Sunshine and Olly

by Jonathan Blaustein

Jessie and I just got in a little argument. 

It doesn’t happen often, and was mostly b/c we’re both super-fried. (Long week, long year, long decade.)

But the gist was, out of the blue, she asked me why I thought Ghislaine Maxwell is the only person in the entire Jeffrey Epstein ring to go to jail?

Was she the patsy, or did the Russians just know she was too strong to break, and she’d earn her benefits once she got out of jail? 

(Theo talks about this stuff now too. He loves the theory about Trump and Clinton getting together.)

Finally, after years of normalcy, the Epstein files have invaded my house. 

I tried to stay above the fray, but it’s not possible anymore. 

I answered Jessie, (as she knows how little I follow this story,) by speculating that perhaps it was misogyny? Or maybe it had been easier to prove she’d broken sex trafficking laws, in a leadership context, so it was easier to lock her up?

As opposed to harder-to-prove-with-evidence crimes?

I was just spitballing.

But this was not the right answer, apparently. 

For the longest time, I blogged about politics, and also wrote for a famous newspaper. 

But until it became impossible to block out the Epstein noise, I did. 

Because I hate a story where a Jewish person is painted out to be the most cartoonish, stereotypical bad guy, like the worst person possible, and then it’s true. 

Epstein, Epstein, Epstein!

Stephen Miller’s one of us. So is David Zaslav. And so many of the people we’re now hearing about from inside the files, (like NY Giants co-owner Bob Tisch) are Jews too.

When you’re trying to convince the world that a small, evil cabal from your tribe DOESN’T run the world, and then the news is just... this? 

And Israelis colonizing the West Bank and bombing Gazan kids? 

You become the boogeyman. 






It’s not just speculation. 

This has entered the realm of cultural subtext. 

Look at the most recent Superman movie.

The bad guys are (fake) Israelis killing (fake) Gazans. 

In the newly released Season 3 of the highly rated Netflix smash, “The Night Agent,” the ultimate baddie is (spoiler alert) a hook-nosed, Jewish, whiny, female banker named Meyer. 

In final battle, she literally scurries around like a rat, and gets her proper karma in the end, when she’s murdered offscreen. 

(It’s just like “The Wire,” when the ultimate bad guy, at the end, is the Jewish lawyer, but at least David Simon is Jewish, so he was critiquing from inside the tribe.) 








Where was I? 

The worst part of the identity politics era 2.0, (the Biden years,) was that it normalized sorting people into tribes based upon skin color, gender identity, sexual orientation, national origin and religious affiliation. 

Literally the opposite of the American melting pot concept upon which Gen X was raised. 

So here we are. 

People are openly hating Jews, and perpetuating the worst stereotypes, and it’s just crickets, and horrible, cheesy, blue square commercials. 

Seriously, who’s running the anti-Jew-hate ad campaign? 

We joked it’s like the anti-smoking commercials the cigarette companies were once forced to produce. 

(Like, showing the phrase “dirty Jew” in your ad only perpetuates the term, guys.)

Let’s wrap it up here, shall we? 

Hating people for any reason, beyond their character/behavior, is prejudice. 

Prejudice is bad. Ok? 

We’re done here. 

See you next time.