As I write this, the known death toll of floods in Texas stands at 104, including dozens of children from summer camps dotting the affected area. That number will likely increase.

It’s a terrible thing, and naturally many of us not caught in the middle of it would like to assign blame.

“Key roles at local offices of the National Weather Service, in particular, went unfilled as the floods hit,” the New York Times reports. US Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) wants “an investigation into the scope, breadth, and ramifications of whether staffing shortages at key local National Weather Service (NWS) stations contributed to the catastrophic loss of life and property during the deadly flooding.” US Senator Christopher Murphy (D-CT) cites “consequences to Trump’s brainless attacks on public workers, like meteorologists.”

But let’s be real here. No, US president Donald Trump and his administration are not to blame for it — and I say that as someone possessed of an ingrained “blame government first” mentality in general and a strong dislike for Trump in particular.

Trump’s not responsible for the weather, and to the extent that federal agencies are responsible for accurately forecasting that weather and warning the public of dangerous situations (they shouldn’t be, but they are), they did exactly that.

According to an ABC News timeline:

The National Weather Service’s Austin/San Antonio office issued its first flood watch at 1:18pm on July 3.

That evening at 6:10pm, the Weather Prediction Center warned of severe thunderstorms in the affected area.

At 1:14am on July 4, flash flood warnings  with a “considerable” damage tag — automatically triggered alerts on weather radios and mobile devices. Those warnings were upgraded at 3:35am and 4:03am.

At 4:35am — nearly 16 hours after the first watches and three hours after the emergency warnings — started going out, the Kerr County Sheriff’s Office reported the first observed flooding.

By 7am, evacuations were under way.

It’s important, at this point, to assure you that I’m not trying to SHIFT blame to the victims. There are many reasons other than negligence why those alerts might have been missed, or why those who received them took action that seemed sufficient, but turned out not to be, to save their own lives and  others’.

But while we could (and probably will) see failures and foul-ups in the post-flood response from FEMA et al.,  and while we can (and definitely will) argue incessantly about various things Trump and his team do, this particular tragedy didn’t result from failures of the government systems in place to warn us of impending disaster.

Trying to get politicians and the politically involved to not “play politics” with every bad thing may be a fool’s errand, but it’s always worth condemning when it happens.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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“A government burdens the religious exercise of parents,”  Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito writes on behalf of the court’s majority in Mahmoud v. Taylor, “when it requires them to submit their children to instruction that poses ‘a very real threat of undermining’ the religious beliefs and practices that the parents wish to instill.”

Consequently, the court ruled, the Montgomery County, Maryland “Public” School System must allow parents to “opt out” of sending their children to classes in which “LGBTQ+-inclusive” stories are read and discussed if those parents claim their religious beliefs, and their “right to direct the religious upbringing of their children,” go against having their children exposed to that content.

I’m personally both “LGBTQ+-positive” AND in favor of the right of parents to direct the upbringing of their children — not just where religion is concerned but in every respect that doesn’t constitute physical abuse or neglect.

I have to disagree, however, with fellow libertarian writer James Bovard, who claims that, with its ruling, “SCOTUS Strikes a Blow against Public School Indoctrination of Young Children.” Indoctrination is baked in to “public” education. The court simply weighed in on one particular aspect of that indoctrination while going out of its way to preclude the correct solution for indoctrination in general.

“It is no answer,” the case syllabus claims, “that parents remain free to place their children in private school or to educate them at home. Public education is a public benefit, and the government cannot ‘condition’ its ‘availability’ on parents’ willingness to accept a burden on their religious exercise. … Moreover, given that education is compulsory in Maryland, the parents are not being asked simply to forgo a public benefit. They have an obligation — enforceable by fine or imprisonment — to send their children to public school unless they find an adequate substitute they can afford.”

So:

We’re going to set up a system.

We’re going to make you pay for that system.

We’re going to force you to put your kids into that system unless you can ALSO afford to pay for an alternative system.

But then we’re going to allow a heckler’s veto on anything in that system that anyone with the money and friends to get a case before the Supreme Court may happen to dislike.

Because the thing they dislike, THAT’s the problem.

No, the system is the problem.

The right to direct the upbringing of one’s children entails the obligation to bear the costs of bringing up one’s children.

The system itself violates parents’ rights to direct the upbringing of their children AND forces them to bear the costs of that violation, making them less able to afford the costs of whatever upbringing they might prefer.

So long as “public” education — education funded by compulsory taxation — exists, parents will be “burdened” by that system’s “indoctrination” of their children in various ways.

There’s one, and only one, way to solve the problem of school “indoctrination” that this or that sub-set of parents may dislike: Separation of school and state.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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“John Marshall has made his decision” regarding relations between the Cherokee Nation and the United States,  US president Andrew Jackson supposedly said of the US Supreme Court’s chief justice in 1832. “Now let him enforce it!”

That sentiment comes to mind when considering the Supreme Court’s June 27 decision in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton. The court ruled that the government of Texas doesn’t run afoul of the First Amendment by requiring websites to verify users’ ages if those sites serve content the regime deems “harmful to minors.”

Even if the Jackson quote isn’t apocryphal, there are differences, of course.

One is that enforcement of Texas’s age verification law falls to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, not to chief justice John Roberts (or to associate justice Clarence Thomas, who wrote the majority opinion).

The other, bigger difference is that Jackson successfully defied Marshall — herding the Cherokee westward at gunpoint without further legal consequence — while Paxton stands virtually no chance of implementing his permission slip from the Roberts court to intrude on Texans’ Internet privacy.

The response of the porn industry to these state-based “age verification” laws breaks down into three types:

A few sites comply. They put up a web gate and require users from states with such laws to prove they’re over 18 by providing government-issued ID or submitting a face picture that lets AI estimate their ages.

Some other sites put up a different kind of web gate — they simply don’t allow users whose IP addresses seem to be located in states with “age verification” laws to see what’s behind the gate.

Those two responses probably cover 10% or so of “porn” sites, mainly the big operators who have a lot of money invested in their operations and don’t want legal trouble.

Most sites go a third way: They just ignore the Ken Paxtons of the world.

And, like Andrew Jackson versus Marshall, they can get away with it.

Their servers aren’t located in Texas, or possibly even in the United States. Maybe it’s possible to tell who operates those servers, maybe not. Anonymous website operators in Thailand probably don’t lie awake at night worrying about a Ken Paxton lawsuit.

Paxton might waste a bunch of taxpayer money creating a Chinese-style “Great Firewall of Texas” to stop Texans from viewing web content he doesn’t like … but Virtual Private Networks would get those Texans around that firewall. VPNs would also help those users convince sites that DO require age verification from Texans that they’re actually from the Netherlands, Japan, or Romania.

I’m a big fan of VPNs and other tools for circumventing government control of what we can access on the World Wide Web. I’m also old enough to remember the US government’s war on encryption in the 1990s. Short version for you youngsters: The government lost that war. Paxton and his co-belligerents will lose this one, too.

That’s a good thing. Government control over what we may or may not see and hear on the Internet is far too dangerous to allow.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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