Marjorie Taylor Greene's Horrific Comments on the Texas Floods Are Just the Beginning
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On Friday morning, heavy rains began pounding Central Texas along the Guadalupe River, rapidly swelling the river basin —by nearly 30 feet in less than an hour —and spurring deadly flash floods. Dozens of children were reported missing from the grounds of Camp Mystic , a nearly century-old Christian girls' summer camp, as floodwaters surged east along the river and ravaged the neighboring city of Kerrville, downing roads and power lines while residents attempted to flee. Federal and local authorities began carrying out rescue missions as more rain overran households in the towns of Burnet and Liberty Hill, extending the damage well into Saturday. By that evening, Gov. Greg Abbott had requested emergency federal aid for six different Texas counties, a declaration that President Donald Trump quickly honored. The floodwaters began receding Sunday morning—only to rise once again as less-severe rains poured into the already-devastated region .
As of this writing, flood warnings are still in place for various areas north of Kerrville, including Llano County, where the Llano River's water levels are currently rising . As of Monday afternoon, the official death toll from the weekend stands at 104 , with a large majority of those fatalities having occurred in Kerr County—where at least 56 adults and 28 children have perished. That makes these floods some of the deadliest in the country’s modern history , and there are likely more reported deaths to come, with dozens of Texans still missing and more flooding forecast throughout the week across the waterlogged towns.
Central Texas had been suffering from drought conditions this summer, yet the needed rains landed too suddenly, at too rapid a pace. The remote counties hardest hit are located in what's known as “ Flash Flood Alley ,” but the sheer speed at which the rains fell and the rivers swelled was horrific and unprecedented. A catastrophe of this scale and pace spurs urgent questions that seek impossibly quick answers. And, as is sadly typical these days, there are many waiting to provide only wrong answers, with the goal of inflaming political passions and redirecting a state's, and country's, mass grievance. You could see this in a manufactured story that went viral this weekend and was even picked up by mainstream outlets: the rumored rescue of two missing girls who'd been clinging for life to a tree. This was an entirely made-up account boosted via Facebook, according to CNN's Brian Stelter , and it served only to provide false hope to grieving parents. Even House Rep. Chip Roy, an otherwise-reliable conspiracist , took to social media to swat down this feel-good hoax.
The bigger question, however, was that of preparation—how could Texans have shielded themselves from such hard-falling rains and rapidly rising waters? Many liberals were quick to point out that the Trump administration's steep cuts to the government's weather-monitoring and warning systems likely contributed to inaction and incapacity; elected officials in the harmed areas blamed the local National Weather Service outposts for not providing sufficient forecasts. (As is typical of him, Trump referred to those federal services as a “ Biden setup .”)
But, at least in this case, none of those explanations holds water. Yes, there are staffing shortages at the NWS stations in San Angelo and in San Antonio, and those exist in part because of DOGE's governmentwide cuts. Still, by all accounts, the meteorologists in place at neighborhood NWS offices did the best they could, having issued consistent warnings of increasingly intense “downpours” in the days leading up to stormfall. By Thursday evening, as Wired's Molly Taft reported, the NWS had even dispatched a flood watch . It is true that the agency did not predict the exact amount and extent to which the rains would fall and overflow the banks of the Guadalupe River—not least because what unfolded was the worst-case scenario. And that unprecedented severity did not become apparent to forecasters until the early-morning hours of Friday, when most residents were asleep. These remote Central Texas towns may not have widespread cellphone reception , making it difficult for residents to receive timely alerts anyway. Those who might have turned to the internet instead would not have seen anything until around 5 am, when the Facebook pages for the Kerrville Police Department and the Kerr County government finally reshared the scarier NWS warnings .
Such important details are granular in nature, and it doesn't help when some of Texas' neighbors lob their own conspiracy theories. In Georgia, MAGA congressional candidate Kandiss Taylor posted multiple tweets on X referring to “fake weather” and “fake flooding,” doubling down against “raging liberals” and “brainwashed zombies” when encountering backlash. “It's cloud seeding, geoengineering, & manipulation,” Taylor tweeted. “If fake weather causes real tragedy, that's murder. Pray. Prepare. Question the narrative.”
Since it apparently wasn't enough for one Georgia Republican to raise such alarming conspiracy theories, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene joined in on the action, continuing her proud tradition of blaming Jewish space lasers and claiming that a certain “they” can “ control the weather ” in response to historic natural disasters. This time, she's pushing legislation piggybacking off Taylor's nods to cloud seeding and geoengineering (the basis of her prior lies about how “they can control the weather”), tweeting on Saturday that she had introduced a bill that “prohibits the injection, release, or dispersion of chemicals or substances into the atmosphere for the express purpose of altering weather, temperature, climate, or sunlight intensity.” But cloud seeding and geoengineering experiments are severely limited in scope and unable to power anything even resembling this weekend's rains. So now we've ended up in a place where even a long-time climate denier like Texas Sen. Ted Cruz is being forced to push back against Greene and Taylor's disinformation, admitting that there's “ zero evidence ” such “weather modification” could have caused this.
Yes, climate change is key to this tragedy. Weather analysts have observed that the flood conditions were exacerbated by a deadly, unlikely combination : northward-bound remnants of the tropical cyclone that flooded southeastern Mexico late last month, which traveled above the long-steaming, constantly warming waters of the Gulf of Mexico (which alarming temperatures provided fuel last year for ghastly Hurricanes Helene and Milton ). A jet stream then carried all this moisture to an especially flood-prone region of Texas, with riverbeds and arid soil and hillsides. This was the worst possible manifestation of this climate change–induced setup.
Though the NWS isn't thoroughly sabotaged, our federal systems are woefully unprepared for the summer. By the end of this month, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will stop transmitting information from military satellites that have been deployed and used historically to measure the paths of extreme-weather disasters like hurricanes. So it's only a matter of time before the Trump administration cuts do fail us. But we won't be ready to take on the future if we don't get straight what's going wrong now . We may find out how bad things are sooner than later: Tropical Storm Chantal is currently flooding North Carolina with inches of rain , and the water is making its way up through the northeast.
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