Friends?

What’s more damaging to our national discourse and the education of children? An utterly ignorant fool who knows nothing, or a half-informed zealot armed with dangerous fragments of knowledge? Let me put it to you this way, like a Kentucky farmer explaining the difference between harmless garden snakes and venomous copperheads. Is someone who has never heard the definition of anecdotes and trends more dangerous than someone who confidently misapplies these concepts by thinking anecdotes are trends with evangelical fervor? I actually think it’s the latter, like a blind man confidently leading others through a minefield.

As I’ve mentioned before, as an independent I maintain friendships across the political landscape—from gun-toting conservatives to hemp-wearing progressives. Some on the right clutch their remote controls with white knuckles, treating Tucker Carlson’s furrowed brow as if it were Moses descending from Mount Sinai. Others on the left scroll through their phones with the glazed eyes of the converted, hanging on Rachel Maddow’s every carefully enunciated syllable. My daily struggle as an independent thinker is watching both extremes package moronic opinions in the plain brown wrapper of fact, while the messy, complicated truth lies abandoned somewhere in the middle.

For years, I’ve scrolled past the digital billboards of falsehood on my feed—the doctored images, the context-free quotes, the cherry-picked statistics, the absolute crap that is shared by friends from idiotic biased sites—but there’s one particular acquaintance whose posts have become as irritating as poison ivy on bare skin. We once exchanged messages almost daily, but now my tolerance for their particular brand of misinformation has worn thinner than the traces of hair left on my head.

This person spends too much time hunched over their glowing screen, collecting anecdotal stories that reinforce their pre-existing worldview. What truly grates on me is how they’ve transformed into a digital street preacher, sharing these isolated incidents as if they represent universal patterns. In the past I let their posts drift past like autumn leaves on a creek, but something else gnaws at my conscience—and surprisingly, it’s the ghost of Jeffrey Epstein.

Two supposedly great leaders, Trump and Clinton, were “close friends” with Jeffrey Epstein. That’s not an opinion, but cold, hard fact. Trump knew him well for over a decade—they visited each other’s gilded homes, clinked champagne glasses at glittering Manhattan galas, and Trump’s name appeared in Epstein’s black leather contact book with multiple phone numbers. He flew on Epstein’s gaudy private jet—nicknamed the “Lolita Express”—at least 14 times, and Trump even invited Epstein to his lavish second wedding at Mar-a-Lago, where Epstein mingled among the tuxedoed guests like any other respected businessman.

In Clinton’s case, the evidence sprawls across years like a spider’s web—over 26 meticulously logged flights aboard Epstein’s gaudy private jet, plus a decade of photographed handshakes and shoulder-clasps at galas. The White House visitor logs show Epstein’s name scrawled multiple times. Most damning was the handwritten note Clinton penned for Epstein’s 50th birthday, “Jeffrey — Happy 50th — It’s reassuring isn’t it, to have lasted as long, across all the years of learning and knowing… and also to have… the solace of friends”.

Friends? Yes, both Presidents—one with his folksy Southern charm and saxophone-playing charisma, the other with his gold-plated Manhattan swagger—maintained decade-long friendships with Jeffrey Epstein, that convicted predator whose Palm Beach mansion and private Caribbean island became temples to the systematic abuse of underage girls. The same man whose black leather contact book bulged with powerful names.

So here is the question both tribes should ponder. Is it possible to have a decade-long friendship—sharing holiday meals, swapping family photos, exchanging late-night confidences over bourbon—and never catch a whiff of depravity? Not a single off-color joke about young girls, no lingering glances that made your skin crawl, no comments that in retrospect should have set off alarm bells loud as tornado sirens? As a 74 year old father of four daughters, seven granddaughters and two great granddaughters the answer is …. of course not you idiots! Even a mere suspicion—just the faintest shadow of doubt about someone’s God awful predilections—would send any decent person running like a startled whitetail through our Kentucky autumn cornfields.

And that brings me back to my friend. His direct comments and social media personna have become a hellscape of raw hatred masquerading as “common sense”—memes with homeless people photoshopped as rats feeding from dumpsters, immigrants portrayed as knife-wielding invaders scaling fences, articles seething with references to “urban thugs” destroying neighborhoods, and venomous warnings about avoiding establishments where “places turn a little too dark” after sundown. Each encounter or scroll reveals another twist of bigotry that makes my stomach clench.

So, it’s time for me to again cut a little more racist cancer from my life, like a surgeon removing a malignant tumor. Will he even notice my absence, I’m gone, or care? Maybe not—but I’m done being complicit. Every second I’ve spent tolerating his vile garbage has encouraged him to spread it, letting his poison seep into his family and community unchallenged. You see, by ignoring wrongs you unknowingly hand people megaphones. That is something every solid and good leader I have ever known or studied realized at sometime during their lives.

Yes, some friendships deserve to die and this one’s getting a bullet between the eyes today.

Such is life.