By E. Michael Jones
Source

From late January to early February, A & E ran what it called a “documentary event” called “Secrets of Playboy,” which in their words, explored “the hidden truths behind the fable and philosophy of the Playboy empire through a modern-day lens.” Secrets of Playboy, we are told, “delves into the complex world Hugh Hefner created and examines its far-reaching consequences on our culture’s view of power and sexuality.”1 After watching the first four episodes, I learned that Hefner was a ruthless exploiter of young women and that he used one of his favorite bunnies to purchase drugs for him, recklessly endangering her life. Needless to say, I was shocked. Who knew that Hugh Hefner exploited young women? Who knew that Hefner used drugs? Sondra Theodore, who is now in her sixties, made this admission a year ago, four years after Hefner’s death in September 2017. If she had made it in 1973, Hefner would have gone to prison, according to the Chicago cop who had been assigned to his case. When Bobbi Arnstein, another young woman whom Hefner used as a drug mule, was convicted of drug trafficking, the same cop was ready to use her testimony to go after Hefner, but she committed suicide before spilling the beans, effectively ending the Chicago police department’s attempts to put Hefner in prison.

So why didn’t Sondra go to the cops then? Well, we never find out because “Secrets of Playboy” is consistently a day late and a dollar short when it comes to telling us anything about what was really going on. As an indication of a tantalizing lead which never got pursued, “Secrets of Playboy” at one point mentions that everything those celebrities did in what they assumed was the privacy of the rooms Hefner provided was recorded by hidden cameras. When asked why he did this, Hefner just shrugged, commenting offhandedly that as a voyeur he found that sort of thing “interesting,” without telling us who else might be interested. Why the interviewers would give Hefner a pass at this point is puzzling because of the obvious connection between Hefner’s Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles and Jeffrey Epstein’s mansion in New York, which was also equipped with cameras in every room to photograph the rich and the powerful having sex with underage girls as a prelude to future blackmail.

Hefner’s sex empire came into being in 1954, shortly after the CIA first deployed psychological warfare in its successful attempt to topple Mossadegh in Iran, and it was born into that same world of intrigue and blackmail. Hefner started Playboy when divorce was the issue driving the sexual revolution in the United States. The GIs who returned to America with their sexual morality in shreds because of the temptations which war always provides were being inducted into large national corporations which, like the army, saw the family as a hindrance to accomplishing their mission. If the army wanted you to have a wife, so the saying goes, they would have issued you one. The same attitude permeated the firms that were creating “the organization man” as the corporate sequel to the social engineering which had created the 11 million GIs who had served in the war and were now coming home looking for jobs. Even after divorce had become accepted, those same corporations continued to pay a family wage, which provided the newly divorced corporate executive with an unheard-of amount of disposable income, which Hefner’s operation obligingly helped him dispose of by presenting consumer items he didn’t know existed and wouldn’t have known about if Playboy hadn’t told him.

Hefner created a lifestyle for the newly divorced corporate executive which detached sex from the family and turned it into a form of social engineering symbolized best by the Playboy Mansion. Hefner credited Sex Researcher Alfred Kinsey as the inspiration for Playboy magazine, but he may have been the inspiration for the Playboy Mansion as well because Kinsey was a notorious blackmailer, who used his sex survey to get influential men to reveal compromising details of their sex lives which could be used against them later.

Later in this regard meant the moment when the Rockefellers threatened to pull the Kinsey institute’s funding. Before he could reveal what he knew about all of the prominent figures who had given him their sex histories, Kinsey ended up in the hospital, where he died in his mid-fifties under circumstances similar to the death by hospital of George Patton a few years earlier. Before that happened, Kinsey was threatened with prosecution by the most powerful blackmailer in the United States, when J. Edgar Hoover, the founder and then head of the FBI, demanded access to Kinsey’s files. Hoover understood the power of blackmail because he himself was being blackmailed by the Anti-Defamation League, which allegedly had compromising pictures of Hoover, who was a closeted homosexual. Hefner’s link to the ADL became obvious when that Jewish domestic espionage organization gave the founder of Playboy its Torches of Liberty award in 1984, provoking outrage from National Review Editor William F. Buckley, who correctly understood the role Hefner played in the moral subversion of the United States in the period following World War II.

Receiving the ADL award in 1984 wasn’t Hefner’s first contact with powerful Jews. Hefner’s carefully sculpted public profile as the liberated son of Puritanical Methodists was created to disguise the fact that Jews ran the Playboy operation from behind the scenes during the crucial years when Playboy weaponized free speech as an instrument of moral subversion and social control, with the Playboy Mansion as a concrete example of what life would be like in a future when all sexual inhibition had been consigned to the dustbin of history.

This dimension of the Playboy empire is completely missing from the A & E documentary even though it was made public some 12 years ago when Josh Lambert explained how “a team of Jewish editors” turned Playboy into a front for the Jewish Revolutionary Spirit with Hefner as their shabbas goy front man. In an article entitled “My Son, the Pornographer” which appeared in the Jewish magazine The Tablet on February 24, 2010,2 Nat Lehrman, one of the most important members of that “team of Jewish editors,” claimed that “the 1960s should be remembered as Playboy’s Jewish decade” because “those were the years in which a cadre of young Jewish editors, including Lehrman, reinvigorated the publication, embracing and fomenting the sexual revolution.”3 By the 1970s, Playboy had become a:

surprisingly Jewish voice in American culture during the most turbulent decade of the last century. Much of the magazine’s achievement in changing the way Americans talk about sex resulted from Lehrman’s activities, and from his willingness to buck convention while never indulging in Hefnerian hedonism or rebellion for its own sake.4

Because the Jewish Revolutionary Spirit fit in perfectly with Playboy’s plan of moral subversion, more and more Jews got hired as Playboy went from being a magazine to being a manifestation of Tikkun Olam, which is the Jewish term for using the Jewish Revolutionary Spirit to wreck your culture. The man in charge of that wrecking operation at Playboy was a Jew by the name of A.C. Spectorsky, author of a book called The Exurbanites, but better known for the articles he wrote for glossy New York magazines. Spectorsky was ideally qualified to articulate the Playboy philosophy because he had been married three times, but more importantly “the first two marriages . . . were terminated by divorce”:5

In the 1960s, as the magazine prospered, Spectorsky’s hires included a couple more Jewish editors, Sheldon Wax and Arthur Kretchmer, who quickly rose to prominent positions on the masthead. Hefner didn’t object; many of his closest associates and personal assistants, including Bobbie Arnstein and Dick Rosenzweig, were Jews. Indeed, in the “Playboy Philosophy,” the ponderous series of articles that he published beginning in late 1962 to air his beliefs about sexual morality and sundry topics, Hefner professed a frank admiration for American Jews, who, he wrote—“while not nearly as sexually permissive as the Hebrews of the Old Testament—are more liberal than either American Catholics or the mainstream of American Protestantism.”

This is hardly surprising because once Hefner became a full-time lifestyle icon, he delegated the onerous philosophical lucubrations involved in articulating the Playboy Philosophy to Lehrman, who had a better grasp of how to use it as a vehicle for the Jewish Revolutionary Spirit. As Playboy’s resident philosopher, Lehrman took over the Playboy Forum in 1963, when it became  a platform for those advocating “homosexual rights, free speech, sex education and birth control.” He also took control of Hefner’s nonprofit Playboy foundation, which footed the legal bills for “sexologists, abortion activists, and defendants charged under arcane American sex laws,” which Lehrman refers to as “civil rights, civil liberties, all that good stuff.”6 Shortly after joining the editorial staff at Playboy, Lehrman was put in charge of editing what Lambert calls “this revolutionary material.” Playboy played a crucial role in destabilizing social and moral norms as American entered the revolutionary period of the mid-1960s, when:

Playboy’s young editors were charting the magazine’s course. “The whole staff, practically, was Jewish,” Lehrman recalls. “We were the dominant, probably the brighter ones.” Under Spectorsky, Lehrman, Wax, and Kretchmer, and always with Hefner’s approval, Playboy at the same time began to feature Jewish writers, artists, and themes more prominently than ever before. Literary critics Alfred Kazin and Leslie Fiedler contributed essays early in the decade, while the stable of fiction writers grew to include a virtual Jewish all-star team, including Bruce Jay Friedman, Herbert Gold, Leonard Michaels, Irwin Shaw, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, and, eventually, Isaac Bashevis Singer. Shel Silverstein, a close friend of Hefner’s, published cartoons regularly in the magazine, as did Jules Feiffer, to whom Hefner paid a retainer in exchange for exclusive first-look privileges. In 1964 and 1965, the magazine serialized Lenny Bruce’s autobiography, and Mel Brooks kibitzed his way through a Playboy interview in the May 1966 issue, unabashedly characterizing himself as “spectacularly Jewish,” and explaining the prominence of Jews in American comedy as a result of their people’s history: “When the tall, blond Teutons have been nipping at your heels for thousands of years, you find it enervating to keep wailing. So, you make jokes.” Perhaps only Commentary could be considered a more central platform for American Jewish cultural achievement in the 1960s, and of course Commentary at its zenith could never boast even a tenth of Playboy’s circulation.7

After the Jews broke the Hollywood production code in 1965 with the Holocaust porn flick The Pawnbroker, they spawned a series of imitators which, like The Pawnbroker used the Holocaust to smuggle nudity onto the big screen. Appearing in the same year, The Pawnbroker and Jerzy Kosinski’s Holocaust novel The Painted Bird were equally and deliberately transgressive in their respective genres, and taken together both helped inaugurate the era of Holocaust porn, which began in 1969 with the release of Love Camp 7, “the earliest full-blown sexploitation film set in a Nazi camp” and the one which set the pattern for the many films that followed.”8 During the course of the 1960s, the U.S. Supreme Court decreed that smut could become acceptable if it had redeeming social value. The Swedish reductio ad absurdum of this theory was I Am Curious, Yellow, which mixed sex scenes with clips of speeches by Martin Luther King in a cynical attempt to circumvent the censors. Once The Pawnbroker and The Painted Bird established the Holocaust as the ultimate expression of redeeming social value, they opened the way for a series of increasingly transgressive imitations which acted as a battering ram against what was left of obscenity laws in America and Europe.

The plot of Love Camp 7 revolves around an attempt to get Martha Grossman, the assistant to Karl Stahl, who “knows the secrets of his jet engines,” out of a concentration camp turned into a bordello for Nazi officers known as Love Camp 7. The film begins with military officers discussing the problems involved with the mission, which involves getting two female officers into the camp so that they can “locate Martha Grossman and obtain as much information on those jet engines as they can.”9 One of the officers finds the mission “a little far-fetched,” while another is appalled at its moral implications. “Those women would be worse than whores. Who could you possibly find to undertake an assignment such as this one?” Moral considerations, however, soon take back seat to technical details. The women in question qualify for the mission not because they are whores but because they “are experts in guerilla warfare, hand to hand combat, and karate.” They also speak French and German. And most importantly, they are good at memorizing random facts, all of which leads the commanding officer to “feel confident that these women can handle the mission” with no danger to their souls or the legitimacy of the Allied cause. If what the two female lieutenants are planning to do is morally neutral if not morally good because of the end it can bring about, why is the same sort of behavior bad when the Germans do it? Well, according to the logic of the Holocaust narrative, it’s bad because Germans do it. Didn’t they create Auschwitz? Isn’t that the epitome of all evil now? Isn’t anything that subverts Auschwitz therefore good, even if it is exactly the same behavior that makes the Nazis reprehensible in the first place? Needless to say, none of these questions got raised in the initial discussion, nor was that necessary because both women volunteered “with full knowledge of the assignment,” which means readiness to engage in sexual intercourse, making the connection between the Holocaust and pornography…

[…] This is just an excerpt from the March 2022 Issue of Culture Wars magazine. To read the full article, please purchase a digital download of the magazine, or become a subscriber!

(Endnotes Available by Request)