I remember the first time I encountered the Rothschild name. I was studying wine as a young adult, trying to learn to appreciate it. Living in Germany, I had much more affordable access to very good European wine than I'd had in the States, so I started tasting through some of the best wines I could get my hands on, learning to appreciate what was considered quality and what wasn't.

I soon learned that a particular estate in Bordeaux, Chateau Lafite Rothschild, was seen as among the top of the top for red wine. I never tasted their very best, because I had a limited budget, but I tasted some very good wine off the estate as I leaned what truly great red wine tastes like.

I had zero idea then that Rothschild was a Jewish name. Young and callow, I'd never heard any of the conspiracy theories. I did, however, learn that a man named Rothschild, originally from Frankfurt, had bought the estate in the 19th century, and one of his descendents had done a tremendous amount to being the devastated vineyards back after WWII, helping to bring the Bordeaux region itself back into wine-making prominence.

Then one day, an American Air Force officer I was serving with saw a list I'd made of wines I searching for at affordable prices. He saw the Rothschild name, and soon I was hearing a long-winded anti-semitic rant — the old, toxic ridiculousness about the Rothschild family and other Jewish bankers secretly controlling the world.

I laughed at first, because he sounded so irrational I thought he was trying to be funny. I mean, nobody could believe anything so obviously fanciful or conspiratorial. Especially, nobody would talk about something like that in Berlin, assigned there as a direct result of the war with the Nazis, surrounded by reminders of the Holocaust.

I didn't get it. I thought my colleague was delusional, though I used stronger words in my head as I thought about it.

That was one of my first lessons in the power of conspiracy theories, as I learned that my colleague really believed what he was saying, without the slightest shred of evidence, actually contrary to mountains of evidence —and that other people believed it too. He believed it because he wanted to believe, for whatever conscious or unconscious reason. He chose to be an anti-semite, although he disputed that label.

Decades later, I read a book by an anti-transgender fanatic who claims that "international bankers" are funding gender clinics to both enrich themselves and to destroy "white European, Christian culture." (Because destroying culture is apparently an amusing game for the ultra wealthy... or something. 🙄)

Normally, "international banker" is a code word for Jewish banker, when somebody wants to be anti-semitic but not sound totally anti-semitic. But this guy didn't stop there, he specifically accused Jewish bankers of being behind what he calls the transgender conspiracy, and he named the Rothschild family.

Obviously, this is absurd, one reason being that no particular family with the name Rothschild is particularly powerful in any kind of banking, let alone wealthy enough to set up and fund major medical clinics all over the world.

But conspiracy theories don't have to make sense. They just have to fill some perverse need to vilify and Other, to attack and malign.

Posy Parker is really really really good at that.