Clay Travis Has No Principles: A Tale of Two Disasters

The hypocrisy isn't surprising -- it's the business model

When wildfires scorched Los Angeles earlier this year, Clay Travis—co-host of The Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Show and founder of OutKick—wasted no time declaring who was responsible: Democrats.

In a string of tweets, segments on his nationally syndicated show, and multiple pieces on OutKick.com, Travis pointed fingers at LA leadership, mocked residents for "voting for this," and blasted Mayor Karen Bass for being out of the country during the height of the disaster. He framed the tragedy as a cautionary tale of liberal mismanagement, environmental extremism, and urban decay.

But when Texas, a Republican stronghold and a frequent beneficiary of Clay’s praise, suffered historic flooding this past weekend, his tone changed entirely.

Suddenly, the real villains were the people daring to ask questions—not the ones in charge.

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The Flip-Flop: From Outrage to Obfuscation

Let’s be clear: The Texas floods have been devastating. Entire communities across Harris and Fort Bend counties are underwater. Completely innocent lives have been tragically lost, many of them youth. Families are displaced. Infrastructure collapsed. Emergency responses lagged.

You would think this would present an opportunity for consistency—maybe even introspection—for someone so eager to hold leaders accountable in blue states.

Instead, Clay Travis took to his Twitter feed on July 5 to post:

“If your instinct in a natural disaster is to blame political leaders rather than help people, your brain and your soul are broken.”

This, from the same man who in February wrote on OutKick:

“Californians have no one to blame but themselves. They keep electing clowns like Karen Bass who leave the country while the state burns.”

And on his February 13 Clay & Buck segment, he added:

“This is what you get when you elect people more interested in climate virtue-signaling than actual disaster preparedness. You get ashes.”

Yet with questions surfacing about Senator Ted Cruz vacationing in Greece as homes in his state flooded, Travis said nothing. Not on Twitter. Not on OutKick. Not on air.

It’s worth noting: Ted Cruz is a frequent guest on The Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Show and a regular on OutKick’s network. It’s not hard to connect the dots. When Cruz bailed during the 2021 Texas freeze to go to Cancun, even some conservatives called him out. But not this time. Clay’s silence is thunderous—and calculated.

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Manufactured Outrage—For One Side Only

This isn’t just hypocrisy. It’s partisan malpractice. Clay Travis isn’t offering principled commentary. He’s running a messaging operation where moral outrage is only deployed when it targets Democrats—and moral relativism is used to defend Republicans, no matter how egregious the failure.

When Californians suffer, they’re portrayed as liberal sheep who deserve the chaos. When Texans suffer, it’s a tragedy that must be insulated from political critique.

This kind of selective outrage is not only dishonest—it’s dangerous. It deepens polarization, delegitimizes public accountability, and trains millions of listeners to see disasters not as failures of leadership but as battlegrounds in a never-ending partisan war.

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The Clay Travis Playbook: Never Let a Crisis Go to Waste (Unless It Hurts Your Team)

Here’s how the grift works:

1. When a Democratic leader fails (or appears to), Clay frames it as emblematic of liberal ideology. Their failures aren’t circumstantial—they're inevitable results of progressive policy.

2. When a Republican leader fails, Clay either ignores it or deflects, usually by attacking the media or accusing critics of politicizing tragedy.

3. When average people suffer, Clay’s sympathy depends entirely on which party governs their zip code.

And when you own the outrage machine, you never have to reconcile contradictions. You just keep turning the crank.

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This Is What Propaganda Looks Like

Clay Travis isn’t just wrong. He’s functionally dishonest in how he applies blame and demands accountability. His media empire thrives on the kind of performative rage that suffocates real conversation and shields bad actors—as long as they’re on his side of the aisle.

It’s not journalism. It’s not commentary. It’s tribal agitprop, packaged as sports-adjacent infotainment, and it’s helping radicalize an entire demographic against nuance, empathy, and the idea that anyone but “the libs” can ever be at fault.

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Where We Go From Here

What should be obvious by now is that Clay Travis doesn’t care about improving government response to disasters. He cares about leveraging tragedy to score ideological points—and silencing criticism when it targets the people he likes or does business with.

It’s up to the rest of us to point this out. To call the hypocrisy what it is. To challenge media figures who think disasters are only political when they hurt Democrats—and off-limits when they implicate Republicans.

Because if we don’t push back, we allow the Clay Travises of the world to keep flooding the airwaves with disinformation while the literal floodwaters rise.