Jonathan Swift had a solution for Irish poverty in 1729: let the poor sell their children as food for the wealthy.

The meat would be tender, he wrote, the profits tidy and Ireland’s overpopulation problem solved.

After all, the ruling class was already devouring the Irish.

Swift wasn’t advocating cannibalism; instead, he held up an unflattering mirror in his satirical essay, A Modest Proposal.

And nearly three centuries later, we’re staring into our own looking glass.

The Epstein files — millions of pages documenting the abuse of hundreds of girls — have been released, and the names listed are exactly who you thought they’d be.

Presidents, princes, professors and power brokers. Not all perpetrators, maybe, but all passengers in an ecosystem built on looking the other away.

And for decades, the machinery hummed along because the powerful learned what Swift’s Anglo-Irish landlords knew: You can consume the vulnerable indefinitely if you’re never called to account.

This is where Swift’s satire and Jeffrey Epstein converge — in the gap between what a society claims to value and what it actually protects.

I submit that’s because shame has fallen out of fashion.

Your Rundown for Monday, February 9, 2026...

A Modest Proposal

But shame — the recognition that certain acts place you outside the bounds of civilization — shouldn’t be optional.

The Greeks, for instance, called outsiders barbarians because they were outside the borders of the community. Barbarism today is transgressing moral boundaries the community agrees should be uncrossable. 

By that measure, Epstein’s network — and everyone who enabled it — are our modern-day barbarians.

The files reveal a system where the most grievous violation imaginable, the sexual exploitation of children, could be treated as an unfortunate eccentricity of the well-connected.

And here's what should terrify us: The files are public, but we still get strategic redactions and the quiet return of powerful men and women to their posts while their victims remain tragic footnotes.

If this doesn’t provoke shame — the kind that burns and demands justice — then we’ve lost the capacity for it entirely.

Certainly, the harshest shame would be judicial accountability. But we’ve seen precious little of that. So perhaps we need a different kind of accountability, one that operates outside the institutions that have failed us.

Which brings me to my own modest proposal, only somewhat tongue in cheek: Drain the swamp. Not through rhetoric but through the ballot.

Vote against every incumbent elected official at the federal and state levels. Every single one.

Not because they’re all complicit in this particular horror, but because the system that enabled Epstein — that enables the powerful to operate above consequences — is built on incumbency, on networks of mutual protection.

The same faces, the same committees, the same calculations about what can be ignored in exchange for what can be gained.

Swift wanted to shame his readers into action.

Let’s see if shame still works, if we’re willing to wield it as a verb — a force that says some acts are beyond the pale, some derelictions of duty cannot be forgiven and those who perpetrate (or enable) the exploitation of the vulnerable have forfeited their place in civilized society.

The files are out. The question is whether we still possess the capacity for shame.

Market Rundown for Monday, February 9, 2026

S&P 500 futures are down 0.10% to 6,940.

Oil is down 0.40% to $63.30 for a barrel of WTI.

Gold’s up 0.85% to $5,023.

And Bitcoin’s down over 3% to $68,700.