Steve Sailer has a post up on a story in the NYMag about how guys who sound surprisingly like Borat discriminate against the sacred people. Me being me, the over-the-top enthusiasm for the article had my skepticism meter pegged. It reads a lot like the Rolling Stone rape hoax story in that the characters are all from central casting.

Ephraim is both developer and landlord. His thick beard and heavyset frame make him look much older than his 26 years. He is a Hasid, and he started buying buildings a few years ago, in the wake of the housing crash.

A real-estate agent introduced us. “Anything for that guy,” Ephraim told me when I asked if I could interview him. We met in Prospect-Lefferts Gardens where I found him sitting in his parked car with the engine running. I hopped into the passenger seat and went for an afternoon ride-along through the neighborhoods where he does most of his business: Bushwick, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Crown Heights. 

It is important to remember that Ephraim is one voice on a wide spectrum. And it is important to know that Ephraim is a pseudonym for reasons that will become obvious.

We now have the stock characters introduced. The amazingly typical Jew, circa 1935 Warsaw, and the eyes wide open reporter.

Ephraim turns the car on. I stammer through a request to hear what it’s like to be a landlord in so many evolving Brooklyn neighborhoods. Ephraim nods and stares out the window, as if he lacks the will or energy to answer such a broad question.

This is where we are supposed to believe the reporter is Jimmy Olsen, too naive and intimidated to embellish or fabricate. DW Gibson, by the way, runs a writer’s colony (no kidding) in NY and has a book coming out. He has done a lot of interviews. He’s no babe in the woods. But, he needs to show he is not like this guy, this Jew!

Now, we meet the “Jew” who will be the center of the story:

Do you know anything about property? There’s a deed and there’s a note.

Like with a car, if you have a lease, the title is in your name but you don’t actually own the car. The deed to the house is the same thing. If you have a mortgage, the actual thing, the house is the bank’s. So they have a note, and they can transfer it to other banks, they can sell it to big companies, they can make packages of notes. You still own the deed — that’s yours. And if the bank wants to take it from you, they have to go through the process of foreclosure. If the house has a small mortgage, that’s fine — you can sell the deed — but if the house is underwater, you can’t really do anything with it.

So we came up with the idea: The bank takes a long time before they take the property away. It can take them up to five, six years. So we go to the owner, buy from him the deed, and then we rent it out. When the market went up a little bit, about 10 percent of the mortgages were almost at market value, so we’d pay them off and keep the building. If it’s a big mortgage, I don’t have any choice; I just sit until the bank takes it away. I’m just sitting, collecting rent. And that’s it.

That should be “scheming Jew.” The recurring theme in the Cult is that the world is victims and predators. The Cult, as the vanguard of the people, defends the victims from the predators. The scheming Jew is now in the predator category.

Some Jewish people, they’re going to come in and they’re going to try to rip off the black tenants — and the tenants know it, there’s word of mouth. So it’s like, “Oh, a Jewish guy again?” There’s a lot of Jewish guys moving around. Like a lot, a lot, a lot of investors who are either Hasidic Jews or a little bit less, but they’re Jewish. They’re holding Bed-Stuy like this — he squeezes at the air in front of him, strangling it. So sometimes it’s like, “Hello, this was our neighborhood. What are you doing here?”

We started in East New York, but we sold everything we had. We didn’t want to be there. Most of them are either Section 8, other government programs, and even the person that pays with cash is too much headaches. So we sold everything over there and we came out all the way to Park Slope. Then we started backing up, backing up, slowly, all the way to Bushwick. This is one of the houses we’re finishing now.

Now we have the back story of our scheming Jewish landlord. He is part of the conspiracy!

We’re small, so we look into places that haven’t caught on — we just did a place on Nostrand Avenue. People are not even there yet. We put in $600,000 and everyone was laughing at us. “It’s crazy, you’re over there. A building for yuppies, white people? It’s not going to work.” The building was full of tenants — $1,300, $1,400 tenants. We paid every tenant the average of twelve, thirteen thousand dollars to leave. I actually went to meet them — lawyers are not going to help you. And we got them out of the building and now we have tenants paying $2,700, $2,800, and they’re all white. So this is what we do.

My saying is — again, I’m not racist — every black person has a price. The average price for a black person here in Bed-Stuy is $30,000 dollars. Up over there in East New York, it’s $10,000 dollars. Everyone wants them to leave, not because we don’t like them, it’s just they’re messing up — they bring everything down. Not all of them.

Most of them don’t believe you at first. “Oh, you Jewish people you’re a bunch of thieves, you’re never going to give me my money.” But once you start actually having a base of people who know you, who you actually gave the money, it’s better. Sometimes it’s really tricky because you’ll have one person willing to leave for $2,000 and another wants $20,000. And the second this guy finds out that guy is getting 20 he says, “Hell no, I’m not leaving. I want 20, too.”

They don’t know — here he lowers his voice — that even if they get the money and they left, they could always come back. They don’t know that part. And it’s so scary sometimes because they could come up in the middle of construction and say, “It’s my property, I didn’t understand what I was signing, and I want to come back.”

I don’t doubt that landlords prefer buildings full of hipsters. I don’t doubt it is open season on low end rental properties in neighborhoods with potential. most of those are black. I just don’t believe for a second that this writer got a Hasid to talk to him, much less talk to him like this. I think this is Rolling Stone all over again.

The thing is, it is a lot like a scene from The Wire, which has become gospel for Progressives. In it, a naive reporter with the heart of gold ends up faking stories about how the poor are victimized. Instead of being painted as a fraud, he is portrayed as just another victim of the system.

The Rolling Stone hoax went forward because everyone at Rolling Stone was inclined to believe it. The good con-man knows the beliefs of his mark and uses them to run the con. Jason Blair knew his NYTimes superiors had a blind spot for sacred people and progressive causes. Stephen Glass knew his bosses hated the Right and therefore would believe the worst about them.

NYMag is on the cutting edge of the new religion. A story like this is catnip to them. You have the right victims. You have the right guilt. And now, you have the right villain. The Cult is turning on the Jews and this gratuitous portrayal of the mythical Jewish landlord is right in their wheelhouse. How could they not buy it?