Crossing the Line

Dan Bilzerian has bright white teeth and the chest and waist of an alpha male. If you know him at all, it’s because he is an anointed influencer, famous for being controversially famous. He claims a career as a brilliant poker player, a boast contested by brilliant poker players who point to a pattern of unverifiable claims.

This does not seem to have affected his attractiveness, especially when it comes to young, sexy women, who frequently appear in admiring clusters and whom he treats as props in the performance of his manhood. He is always at the center of these pictures, clad in a bathing suit and draped in swim-suited beauties. He has the repellent charm of a latter-day Hugh Hefner, right down to the affectation of a big brown pipe.

But we should probably concentrate on the nature of his repellence. His public declarations mark him as a true-blue Jew hater. To take two especially egregious examples, he believes that the Jews assassinated JFK and brought down the World Trade Center on 9-11. That was even before October 7, the Hamas attack on the Israeli settlements near Gaza.

You might think that episode would have turned him around, that the slaughter of a thousand-plus men, women, and children—many of them tranced-out celebrants at a music festival—would have evoked a measure of sympathy and understanding. Alas, that is not the Bilzerian way. He has been especially harsh in the last several days. When Israel claimed a right to defend itself, he insisted that it was an unrepentant aggressor and did not deserve to exist as a state.

It probably doesn’t need to be said, but that goes well beyond the realm of defensible speech. It’s clear that Bilzerian is a rabid anti-Semite. Along with everything else, he takes shots against the Talmud. That’s one of the oldest anti-Semitic games I know, the idea that the Talmud is a sink of evil that preaches a gospel of Jewish supremacism. He is also, clearly, antagonistic toward Israel.

But what concerns me is that he goes one step beyond. It is one thing to say that the Israeli government has behaved badly. Many Jews think that uncomfortable thought and have bothered to say so as a matter of conscience. But to say that Israel has no right to exist is to offer encouragement to genocide and annihilation. If Israel has no right to exist, that’s true of most of the nations on the planet.

What fills me with regret is that the Age of Bilzerian is upon us. When Marco Rubio said earlier this week that we are at war with Iran because Israel forced our hand, he marked an inflection point in the modern history of the Jews. Every day since, he has been walking it back, but the proverbial genie is out of the bottle: Israel and the Jews as international puppet masters, controlling the traffic of human will. We will be dealing with the consequences for a very long time.