… sounds like the first line of a Gilbert and Sullivan patter song:
When shooting rats with a pellet gun
Watch out for Temple Ben Zion.
And also something else the matter:
Windows hit by bullets shatter.
No one, certainly. And yet the rise to great public positions in our once great republic of Donald Trump, Lawrence Summers, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, and other nasty pieces of work, forces the question of personal viciousness and the survival of liberal democracy. If Matt Ford is right that
At its core, Trumpism is a permission structure for evil. It is the abolition of ethical norms and the erasure of moral authority… Trumpism is not really about immigration, or inflation, or trade, or draining the swamp, or building the wall—it is ultimately about the dark thrill of abusing those whom its adherents consider to be inferiors, either directly or by proxy.
then we need to return, at the very least, to Judith Shklar’s Ordinary Vices and its meticulous anatomy of what’s worst in us, as we try to forge American civic life despite it.
[Summers] is so convinced of his own genius, and he is so convinced that he is smarter than anyone else, that he is very bad at listening to other people, people who might be able to stop him, prevent him from doing really stupid things. I’m sure that he had people telling him, don’t be emailing Jeffrey Epstein, that’s a bad idea. But he would just go ahead and do it anyway because he has that kind of hubris, right?
He did one of the world’s worst ever fixed income trades when he was president of Harvard, where he decided that he was going to build a massive new campus across the river. And he knew that this massive new campus was going to cost a lot of money. And he was also convinced that interest rates were very low and they wouldn’t go down any further. And in fact, they were going to go up further.
And so he reckoned that when Harvard in the future was going to borrow money to build the campus, he wanted Harvard to be able to borrow the money in the future at the interest rates today. So he entered into this incredibly complex sort of future forward swap thingy. And then, of course, interest rates went down rather than up. He had to unwind the swap because they never built the campus. And he cost the university about a billion dollars.
… is the provocative title of a New Republic essay which goes there. It goes to the place where you say that the fault lies with us. Not just them – the Trump voters. Us – the other side.
“Avarice, ambition, revenge, and licentiousness would break the strongest cords of our Constitution, as a whale goes through a net,” [John] Adams once wrote to [a] friend. “Our Constitution was made only for a moral … people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
So far, Americans are failing that test—and the republic itself... It would be tempting to dismiss the Epstein scandals as a purely elite phenomenon. But this is the society for which the American people have voted. The 2016 election could once be dismissed as a constitutional fluke since most Americans voted for Trump’s opponent. The 2024 election is more definitional. This country had nearly a decade of experience with Trump in power—the corruption, the lies, the bigotry and misogyny and abuse and violence—and welcomed more of it.
This is, if you like, the importance of Larry Summers. That Harvard University, of all places, appointed a corrupt greedy licentious reprobate president is a chapter in a story. It is a story about millions and millions of Americans, including our corrupt elites, including even presidents of our greatest universities, failing the test and failing the republic. Don’t forget Stanford’s disgraced corrupt billionaire ex-president! Coast to coast, at our greatest schools, reprehensible self-serving cynics and liars are appointed president, just as Trump is elected and re-elected the country’s president.
As late as 2014, Harvard ignored this letter from an anti-trafficking organization: “[It is] unusual and disheartening . . . to read almost daily press releases distributed by a pedophile [who] feels entitled to identify himself as a ‘Harvard philanthropist.” Who was allowed to identify himself as a Harvard philanthropist.
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At its core, Trumpism is a permission structure for evil. It is the abolition of ethical norms and the erasure of moral authority… Trumpism is not really about immigration, or inflation, or trade, or draining the swamp, or building the wall—it is ultimately about the dark thrill of abusing those whom its adherents consider to be inferiors, either directly or by proxy.
Summers abused those he considered his inferiors – women – and he got his thrill by proxy. We assume.
Everyone [outside the contemporary American elite is] part of an underclass whom the wealthy can abuse and immiserate at their own discretion. The Epstein emails give the rest of us a glimpse into this world, where even the most grotesque crimes can be forgiven or ignored out of a sense of elite solidarity—at least until they become too publicly awkward to privately sustain—and where amorality is required to participate.
O Christmas Tree, O Christmas tree,
How lovely are your branches!
O Christmas Tree, O Christmas tree,
How lovely are your branches!
Come gather, childen, pack the heat,
In winter’s cold and snow and sleet.
O Christmas tree, O Christmas tree,
How lovely are your branches!
Dizzying mixed metaphors/figurative language in this sentence. Anoint, fraternity, crash, BUTTERING!? Summers was, famously, a president, so it makes sense to have that allusion here; but what is the writer doing with it? Priests, not presidents, are anointed. Promote instead of anoint?
Crashed careers is nicely alliterative, but jammed right up against soft slithery buttering it just makes a mess.
After a video posted of Mr. Summers teaching a class Tuesday, Alejandra Caraballo, a clinical instructor at Harvard Law School’s Cyberlaw Clinic, commented online that “it’s not normal for a professor to start a class discussing how they ‘regret’ being best buddies with a child sex trafficker.”
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One of his students comments:
“It’s incredibly easy — maybe one of the easiest things in the world — to not have a long-standing relation with maybe the world’s most notorious pedophile and human trafficker,” Anna J. Guerrini ’29 said. “I think it’s disgusting that he was asking for advice from another man on how to cheat on his wife and how to best win the affection of this woman.”
… and that’s just the long and the short of it, mes petites. This blog, with help from readers like George, who recently sent UD this despairing piece from Indiana University, has I think decisively demonstrated that, qua behavioral category, fraternities are a catastrophe. Down south, more and more of the lads have guns that feature in haze-play. Drugs are a frat biggie, too, with the all-male secrecy/loyalty plus public-facing clean-cutness of Greek boys a perfect cover for large-scale distribution conspiracies. More commonly, on a daily basis, frats are about torturing teenagers desperate for acceptance, getting violently drunk, establishing more and more sophisticated ways of cheating through college, offering corrupt bigtime sports programs their most fanatic forms of support, and of course harassing women.
Because frats are supported by powerful rich organizations, and because party schools know they’d fold without them, nobody really does anything about the blood and guts. Dormouse deans sleep through the mad tea party, roused to irritable attention only when the little ones manage to kill a pledge. Unable to shut out the thudthudthudthud of a dead drunk falling hard down his final flight of stairs, the deans pull out the unacceptable intolerable unforgiveable appalling template and let fly until it blows over. They pull it back out when it happens again.
The situation is exactly like that of the camorra in Italy. Everyone knows that criminal violent enterprises are intrinsic to the setting, and no one does anything. I mean, as in this most recent shutdown of the entire system at Indiana (how long will it be suspended? couple of weeks), some teeny symbolic something will occasionally occur, and then it’s back to business.
SOS would write “the more fireable offense,” since there are only two, er, members of the list (mouth; dick), but otherwise this is a nice formulation.
Oh, and he’s stopped teaching at Harvard, though he hasn’t resigned his position.
… the most morally bankrupt of characters… [lacking] basic moral and behavioral standards…’
The Harvard Crimson calls for Larry Summers to resign.
Both took/are taking far too long. Elites protect their own until absolutely pushed to the wall. Remember how lovingly Oxford clung to Tariq Ramadan! Remember Yale’s Michael Simons. Remember Robert “Two Chairs” Alpern.
[T]he connection between Summers and Epstein has long been public knowledge. Summers joined OpenAI in November of 2023, almost four years after the New York Times published a photo of him hanging out with Epstein at the sex trafficker’s Manhattan mansion, and six months after the world learned that Summers had solicited donations from Epstein on behalf of his wife’s poetry foundation. Undeterred, the Times itself hired Summers as a contributor to its Opinion section at the beginning of 2025... Prestigious institutions knew exactly who Summers was, and sought him out anyway, for years... [It all] reveals an American elite blinded to outrages occurring in plain view, due to the clubby nature of high society. All the way back in 2009, Summers offered some unsolicited advice to not yet-Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) about surviving in Washington. “Outsiders can say whatever they want,” he counseled, “but insiders don’t criticize other insiders.” As an empirical observation, Summers was right—the world does work that way, illustrated most grotesquely in the Epstein debacle.
Harvard continues to affiliate itself not only with Summers, but with his buddy, Mister Female Genital Mutilation himself, Alan Dershowitz.
Summers’ appointment as Harvard’s president “worried some of those who knew [him]. The economist had earned a reputation as a bull in a china shop, rudely dismissive of the opinions of others, astoundingly arrogant even by Washington standards.”
Some gems in this Politico piece.
It’s not just that Summers continued a friendship with a man who clearly had a pathological sexual interest in girls and had gone to jail for his sexual proclivities. It is also hard to imagine how Summers could have been so stupid as not to expect that emails with a convicted felon might one day go public.
As for the content of the emails… much of it is, in a word, gross. Certainly, we all write emails that, deprived of context, could embarrass us if they went public. But Summers’ emails went to a deeper, darker place; there is no context that absolves them.
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In July 2011, the former Harvard president was interviewed at the Aspen Institute by its head, author Walter Isaacson, in front of an admiring group. A friendly Isaacson asked about the veracity of a scene in the movie The Social Network in which Summers agrees to meet with Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, two Harvard undergraduates who claimed that Mark Zuckerberg had stolen the idea for Facebook from them. The “Winklevi,” as Summers referred to them, came from Greenwich, Conn., rowed crew, were tall, handsome and old school — they wore coats and ties to meet the Harvard president. Summers disliked them instinctively, and the film portrays him treating them with humiliating condescension. Was it true? Isaacson wanted to know.
“One of the things you learn as a college president is that if an undergraduate is wearing a tie and jacket on Thursday afternoon at three o’clock, there are two possibilities,” Summers answered. “One is that they are looking for a job and have an interview. The other is that they are an asshole. This was the latter case.”
The remark — a former president of Harvard describing two of its students as assholes — prompted near-unanimous laughter from the audience, titillated by this trash-talking rule-breaker. Summers wore the chuffed look of a man who rarely tells a successful joke but is pleased to have done so now. The funny thing is that Summers was wrong on both counts: Zuckerberg wound up paying a $65 million settlement to the Winklevoss twins, and Larry Summers turned out to be the asshole.