Tyler Durden just called for witch hunters to track down Epsteinites and “erase them from the Earth.” Yes, please.

I was reminded that in chapter seventeen of Judging Athena, someone did something very much like that, responding to a case of Epsteinish sexual abuse of a young teen girl.

It happened too fast for the smoking pedophile to make sense
of it. He watched as his partner was knocked back and then
crushed beneath the falling door that was smashed into the room,
hinges, lock, frame, and all. A large gray blur swept into the berth.
In an instant, it had a death grip on his throat and the lowlife
was horrified to see a golden Cross embossed on a vambrace just
above the armored glove that silenced his breath and speech. ‘You
should’ve trusted your gut,’ a deep, menacing voice growled. Then
the criminal was lifted up, rammed into the wall, and slammed
into the ceiling, before being pulverized through the table and into
the floor. Everything went dark…

The large gray blur is a character I’ve kind of held in reserve. In the quoted scene, he was following specific orders from the title character. And his actions were a little out of his ordinary (both criminals lived for a reason). As I mentioned in my end notes, his inclusion in the otherwise kind and gentle Athena was noncanonical, as was the Dandy and the Bass Slayers concert. Athena is, again, not set in the Tom Ironsides universe. But in Tom’s world, as captured in chapter twenty-one of The Substitute, the same character is the man who permanently eliminates Mr. Steinberg, who is, as one might guess, a proxy for Epstein. He’s also the shadow approvingly watching over Dr. Tom, his old friend, at the end of the book. And he’s not done yet. More on that one day. By the way, in addition to being a treatise on the horrors of modern “education,” The Substitute is laced with various layers of the ways of the Epstein class, ways that flow from Langley to your child’s school to, well, just about everywhere.

Tom isn’t finished either. The forthcoming Aurelius, a prequel, should be published … soon? (Paul? Paul?) In it, Tom, arch enemy of evil, blasts his way through a series of wicked men the way Durden suggests — bullets as little flying millstones. At the end, we see exactly how Tom reformed a Steinberg associate, the one he warmly remembered offing in The Substitute.

Fiction does not, of course, solve real problems. But it does provide a little inspiration.

And speaking of inspiration, I’ve just made an inquiry about using some music in yet another romance novel, somewhat akin to the way I used Sima Itayim’s song in Athena. (Thanks, again, Sima!) That one is still some time out, but it’s gonna be a great Southern Christian story, with a little “heat.” You’ll know it when you read it.

Maleficae delenda est.