“A significant error in judgment”: That’s how disgraced Clinton Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers simply described his “affiliation” with the late intercourse fiend Jeffrey Epstein, who donated a cool $9.1 million to Harvard whereas Summers was president and gave $110,000 extra to a poetry nonprofit based by the awkward Ivy League economist’s second spouse.
Summers, who additionally led Barack Obama’s Nationwide Financial Council and was a senior World Financial institution official, feels “deeply ashamed.”
His disgrace runs so deep, he stayed in common contact with Epstein for 11 years after the perv’s 2008 conviction for soliciting intercourse from a minor.
They texted simply the day earlier than Epstein’s 2019 arrest for sex-trafficking minors on a mass scale.
Earlier than Epstein landed within the Metropolitan Correctional Heart, the place he was quickly discovered useless in what was dominated a suicide, he and Summers talked about Donald Trump, whom each detested, and swapped low opinions of girls’s intelligence.
They’d heart-to-hearts about Summers’ foundering pursuit of a purportedly inconstant youthful lady he referred to as his “mentee” and bantered concerning the (low) mathematical likelihood she would sleep with him once more.
In maybe the century’s worst romantic metaphor, Epstein described himself on this monthslong drama as Summers’ “wing man.”
Summers’ final textual content to the doomed pedophile vented that his vacationing relations reminded him of dysfunctional characters in an Ibsen play.
The friendship was lengthy, however Summers’ downfall was swift. Trump requested the Justice Division to analyze him, President Clinton, Democrat megadonor Reid Hoffman, JPMorgan Chase and “many different individuals and establishments” he thinks could also be implicated within the large trove of Epstein paperwork launched this month — at the same time as Summers’ fellow Dems combed them in useless for dust on Trump.
Inside hours, the cancel-culture machine set the unhappy Ivy League veteran on the trail to spoil.
The Brookings Establishment, the Heart for American Progress, the Heart for World Growth and Finances Lab at Yale all lower ties with Summers.
He resigned from OpenAI’s board.
The New York Occasions solemnly declared it wouldn’t renew his contributing-writer contract when it expires at 12 months’s finish.
Harvard introduced he’ll “step again” from his high-profile instructing gig and stand down as director of a business-study heart.
And Friday, uber-woke hedge fund D.E. Shaw fired him from his profitable consulting gig, The Submit completely reported.
Being chummy with a intercourse offender is a foul search for right this moment’s public mental, however there’s no proof (no less than not but) Summers participated in any of Epstein’s felony or morally questionable actions — although information reveal he and his spouse visited Epstein’s non-public island throughout their Caribbean honeymoon.
All he seems to have carried out was sustain a weird relationship with a sketchy correspondent whom wiser individuals — like Donald Trump — lower off even earlier than Epstein’s felony conviction.
Having did not come clean with it, Summers is struggling after being outed in a political doc dump approach past his management.
The fact runs deeper, nevertheless.
Summers is the son of two Ivy League professors and nephew of two Nobel laureates. He had each benefit in life and loved a meteoric rise by means of elite academia.
His authorities service elevated him to cupboard rank and landed him the presidency of arguably the world’s most prestigious college — all earlier than he was 50.
However in consenting to his personal cancellation in a tradition that calls for blood even for minor slipups, unproved accusations and unlucky associations, he might have solely himself accountable.
Twenty years in the past, when “cancel tradition” was nearly completely unknown and leftist intolerance remained an amusing campus quirk somewhat than academia’s dominant ideology, then-Harvard prez Summers speculated in off-the-record remarks that girls is likely to be much less adept at science than males.
He launched the thought as a provocation he hoped wasn’t true and provided different views.
An early model of the mob got here for him anyway, with the Harvard college narrowly voting a “insecurity” in his management.
Again then, Summers might have stood his floor. He might have used his apparent intelligence and his place’s immense status to combat again and arise at no cost speech and inquiry — for himself and everybody else.
He might have advised the identity-politics fascists to stuff it.
He might have argued — to a pupil physique that supported him by greater than three to 1 — it’s not schools’ position to police constitutionally protected language and conduct.
He might have moved on with out remark and let his critics sulk in impotent silence.
However he did none of these items. He resigned, providing a flurry of self-abasing apologies as he adopted a greedy path to rehabilitation inside a system that despised him then and despises him now.
Final month, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni gave Summers an award for “excellent contributions to liberal arts schooling.”
Who is aware of if will probably be revoked as a result of he moronically took relationship recommendation from Jeffrey Epstein?
However the greatest of his illustrious “contributions” seems to be like opening the ivory tower’s gates to the cancel-culture furies.
In permitting that, he failed himself, he failed Harvard, he failed larger schooling, and he failed America. Finally, that’s the tragedy of Lawrence Summers.
Paul du Quenoy is Palm Seashore Freedom Institute president.
