Republicans must hold MAGA supporter Ohio Congressman Jim Jordan accountable for ignoring Ohio State sexual abuse

A new film about the Ohio State wrestling team sex abuse scandal indicts those who looked away. Echo opinion published in the Los Angeles Times by Robin Abcarian. 

Robin Abcarian
A new film about the Ohio State wrestling team sex abuse scandal indicts those who looked away

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), House Judiciary chairman and staunch ally of Donald Trump, has denied knowing anything about the sexual abuse of male wrestlers when he was an assistant wrestling coach at Ohio State University.
(J. Scott Applewhite / Associated Press)

For more than 30 years, Fred Feeney refereed matches for the Ohio State University’s powerhouse wrestling team.

Unlike the dozens of young men whose athletic scholarships depended on staying in the good graces of the team doctor, Richard Strauss, who could withhold permission for them to compete, Feeney didn’t have to persuade himself that what Strauss did was OK.

He didn’t have to pretend it was OK that Strauss was constantly taking showers with athletes. Or that it was OK when, after a match, Strauss masturbated next to Feeney in the shower, then grabbed the ref’s ass.

A visibly shaken Feeney recounts in the new documentary, “Surviving Ohio State,” that he left the locker room that day in distress and immediately told wrestling coach Russ Hellickson and assistant wrestling coach Jim Jordan what had happened.

Both coaches shrugged, said Feeney, who added that Jordan told him, “It’s Strauss. You know what he does.”

Dan Ritchie, who quit the wrestling team in his third year because he could no longer tolerate Strauss’ sexual abuse — which included forcing athletes to drop their pants and endure genital and rectal exams when they saw him, for even the most minor complaint — said that Jordan once told him, “If he ever did that to me, I’d snap his neck like a stick of dry balsa wood.”

But Jordan, now the powerful chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and an unwavering ally of President Trump, has assiduously denied ever seeing or knowing about assaults committed by Strauss during Jordan’s eight years with the team.

He emerges as one of the bad guys in the new film, which is based on the Sports Illustrated 2020 investigation, “Why Aren’t More People Talking About the Ohio State Sex Abuse Scandal?” Produced by the Oscar-winning documentarian Eva Orner and George Clooney’s production company, it debuted on HBO Max in June.

“To say that [Jordan] knew nothing, that nothing ever happened, it’s a flat out lie,” Ritchie says in the documentary.

A callous response to reports of sexual assault was the norm at Ohio State. While administrators deflected reports about Strauss for years, claiming they were just rumors, the university’s 2019 investigation, performed by an outside law firm, found that during his 1978-1996 tenure in the athletics department and at the student health center, Strauss assaulted at least 177 students thousands of times.

The school’s fencing coach, Charlotte Remenyik, complained about Strauss for 10 years until he was finally removed as her teams’ doctor. (In response to her efforts to protect her athletes, Strauss accused her of waging a vendetta against him.)

A complaint finally caused the university to remove him as a treating physician at OSU in 1996, but he was still a tenured faculty member when he retired, with “emeritus” status, in 1998. He died by suicide in 2005.

It was not until the Larry Nassar gymnastics abuse scandal exploded between 2016 and 2018 that the former Ohio State wrestlers understood that they, too, had been victimized by their team doctor, and that there were probably a lot more of them than anyone realized.

“I said, ‘Wow, that’s us,’” said former OSU wrestler Michael DiSabato, one of the first to go public. “It unlocked something in me.”

A group of former teammates met in 2018, then later sat down with their old coach, Hellickson, in an emotional encounter. 

Hellickson promised to write letters supporting them, the wrestlers said, then ghosted them. He did not respond to filmmakers’ requests to be interviewed.

Likewise, Jordan shunned requests for interviews, and he has appeared exasperated in news clips when questioned about what he knew. He’s not a defendant in any of the abuse lawsuits filed against OSU.

In 2020, Michael DiSabato’s brother, Adam, a former wrestler and team captain, testified under oath during a hearing on an Ohio bill that would have allowed Strauss’ victims to sue OSU for damages, that Jordan called him “crying, groveling … begging me to go against my brother.” Jordan has denied that conversation took place.

It seems to me that a normal human being, operating from a place of empathy, might express feelings of sorrow that the young male athletes in his charge were abused to the point that some considered suicide and others quit sports altogether, instead of accusing them of lying. Ritchie, for example, said his father was so disappointed about his decision to quit wrestling — he could not bring himself to tell his father why — that it permanently overshadowed their relationship.

I find no evidence that Jordan ever expressed feelings of regret for his wrestlers, though he did insist to Politico in 2018, “I never knew about any type of abuse. If I did, I would have done something about it. And look, if there are people who are abused, then that’s terrible and we want justice to happen.” If?

Although the explosive new documentary has been overshadowed by the implosion taking place in MAGA world over the “Jeffrey Epstein files” and questions about Trump’s relationship with the serial sexual predator, the OSU scandal is far from being yesterday’s news.

So far, OSU has settled with nearly 300 abuse survivors, each receiving an average of $252,000. But many are not willing to settle for what they consider peanuts and note that the average payout to Nassar’s victim is more than $1 million.

On Friday, as part of a federal civil lawsuit filed by some of them, Jordan was reportedly due to be deposed under oath for the first time about the allegations that he knew about the abuse and failed to protect his wrestlers.

Steve Snyder-Hill, one of the first OSU non-athletes to report that he’d been assaulted by Strauss in 1995, told NBC that he planned to be present for Jordan’s deposition.

“I expect him to lie under oath,” said Snyder-Hill. “I don’t know a nicer way to put it.”

Bluesky: @rabcarian

Donald Trump and the Department of Justice under the direction of Pam Bondi are obviously involved in an Epstein files cover up

Inquirer readers on the Epstein files

Donald Trump talks with Jeffrey Epstein at a Mar-a-Lago party in NBC footage from 1992.

Declassify the Epstein files. #EpsteinFilesCoverUp

Donald Trump “is in the Epstein files,” wrote Elon Musk in June. “That is the real reason they have not been made public.” 

When a person with inside knowledge makes a public claim that the president has a purely personal reason for suppressing certain portions of the files describing the criminal investigation into charges of child sex trafficking by Jeffrey Epstein and his convicted co-conspirator, Ghislaine Maxwell — both known associates of Trump — how does that matter evaporate from our consciousness in just a couple of days? This administration’s strategy is to create so much chaos and angst that we are too stunned and numb to focus on any specific claim. I call on the FBI and U.S. Justice Department to pursue Musk’s allegation. 

If these federal government agencies are unable or unwilling, I call on Congress to do its job now and investigate if this is an abuse of presidential power, as we had with Watergate. I have a right to know about the character and integrity of the people running the United States of America. We all do.

From Kathy Dwyer, Hollywood in Mongomery County, Pennsylvania

P.S. Calling on Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein to find another "deep throat"....."follow the money".  💲

Donald Trump and the Republican maga cult are making innocent migrants disappear!

Trump Is Building a Machine to Disappear People

Intentional Cruelty❗ Opinion published in the The New York Times by Jeff Crisp*

In May, the United States flew a group of eight migrants to Djibouti, a small state in the Horn of Africa. For weeks, the men — who are from Cuba, Laos, Mexico, Myanmar, Vietnam and South Sudan — were detained in a converted shipping container on a U.S. military base. More than a month later, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the men, who had all been convicted of serious crimes, could be transferred to their final destination: South Sudan, a country on the brink of famine and civil war. Tom Homan, the border czar, acknowledged that he didn’t know what happened to them once they were released from U.S. custody. “As far as we’re concerned,” he said, “they’re free.”

Deporting foreign nationals to countries other than their homeland has quickly become a centerpiece of the Trump administration’s immigration policy. Thousands of people have been sent to countries in the Western Hemisphere, including Costa Rica, El Salvador, Mexico and Panama. At a recent summit of West African leaders, President Trump pressed them to admit deportees from the United States, reportedly emphasizing that assisting in migration was essential to improving commercial ties with the United States. All told, administration officials have reached out to dozens of states to try to strike deals to accept deportees. The administration is making progress: Last week, it sent five men to the tiny, landlocked country of Eswatini in southern Africa after their home countries allegedly “refused to take them back,” according to an assistant homeland security secretary, Tricia McLaughlin. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

In some ways, this is nothing new. It has become increasingly common for the world’s most prosperous countries to relocate immigrants, asylum seekers and refugees to places with which they have little or no prior connection. Previous U.S. administrations from both parties have sought third-country detentions as easy fixes. In the 1990s, Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton both sent thousands of Haitian refugees to detention camps in Guantánamo Bay before forcibly repatriating most of them to Haiti.

What is new about the Trump administration’s deportation efforts, unlike previous European or even past U.S. attempts, is their breadth and scale, effectively transforming migrant expulsions into a tool for international leverage. By deporting foreign nationals to often unstable third countries, the Trump administration is not only creating a novel class of exiles with little hope of returning to either the United States or their country of origin,😟😢 but, also, explicitly using these vulnerable populations as bargaining chips in a wider strategy of diplomatic and geopolitical deal making.

This strategy marks a significant evolution in a practice that has been gaining traction throughout the developed world. In the early 2000s, Australia devised the so-called Pacific Solution, an arrangement that diverted asylum seekers arriving by boat or intercepted at sea to holding centers in the island states of Nauru and Papua New Guinea in exchange for benefits, including development aid and financial support. In 2016, amid what was then the largest displacement of people in Europe since World War II, the European Union struck a deal that allowed it to send migrants arriving in Greece from Turkey through irregular means back to Turkey — to the tune of six billion euros.

Some of these efforts have faced legal challenges. Starting in 2022, for example, the United Kingdom attempted to establish a program that would have automatically deported some asylum seekers and migrants entering the U.K. illegally to Rwanda, costing over half a billion pounds — more than 200 million of which were paid upfront. The British Supreme Court ruled that the policy was unlawful, and Britain’s prime minister scrapped the plan last year.

But many countries remain undeterred. In 2023, Italy signed a deal that allowed it to send certain migrants rescued by Italian ships in international waters to detention centers in Albania, and is persisting with the effort even in the face of legal setbacks. This spring, the European Union proposed establishing “return hubs” in third countries for rejected asylum seekers.

Although these deals take various forms, states that enter them are motivated by similar concerns. The world’s richer states wish to retain control of their borders and are particularly aggrieved by the arrival of people who enter by irregular means, especially when they are coming from low-income countries that many associate with crime, violence and terrorism. Governments in destination countries are attracted to such deals by the promise of financial, diplomatic and military support.

Throughout much of the West, as public sentiment has turned against newcomers, policymakers and pundits alike have portrayed migrants as a threat to national security and social stability. 

These innocent migrants, they argue, impose an unsustainable burden on government budgets and public services and deprive citizens of jobs. (Maine Writer: These desperate migrants carry a lable being "migrant", as though they are somehow not really human beings!)

Racism and xenophobia, fueled by populist politicians and right-wing media outlets, have also played an important part in creating a toxic environment in which the expulsion of migrants to arbitrary destinations is increasingly considered legitimate.

But how legitimate is it? Third-country deportations often sidestep due process and violate international law, under which it is forbidden for states to deport such people to any place where their life or liberty would be at risk. It is also plainly unethical, imposing additional stress on people who have undergone traumatic journeys and who are then dumped in far-off, unfamiliar places.

Several of the countries slated as deportation destinations have bleak human rights records and are unsafe for all civilians, let alone foreign deportees, who are likely to be targets of abuse and exploitation. In the worst instances, as with U.S. deportees in El Salvador, they can find themselves in jails where the authorities routinely inflict physical and psychological violence on inmates.

These deportation deals also have corrosive consequences for international politics. They encourage smaller, weaker countries to engage in transactional behavior, commodifying human life by trading immigrant bodies for cash, development aid, diplomatic support and international impunity. They may even strengthen the impunity of authoritarian regimes that violate the human rights of their own citizens. In the case of El Salvador, for example, deportees from the United States reportedly included some leaders of the criminal gang MS-13, who were thought to be in a position to expose links between President Nayib Bukele and the gang.

For nearly three-quarters of a century, a network of international instruments, institutions and norms have acted as guardrails, if imperfect ones, to ensure that refugees, asylum seekers and other migrants are treated humanely. Now it seems as though the president is looking to rewrite the rules of this system to one in which people are pawns.

By expanding the practice of forced relocation, Trump is using migrants as currency in a global network of geopolitical negotiation. His administration is normalizing the use of vulnerable people as bargaining chips to extract better deals with friends and foes alike. He is setting a dangerous precedent for other democratic countries by ignoring the moral and reputational cost of shipping desperate people into terrible conditions. 

As Trump works to bring this evil 👺👿new paradigm to life, leaders the world over will be watching closely. If he can pull it off, so can they.

*Mr. Crisp is an expert on migration and humanitarian issues.

Donald Trump could not create enough evil to satisfy the cult base insatiable appetite for diabolicle Epstein evilism

Behind Trump’s Jeffrey Epstein Problem published in The New Yorker by Benjamin Wallace-Wells

Donald Trump tried to blame Democrats, and, more unexpectedly, he has called those in his base who have asked for a fuller accounting about Jeffrey Epstein, “weaklings” and “stupid.”

Donald Trump’s cult political allies have long insisted, with more than a little condescension, that the press should take the President seriously, but not literally. Yet the people who take Trump most literally are among his own supporters, who over the years have absorbed his most hyperbolic claims as if they were settled truth: that Hillary Clinton and various Bidens were guilty of high crimes, that the 2020, election was stolen, that the circumstances surrounding the death of the billionaire Jeffrey Epstein warranted “a full investigation” and might have involved Bill Clinton. Rarely do the diehards demand proof. So earlier this month, when the Department of Justice and the F.B.I. issued a statement asserting that there was, in fact, no deeper mystery behind Epstein’s death—which occurred in a Manhattan jail cell in 2019, as he was facing trial for sex trafficking, and was determined to be suicide by hanging—the White House likely assumed that the magaverse would simply move on, as it had so many times before. The surprise—one that, two weeks in, Trump has still not been able to quell—is that it didn’t.

Squirming, the President has tried to dismiss the uproar (“Are people still talking about this guy?”) and to blame it, somehow, on Barack Obama and Joe Biden (the Democrats’ “new SCAM”). More unexpectedly, he has called those in his own base who have asked for a fuller accounting “weaklings” and “stupid,” lamenting that “my PAST SUPPORTERS have bought into this ‘bullshit,’ hook, line, and sinker.” But that has been just blood in the water, both to the Democrats who are now calling for the full release of the Epstein files and to the anonymous Republican strategists who have begun to warn of a drop in turnout in the midterms.

Among Trump’s aides, one theory was that his team had erred in promising not just vibes and insinuation, as he normally does, but something to which he is generally allergic: hard evidence. The details of Epstein’s life—the formidable connections he cultivated among political, financial, and academic élites; his conviction in Florida in 2008 for solicitation of prostitution; the way he avoided more serious punishment—have been exhaustively documented. But the maga fixation was that the government had participated in a coverup and had in its possession a list of Epstein’s clients, which could, the theory went, implicate scores of the powerful in heinous crimes. Last October, Trump’s running mate, J. D. Vance, said, “Seriously, we need to release the Epstein list.”

Then in February, Attorney General Pam Bondi responded to a question about whether the Justice Department would soon make public the “list of Jeffrey Epstein’s clients” by saying it was “sitting on my desk right now to review.”

Fifteen right-wing influencers had gone to the White House and were given binders titled “Epstein Files: Phase One. But, those “files” offered nothing new.

To Trump’s allies in the right-wing media, many of whom had been predicting spectacular revelations about Epstein for years, this seemed like a dodge. “The fact that the U.S. government, the one I voted for, refused to take my question seriously and instead said, ‘Case closed, shut up, conspiracy theorist,’ was too much for me,” Tucker Carlson said. Megyn Kelly posted on X that there were only two possibilities: that there was no client list and Bondi had misled the public or that “there is a scandal that’s being covered up & it’s at his”—Trump’s—“direction.” Steve Bannon estimated that the backlash would cost Republicans forty seats in the House of Representatives next year. That last prediction is probably worth taking seriously, but not literally.

More interesting was the reaction among Trump’s most recent allies: the Silicon Valley billionaires and the podcast bros who were key to his win in 2024. Elon Musk has been making gleeful accusations against Trump for weeks. The comedian and podcaster Andrew Schulz complained, “He’s doing the exact opposite of everything I voted for.” Joe Rogan, among the most important of Trump’s allies in November, now sounded betrayed: “Why’d they say there was thousands of hours of tape of people doing horrible shit? Why’d they say that?”

Trump is vulnerable to the Epstein case, and not only because the two men were photographed partying together, or because Trump praised Epstein in a quote that was widely circulated, or because Epstein had told the reporter Michael Wolff that, for ten years, he had been the President’s “closest friend.” (Trump eventually said that they had had a “falling out.”) On Thursday, the Wall Street Journal reported that, for Epstein’s fiftieth birthday, Trump, among others, sent him a “bawdy” birthday letter, which Trump denied, saying that he would sue the Journal, “just like I sued everyone else.” Liberals, taking all this in, might suspect that it’s a simple comeuppance for Trump’s political choices: if you build a following on the internet fringe, you can become beholden to its obsessions. But the uproar also has to do with the ways in which the Trump movement has evolved.

In the post-pandemic atmosphere of fury and distrust, Trump moved much more nimbly than the Democrats to expand his support among people who are only irregularly interested in politics, and he has reached a group that is young, nonwhite, male, and less likely to have a college degree. That group, and the podcasters whom they supply with an audience, has seemed drawn to Trump’s persona as an outsider, an inveigher against the establishment. And yet, in the six months since the Inauguration, what Trump, despite adopting a cruel and autocratic style, has given them are Republican establishment policies: a budget that cuts Medicaid, stripping seventeen million people of health insurance, and gives huge tax breaks to the rich; a military intervention in the Middle East. A CNN poll released on Wednesday suggests that the number of Americans who “approve strongly” of Trump’s Presidency—one measure of his base—is now at its lowest of any point in his first and second terms.

No wonder Trump sounds so exasperated. (On Thursday, he said that Bondi would produce “any and all” grand-jury testimony from Epstein’s case, though this seems unlikely to satisfy anyone.) The central illusion of his political career has been that, despite his wealth and evident clout, he remains an outsider. But that was always a fiction, and now—with the G.O.P. leadership unified behind him and the Supreme Court mostly backing him—he may feel strong enough to leave some of his movement’s weirdness behind. Second-term Trump is no longer acting as a populist, and the Epstein case is unfolding as a test of how maga responds to this news. ♦

Published in the print edition of the July 28, 2025, issue, with the headline “The Epstein Problem.”

Donald Trump and the Republicans fired hundreds of weather professionals just weeks before the deadly Texas flash floods

Flash Floods and Climate Policy: As the death toll climbs in Texas, the Trump Administration is actively undermining the nation’s ability to predict—and to deal with—climate-related disasters.
Published in the Houston Chronicle by Elizabeth Kolbert

On the evening of July 3rd, as the sun went down over Kerrville, Texas, a small city of some twenty-five thousand people and the seat of Kerr County, the water in the Guadalupe River was just four inches deep, according to the U.S. Geological Survey’s stream gauge there. The area hadn’t had any rain since mid-June. R.V. campers in the HTR TX Hill Country campground in Kerrville, some of whom had arrived at the sixty-five-acre facility only hours before, could barely hear the river, even though they were parked in premium spots next to it

At 3:30 A.M. on July 4th, Dalton Rice, the city manager, went out for an early-morning jog along the sluggish waterway. The river had risen to 1.71 feet, around the average depth. Kerrville’s much anticipated “Fourth on the River” celebration at the riverside Louise Hays Park was scheduled for that afternoon, and Rice saw “not a drop of rain” during his run, he later told Dan Patrick, the lieutenant governor of Texas. By 4 A.M., when Rice went home, “there was very light rain,” he said that day. “We did not see any signs of the river rising at that time.”

Rice was apparently unaware that a few hours earlier, at 1:14 A.M., the Austin-San Antonio office of the National Weather Service had sent a flash-flood warning for south-central Kerr County. The area it covered included the town of Hunt, about twelve miles upstream from Kerrville, where Camp Mystic, a girls’ sleepaway camp, was situated, at the confluence of Cypress Creek and the south fork of the Guadalupe. 

At 4:03 A.M., the warning was upgraded to an emergency: “This is a PARTICULARLY DANGEROUS SITUATION. SEEK HIGHER GROUND NOW!💥”

The stream gauge at Hunt showed the river nearing twenty-two feet, twelve feet higher than its banks. In the next hour, it would rise to thirty-seven feet, at which point the gauge stopped transmitting.

Network-news footage of flood-related disasters has traditionally shown low-lying coastal towns swamped by storm surges from named weather systems, with residents and rescue workers navigating the streets in hip waders, canoes, and powerboats, and the water level sometimes taking days to subside. Houston, New Orleans, Tampa, Charleston, and New York are among the cities that have been inundated in the past three decades.

Yet storm-surge-driven inundation flooding is not the deadliest kind of flood. The disaster often unfolds slowly enough that there’s time for many people to get to higher ground—and for weather reporters to get in place. The water isn’t moving anywhere near as fast as that of a flooded river. The flowing water in a mad river reshapes the entire landscape, a process known as fluvial erosion.

The flood barrelling down on Kerr County more resembled a tornado or a wildfire, a volatile, rapidly changing hazard, with a narrow window within which to act before the deadly force of the raging river arrived at your door. The September, 2024, floods that killed a hundred and eight people in the high country of western North Carolina, when Hurricane Helene passed over, were this kind of event, as were the floods in Valencia, Spain, in late October, 2024, which killed two hundred and thirty-two people. The recent flooding in Ruidoso, New Mexico, which claimed three lives, was, too. In my part-time home of Vermont, storms flooded much of the state, including the capital, Montpelier, in July, 2023, and flooding caused by the remnants of Hurricane Beryl hit the town of Plainfield, among other places, in July, 2024. Two people died in each event, and the damage from erosion was severe. The 2023 disaster wasn’t even caused by a named storm. Rain-soaked “thunder boomers” were enough to do the damage.

Historically, this kind of flooding, which often occurs in hilly and mountainous regions, has received far less attention than storm-surge flooding, and local municipalities tend to be less prepared than coastal towns to deal with it. People who have moved away from the beach to escape hurricanes and rising sea levels, and have settled in supposed “climate havens” like Asheville, North Carolina, or Plymouth, Vermont, are reluctant to accept that they have merely traded a devil they know for one they don’t. Francis J. Magilligan, a fluvial geomorphologist at Dartmouth College, told me, “We are actually getting pretty good at figuring out inundation risk. I would say, comparatively, we’re at the starting point of thinking about erosional risk. And we don’t have a good set of tools, FEMA or otherwise, to understand that risk.”

The floodplain maps that the Federal Emergency Management Agency uses to designate a Special Flood Hazard Area, or S.F.H.A., are based on historical climate and geological data. The maps don’t show the actual boundaries of past floods; rather, they illustrate statistical constructs based on the probability that a flood of a certain magnitude will occur there in a certain time range. The National Flood Insurance Program uses the maps to calculate risk. People who live in a hundred-year floodplain, for example, have a one-per-cent chance of being flooded in any given year. Anyone who builds or buys property in a mapped floodplain must take out federal flood insurance in order to qualify for a mortgage. The maps cover the coastal areas and the borders of major rivers, like the Mississippi, that flood frequently. They often don’t cover mountainous communities with smaller rivers and streams, where flooding can affect not only people living down by a river but also those living on banks high above it, whose homes may be lost to erosion. Moreover, most of the data FEMA uses to designate S.F.H.A.s are based on readings from the nineteen-sixties and earlier—data that climate change has largely rendered obsolete. The language, too, engenders a false sense of confidence. It makes it sound as though a bad flood will occur only once every hundred years, and that’s not the way the statistic is supposed to work.

Flash floods often occur in terrain with steep, narrow valleys that drain into rivers where the water is confined in natural and man-made channels and has nowhere else to go. The trigger is very heavy, concentrated rainfall. Warmer oceans lead to more surface evaporation, and warmer air is capable of carrying more moisture. When the warm air is forced upward by mountains, it cools and loses its ability to retain water, causing a sudden release of rain. With the Valencia floods, a year’s worth of rain fell in a single day. In North Carolina, upward of twelve to fourteen inches of rain fell in several hours. As global temperatures rise, outbursts of extreme precipitation will increase. Carl Renshaw, a hydrologist at Dartmouth, told me, referring to the meteorological conditions that led to the Texas floods, “You’re dumping so much water so quickly because you’ve primed the system with moisture. It’s like loading a gun. The people there had no time.”

Kerr County and its neighbor Kendall County sit in a valley that is known as Flash Flood Alley, because of the speed with which rainfall runs off the cliffs of the Balcones Escarpment and sluices down through streams and rivers to the coastal plain around San Antonio. The hillsides are steep, and the thin, dry topsoil over bedrock retains little water. Major flooding occurs regularly. And yet, even in Flash Flood Alley, which the judge of Kerr County, Rob Kelly, described in a press conference on July 4th as “the most dangerous river valley in the United States,” people continue to build in hundred-year floodplains. When properties are flooded, old-timers and newcomers alike tend to fix things back up. Kimberly Meitzen, a geography professor at Texas State University, in San Marcos, a small city in the Guadalupe River basin, told me, “We have this history of flooding and rebuilding here.” She mentioned five floods within living memory, in 1978, 1987, 1998, 2002, and 2015, in which not just houses but whole neighborhoods were washed away. “They just rebuild,” she said. Moreover, she added, “people continue to request variances to rebuild even closer” to the river. “There’s no really strong regulatory authority to prevent it,” she went on. “And so it just continues to put more people at risk.”

In Vermont, a flood in August, 2011, caused by Hurricane Irene, was so devastating that the U.S. Geological Survey called it a five-hundred-year flood, and at least one analysis deemed it a thousand-year flood. The flood that tore through Plainfield on July 10, 2024, occurred one year to the day after the 2023 flood, which had been a hundred-year one. And, on the same day this July, a violent flood struck Caledonia County, in the north of the state. Although such a tight grouping of floods isn’t statistically impossible, it suggests that the probability curves used by FEMA are out of whack with real climate conditions.

Texas Republicans have a responsibility to support all Texas Hill Country disaster relief including accepting FEMA financial help

Federal Emergency Management Agency: A functioning FEMA is there after volunteers have done the best they can. Who helps to finance the actual damage recovery❓😕😧

An echo report published in the Houston Chronicle by Leah Binkovitz.

Bryan Wofford walks through what is left of his brother-in-law Mark Mosty’s rental cabin along the Guadalupe River in Center Point, Texas, on Monday, July 7, 2025.

'Pallbearers in the mud’: Texas Hill Country flood volunteers fill the gap government leaves - but what happens after the volunteers are gone?

By the time Meagan Ruth and a fellow disaster relief volunteer, Paul Middendorf, pulled into Central Texas after devastating floods ripped through towns up and down the Guadalupe River, officials in hard-hit Kerrville were already turning down volunteers.

Instead, the two volunteers pulled into a gas station a few miles away in Comfort.  There, they found a man with eyes so red, it was clear he hadn’t slept since the flood. Ruth told me he must have been in his 70s.

“He said they had just been pulling body after body out of the river down in Center Point,” she remembered.

She reached out to the man and told him, “We’ll take the next shift.”

The pair headed to the small unincorporated community where the volunteer fire department was coordinating newly arrived volunteers.

It wasn’t Middendorf’s first time witnessing such a scene. He is a Houston-based disaster responder and former field director with Houston-based CrowdSource Rescue, a non-profit formed during Hurricane Harvey, which is when I first learned about his work. He has deployed to and led search and rescue efforts across the country, including after the recent fires in Los Angeles and flooding in North Carolina. 

But, he said the work in the Hill Country has been especially tricky.

The devastation from the flood had completely realigned the landscape. The water swept away everything from cabins and RVs to summer camps. Center Point’s bridge was damaged because a dislodged house smashed into it, he told me.

“I’ve never seen it before,” he said of the uprooted tree trunks and large logs that formed a sort of woven wall of debris. “It was almost impossible to get in there unless you had a chainsaw and a bulldozer, which they started getting after day three because the ground was just too soft.”

More rain and flooding made the job that much harder.

“In search, there’s no such thing as ‘I looked there,’” explained Ruth, “because they will tell you, ‘Look again. Look again. Look again.’”

They didn’t just scour the mud. The water had been so high, they searched the tree tops for bodies.

Heavy, sacred work is how Ruth described it. And we, everyday Texans grappling with the impacts of one climate disaster after another, are left to do much of it on our own.

Early on, Ruth was in touch with the mother of a missing child. Part of Ruth’s role after disasters is to help connect survivors with the resources they need, whether it’s a therapist or cases of water.

“I just need you to find [her],” the mother told her.

As she searched the ground, Ruth looked for anything out of place: a backpack, a shoe, a limb. But she thought constantly about the missing girl, a Houston-area elementary school student who attended Camp Mystic. Neither Ruth nor Middendorf found anyone directly but teams around them were regularly finding bodies that were then handled by officials to get them cleaned and identified.

Even with the strict protocols in place limiting who handles the remains, the spiritual load is clear: “It’s like being a pall bearer in the mud,” she said.

By the following Tuesday, the girl was confirmed dead.😢 In Houston, community members lined her school’s fence with flowers and put up ribbons in her honor. Ruth attended the funeral, offering the girl’s grandmother the rosary beads she had prayed with while searching for her.

The Hill Country floods are among the first major disasters under Donald Trump’s radically reshaped, significantly reduced vision of federal disaster relief. It’s a vision Texas Governor Greg Abbott is helping shape. Just a few weeks before the floods, as part of a council tasked with helping overhaul the federal emergency agency, he was critical. FEMA, he said, is “slow and clunky,” while states can act “more nimbly, more swiftly, more effectively” to disasters.

There’s plenty of truth here. FEMA itself encourages states, especially big ones like Texas, to build up their own capacities. And we have. As we learned after Hurricane Beryl, under Nim Kidd, the Texas Division of Emergency Management has poured billions into building up our resources here at home.

But Abbott’s assessment misses something critical, even irreplaceable: volunteers.

Some more libertarian-minded Texans might embrace the seemingly outsized role volunteers play. But, I have deeply mixed feelings about it. It can be a challenge to get people where the need is.

Right after the flood, Leander, for example, had to turn volunteers away. A week later, they were begging for more help to clear debris.

And it is hardly a fair burden to shoulder.

Still, it seems heartbreakingly necessary.

“I used to believe that the government, local, state, or federal, should absolutely be leading in times of disaster,” Allison Zapata, another volunteer who responded from Houston to the Central Texas flooding, told me in an email. “But after working in this recent tragedy, I’m not so sure.”

She was also in Center Point alongside the volunteer fire department, where she said, “what I witnessed was a well oiled, community-led effort that was more organized, compassionate, and effective than any government responses I’ve seen.” The volunteers working are skilled and experienced, some coming with search dogs, drones, heavy equipment and other valuable resources.

This isn’t her first time dealing with recovery. She lost her home in Harvey and FEMA was of little help then. “My rescue came from family, friends, and neighbors,” she shared. “And in every major crisis I’ve been part of, it’s always the regular people who make the biggest difference in those first chaotic days.”

Yet, surely there’s a big caveat here.

What happens months after the flood waters recede?

“Relief and rescue? Let communities lead — if they’re organized,” said Zapata. “Rebuilding? That’s where we need government, especially financially.”

We need a functioning, fully-staffed FEMA. We need a robust state response. And we need the volunteers.

After a long day in the river, Ruth walked into the local Center Point bar to meet a friend. She was still in her muddied clothes.

“The owners embraced me and poured me some whiskey,” she said. They showed her images of the town. The spot where she parks her car? Just days ago that was a playground. Other patrons joined in, sharing their flood experiences.

Eventually the conversation turned too heavy. They sat in silence.

If volunteering isn’t easy work, being inundated with volunteers isn’t easy either. It’s a complicated balance. But it’s one Texans are committed to getting right.

Donald Trump finally has a conspiracy theory he cannot climb out of....Jeffrey Epstein is an evil Trump twin

Echo opinion published in the Los Angeles Times by Jonah Goldberg: Donald Trump and the company he kept. 

#Evil Twins Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein were two peas in a poisonous pod....the company they kept!

Trump is a convicted sex offender accused of rape and he is a philanderer who was revealed by Stormy Daniels in testimony given under oath. But, somehow, 😞we are supposed to believe that Donald Trump never sent Jeffrey Epstein a 50th birthday message loaded with sexual inuendoes written inside the outline of a woman's body. Of course Donald Trump was involved in the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking operation because he hung out with the evil guy for years and sent him a birthday card that he wants us to believe he never sent to one of his best friends. This stuff is planly crazy❗Trump must resign, all he ever does is lie, lie and lie more to cover up all his other lies.

Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein❓” Donald Trump shot back at a reporter during a Cabinet meeting. “This guy’s been talked about for years. ... I mean, I can’t believe you’re asking a question on Epstein at a time like this, where we’re having some of the greatest success and also tragedy with what happened in Texas. It just seems like a desecration.”

It’s hard not to chuckle at the mess the Trump administration has made for itself with the Epstein files fiasco. Don’t worry, I am not going to wade too far into the “merits” of the controversy. Still, a very brief recap might be helpful.

Epstein, the famous financial consultant and sex-trafficking sleazeball to the rich and famous killed himself in jail during the first Trump term. And ever since, the extended MAGA universe — often egged on by Trump himself — has convinced itself that Epstein was at the center of a vast web of underage sex, blackmail and intrigue. He had to have been murdered to keep his “client list” secret, insisted many. When Trump returned to the White House, and put MAGA  all-stars Kash Patel and Dan Bongino at the top of the FBI — both big boosters of various Epstein-related theories — the understandable expectation was that all would finally be revealed. Early on, Attorney General Pam Bondi (aka "nurse Ratchet" wanna'be) said she had the Epstein client list on her desk and would reveal all soon.

Then, (ooops political inertia hit❗) last week the administration officials announced they could find no evidence to support the conspiracy theories. Bondi said she misspoke about the client list. The MAGA world went bonkers. Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly smelled blood in the water. Shouts of cover-ups and insinuations or accusations that Trump must be on the list proliferated. Bongino may be thinking of resigning. Kash Patel is begging friendly journalists to take him at his word. And Trump is trying to shame everyone out of even talking about the guy.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I think there are all manner of legitimate — and interesting! — questions to ask about Epstein’s clients, about how he made money (billionaire Leon Black said he paid Epstein $170 million for “tax advice” — that’s a lot of advice) and, yes, about Trump’s relationship with Epstein (and Bill Clinton’s).

And given how Trump launched and sustained his political career relentlessly pushing unfounded conspiracy theories — including birtherism, the 2020 “rigged” election and so many others — it’s difficult to muster any sympathy for the Mar-a-Lago Macbeth, as Epstein’s ghost plagues him like a sleazier Banquo. In fact, what is delicious about the whole spectacle is that no one — other than Epstein’s underage victims — is worth rooting for. Patel, Bongino, Bondi and the denizens of MAGA media are all caught in a no-win situation: Support Trump and his “coverup” of their favorite conspiracy theory or alienate Trump by refusing to drop it.

The primary intention, as always, is to intimidate the reporters. 

But, what often lends weight to the intimidation is the fact that Trump’s own people — from social media influencers to Fox (Fake❗) News hosts — will follow his cues and annoy, harass, mock or criticize mainstream reporters who ask unwanted questions to Donald Trump. In fact, because the Epstein fiasco divides those very people who trusted him when he said he would release the files,  could be a sign about Trump’s waning influence within his own cult coalition. The fact that the divide is larger and louder on the Epstein files than on any another issue, including Israel, Ukraine, tariffs, Medicaid cuts, debt and deficits, or Trump’s myriad shady business deals, only heightens the schadenfreude.

If he is covering up his own shady involvement with Epstein, that would, of course turn the dial to 11. But assuming we know about as much as we ever will, it doesn’t really matter politically who is right about Epstein or why Trump wants people to stop talking about him. The relevant fact is that he’s made it clear what he wants, and many of his own minions and enablers think it’s in their interest not to give it to him.

That so many people are refusing to drop the issue may be the most significant thing about this whole episode. Trump has a long history of trying to dictate what counts as a legitimate question or topic. Lately has become more strident. When a local reporter asked about the lack of advance warning for the recent Texas floods, he snapped, “Only a very evil person would ask a question like that.” He’s told reporters to never ask him whether he “chickens out” on his tariff schemes.  (Maine Writer- Obviusly, Donald Trump is possessed by evil himself "what goes around comes around". Everybody knows how the Jeffrey Epsetin - Ghislaine Maxwell duo were evil and everybody who knew them are now suspected of being involved in their sex trafickking clandestine demonic operation.)

Let me get this? Over 130 Texan dead including children in Flash Flood Alley but Republicans are focused on redistricting?

Houston Chronicle asked you how Texas lawmakers can prevent future flash flood deaths in "Flash Flood Alley". 

Texa Flash Flood Alley but where are the sirens?

Texas is drowning and the Republican legilature is playing politics:

When the Texas Legislature’s special session starts Monday, people will still be searching for bodies in the mud and muck of the Guadalupe River. And even when the special session ends, they will likely still be searching for loved ones, swept away during the catastrophic July 4th floods. 
What will be done in Austin to help those families❓

Republican lawmakers  lawmakers bear the burden of delivering the change our state needs. They have a responsibility to dig through the flotsam (aka "ship wrecks!) of tough policy questions and pass reforms that reassure Texans everywhere, that we have not been totally abandoned to cataclysmic storms.

A special session of the Texas Legislature will begin and although Governor Greg Abbott announced that response to the Texas Hill Country flash floods is on the agenda, much of the lawmakers' focus appears to be on intensely partisan issues such as redistricting. 😡🙄

But!  Flooding is a high priority⚠️

Here, lightly edited, are some of the responses.

From Jean Tanner, in Harris County: Don't just settle for sirens. The expert who said you can get a warning system that tells you in words what to do got my vote. Also, we need to scale back on the other uses of cell phone alerts. I'm not saying these alerts are false alarms, but hearing about a missing child who is 800 miles away just makes people turn them off or ignore them. 

Rather, the Republican in the Texas legislature need to make all flood-related bills the top priority❗ Nothing is more important than saving lives, and our elected officials need to put their thoughts and prayers into action immediately. This is how you honor those we lost: by preventing it from happening to someone else.

Texas Republicans scrambling like rats to find the escape hatch and avoid accountability about the July 4th deadly flash floods

Echo opinions published by the Houston Chronicle editorial board: 

Thumbs down: If you are understandably brought to tears by images of waterlogged stuffies and want to know who is to blame for the deadly Hill Country floods, the Texas Governor Greg Abbott doesn’t want to hear it. “That's the word choice of losers," Abbott said when asked by a reporter on Tuesday who was to blame for the devastation. As our governor tells it, the July 4th flood was less a preventable tragedy and more a fumbled play under the Friday night lights. 

“Know this, every football team makes mistakes,” he said. “The losing teams are the ones that try to point out who's to blame.’” So dry those eyes and rub some dirt on it. (Wanna be❓) Coach Abbott is here to focus on results — just don’t expect him to review the game tape. Clear eyes. Full Hearts. Can’t lose our patience with officials deflecting responsibility.

At least 37 children died in the July 4 Texas flash floods, primarily in Kerr County. These deaths occurred at Camp Mystic, a Christian summer camp for girls, and in other areas along the Guadalupe River. The flooding was a result of heavy rainfall from the remnants of Tropical Storm Barry, which caused the Guadalupe River to rise rapidly.

Double Thumbs Down: Online commentary is attacking Ted Cruz...aka... "Cruz to lose" for being in Greece during the disasterous July 4th floods. Yes we roasted “Cancun Cruz” when he fled Winter Storm Uri with his family and left his dog behind. And yes, we've called on him to resign for attempting to undermine American democracy and the peaceful transfer of power.

Thumbs down: And speaking of internet trolls, right-wing podcaster Charlie Kirk 🤢saw the floodwaters and knew how he could help — by pushing partisan talking points. Amid an already heated controversy surrounding Austin Fire Chief Joel Baker — who is facing accusations of failing to promptly deploy rescue crews during the crisis — Kirk chose to glide over critiques. Instead, he bizarrely accused Baker, who is Black, of being a "DEI" hire and blamed him for flood deaths. Kirk’s comments were so extreme that even the Austin firefighter union, which is actively calling for a no-confidence vote against Baker, felt compelled to defend the decorated and experienced chief: “As a reminder” they said. “The Austin Firefighters Association firmly condemns all forms of racism, hate speech, and abusive rhetoric.”

Thumbs down: The foot-in-mouth disease went fully bipartisan this week after a Houston-area pediatrician* and a former member of the Houston Food Insecurity Board both found themselves publicly dragged — and professionally sidelined — for treating the deaths in the Hill Country floods as nothing more than a political cudgel against conservatives.😕😒 Pro tip: If you wouldn’t say it at the memorial, don’t post it to the internet.


Thumbs down: Before Texas puts the Ten Commandments in classrooms, maybe the Office of the Attorney General could use a moral tablet or two. On Thursday, Ken Paxton’s wife posted on social media she was filing for divorce “on biblical grounds.” We’re left guessing as to which exact sin has been revealed❓ to state Sen. Angela Paxton since Ken’s impeachment trial. We already knew about the allegations that Texas’ top lawman coveted his neighbor’s wife — not to mention his $1,000 Montblanc pen. (Is Paxton a hypocrite, ya'think❓)

*Houston pediatrician fired over flood victims comment issues apology. "I take full responsibility for a social media comment I made..." (This pediatrician should lose his medical license❗)

Donald Trump cruelty campaign includes ending birthright citizenship but every child born in the USA is NOT an immigrant WWWTP?

The Stakes of the Birthright-Citizenship Case: The Trump Administration is trying to use the case to stop lower-court judges from issuing “nationwide injunctions"  against its unconstitutional executive orders. By Ruth Marcus published in The New Yorker magazine.

An hour into the oral arguments in the birthright-citizenship case at the Supreme Court last Thursday, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson offered a tart summary of the Trump Administration’s playbook in what will surely be its losing bid to end the constitutional guarantee. “Your argument,” Jackson told D. John Sauer, the Solicitor General, would “turn our justice system” into a “ ‘catch me if you can’ kind of regime,” in which “everybody has to have a lawyer and file a lawsuit in order for the government to stop violating people’s rights.” Jackson kept going: “I don’t understand how that is remotely consistent with the rule of law.”

Nationwide injunctions have been around for years but didn’t become a regular occurrence until 2015. Back then, they were a thorn in the side of a Democratic Administration, as Texas challenged Barack Obama’s executive order granting legal protections to Dreamers, undocumented immigrants who had been brought to the United States as children. A federal judge appointed by George W. Bush issued an injunction against the program—not just in Texas but nationwide. That ruling opened the spigots: twelve such injunctions were issued during the Obama Administration, sixty-four during the first Trump Administration, and fourteen during the first three years of the Biden Administration, according to a 2024 Harvard Law Review study. But the first months of the second Trump Administration have made that pace look leisurely: Sauer told the Justices that the Administration has been hit with forty nationwide orders.

Her diagnosis applies beyond the birthright-citizenship case. The Trump Administration has unleashed a torrent of unconstitutional executive orders and other questionable legal actions; with many of them, its goal seems less to win in the end than to inflict as much damage as possible along the way. That is why it is so determined to use the birthright-citizenship case to stop lower-court judges from issuing “nationwide injunctions”—orders that block Administration policies from taking effect across the country while their legality is hashed out in court. Lower courts, Sauer argued to the Justices, must limit their rulings to the individual parties in the case before them. Others who are harmed by the policies need to find ways to bring their own suits—unless and until the Supreme Court steps in with a definitive ruling. In other words, “catch me if you can.”

On Inauguration Day, shortly after taking an oath to defend the Constitution, Donald Trump sought to rewrite the document by executive fiat. He signed an order that purported to eliminate birthright citizenship for children without a parent who is a U.S. citizen or a permanent resident. (The order applies to children born in the United States more than thirty days after its issuance.) His action violated the clear language of the Fourteenth Amendment, which states, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.” It contravened a 1940 federal law codifying that protection. It ignored a hundred-and-twenty-seven-year-old Supreme Court precedent making clear that the guarantee applies to the children of noncitizens, and also subsequent rulings reaffirming and expanding that view. “So, as far as I see it, this order violates four Supreme Court precedents,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor told Sauer.

But, Thursday’s arguments, in cases that were brought by blue states, by immigrants’-rights groups, and by individual pregnant women, weren’t really about birthright citizenship; the Trump Administration could have pressed the Justices to tackle that issue, but it chose not to. Instead, the unusual mid-May session, after regular oral arguments had finished for the term, focussed on the technical matter of injunctions. That is an issue on which the Administration has a far stronger argument, although, for the reasons Jackson outlined, an unconvincing one, at least when it comes to birthright citizenship.

Nationwide injunctions have been around for years but didn’t become a regular occurrence until 2015. Back then, they were a thorn in the side of a Democratic Administration, as Texas challenged Barack Obama’s executive order granting legal protections to Dreamers, undocumented immigrants who had been brought to the United States as children. 

A federal judge appointed by George W. Bush issued an injunction against the program—not just in Texas but nationwide. That ruling opened the spigots: twelve such injunctions were issued during the Obama Administration, sixty-four during the first Trump Administration, and fourteen during the first three years of the Biden Administration, according to a 2024, Harvard Law Review study. But the first months of the second Trump Administration have made that pace look leisurely: Sauer told the Justices that the Administration has been hit with forty nationwide orders.

Questions about the practice were exacerbated by litigants’ blatant forum shopping, filing lawsuits in liberal areas when seeking to block Republican Presidents and in conservative jurisdictions to challenge the policies of Democratic Presidents. 

According to the Harvard study, fifty-nine of the sixty-four injunctions against Trump during his first term were issued by judges appointed by Democrats; all fourteen against Biden came from Republican-nominated judges. This is not a good look for the judiciary, and it is a problem for Administrations of both parties. Among those who have criticized the use of such orders are Trump’s Attorney General William Barr and Biden’s Solicitor General, Elizabeth Prelogar.

But although there are legitimate questions about whether lower-court judges have overstepped, there are also, as Thursday’s arguments illustrated, situations in which broad injunctions may be necessary. And birthright citizenship is particularly ill-suited as a vehicle for curbing them. Citizenship is, by definition, a national issue. It makes little sense to have a patchwork nation in which, while the question wends its way through the courts, children born in one state are citizens and those born in another are not.

“Look, there are all kinds of abuses of nationwide injunctions,” Justice Elena Kagan told Sauer. But, she added, “let’s just assume you’re dead wrong” about ending birthright citizenship. “Does every single person that is affected by this [executive order] have to bring their own suit? Are there alternatives? How long does it take?” Kagan warned that the Administration could game the system by simply not appealing to the high court. Sauer suggested that plaintiffs could try bringing class-action suits—which the government would probably oppose. He also said that there should be “appropriate percolation” through the federal courts. His argument wasn’t helped by his unsettling assertion that the government might not even consider itself bound to follow rulings issued against it within the same appellate circuit. Sounding incredulous, Amy Coney Barrett asked, “Are you really going to answer Justice Kagan by saying there’s no way to do this expeditiously?”

Justice Neil Gorsuch, who has been one of the sharpest critics of nationwide injunctions, seemed similarly eager to move quickly to the business of birthright citizenship. No Justice, not even the most conservative, expressed a hint of sympathy for eliminating it. And, by the end of the two-hour-and-sixteen-minute session, it seemed as though the Justices might be thinking that they had blundered by getting sucked into the injunction debate. They had substituted a hard question for an easy call: that, Trump notwithstanding, birthright citizenship is the law of the land.