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.

WATCH: The Michael Knowles Show

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.

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