Phil Robertson, the “Duck Dynasty” patriarch who will be speaking alongside Donald Trump at the Values Voter Summit this weekend, offered his thoughts on natural disasters in an interview with a West Virginia radio station yesterday, explaining that the government shouldn’t be providing relief to people affected by the devastating flooding in Louisiana because everybody should just chill out, stop whining and move to higher ground.
Brian Sexton, who was hosting “ The Tom Roten Morning Show,” asked Robertson to discuss the flooding in his home state of Louisiana, which led Robertson to embark on an extended reflection on natural disasters and how everyone always gets “bent out of shape whether it doesn’t rain or if it does rain,” when the country’s founders thought you should just deal with it on your own:
Here’s my view of disasters, whether it be hurricanes, tornados, it just rains a lot. Everyone needs to take a deep breath and say—You know, I’ve noticed something. We bellyache when it doesn’t rain because we can’t grow anything and ‘It’s a drought, it’s a drought!’ We all bellyache and then cry out. Well, when it rains, starts raining and it rains too much so you have a flood, ‘It’s a flood, it’s a flood!’ and everyone gets all bent out of shape whether it doesn’t rain or if it does rain.
So everybody is saying, running around on planet earth, seemingly saying in America at least, if it just rained just right all the time we would be happy. Here’s the deal: When it rains a lot, it’s going to flood. And if it doesn’t rain too much you have a drought. Both of them are bones to be chewed.
But it’s my studied opinion, just from observing, our founders basically said, ‘When disasters come your way, it’s unfortunate, they do happen, but you can’t expect the United States government to start pouring in and coming down there.’
What everyone needs to realize is we need to love one another enough that when you or your neighbors when they flood, we call come together, we all start cooking some meals here, looking after one another. These things, it’s the way life is. I mean, we’re not going to have the perfect temperature and the perfect amount of rainfall. So my view is, when it floods here we just move all our stuff higher and higher up the hill and if it starts coming in the house, we move it up, up, up as far as we can and then if it comes right down to it, we’re going to find ourselves another hill higher than the one we were on.
After discussing how he always picks land with potential flooding in mind and so people should never have built homes near the Gulf of Mexico in the first place, Robertson concluded: “We bring a lot of this stuff on ourselves. I don’t think the government ought to be a part of it. That’s when you ought to come together as human beings, love one another, help each other out. The waters will recede and life will go on, so let’s just keep it in proper context. It’s the way life is.”
