Looks like Harvard will have to find new mentors for its young, female economics students. And those prospective protégées can all breathe a sigh of relief, as the 71-year-old Democrat and former Treasury Secretary won't have any more opportunities to put Jeffrey Epstein's seduction advice to use.
Larry Summers and Harvard finally threw in the towel late yesterday. The exposure of his communications with Epstein in the months leading up to the sex trafficker's final arrest in 2019 had already cost Summers his board position at OpenAI. Now the school has been put on leave at the business center he headed for Harvard, and Summers reversed himself on fulfilling his teaching obligations – starting immediately:
Former Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers will immediately leave his role as an instructor at Harvard while the University investigates his ties to child sex trafficker Jeffrey E. Epstein.
“His co-teachers will complete the remaining three class sessions of the courses he has been teaching with them this semester, and he is not scheduled to teach next semester,” a spokesperson for Summers wrote in a Wednesday statement to The Crimson.
Summers will also immediately go on leave from his role as the director of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at the Harvard Kennedy School. He has led the center, which focuses on studying policy issues in the public and private sector, since 2011.
“Mr. Summers has decided it’s in the best interest of the Center for him to go on leave from his role as Director as Harvard undertakes its review,” the spokesperson wrote in a Wednesday evening statement.
Neither Harvard nor Summers had any real choice in this matter. I had earlier scoffed at the idea that Summers could simply continue his academic career. As the Harvard Crimson reported this week, the communications between Epstein and Summers went far beyond friendly chatter or fundraising of the kind that other Democrats now find themselves forced to explain. Summers actively and repeatedly sought Epstein's advice on how to convince his female protégée to get "horizontal," as one e-mail or text put it. Summers went to a convicted sex offender in 2019 to discuss seduction strategies, and kept asking for that advice during the same period in which Epstein had become a focus of federal investigators, a story that drew national coverage while that correspondence took place.
OpenAI dumped Summers because of the embarrassing publicity. However, Harvard apparently didn't think about the prospects of keeping a predatory old man in positions where he would exercise considerable authority and power over young women he could "mentor." The absurdity of that position finally penetrated even the supposed geniuses of Haaahvaaaahd, and just as slowly as you'd expect.
The Epstein Light Grenade was built by similarly clueless fools. And it works precisely as designed, even if those fools didn't understand what they built.
Yesterday, David warned about taking mentions in these files too seriously, and that we need to take some care to read these in full context to ensure we're not simply conducting mindless purges and witch hunts. Now that all of the files will be released, some names will appear in them that had no real business or relationship with Epstein. David's right – to a point. Trump has already experienced that, but the Protection Racket Media didn't care much about context when it came to Orange Man Bad.
However, there is no context in which Summers can claim not to have been a full member of the Epstein Society. The same can be said of Stacey Plaskett. Hakeem Jeffries may not have personally engaged with Epstein – that we know of yet – but his campaign and his fundraisers did on his behalf and with access to Jeffries as the prize, in 2013, five years after Epstein's conviction for sex-trafficking offenses related to underage girls. The entire Democrat establishment seems to have remained close to Epstein and his money.
Summers is the first scalp to get hung by Democrats in their Epstein crusade, and I bet he won't be the last. I'd also bet that the Protection Racket Media will either lean hard into "context" from now on, or will just stop reporting on these files altogether.
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