The following is an adapted monologue from The Michael Knowles Show.

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There were horrific storms and massive floods in Texas this past weekend. So far, over 100 people are confirmed dead, and that number is almost certainly going to rise. Many people are still confirmed missing, including dozens of girls from a Christian summer camp. Just absolutely horrific. We all pray for everyone, for the family, for the dead, and for the rescue efforts.

One thing we should not do, however, is react in the way that prominent people on the Left have been reacting. Their reactions are repulsive and nauseating. But they get to a real problem at the heart of liberalism.

Here’s just one example. Kyle Kulinsky, a fairly well known Internet person on the Left, writes:

With the flooding in Texas and all of those precious little girls dying it’s important to remember this was 100% preventable. Elon and Trump slashed the national weather service and massively reduced the number of weather balloons in the country, destroying our ability to accurately forecast severe weather events. I’ve personally experienced forecasts being way off multiple times already. They have blood on their hands and they should be arrested for the deaths of those little girls.

Listen to the sanctimony, the self-righteousness from this guy: “…all of those precious little girls dying,” “They have blood on their hands.”

None of this is true. This was not “100% preventable.” Elon and Trump slashing the National Weather Service? As Michael Shellenberger points out, the National Weather Service got this right. The issue was not the National Weather Service. There do seem to have been errors in sending out alarms at the state level, but there’s no evidence that the National Weather Service failed at all. There’s also no evidence that suddenly, just now, in the first year of the second Trump term, the meteorologists are getting forecasts wrong. Obviously, that has happened so frequently that it’s a punch line for as long as there have been meteorologists.

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We also know this isn’t true — that it’s not attributable to any supposed “cuts” made during the second Trump term — because of Hurricane Harvey. The confirmed death toll so far in this awful storm is now 100. Hurricane Harvey killed at least 68 people in 2017 — many years before the supposed cuts to the National Weather Service by Trump and Elon. What would the Left and Kyle Kulinsky blame that on?

Let’s go back further. Tropical Storm Allison killed 41 people in 2001, long before anyone really considered President Trump a serious presidential candidate.

Well, let’s go back even further than that, because the other thing that people are going to blame this on is climate change or global warming. How about the Galveston Hurricane? The storm surges and floods from that storm killed between 6,000 and 12,000 people in 1900, long before any global warming — “climate change” — and long before Trump, and long before any of the things the Left is going to blame this natural disaster on.

Plenty of people on the Left have reacted the same way as Kyle Kulinsky.

This reaction entails a lot of vice. You have to have a lot of personal vice and sin to have this kind of reaction. But ultimately, ideologically, it’s about a denial of original sin.

The tragedy has to be preventable because the world can’t be fallen, because there can’t be any such thing as original sin, because there can’t be any limits on human potential. We must be able to control everything. We must be able to prevent every bad thing. We must be able to perfect society. It must be true. That is the premise of liberalism.

But it’s not true because it is a fallen world. And you couldn’t have prevented any of these things. Not in 1900, not in 2001, not just this past week. Bad things just happen sometimes. And bad things happen to good people. It’s called theodicy. Great thinkers have dealt with this problem for millennia, but modern people — modern liberals in particular — cannot deal with that because there cannot be such a thing as original sin.

‘Bad things can’t just happen,’ they say. ‘We must be able to stop it. We are human beings. We have the potential to totally control the world. We can make ourselves into gods.’

That’s the theory, and it’s false.

When you ask liberals what would you have done to prevent the flood? They will say things like, “I would have funded the National Weather Service.”

There’s no problem with the National Weather Service. 

They might say, “I would have had more carbon tax credits. I would have had more electric vehicles.”

But nothing they’ve proposed will stop natural disasters. They wouldn’t have stopped Hurricane Harvey, they wouldn’t have stopped Tropical Storm Allison or the Galveston Hurricane or any of the others. There has been flooding. There have been natural disasters. There has been evil and sin and death in the world since Adam and Eve were booted out of the Garden.

Yes, there are things we can obviously do to protect ourselves, to try to cope, and to comfort people who deal with the suffering that life entails. But this ain’t it.

What it comes down to is a fundamental error in modern ideology — in liberalism, most notably: the hubris, the pride to say, “We can prevent evil. We can just totally stop it. We can perfect the world. We can save the world.” That’s the error.

These people certainly can’t. None of us can. There is one person who can save the world. And He has.

New reporting reveals an extraordinary isolation campaign by former President Joe Biden’s closest aides at the end of his term, with staffers screaming at reporters, changing his phone number, and blocking access from panicked Democrats trying to tell him the truth about his failing campaign.

The revelation appears in the recently published book by a trio of legacy media reporters, titled “2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America,” written by Wall Street Journal reporter Josh Dawsey, New York Times White House correspondent Tyler Pager, and Washington Post reporter Isaac Arnsdorf.

Pager, conducting research for the book, managed to obtain Biden’s cellphone number in March 2025. The former president quickly agreed to an interview despite his aides repeatedly turning down similar requests from Page for several months.

Asked if he regretted dropping out of the presidential race, Biden said in a dispassionate tone, “No, not now. I don’t spend a lot of time on regrets.” He then ended the conversation to board an Amtrak train, Pager recalled for the Times.

Pager’s brief discussion with Biden reportedly sparked panic among the former president’s top aides. “After the first call,” the authors report in the book, “furious Biden aides repeatedly called and texted [Pager].”

“One screamed at me for calling the former president directly. Others texted furiously, trying to figure out how I had obtained Mr. Biden’s phone number,” Pager said.

Although Biden himself initially seemed open to continuing to talk to Pager, the reporter’s calls began to go straight to voicemail.

Within days, Pager’s calls were greeted with a message from Verizon: “The number you dialed has been changed, disconnected, or is no longer in service.”

The Times reporter writes that this incident is reflective of the insularity of Team Biden throughout his doomed presidential campaign.

Pager reports that instead of confronting Biden with the harsh reality after his disastrous debate performance, his inner circle restricted access to him, making it difficult for even longtime allies, such as Senator Chris Coons of Delaware, to connect with the president.

On his way to a fundraiser after the debate, Biden asked his traveling aides aboard Air Force One what people were saying about his performance.

Rather than providing an accurate assessment, they offered what witnesses described as a “sanitized version” of the situation.

According to Pager, Biden’s aides never even allowed him to meet with campaign pollsters, instead presenting Biden with overly optimistic outlooks that alarmed campaign staff.

Following the debate, campaign pollsters presented their findings to Biden’s advisers, and their conclusion was damning: all polling indicated that Biden had no path to victory, and voters were not convinced that he was up for the job.

This assessment enraged Steve Ricchetti, counselor to the former president and chairman of Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign, who reportedly preferred a sanitized version of events.

“Two days after the presentation, Geoff Garin, one of the pollsters, checked in with Mr. Ricchetti. Mr. Ricchetti lit into him and said the presentation was out of line,” Pager reported. “It was not their job to tell them there was no path to victory. The pollsters, Mr. Ricchetti said, were supposed to provide the path to win.”

Rep. Pete Aguilar, a top House Democrat from California, confronted Ricchetti in a heated call, asking, “Do you realize how bad it is? Has anyone told the president how bad it is?”

When Ricchetti insisted that many members of Congress still supported the president, Aguilar pushed back: “Steve, has anyone walked into the Oval and told him we could lose everything?” Ricchetti admitted no one had.

According to The Times, the situation was so dire that reliable Democratic strongholds, including Virginia, Minnesota, and New Mexico, suddenly became competitive – a devastating development that Biden’s inner circle concealed from him.

When former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) met privately with Biden at the White House during this crisis period, she grew frustrated by his insistence that polling showed no real change since the debate.

At one point, Biden called his longtime adviser, Mike Donilon, to refute Pelosi’s claim that polls showed he would lose to Trump. Donilon got on the line and reportedly contradicted Pelosi’s assessment.

Campaign adviser Adrienne Elrod was so concerned that Biden wasn’t getting an accurate assessment that she contacted “Morning Joe” hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, knowing the president watched their show on MSNBC every morning.

Days before Biden dropped out, Scarborough aired these concerns, saying, “The anger I hear are the people who are keeping him in a bubble.”

Even when confronted directly by donors at a Hamptons fundraiser who challenged him on his debate performance, Biden dismissed concerns as “one bad night” and vowed to stay in the race. His closest aides brushed off the concerns as typical donor anxiety.

The controversy over Biden’s isolation mirrors similar concerns that arose during his presidency, when critics frequently questioned whether his staff was shielding him from unscripted interactions with the press and public.

Throughout his term, the White House faced persistent accusations that Biden’s handlers were deliberately limiting his exposure to mask cognitive decline – allegations his team consistently dismissed as partisan attacks despite mounting video evidence of verbal stumbles and confusion during public appearances.