubt the modern culture’s views on climate change is to doubt the efficacy of science itself, according to climate activists. Thus, activists argue, if the earth is warming because of the use of fuels such as oil, natural gas, and coal, then it is up to governments around the world to force the use of technologies that can create electric power without burning fuels, and that requires a political “solution.”
At this point, people who believe such political narratives believe that a vote for candidates who support the use of state power to prohibit the burning of oil, gas, and coal and who want to use government to build and promote alternative energy sources such as wind and solar is also a vote for better weather. One is tempted to say that a vote for pro-alternative energy candidates is a vote against floods, droughts, and wildfires. Likewise, a vote for political candidates who are skeptical of the current climate narratives or who are against using state power to force energy changes are seen as pro-flooding and pro-wildfires, candidates who want people to drown in floods and burn up in wildfires.
Given this set of attitudes, it is not much of a leap from voting for Donald Trump to being responsible for both the flooding and the death toll in Texas. This is not a logical position, by any means, but nonetheless it now is acceptable in many Democratic Party circles and has become virtually an article of religious faith by leftists.
The flash point of this discussion is the Green New Deal, which was the crown jewel in Joe Biden’s policy initiatives. As I noted in an article earlier this year, there is a huge disconnect between the ambitious goals they had to supplant fuel-burning electric power plants and gasoline and diesel-powered vehicles with electric cars and trucks, along with “renewable” energy and the ability to meet these goals. Furthermore, there is no guarantee that making these huge changes will have even an insignificant impact on climate.
To support the Green New Deal, according to the activists, is to want a better earth and fewer floods, hurricanes, and wildfires. However, anyone who might question the efficacy of Biden’s environmental initiatives does so with malice aforethought, as even the act of questioning such things is tantamount to wanting LA to burn down and people to be swept away in floods.
When I taught at Frostburg State University several years ago, one of my colleagues told me that had Gore won the 2000 election, there would have been no Hurricane Katrine because Gore would have stopped global warming which was responsible for the storm. Believing something like this requires either an imagination that most of us don’t have or one simply has become unattached to factual thinking.
But we must remember that millions of people believe something like what my friend said to me. These are people who hold to a faith in the political process that is well beyond the ability of even the best and most level-headed scientists to counter. Once people like Al Gore declared (and got people to believe) that we can reverse climate change by empowering the state to levels well beyond anything we have had in our history, then it was inevitable that even weather events would become grist for the political mill.
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