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What can we get used to? That’s a pivotal question for people, and communities. How much reluctant acclimatization is possible? To what extent can we learn to live with things we find abhorrent?

I like to think I know what I can’t get used to. In 55 years (56 on Sept. 2—buy me a birthday beer if you wanna help celebrate), I’ve never once pooped in a hole or a bag or whatever you people use when you go camping. I can’t do it. Or so I tell myself. But who knows what circumstances might push me to do? During the year I took care of my dying mother, bedridden, dementia, Crohn’s disease that made food run right through her, I had to clean and change her three times a day. The young germophobe Dave would’ve said, “I could never do anything like that!” But because of the dementia my mom responded with violent panic to nurses and other unfamiliar faces, so I did it myself because nobody else could. I did it because I had to.

Life can always find a way to get you used to anything.

And it’s not just “life” that can test your tolerance. Your fellow humans do it too.

In my neck of the woods, that’s happening right now.

If you heard a short, sharp sound in the SoCal evening sky last week, it wasn’t a sonic boom. It was thousands of Westside Jews in unison shouting, “OY!”

To envision my Westside area, imagine one large square divided into four squares. The top two squares are Beverly Hills and Century City. I’ve written about Century City many times; it’s adjoining BH, but technically it’s L.A. That said, you’d have no idea crossing Century Park East that you’ve changed zip codes.

There are no houses in Century City, just pricey high-rise condos.

The bottom two squares are Cheviot Hills and Beverlywood, both on the L.A. side of Pico Boulevard. But again, you wouldn’t know you’re not in Beverly Hills anymore because these areas are just as nice. Even better, as Cheviot and Beverlywood are zoned only for houses (south BH is mainly apartments), with strict HOA guidelines on property styles and upkeep.

All four “squares” are pricey and overwhelmingly Jewish, Cheviot and Beverlywood especially.

These areas aren’t ultra-Orthodox, though. That’s Pico/Robertson, just to the east. Cheviot/Beverlywood families are perfunctory temple-goers, or secular.

So these areas are heavily Jewish, and very monied. And the people there have been hemorrhaging clout like crazy the past two decades. In my day, Cheviot/Beverlywood residents had influence. They helped push through Prop. 13, the landmark California constitutional amendment that kept homeowners from getting reamed by property taxes. They defeated school busing when LAUSD social engineers tried bringing it to the Westside.

You did not mess with Cheviot and Beverlywood.

But times have changed.

The first thing Gavin Newsom did after he beat the recall in 2021 was sign into law a bill abrogating the single family residence status of neighborhoods like Cheviot and Beverlywood, thus potentially dooming those areas to apartment development (though that’s unlikely because the houses are too in-demand). Also in 2021, when grocery superchain Kroger got pissed that the L.A. City Council mandated Covid “hero pay” for supermarket workers, Kroger, in a fit of pique, closed the giant “kosher Ralphs” that serviced Cheviot and Beverlywood (I wrote about this at the time). So Cheviot and Beverlywood lost their only local grocery store; the building still sits empty today, a husk. Not because of crime, but because Kroger felt comfortable saying, “Fuck yew, Jew.”

Kroger wanted to make a point and knew it could do so without repercussions.

That never would’ve been the case in the old days.

And now comes the greatest ignominy of all: At the entrance to Cheviot and Beverlywood lies a senior center. It’s been there for decades, a place where elderly Jews go to die while reminiscing about marching with Eugene Debs. But a few months ago the City of L.A., in association with a taxpayer-funded nonprofit called Weingart headed by an insanely corrupt (and butt-ugly) black former state senator, announced that the oldies were being kicked out and the building was going to become a homeless shelter for mentally ill druggies.

A placid Jewish senior center at the gateway to two of the Westside’s priciest neighborhoods will be replaced by the most crime-increasing, property-value-lowering type of building imaginable.

The details of the deal are beyond shady. The owners of the senior center signed a contract to sell the center to Weingart for a staggering $27.3 million. Then, the senior center owners sold the property to a shell company for $11 million (the actual going rate for the building), then Weingart gave the shell company the $27.3 mil. Meanwhile, the city councilwoman for the area, Katy Yaroslavsky (daughter-in-law of legendary L.A. politico Zev Yaroslavsky), rammed through the deal, bypassing every legally required hurdle (community notification, community hearings, environmental impact reports, etc.). By the time residents found out what was going on, all the parts were in place and moving. And that $27 million—or at least the $16 mil above what the building actually costs—had ended up…somewhere.

This deserves its own column, but to be honest, it’s all so fresh, I’m still figuring it out myself. So gimme some time; this is the beginning of the story—the conclusion’s not in sight. But concentrating on what we know, the Weingart complex will be a 76-unit multiple-occupancy homeless shelter. So that’s guaranteed to be over 100 criminally insane homeless nuts, plopped down in one of the Westside’s best single-family neighborhoods, pissing distance from an elementary school.

And yet…the neighbors are taking it. I volunteered for the, shall we say, “resistance,” and it’s staggering to me, as a longtime resident of the general area, how little outrage there is. These are streets where people leave their backyards unlocked for their gardeners, where kids play on front lawns and in well-manicured parks. And while maybe 25 percent of us don’t want to see the entire thing flushed down the crapper, more than half, at least, seem willing to tolerate the increased crime and decreased property values.

I fear some of you might be taking the wrong lesson from this story: “Hah! Them Jews is gettin’ a taste o’ their own medicine.”

Twitter has conditioned rightists to see everything as a reason to DUNK instead of learn.

But isn’t one of the sacred tenets of anti-Jewish ideology that wealthy Jews are catered to by the government (especially their own representatives), and that they keep themselves safe even as they harm the goyim? “Them Jews do shit to whites they’d never do to themselves!” But here we see the Cheviot/Beverlywood city councilwoman screwing Jews like a cheap kosher whore in a pay-by-hour mikvah, and we see Jews “doing to themselves” the kind of dystopia “they” supposedly only do to gentiles.

Where are your Protocols now, Cletus?

This is why the current rise in anti-Jewish ideology on the right, from Owens to Fuentes, is so idiotic. It’s a passé model. Secular Jews are now for all intents and purposes “white” when it comes to suicidal tendencies regarding what they’ll tolerate in their community and from their government (to be clear, I’m speaking of American seculars, not Israelis, Orthodox, or the Persians who populate the red parts of Beverly Hills). Hell, throw in tranny kids (which you’re far more likely to find in liberal Jewish households than, say, barrio Mexican ones) and interracial adoption and interracial marriage—one-quarter of secular Jews have an interracial marriage and/or child, and (based on stats from 2017 so it’s likely higher now) a whopping 66 percent of adoptions by Jewish families are black or Third World (in other words, 66 percent of Jews who adopt get a kid who’ll eventually denounce them at a UCLA struggle session)—and it becomes clear that 1930s anti-Jewish propaganda (“Jews Must Live!”) isn’t relevant anymore.

So of course that’s what rightists are going all-in on today. It’s like rightists can’t help but make the most retarded move at any given moment. While others have their fingers on the pulse, rightists have theirs up the ass. Go backwards as events move forwards! Americans are concerned about BLM riots? That’s the perfect time for a Platinum Plan and amnesty for black criminals! Movies are becoming increasingly irrelevant to culture? Now’s the time to go full steam ahead on conservative film production to change the culture!

Jews become less “historically” Jewish? Perfect time to infuse rightism with historical paranoia about Jewish cabals and clannishness!

Meanwhile, in real life, Westside Jews are accepting things that, just thirty years ago, would’ve been seen as apocalyptic.

Forget “buck-broken’; Cheviot/Beverlywood’s being kike-broken. And as a guy who always puts you, my beloved readers, first, because you’re the best people on earth (did I mention buy me a birthday beer?), I’m determined, as this process plays out, to understand and relay the dynamics. And what I’m finding so far, speaking with residents, is really just the blue version of what a lot of red-staters feel: a lack of responsive representation from party establishment and an ominous sense of inevitability that things are gonna get worse one way or another.

Psychologically, this mental state can lead to a variety of responses. Falling head over heels for the first slickster who feigns interest in helping (Trump), falling for every con man who targets your wallet (Bannon), losing yourself in a fantasy world (Jones), suicidally “taking up arms” (J6), or—and this is what I’m seeing in Cheviot/Beverlywood—resignation.

It’s a very Ashkenazi response, arguably the only “typically Jewish” thing in this tale. These folks are too high-IQ to be Alex Jonesians, too niggardly to fall for Bannon-style cons, and taking up arms? These jittery nebbishes faint on July 4th when a firework goes off.

Sure, a champion—someone to challenge Yaroslavsky—could be a decent alternative to resigned acceptance, but City Hall and Sacramento politicians have never forgiven these Jews for Prop. 13, which to this day hampers their ability to ass-rape homeowners. The breaking of these neighborhoods will find only support from the city’s Dem establishment.

So if every response to a feeling of inevitable decline is bad—resignation, rebellion, fantasy, gullibility—what are we supposed to do?

Hell if I know. Maybe stop doing the obviously stupid things, like throwing your money at grifters and giving huge audiences to “influencers” who say “it’s the Jews” and “don’t vote—it’s all rigged,” and what’s left might be the best option.

Sorry, that’s all the wisdom I got in me this weekend. This column was intended merely as an introduction to a local story that might prove interesting as it progresses, especially as a small band of “resisters” tries to shake a formerly proud neighborhood out of final-stage grief.

Stay tuned; should we lose and the homeless take over, I’ll post photos and you’ll see just where the “acceptance” stage leads.