a tipping point

This whole affair with Jeffrey Epstein has really changed my thinking on a rather touchy subject: antisemitism. I have concluded that Epstein, and his girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell—and her father, Robert Maxwell, for that matter—that these people really did believe that the Goyim are inferior beings placed on Earth to be manipulated and exploited for their own pleasure and profit.

I didn’t used to think this. By an accident of fate and real estate patterns, I went to elementary school with a lot of Jewish kids. I never thought much about it. In fact, the big distinction in the suburb of Milwaukee I grew up in was between Catholic kids and the rest of us, because some of the Catholic kids went to a totally separate school. To the extent that I thought about it at all—which wasn’t much—I probably thought of Judaism as just a somewhat unusual form of Protestantism.

This attitude pretty much took me through high school and college, where I also knew a lot of Jewish kids. It was only after that that I started occasionally running into people whose dismissiveness I found unusual. But even then, my attitude was simply quizzical: ‘What’s up with that?’ The Epstein business seems to have brought these occasional experiences into a certain focus. Perhaps these people behaved the way they did because they genuinely assumed their superiority to others.

I think a small fraction of Jews are like this, probably not even a tenth, although the percentage may be higher in Israel. I would place Benjamin Netanyahu and his disgusting wife in this category, for example. I once saw Mike Huckabee, that fine Christian gentleman, interviewing Netanyahu. As Huckabee threw softball after softball question at him, I could just see the wheels turning in Netanyahu’s head: ‘Man, I’ve got a live one here.  This guy’ll swallow anything I say!’ He had that same knowing smirk that one sees in some photos of Epstein.

The tipoff for me is the rudeness, the gratuitous rudeness. When someone behaves this way toward total strangers, he probably also feels entitled to lie to and cheat them as well. After all, that’s why they’re there, right? So now when I get this kind of attitude, I push back: ‘Are you this rude to everybody? Why are you so rude? What’s your problem?’ People like this need to be challenged right from the get-go, so that’s what I do now. And I can thank Jeffrey Epstein for helping bring this into focus.