They Always Blame Us When It Breaks
The flood washed away lives. Y’all in the media let the truth drown with them.
A hundred bodies. Twenty-seven of them were children: Black, white, Latino, rich, poor, Christian camp kids in matching T-shirts. Swept away in the middle of the night by a wall of water that didn’t knock before it came in.
And within 48 hours, the blame had a name: Joel Baker.
Austin’s fire chief. Black. Bald. Leather jacket. The kind of brother who shows up to a press conference looking like he just left one.
Didn’t matter that Austin wasn’t flooded. Didn’t matter that his crews were already responding to calls in Travis County.
Didn’t matter that FEMA didn’t pick up the damn phone for three days.
The story had already been set: “A fire chief failed.” Not “FEMA failed.” Not “Kristi Noem imposed a budget rule so dumb it might as well have been written in crayon.”
No. The story was: “The Black guy hesitated.”
And I’m sitting here watching national anchors tiptoe around the federal screwups like they were scared the teleprompter might sue them.
Meanwhile, Charlie Kirk over here blaming DEI like it was the storm cloud.
“See? This is what happens when you hire for diversity!”
Oh word? So the rain checked the fire chief’s résumé before it flooded the camp?
I’m not laughing, but I have to. Because the alternative is rage.
And rage don’t work in this country unless you’re white, carrying a rifle, and claiming your HOA violated your First Amendment rights.
What I’m saying is: they found a Black face fast.
Faster than they found a FEMA rescue boat.
Faster than they found the call logs showing DHS let thousands of desperate Texans hit voicemail.
Faster than the Washington Post found the fucking spine to say the damn word failure without wrapping it in three layers of “according to officials familiar with the matter.”
So yeah, I saw the flood.
But what I really saw was the ritual.
The machinery.
The American way of cleaning up a disaster: Drag out the bodies. Send thoughts and prayers. Then blame a Black man.
The Flood They Showed Us
They showed us the water.
Nonstop aerial drone shots of muddy rivers swallowing rooftops.
Sheriff boats cruising past front porches like it was Lake Travis Gone Wrong.
Parents crying on local news. Kids missing. Entire towns turned to memory foam and soaked, sunken, unrecognizable.
They showed the pain.
They showed the loss.
They showed Governor Abbott standing in front of a podium trying really hard to look like leadership and not just PR with cowboy boots.
And then they showed Trump smiling in Kerrville like it was a campaign stop.
Holding babies. Shaking hands. Saying things like, “They should’ve had bells or something.”
Because that’s how this country processes trauma: we wrap it in photo ops and hope you don’t ask who cut the funding for sirens.
FEMA came next, of course. Late, but polished.
Graphics. Press releases.
The kind of language that says “response efforts are underway,” while the people who needed help have already moved in with cousins two towns over.
And in the middle of all that wall-to-wall coverage, hour-to-hour not a single major outlet paused to say:
“Wait a minute… Didn’t Kerr County ask for sirens years ago and get denied?”
Or:
“Isn’t it a little odd that FEMA’s call center just happened to lay off its contractors the night people were literally calling for rescue?”
Or how about this one:
“Why did FEMA search-and-rescue teams have to sit on their hands for three days waiting for Kristi Noem to sign a check?”
They didn’t ask.
Because that’s not the kind of story you tell when the cameras are still warm and the spin cycle’s still running.
They gave us coverage. Not clarity.
Emotion, not accountability.
Disaster porn with no mention of who loaded the clip.
What we saw on TV was a tragedy.
What we didn’t see was how avoidable that tragedy was.
How predictable it was.
How somebody—hell, multiple somebodies chose paperwork over people and silence over sirens.
But when you’ve already got a Black fire chief to point at, I guess there’s no need to look upstream.
The Failures They Buried
Let’s start with what they didn’t put in the headline.
FEMA didn’t show up late because of traffic.
They showed up late because Kristi Noem yes, that Kristi Noem, the one who shot a puppy for political clout quietly slipped in a new budget rule.
No emergency spending over $100,000 without her personal sign-off.
Search-and-rescue teams were ready to roll. But they had to wait…
For a pen.
For a signature.
While people were drowning.
And this wasn’t speculation.
FEMA officials said it to the Washington Post, in writing:
“Securing the approval of the Homeland Security secretary was never part of the process previously and is absolutely hampering our ability to provide immediate assistance.”
They didn’t whisper that.
They yelled it.
But somehow, when it made it to CNN, it got dressed up in soft clothes:
“FEMA efforts slowed due to internal budget protocols.”
Slowed?
Bruh. A soul dies waiting on a rescue boat, and the media calls it a goddamned protocol delay?
Meanwhile, FEMA’s call center, the hotline for help, gets quietly gutted.
Laid off the operators.
Right in the middle of the damn disaster.
They were answering thousands of calls on July 5th.
Then… silence.
People were calling. Begging.
Some got hold music. Some got click tones. Some got nothing.
And again…they knew it.
FEMA had the data.
They just figured you wouldn’t notice.
And what about Kerr County?
No sirens. No alerts. No warning system.
Not because they didn’t want one.
Because the state said no. Three times.
Three denied applications to install flood sirens before this flood hit.
And after? The Lt. Governor shows up to the press conference like it’s open mic night:
“Yeah, I guess we probably should’ve had sirens down there.”
You guess?
This wasn’t a natural disaster. This was a system malfunction.
Top to bottom. State to federal. Red tape to red state.
And yet somehow, the name on everyone’s lips was Joel Baker.
Not Kristi Noem.
Not David Richardson, the FEMA director with no disaster experience.
Not the governor. Not the budget chair. Not the Trump campaign staffer who signed off on the whole damn thing.
Nope. It was the Black man in the Austin firehouse who caught the smoke.
Because the media didn’t bury the lede.
They buried the truth.
The Black Man in the Crosshairs
Let me break it down the way they’d never say it on CNN:
A hundred people die in a flood.
And within days, the headline becomes: What did the Black fire chief do wrong?
Joel G. Baker.
Chief of the Austin Fire Department.
Didn’t flood. Didn’t fumble.
But he was photogenic, high-ranking, and Black.
Which, in American disaster math, equals perfect scapegoat.
The local firefighter union lit the match.
They put out a public statement accusing Chief Baker of “egregious dereliction of duty,” saying he delayed sending swift water rescue teams to Kerr County.
They even claimed he did it to “save money.”
Which is wild, considering:
• Austin was under its own flood warning at the time
• Baker did deploy personnel and boats, in phases, starting July 4
• And any emergency costs would’ve been reimbursed by the state anyway
But none of that mattered I guess.
Because the fire was already set.
And the folks with matches? They weren’t right-wing.
They were local. Labor. Union. White.
And before you knew it, Charlie Kirk jumped in with the gasoline.
“This is what happens when you hire for DEI instead of competence.”
“But hey—you got a Black fire chief in Austin.”
Now hold up.
The flood hit rural Texas.
The state failed to fund sirens.
FEMA got caught sleeping in their boots.
Kristi Noem personally delayed the rescue teams.
And somehow the problem is… diversity?
Let’s call it what it is:
This was never about what Chief Baker did. It was about who he is.
A Black man in authority. In a liberal city. Wearing his badge and his skin at the same time.
You think if the fire chief was white and named something like Brad Whitmore that they’d have called him a “diversity hire”?
You think Charlie Kirk would’ve posted a meme?
You think national media would’ve stayed this quiet?
Because that’s the real story.
Not just that Baker was blamed.
But that nobody with a mainstream platform stepped up to correct the record.
No cable segment. No op-ed. No pushback.
Even the firefighter union who started the whole thing had to circle back and clarify:
“We strongly condemn all forms of racism… our concerns are unrelated to DEI.”
But by then it didn’t matter.
The image was already out there: Baker as the weak link.
Baker as the one who hesitated.
Baker as the reason little white girls from a Christian summer camp didn’t come home.
That’s the part that gutted me.
Because we’ve seen this movie before.
Hell, we live in this movie.
Disaster strikes. System fails.
Power ducks.
And somewhere, a Black man in uniform becomes the headline.
The Media Chose Comfort Over Truth
Let me be real: I didn’t expect Fox News to tell the truth.
I didn’t expect Charlie Kirk to hold back.
But I did expect better from the so-called grown-ups.
CNN. The Washington Post. MSNBC. NPR.
All the institutions that love to drop phrases like “accountability journalism” and “speaking truth to power.”
All the ones that ran wall-to-wall coverage when a dog barked during a Biden press conference.
When it came time to report on Kristi Noem’s FEMA delay…a delay that likely cost lives…they buried it in paragraph twelve.
When it came time to ask Trump why he blamed the counties he defunded, they turned the mic off when he got loud.
“Only a bad person would ask a question like that.”
That’s what Trump told a CBS reporter when she brought up the children who drowned without warning.
And the press?
They moved on.
Didn’t press. Didn’t follow up.
Didn’t want to become the story.
Hell, the Washington Post already got sued by the Trump campaign once.
You think they’re eager to catch another case for calling out Kristi Noem?
You think they want to burn a source at FEMA by quoting what staffers actually said behind the scenes?
Nope. They played it safe.
They quoted the official. They avoided the adjective. They traded clarity for caution.
“Response was slowed.”
Not: “Lives were lost because the Secretary of Homeland Security imposed a reckless bottleneck.”
Not: “FEMA was paralyzed by political optics.”
Not: “The federal government failed to respond in time, and now over 100 people are dead.”
They went with neutral verbs and vague nouns.
Because calling it what it is…..negligence, would require taking a side.
And American media hates taking a side more than it hates repeating lies.
So instead, they ran the safe stories.
The ones with grieving families, prayer vigils, and slow-motion drone footage.
The ones that make you feel sad without making you think.
Or worse without making you angry at the people who should’ve stopped this.
And while the mainstream networks ran soft-focus stories about resilience and community healing,
Black Twitter had already figured it out:
“They blaming the Black man again.”
“Where the hell was FEMA?”
“Kristi Noem hiding behind a press release.”
“This some Katrina remix bullshit.”
But the big outlets didn’t want to say it.
Didn’t want to look “partisan.”
Didn’t want to risk losing access.
Didn’t want to admit they’d been complicit in the cover-up by omission.
So they did what they always do when the truth gets too uncomfortable:
They went quiet.
This Ain’t New—But It’s Getting Worse
This isn’t the first time the system failed and a Black man took the fall.
It’s not even the tenth.
Hurricane Katrina.
Bodies floating down Canal Street while cable news asked why people “didn’t just evacuate.”
Meanwhile, FEMA dragged its feet, and George Bush flew over it all like he was scouting a new golf course.
By the time the press got serious, the damage was done—and the stereotype had stuck: Black folks are just “unprepared.”
Flint.
Lead in the water for years.
Governor Snyder signed off on it. Emergency managers enforced it.
But somehow the face of the crisis became Black mothers on welfare “complaining” while white officials played dumb.
COVID.
Black and Brown people died at twice the rate.
Why? Because we’re “less likely to trust vaccines.”
Not because we’re less likely to have health insurance, or paid time off, or access to safe care.
But again, the story became our hesitancy—not their neglect.
It’s always the same play.
Disaster hits.
System fails.
Government panics.
And when the smoke clears, they hand you a brochure with a Black face on it and say “Here’s who dropped the ball.”
They never blame the funders.
Never blame the budget cuts.
Never blame the consultants who said, “Let’s move fast and break things” and then disappeared before the flood.
And let’s be real—it works.
The blame sticks.
Even when it’s false. Even when it’s absurd.
Because people need a face to blame.
And in this country, the darker the face, the easier the sell.
But what’s new and what’s changed is the speed.
The velocity of the scapegoating.
How fast the memes hit.
How fast the narrative hardens before the facts are even out.
We don’t just bury truth anymore, nah, we preempt it.
And the media?
They’re not just passive bystanders.
They’re co-authors.
They’ve learned how to deliver tragedy without discomfort.
In high definition.
With soft piano music.
And a carefully edited segment that names everyone except the people who wrote the damn policy.
So yeah.
This ain’t new.
But it is getting faster.
More efficient.
More automated.
They’ve turned racial scapegoating into a crisis management protocol.
And we keep ending up at the bottom of it.
Closing Truth
Some of y’all know this story in your bones.
You’ve lived the version where the water wasn’t a flood—it was eviction.
Or bankruptcy.
And some of y’all…
You’re just now waking up.
You’re reading this like, “Damn, I didn’t see that on the news.”
And you didn’t.
Because the news don’t serve truth.
It serves narrative.
It serves comfort.
It serves power.
I’m not a journalist with a press badge.
I’m a father. A husband. A man who’s seen how this country eats its own and always starts with us.
I don’t write this because I enjoy the pain.
I write this because if we don’t tell the truth out loud, they’ll erase it quietly.
So here’s the truth:
The flood didn’t drown us.
Silence did.
The kind that starts in pressrooms and ends in eulogies.
If You Made It This Far…
You’re not here for clickbait.
You’re here because you see the cracks. And you want the real story told—without fear, without polish, without waiting for permission.
If this resonated, if it hit you somewhere honest…
👉🏾 Become a PAID subscriber.
It keeps this work alive. It tells the algorithm we’re not afraid of the truth.
And it lets me keep doing this—for us, not for clicks.
This ain’t just about content.
This is about memory.
About resistance.
About making sure next time, they don’t get away with it so easy.
Join me. Let’s make them uncomfortable together.
🖤
—Xplisset