The Free Press

Languishing in cockroach-infested apartments, walking miles to the grocery store for food, and eating just one meal a day to save money. This is life in America for some newly arrived Afrikaner refugees from South Africa.

“There were people slumped over everywhere from using fentanyl and prostitution happening on the street corners,” said a former farmer who arrived in Denver with his wife and mother in September. He told me that the nonprofit group funded by the federal government to help the family get back on their feet placed them in a moldy, dirty basement apartment in a high-crime area.

We have heard so much speculation about a future in which drones will own the skies that we’ve barely noticed that for many people, the drone future has already arrived. Drones are ubiquitous in war zones, routine in disaster response, and in some American towns they quietly deliver burritos, coffee, vaccines, and insulin. Police use them far more often than people—and critically, more than criminals—realize. They are even an instrument of American “soft power” in competition with China.

In recent months I have seen video, taken from a real police operation, of cops catching car thieves with drones—down to filming the crooks switching the license plates. I stood under a drone hovering 400 feet in the air above me and watched it release a smaller droid, which dropped to the ground to make a delivery in a space the size of a large pizza box.

Oleg Karakash fled the Odesa region of Ukraine in 2023, just a few months after Russia invaded. He obtained humanitarian parole for his family under the Uniting for Ukraine (U4U) program and settled in Crystal Lake, Florida, where he started DoorDashing to save up for his own pressure washing business. “I decided if this is the land of opportunity, we will use it,” Karakash said.

After two years of hustling and door-knocking, Karakash made $60,000 in 2025. “I would do more than $100,000 in my second year,” he told me with confidence, “because it’s just possible. There’s so many jobs waiting.”

Having bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities in June and Islamic State targets in Nigeria on Christmas, President Donald Trump then forcibly conveyed Nicolás Maduro from Caracas’s presidential palace to a New York jail cell and warned the Iranian regime that the U.S. would come to the “rescue” of its country’s protesters. He cut a deal to augment the U.S. presence in Greenland, and has suggested that his Gaza Board of Peace may supplant the United Nations. These are hardly the acts of the isolationist many of us took him for. And so far, he has succeeded in wielding or threatening military force without the loss of an American life.

But now what? None of the goals of those actions has yet been achieved. Iran is starting to rebuild its missile and nuclear programs, and while thousands of anti-regime demonstrators have already been killed, none have been rescued. Gaza may have a board but still no peace.

Most Americans assume two basic rules already exist: You should prove who you are to vote, and only U.S. citizens should be allowed to register to vote. Yet federal law is lax on both points. Voter ID laws vary greatly from state to state, and while it’s illegal for noncitizens to cast ballots, nothing requires states to actually check whether each vote belongs to a citizen.

President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans are eager to fix this gaping hole in the integrity of America’s elections. The House plans to vote this week on the SAVE America Act, which would require prospective voters to show proof of citizenship before they can register. Enacting it would build public trust when it’s desperately needed—and dispel decades of myths about how voting works.

Last week, the 92nd Street Y—a storied Jewish institution for over 150 years—was the target of intimidating protests. As patrons entered our building, dozens of masked demonstrators banged drums, thrust signs and Palestinian flags into their faces, and hurled crude language at them. A protester assaulted me, swatting my camera out of my hands as I filmed the proceedings.

Over the last two years, such protests have become familiar. They have typically accompanied conversations about Israel or the appearance of Israeli figures. While these disruptions were never acceptable, they rested on a nominally defensible (if still flawed) premise: that such disruptions were targeting a nation and its policies, not a people. Last week’s protests proved that pretense false.

The most salacious Winter Olympics drama of the week was, for me, an emotional roller coaster. A high-speed journey from dismay to horror to nauseated recognition, culminating in a sense of having fallen out of space and time as déjà vu collided with clairvoyance. The thing that was happening had happened before; it would happen again, and again.

I am referring, of course, to the incident wherein American Olympic skier Hunter Hess said he had “mixed emotions” about certain U.S. domestic policies, and President Donald Trump called Hess a “real loser” who “shouldn’t have tried out for the team, and it’s too bad he’s on it.”

On January 30, 2026, the Department of Justice released more than three million files related to Jeffrey Epstein. And buried within that are roughly 2,000 previously unpublished videos. But while they’re technically public, they are stored in a way that makes them very hard to find or browse.

To watch these videos, the public has two choices: download h…

On January 30, 2026, the Department of Justice released hundreds of gigabytes of material related to Jeffrey Epstein—and in the days since, much of the focus has been on the cascade of previously unpublished emails. But buried within the data dump were some 2,000 videos that had never been released.

While they are technically public, in practice, these videos are very difficult to access. There is no master index listing all the files in one place, no way to browse the archive, and no ability to search by file type. That’s why, unlike the emails in this release, the videos have not been pored over and shared widely. The DOJ does provide file lists for each data set, but it disables automated crawling or link extraction, leaving the public with two options: Download hundreds of gigabytes of material, or click through hundreds of web pages, one by one.

I did both.

Taken together, the videos paint the most vivid picture yet of Epstein’s dark world.

The material released was divided into 12 batches, or “data sets.” Roughly 400 videos live in a folder called Data Set 8, which contains prison closed-circuit television footage, including hallway cameras and angles from inside Epstein’s cell. But the vast majority of the videos—and by far the most revealing ones—are in Data Set 10. These are videos seized from Epstein’s devices: footage he recorded himself, received from others, or downloaded from the internet.

Individually, most of these videos tell us little we didn’t already know; but taken together, they paint the most vivid picture yet of Epstein’s dark world: his lavish lifestyle and twisted worldview, his mannerisms and quirks, his sense of humor—and sense of impunity. The videos are heavily redacted, to protect the privacy of Epstein’s victims. In some clips, these redactions mask explicit content. In others, they lend an air of criminality to otherwise innocuous-seeming footage.

It is because of that impression left by the videos, as well as the difficulty of accessing the files, that we’ve decided to publish all 14 hours of the footage contained in Data Set 10. We’ve excluded only obvious duplicates, audio-only files, and fully redacted videos that contain neither sound nor image. You can watch them yourself, although viewer discretion is advised. The footage contains clips with toddlers, a lot of (redacted) porn, eerie footage from Epstein’s private islands, and scenes from inside his office, where young women dance for him with a paternity test visible on the corner of the desk. There’s also a nearly two-hour interview conducted by Steve Bannon.

If you’d rather not watch for yourself, here’s what stood out to me.

On January 30, 2026, the Department of Justice released more than three million pages of material related to Jeffrey Epstein. But very few of the more than 2,000 video files included in the release have been seen by the public, because they are stored in a way that makes them very hard to find or browse.

The Free Press wanted to make this archive more easily viewable for the public, so viewers can understand this story for themselves. We downloaded the most important set of video files: Data Set 10, which contains the majority of the video files in the release.

We are publishing the entirety of the 14 hours of footage, excluding only obvious duplicates.

These are “The Epstein Tapes, Part 2” of two parts.

Viewer discretion is advised.