Healthy babies, to be specific.  Because worldwide, infant and child mortality has fallen greatly; and is still falling; and will almost certainly continue to fall.  

In premodern societies, meaning pretty much the entire world before 1820 or so, between a fifth and a quarter of all kids died before their first birthday.  Then, of the survivors, roughly about another fifth-to-a-quarter died before their fifth birthday.  Then, of those survivors, about 10% died before their 20th birthday.  If you do the math, that means that every baby had roughly a coin-flip chance of living to adulthood.  The exact numbers varied by place, time, and circumstances.  But worldwide, that was the general state of affairs.




Today, worldwide about 96% of babies survive their first birthday.  Of all babies born worldwide, about 90% live to reach age 20. 

That’s a worldwide average.  In developed countries, those numbers are “over 99%” and “around 99%”.  In the most dangerous, backwards and unhappy corners of the world the numbers are much lower, but they’re still high by historical standards.  A baby born in Afghanistan or Niger or the Democratic Republic of the Congo today, in 2026?  Has better odds than a baby born in the England of George III and Pitt the Elder.

Nigeria today has an infant mortality rate about what the US had in 1946, when the Baby Boom got started.  The Boom peaked around 1952.  The infant mortality then (a bit over 3%) is about what you find in current-day Bangladesh. Pretty much the entire human race today faces a lower rate of infant mortality than that faced by our parents and grandparents. 

This doesn’t get much discussed, perhaps because it’s a “what about all the planes that land safely” kind of story.   Also, when one discusses long-term positive trends, academic friends may become restive and start murmuring about teleological errors and Whig History. 

But I think it’s really interesting.  That’s partly because it really is very good news, but also — putting my nerd hat on — because this almost certainly represents a permanent and irreversible change in the human condition.

(A pause here to define the topic: we’ve been talking about pro-natalism lately.  This isn’t that.  Today’s discussion is not about whether people should have more babies.  It’s about what’s happening with the babies that people are actually having.) 

Right, so.  Infant mortality has been falling steadily, worldwide.  Why?

Well, a lot of reasons.  Here’s one: there’s a cluster of technologies around childbirth.  And, neat thing:  many of those technologies?  Including ones that have a dramatic effect on infant mortality?  Are cheap; simple; pretty easy to make and use; and widely, almost universally available. (1)  A few examples:

— Basic medical equipment.  Stethoscope, blood pressure cuff, thermometer, scalpel, forceps… all of those are simple devices that are available everywhere. Hypodermics are ubiquitous and very, very cheap.  Reliable pulse oximeters are $10 on Amazon.  
— Antisepsis.  You can do basic antisepsis with alcohol.  Alcohol is everywhere.  (Reasonably pure alcohol solutions are a late medieval technology.)  
— Antibiotics.  A bunch of different antibiotics are very cheap, and several are surprisingly easy to produce.  All the antibiotics that end in -cillin, for instance?  Those can literally be made by a careful high school student in a cellar.  Even the poorest developing country can make them (though as a practical matter, it’s usually cheaper and easier to import). (2)  
— A bag-and-valve mask, with oxygen.  B&V masks are everywhere; decent quality reusable ones are less than $50.  Bottling oxygen, also very widely available — it’s 19th century technology.  (Really.  Oxygen was first bottled in 1868, and bottled oxygen was fist used in medicine in 1885.)
— The germ theory of disease.  Just knowing that microbes cause infection, and can be transmitted by touch, fluids, coughing, etc., is a huge leap forward.  And you can implement that with things like masks and disposable gloves that, say it again, are dirt cheap, widely available, and easily made anywhere.  And “newborns have weak immune systems, so keep them clean and away from sick people” — we didn’t know that a couple of hundred years ago!  But now we do know it, and we’re not going to un-know it.
— And of course, basic education in maternal health and childbirth.  Basically, training midwives up to a certain standard.  To grossly oversimplify, most of the world is already doing this.  The certification standards in developed countries are pretty high (some years of experience plus several years of higher ed), but that’s almost certainly overkill.  It turns out that while advanced education is nice to have, you can get significant reductions in infant mortality from even very basic education and training.

(1) There’s also an intermediate class of childbirth-related technologies that are not simple in the sense that they could be locally manufactured in a developing country, but that are nevertheless cheap and widely available. Ultrasound machines, for instance, are moderately complex bits of tech that are manufactured mostly in wealthy and middle-income countries.  But you can buy a Chinese-made portable ultrasound scanner for a few thousand dollars, well within the reach of a hospital or clinic in a developing country.  Similarly, oxytocin — a very useful tool for inducing labor, empowering contractions, and reducing uterine bleeding — requires a somewhat delicate solid-state chemical synthesis, and so is produced in only a dozen or so countries.  But it’s available everywhere, worldwide. (3)

(2)  These days, developing countries have a lot more industry than you might think.  To give one example, Uganda currently has a couple of million college graduates, a modest but real local chemical industry, and several large pharmaceutical factories.  (I visited a couple of them back in my former career.)  The money may be South Asian, the equipment may be Chinese, but the technical staff are almost entirely Ugandans, and they know their stuff.  I’m not sure if they currently produce antibiotics or oxytocin, but there’s no question that they could if they wanted to.

(3)  Although — deep cut nerd here — oxytocin was first used medically in 1909, while its modern synthesis wasn’t developed until around 1960.  Where did medical oxytocin come from, for those fifty years?  From slaughterhouses.  Oxytocin can be extracted from the pituitary glands of mammals.  We use the synthetic stuff because it’s purer and safer, but we could still get it from the local meat packer.

So:  because these technologies are cheap, simple, robust, useful, and very widely distributed, their uptake and use is likely to be permanent.  It’s very hard to imagine a global catastrophe that would eliminate the ability to distill alcohol or the knowledge that microbes cause disease.  In order to go back to premodern levels of infant mortality, we would literally have to bomb ourselves back to the Stone Age.  

Okay, that’s the technological side.  What about the political / social aspect?

Well, it turns out that keeping babies alive is a very popular policy.  So much so that even truly corrupt and extractive regimes, overseeing unpleasantly patriarchal societies, will usually invest some resources in maternal and infant health.  Like, the infant mortality rate in the Islamic Republic of Iran?  Currently about 1/10 of what it was when the Islamic Republic was founded back in 1979.

And if your leadership is obsessed with National Greatness, well, healthy babies make sense there too. (4)

(4)  Authoritarian and blood-and-soil regimes tend to converge on iconography of a happy / contented mother with a healthy baby (with baby usually either ungendered or male).

Which is very obnoxious, but healthy babies?  Still a good thing anyway!  

And creepy propaganda aside, maternal and child health makes economic sense too.  From a cold blooded fiscal /economic POV, modest investments in basic maternal and infant health?  Can give ridiculously large payoffs down the line.  

And then of course, healthy babies are better than sick or dead babies.  Isn’t that pretty close to a moral absolute?  The advances that have reduced infant mortality have eliminated millions and millions of heartbreaks and tragedies, saving countless human lives.  You have to work pretty hard (4) to not see that as a vast and great Good Thing.

(4)  Although I’ve seen people try.

The limited available evidence suggests that hunter-gatherers and human societies of the deep past also had very high infant, child, and pre-adult mortality.  Whether it was as bad as premodern agricultural societies is less clear, but it was definitely much worse than pretty much anywhere in the modern world.  A baby born in Somalia today almost certainly has much better odds than a baby born into some Paleolithic tribe of wanderers.

So, to loop it back: the case for this being a permanent and irreversible change in the human condition is pretty strong.  And I’d suggest that this has implications for everything from current political economics to the long-term evolutionary future of humanity.

But as noted, for some reason it doesn’t get much talked about.  It’s a huge departure from the historical norm that just seems to be… taken for granted.

Some of this is because in the developed world it’s old news (although not /that/ old — again, as recently as the 1940s, the US had infant mortality rates worse than much of the developing world today).  And today it’s happening in the developing world, and who really cares about good news from Senegal or Laos?  Also, even though it affects everyone and everything, issues relating to childbirth and infancy are hard-coded as Woman Stuff.

Oh, and it annoys people who want to be relentlessly negative about the future.

Which, whatever, guys.

But anyway.  Permanent and irreversible change in the human condition — for the better.  

Buckle up. There is more, and it is worse than you think.

Donald Trump, as he does almost daily, had reporters in the Oval Office today and answered a question saying “there’s nothing on me” in the Epstein files and claimed that “they found that Jeffrey Epstein and a sleazebag writer named Michael Wolff were conspiring against Donald Trump to lose the election.”

Elsewhere, it emerged that in the three million pages of files released by the Department of Justice, there are 38,000 mentions of Donald Trump, and Vladimir Putin’s name appears 1,056 times.

There is an FBI report of an interview with a woman who claimed that Trump raped her 35 years ago when she was underage. There are repeated references to Trump’s friendship with Epstein. There are messages between Melania and Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. As I reported yesterday, the files contain the names of prominent men like Howard Lutnick and Woody Allen and Larry Summers and others. They establish that each of these men had relationships with Epstein. There are details, such as visits to Epstein’s notorious island and trips on his jet aircraft, which was referred to as the “Lolita Express.”

However, there is no proof about any of them, no proof about Donald Trump, no proof that their friendship with the notorious and eventually convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein included committing sexual assault or rape of underage girls.

That’s the problem with the Epstein files. There isn’t any proof. They reveal tons of disgusting material about Epstein himself and the prominent men with whom he surrounded himself, but there is, as at least one report noted, “no smoking gun.”

So, let’s discuss what “proof” is. In the context of Donald Trump, we already know that proof does not matter. Maybe the truest statement Trump ever made was his “joke” in 2016 just before the Iowa caucuses: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?” After ten long years of this asshole, I think we can all agree that his statement was absolutely correct. If it were to emerge that there is cellphone video of Trump carrying out the murder of a person in the middle of Fifth Avenue, his supporters would claim that it is fake news, a fake video, that it doesn’t show what it clearly shows.

“Proof” never really had any meaning with Trump. He is functionally immune from proof of wrongdoing. The Supreme Court confirmed and compounded that fact with its decision making him legally immune from prosecution for any action he takes as president. That is why he and his sons are out there making “deals” involving their crypto firm with Gulf state potentates that have, according to reports, yielded them some $4 billion in profits so far. There is nothing that can be done by anyone, anytime, anywhere that would get in the way of Trump’s rampant corruption.

But proof and truth are separate things. It is true that Trump and his sons and Steve Witkoff and his family made a deal with Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who manages the sovereign wealth fund of the United Arab Emirates, that yielded a $187 million gain for the Trump family through the Trump/Witkoff crypto business, World Liberty Financial, with $31 million going to the Witkoff family. But it is not proof of corruption, because according to the Supreme Court, Trump cannot commit any corrupt act, and anyone associated with him can be assured that they will not be prosecuted for corruption, because Trump has the power to pardon them, thus nullifying the entire concept of corruption.

How can something that is true not be proof of a crime or legal misbehavior? Easy. It is shown in pages from the Epstein files that were generated by the prestigious law firm, Kirkland Ellis, and signed by the prominent – for all kinds of reasons – Kenneth Starr, who was one of Epstein’s lawyers. Starr and Epstein’s other lawyer, Jay Lefkowitz, sent a letter to the former U.S. Attorney for southern Florida, Alexander Acosta, arguing that Epstein should not be indicted for crimes committed against underage girls. We know that the letter from Kirkland Ellis was successful, because Acosta signed a non-prosecution deal with Epstein that got him off federal charges and left him facing lesser charges by the state of Florida that he pleaded guilty to. We know that this deal was corrupt. Trump paid off Acosta for helping his friend Epstein in 2007 by appointing Acosta Secretary of Labor in 2017, a position in which he served until 2019, when the federal indictment of Epstein in New York forced Acosta to resign his position as Labor Secretary.

All this is fascinating by itself in the way it shows how powerful men, in this case, Epstein, Trump, Acosta, Starr, and Lefkowitz, conspired to fix the case against Epstein and let him off with a slap-on-the-wrist conviction and no real prison time. But it’s how it was done that goes to the heart of how proof and truth are corrupted by lies.

One of the things Epstein was investigated for was “inducement,” which in his case was convincing underage girls to engage in acts of prostitution. The letter from Kirkland Ellis goes into great detail to convince Acosta that Epstein could not have “induced” girls to engage in illegal sexual acts with adult men because (1) they lied about their ages to Epstein, and (2) the acts they carried out on men were consensual.

Oh, boy. It’s hard to even grasp that these men, Starr and Lefkowitz, could go to sleep at night having written the garbage they wrote to Acosta, just as it is hard to believe that Acosta could get to sleep having accepted their arguments.

Reading the pages as they are reproduced in the Epstein files is…there is no other word for it…incredible. Under the subheading, “No Sexual Contact,” the letter quotes one of the underage girl’s sworn statement about Epstein: “So I willingly the first time took off my top when I gave him a massage and nothing more than that.” Further down, the same underage girl says, “I would wear panties. Willingly one time because we were making jokes and everything and willingly one time I had, yes, I was [blacked out] but I was fine with it.”

This is from an underage girl, interviewed by the FBI, and here statements were being used to absolve Epstein of having “induced” her to commit a crime. Elsewhere in the letter, she quoted describing “bringing him, I don’t know, maybe 30 girls. It was all about money to me at the time.” She describes telling the other “girls” to lie to Epstein about their ages. She states, “Like I said, I went [blacked out] for him one time. But the other girls, they practically were topless and that’s all that they were willing to do.”

Here is the conclusion made by Kenneth Starr and Jay Lefkowitz after the above quotes and many others, all of them about the underage girl discussed in the letter:

“In sum, [blacked out] testimony clearly shows that she is not a victim.”

Not a victim.

Here is the conclusion Starr and Lefkowitz provided to Acosta, with which he apparently agreed: “We believe — and know you share our belief that citizens should he treated alike regardless of wealth or status when it comes to criminal justice. We ask for nothing more of your treatment of Mr. Epstein than that he be treated as would any other citizen of Palm Beach under similar circumstances. Mr. Epstein should not be charged with offenses to which his conduct does not apply.”

The underage girl’s testimony about providing Epstein with other girls and being paid for it, about underage girls wearing “panties” and going “topless” while giving “massages” was not enough proof for Acosta to prosecute Jeffrey Epstein.

What we know about Epstein, what we know about Trump, what we know about their friendship from photographs and from everything that has been written about these two men, and their friends, and their associates, may be true, but it is not proof.

Think about this for a moment. Try to imagine being a 15 or 16 year old girl being topless and standing over the prone figures of Epstein or Summers or Trump or any of the rest of them and giving them a “massage.”

That may be evidence of the gross and misshapen moral sensibility, the utter absence of knowing the difference between what is right and what is wrong, by these men, but it is not proof of anything.

That is what Trump and the rest of them want us to believe. That is why “there is nothing on me” is a lie, and yet when it comes to the law, it is true. Proof is neither truth nor evidence of a lie. It is legal and cold and naked. It is what they will deploy to defend the murderers of Alex Pretti and Renee Good. Cellphones and the body cameras they promised today will be issued to ICE agents won’t save us.

We may see with our eyes and hear with our ears and be able to distinguish between right and wrong, but that is not much more than evidence of being human. It may be true, but it’s not proof.

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OK, I rarely RARELY write about this newsletter. I find it distasteful when some people who shall remain nameless write crap like “We’re under attack by Trump!” or “Republicans Try To Take Us Down!” and then ask for money. Some newsletters do this so regularly, one wonders when they have time to write any actual news or analysis.

But I am going to write about how an article I wrote last week sent Nazi-stack into a frenzy of rage and how the frenzy is still going. Not because it’s funny, although it really fucking is. Not because I’m patting myself on the back for pissing off Nazis, although that was definitely a perk. But because watching them shake their little Nazi fists and scream their little Nazi rage reinforced a point I’ve been making for a very long time: Racist white men are absolutely fucking terrified of accountability.

Let’s step back to the distant past of…last Thursday.

With 21,500 views1, there’s a good chance you either read this article or saw it on your timeline:

If you haven’t read it yet, this was not a deep or complex article. It was a straightforward call to action and an observation: We must continue to talk about holding the racist white men of the regime accountable because until we believe that can happen, it never will. And it must happen, or the cancer killing our nation will never be defeated.

Now, I do occasionally go viral2 despite Substack’s best efforts to throttle my newsletter (that’s a whole different conversation). Sometimes it’s the headline, sometimes it’s the image, sometimes it’s the article itself. Usually, it’s a combination. But once I get to 200-250 restacks, I draw the attention of the filthy Nazis. Or anti-vaxxers if the article happens to be about vaccines.3

This time, I got up to 400 restacks4 before Nazi-stack noticed me. If you’re not familiar with it, Nazi-stack is exactly what it sounds like: The sewer of Substack where all the Nazi filth dwells. Most people are not directly aware of them because unlike other social media platforms, Substack does not constantly try to shove white trash down our throats to goose outrage engagement. My wall, and most people’s walls, are almost exclusively people and newsletters we follow, and nothing else. You know, what social media USED to be before promoting fascism became the business model (I’m looking at you, Twitter and Facebook).

But when an article goes viral enough, the filth inevitably comes sniffing. By Saturday night, they were swarming the comments. By Sunday morning, the weak manbabies were sharing it among themselves by the dozens, restacking my article with increasingly hysterical comments. I spent a few hours deleting and blocking. Taking out the white trash is tedious, but, like I said, instructive.

There were a lot of racial slurs. They couldn’t make up their minds. I was either a Jew (correct) or an N-word (incorrect). A lot of sexual slurs. I’m neither gay nor transsexual.5 I got called a communist a lot, too. As if these fucking inbred imbeciles could even explain what communism is.

The vocabulary of white trash is very limited. It speaks to their lack of imagination and the fact that they live in a sealed propaganda bubble, only talking to themselves. It’s an endless loop of mindless hate masquerading as intellectual debate. They really do think they’re “free thinkers.” Poor dumb bastards.

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Anyway, after deleting the 50th or 60th whining troll, I noticed that the most recurring theme was just raw anger. They were pissed. Mind you, I didn’t say we should frog march all white men to the ocean, shoot them, and feed their bodies to the fish. I said the racist white men of the regime should be arrested and tried for the crimes we can all see them committing right in front of us.

From the reaction, you would think I had personally punched each of them in their micropenises.

Etc. Etc. Etc. Dozens of comments just like. Plenty of death threats. Nonstop vitriol. Why? Because I dared to demand consequences for racist white men committing crimes.

This is the thing that really freaked the right out after January 6th. We started arresting people. Over 1,600 of them. We came for the Republican fake electors who tried to steal an election. We came for Trump, and we would have come for his inner circle if Merrick Garland and the FBI hadn’t dragged their fucking feet and let corrupt judges fuck us all.

But watching racist white men face consequences for the first time in 150 years sent shockwaves through the American right. Mind you, this country was not screaming for heads on a platter after the 2020 election. We wanted to “get back to normal.” We wanted to “look forward, not back.” Just like we had after every disastrous period where racist white men threw the country into chaos. The only reason Trump and his footsoldiers faced the possibility of justice was that the crime was so large, it couldn’t be ignored. And because Trump wouldn’t shut the fuck up and go away like previous criminal Republicans had (Nixon, Reagan, Bush 41, and Bush 43 all vanished from public life).

The result was that the right threw itself into fascism. If America was going to hold racist white men accountable, then America had to fucking go.

Now, imagine you are a racist white man, masturbating to dreams of a Nazi police state. Imagine you spent most of 2025 wallowing in the hate and cruelty of ICE, enjoying every liberal tear as Trump destroyed the country. A thousand-year-reich! Woohoo!

But then it all started to fall apart. Despite assurances from all of your totally true right-wing media, the public did not support the Dear Leader. They really didn’t support the violence against Those People. Every special election was a fucking bloodbath, and the midterms were shaping up to be a complete wipeout.

Worse than all of that, though, were the calls for accountability. That was new. Racist white men had faced electoral defeat before. They had been on the wrong side of public opinion before. But this growing demand for consequences, real consequences? What the hell was that about?

No talk about healing the nation. No talk about looking forward, not back. No talk about putting the past behind us. The left kept talking about Nuremberg Trials. Executions. Life in prison. Mass firings and blackballing. Public shaming. Real consequences that would last a lifetime.

But…this is America! We don’t DO that! We don’t hold racist white men accountable for the violence they visit on the nation! We wag our fingers, cluck our tongues, and send the racist white men home to “learn their lesson.” Then we watch as they regroup and try to destroy America again and again, like Batman sending the Joker to prison where he’ll escape over and over, racking up a body count each time. That’s the America Nazi-stack is familiar with.

So seeing articles like mine is scary. Seeing an article like mine go viral is even scarier. It means there is an audience for it. That people are not just listening, they think that, yeah, making the filth pay for what they’ve done is a Pretti Good idea. It means that this is an idea that has traction and is not going away. America got a taste for punishing racist white men for the evil they do, and we fucking want more of that.

Consequences, real, lasting consequences, for the party of “personal responsibility” is like holy water on a vampire. They can only react in horror and anger. They’re outraged that the glorious future they masturbated to is not only disappearing faster than every woman they ever sent an unsolicited dick pic to, but is now being replaced with a dark and frightening future where they have to answer for their actions. That’s not fair! That’s not right! That’s oppression!

That is the sound of fear and desperation. It’s in every rage-filled comment calling for me to die. In every attempt to dox me.6 In every attempt to hurt my feelings or piss me off.7 They’re lashing out because the future I speak about is horrifying to them and growing increasingly more likely than theirs. And they fucking know it.

Shed a tiny tear for the limp-dicked losers sitting in their basements, scared of what’s coming. Boo fucking hoo.

I hope you feel better informed about the world and ready to kick fascists in the teeth to protect it. This newsletter exists because of you, so please consider becoming a supporting subscriber today for only $5 a month or just $50 a year (a 17% discount!). Thank you for everything!

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There are 273 days until the most important midterm election in American history. The regime is afraid, and they should be. We are legion, and they are weak. Stay strong. You are never alone.

The millions of pages of documents the Department of Justice has released – more than a month late – are not about who was on the private jet, or who was invited to dinner or when they sent emails or what was in the emails and texts. One way or another, the pages are about raping children. A powerful man wanted to “invest” money with Epstein? It’s not about the money. It’s about what that money ultimately was used for: raping children.

Elon Musk was busy on his X account yesterday doing what the New York Times is now calling “distancing” himself from Epstein. Why would he bother posting what I guess we could now call a distancing denial? “I had very little correspondence with Epstein and declined repeated invitations to go to his island or fly on his ‘Lolita Express’,” Musk wrote. Elsewhere, we learn that Musk’s “very little correspondence” with Epstein amounted to 14 emails. Musk admits that it isn’t the number of emails that matters right there on X with the words “Lolita Express.” Why would an aircraft be given that name if not to indicate that the rape of children was its purpose?

Listen to this from a Musk email to Epstein in November of 2012: “What day/night will be the wildest party on your island?” Note the date: four years after Epstein’s 2008 conviction for promoting prostitution with underage girls, three years after he was released from his pretend home-confinement sentence. Musk also posted on X yesterday that he didn’t know Epstein “very well.” By 2012, you would have to be functionally illiterate and blind and deaf not to know of Epstein’s criminal conviction and what he was convicted of. Musk wasn’t emailing Epstein about the date of his “wildest party.” He was emailing him knowing that Epstein had been accused of raping children and had been convicted of procuring a girl under the age of 18 for the purpose of prostitution. Every newspaper, every cable news report, every place there was coverage of Epstein’s conviction reported that he had pleaded guilty to the charge.

So, anyone emailing with Jeffrey Epstein after the year 2008 knew that he had been convicted of raping children, even if prosecutors had agreed to couch the crime in the more gentle language of “procuring for prostitution.” That would include Steve Bannon, who we are now told had a correspondence with Epstein that amounted to thousands of text messages in 2018 and 2019, ten years after Epstein’s conviction in Florida. Reports yesterday said that Bannon and Epstein had texted about all kinds of things – “shaping European coalitions” and investments in the Middle East. Epstein allowed Bannon to fly around the world, including to Rome, on his private jet.

Steve Bannon worked in Donald Trump’s White House as an aide in 2016. He helped in Trump’s attempt to get reelected president in 2020, and again when Trump ran in 2024. Bannon’s texts to and from Epstein might have been technically about money or “investments,” but where did that money go? What was it ultimately used for? Men raping children, that’s what.

What about Trump’s Secretary of Commerce, Howard Lutnick? The newly released raping children files reveal that Lutnick and his family went to lunch on Epstein’s island in December of 2012, four years after Epstein’s plea-deal conviction for raping children in Florida. Is that why, every time he has been asked, Lutnick has denied a friendship with Epstein? So, Lutnick not only went to lunch with Epstein, he took his family along. Was Lutnick unaware that Epstein’s island had been where Epstein and others raped children? How could Lutnick, a billionaire who ran the investment firm Cantor Fitzgerald, not know that Epstein’s island had been paid for, directly or indirectly, with money that came from raping children?

Lutnick has spent the last couple of days distancing himself from Jeffrey Epstein. British Billionaire and owner of his own private Caribbean island, Richard Branson, has been distancing himself from Epstein, too, after the recent raping children document drop revealed that he had visited Epstein in 2013, five years after his Florida conviction. Branson later emailed Epstein, “Any time you’re in the area would love to see you. As long as you bring your harem!” The New York Times was told by a “Branson representative” that his meeting with Epstein had been about “business” and that the reference to a “harem” had been about adult women, and that the women had not attended the “business” meeting between the two men.

Glad that’s all straighten out. Distancing, it seems, has to be rather specific after the DOJ dump of the child rape files.

Why all the wiggling and squirming and distancing by these powerful men, these billionaires, these men who have run major companies, some of whom now serve in Donald Trump’s cabinet?

The major problem with the three million documents that were just released is that the names of Epstein’s co-conspirators are redacted. But do you know what the DOJ did not redact? The images of more than a dozen children who were raped by Epstein and others. They are in a part of the files that reveals photographs of what are referred to as “Epstein victims.” Their ages are given. All are under 18 years of age. But their faces are right there, unredacted. Aaron Parnas reported today that he found a document with a list of 32 “Epstein survivors,” 31 of whose names are unredacted.

It’s not about having lunch or investments in the Middle East or even harems or wildest parties. It’s about men raping children. These powerful men – Musk and Branson and Lutnick and Donald Trump himself, whose name is all through the files -- don’t want to be associated with raping children. Because that is what the so-called Epstein files are about. It’s why Trump feels it’s necessary to tell the lie that the files “absolve me.” They’re about men raping children. The files absolve no one. Don’t let anyone tell you any different.

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My dad genuinely had no interest in music. Well, almost none – he did enjoy novelty songs from time to time, but not really for the music. Our friend Bob, who is otherwise quite sensible, used to try to convince him that listening to music would enhance his life. I had more sense (I did, briefly, join Bob’s campaign to get my dad to use a smartphone but, again, it was pointless).

So I never shared The Bar Steward Sons of Val Doonican with Tim. I discovered them about 3 months before he died. I believed he didn’t have long to live, and was unusually glum at a cross country meet my son was running in, just walking around for exercise, when spotify played The Cockwombling Song for me, following on from something else. I was puzzled for about 15 seconds before feeling sudden joy. They love what they are doing, and even on record their enthusiasm is utterly infectious. That fall I listened to them a lot, especially when I was feeling down. Songs I’ve never cared for – like, The Lady in Red, and Walking in Memphis have, in the hands of the Doonicans (as The Lady in Greggs, and Walking in Manpiss), became staple listening.

In my excitement I texted my friend Juliette who I knew would just love them: her response was to the effect of “Yeah, Harry, I know all about them, I’ve seen them live twice, they’re even better that way”. To which my thought was “well if you knew all about them, why didn’t you tell me?” [1]

So, I had to see them live. It was a very small venue (maybe 150 people, how the hell do the economics of that work?) and, indeed, they are even better that way. The couple behind me knew about them, but the couple next to me, and I’d guess up to half the audience, only knew them because they follow the venue and looked them up when they saw the listing. And then there are the real enthusiasts, wearing garishly coloured tank-tops (vests), and shouting “Al-an, Al-an” every time Scott mentioned that Alan had written a song. I was entranced.

After the show I had a nice chat with Scott, who said, I think falsely, that he has never written a political song, but that what is going on in the US has made him think perhaps he should.[2] I didn’t express an opinion, but actually I think it might be a good idea, only because I know he has the subtlety to glance a blow rather than fire a shot. The tearful moment of my initial hearing of The Cockwombling Song is the casual mention of the execrable Katy Hopkins, not as a cockwomble, but as an arsehole. It is simply… joyful, and I felt, actually, not so much gratitude as relief about being in a world in which people like the Doonicans do what they do.

And, in that moment, I thought about my dad, and knew it was pointless sharing it with him, but wished he appreciated music. Because if he did I knew it would have reduced him to tears of laughter.

2026 is their 20th birthday. See them live, if you can. If you don’t live in the UK: well, one of my favourite people has crossed an ocean to see Taylor Swift, and, marvelous as she (Swift, though my favourite person too, for that matter) is, I don’t see why you wouldn’t do the same to see the Doonicans.

[1] In fact, I’m glad she didn’t. That fall was bloody hard, and discovering the Doonicans just then made them even more special than they’d otherwise have been.

[2] They tell you not to meet your heroes. Still nonsense, in my experience.

Maybe the most emblematic photo of the ICE/Border Patrol assault on Minneapolis will turn out to be the one above of Alex Pretti holding up his phone as he confronts a Border Patrol agent on the street.

No, let me revise that. There are several photos of Pretti holding his phone as if it is a shield. There is a photo of Pretti holding his phone in his right hand as he lifts his left hand to protect himself from pepper spray that another agent is shooting directly in his face. Finally, there is the third heartbreaking photo taken as Pretti is being shot that shows his phone still in his right hand as he attempts to struggle to his feet.

We know that Pretti was armed with a handgun. And yet the defensive weapon he wielded throughout his confrontations with masked federal agents was his phone, gripped in the classic position one holds a cell phone while filming, so Pretti could see the video on his phone screen facing him.

There are thousands of photos online showing Minneapolis residents holding their cellphones aloft while videoing masked ICE and Border Patrol agents as they arrest people, crowd through the front doors of homes, shove people to the ground -- all the gross, aggressive stuff they’ve been doing throughout Trump’s “largest deportation in history.” There are more photos showing citizens of Minneapolis holding their cellphones during confrontations with ICE agents in clouds of tear gas, being sprayed in the face with pepper spray, being manhandled by agents who are shoving and herding them.

It is clear from the photos that people’s cellphones are not only being used to record the often extreme and overbearing actions of ICE agents, but for self-defense. Masked agents have guns. Citizens have cell phones. The contrast is remarkable, especially in the photo that shows the masked agent shooting Alex Pretti in the back as he attempts to struggle to his feet, still holding his phone in his hand.

There are court decisions I could quote that establish a First Amendment right of citizens to use a cell phone or other camera to record the actions of law enforcement officers in public where “there is no expectation of privacy,” as at least one of the courts put it. If you are on a public street or sidewalk, or even if you are in a building such as a county facility serving the public in some way – a DMV or a refuse center or even a police headquarters – the same theory applies, that anyone serving the public has no right or expectation of privacy as they carry out their duties to serve the public. That is why people can use their phones to photograph or video police during traffic stops. Cellphones are used defensively because they might provide evidence of police misbehavior, use of disrespectful language, or excessive use of force. Lawsuits against police officers have been won based on video evidence taken with a cellphone.

Homeland Security agents are just the latest law enforcement officers whose misbehavior, excessive force, or illegal actions have been recorded with cellphones. In Minneapolis and Chicago and New Orleans and elsewhere, citizens have deployed their cellphones as a warning to masked agents that even though the agents are concealing their identities, their actions cannot be hidden from people recording them with their phones. We do not yet know the identities of the Border Patrol agents who murdered Alex Pretti, but they have been identified by the color of the knit caps they were wearing, the design of their bulletproof vests, the color and type of their jackets, whether they were wearing olive drab pants or blue jeans. The fact is, neither photographs nor videos tell lies. They record everything. Videos have established that civilians did not move aggressively against agents and did not hit them or hinder their actions. The publication of photos and videos of confrontations in Minneapolis has led to the release of citizens who were arrested for alleged assaults on agents that never happened.

Photos taken by photographers working for newspapers and television news crews have been used in the past to establish that people killed in confrontations with police or National Guard soldiers were unarmed at the time they were shot. The iconic photo of the girl kneeling next to the Kent State student who was killed by National Guard soldiers is one such photo.

But now, everyone is a photographer or a camera operator. Everyone has not only the instrument to record the action, but the ability to quickly publish it online, where as we know from the recent murders in Minneapolis, the photos and videos take on a life of their own.

While cellphones have become instruments of self defense for civilians, ICE and Border Patrol and FBI agents are using cellphones as another kind of weapon, recording demonstrations on the street as potential evidence against arrestees, and to use photo recognition programs to identify protesters for later arrest, or to make them targets of investigation after a protest is over.

Trump’s fascistic campaign against immigrants has turned into a war on American streets. One side, Trump’s side, is armed with guns and flashbang grenades and tear gas and clubs and pepper spray – and with cellphones and drones they are using to record the actions and identities of the other side. The civilians who live in the cities they are terrorizing have their cellphones and goggles and gas masks and not much else.

As in almost all wars, the struggle is lopsided in terms of weapons in favor of one side against the other. But the war in the streets against Trump and Stephen Miller and ICE is being won in the court of public opinion. Trump’s poll numbers are falling rapidly. Recent polls have shown Trump’s net approval underwater at minus 24 points. According to Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire, “Trump is underwater with women by 32 points and with men by 15. He posts catastrophic numbers among voters of color: –71 with Black respondents, –45 with Hispanics, and –48 with Asian Americans. Even among white voters — long his strongest demographic bloc — he is still net negative.”

They have guns and bullets, but we have cellphones and videos, and we are winning.

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