Enormously influential, he provided the intellectual gravitas as well as the raw policymaking muscle for a version of the US economy that was financialized, globalized, and monopolized.
If you're broke in 2025, Larry Summers probably had something to do with it.
Anything that will knock this guy down many many pegs is worthwhile imo.
I have long been a hater of Summers, but had no indication that he was involved with Epstein like this. I could understand others at Harvard not knowing, unless they had access to Summers' personal email somehow.
Chomsky, another person who I have long hated (for setting back linguistics with his extreme bullying, the dominance of bad theory, and the resistance to actually studying languages before they go extinct, etc etc etc). And though I knew there was some connection to Epstein, as many intellectuals had connections to him, I had no idea it was to that extent.
All this is to say that even opponents of Epstein's confidants didn't know the extent of connection, and I'm not surprised that others are Harvard didn't know.
Plus, there are harward people who complained about these harward people for years and claim to not be surprised.
It seems like the NYT was cackling in glee just a couple months ago, saying that even Trump had to finally buck the conspiracy theories of his evil, ignorant MAGA followers and admit that there was absolutely nothing to see and nothing interesting about the Epstein case and it's actually silly that you would think there was. Nice that MAGA demands accountability from Trump in a way Democrats don't from their leaders.
It's also telling that the NYT is the only major outlet to consistently be reticent to state unequivocally that Epstein killed himself. Always said "found to have committed suicide." Somebody there with editorial veto control knows that flimsy story isn't going to last forever. Even if he hadn't been made cellmates with an insane strangler murder cop with nothing to lose, hadn't said that the "suicide attempt" was insane murder cop trying to kill him, and was taken off suicide watch one day after that "suicide attempt."
The night Jeffrey Epstein claimed his cellmate tried to kill him, CBS News 2025/09/22
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/jeffrey-epstein-claimed-cellmat...
Nicholas Tartaglione
https://www.lohud.com/story/news/crime/2019/09/23/feds-how-n...
[edit: re Tartaglione, who never had the slightest chance of ever getting out of prison. Has anybody checked if the financial situation of his family changed for the better since the incident?]
Nonsense. "...Mr. Epstein, who died by suicide... [0] "...disgraced financier who died by suicide...[1] etc.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/18/us/politics/trump-epstein... [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/12/us/politics/trump-epstein...
What planet do you live on?? I don't see any blowback against Trump himself from MAGA followers. It's always "he's getting bad advice", or they blame his sycophants like Bondi. If MAGA demanded accountability from Trump they seemed to be totally fine when he was caught boasting on tape of committing sexual assault.
So he's still immune the anything that's horrendous.
The real test is how people vote. With this much confusion I think it is perfectly valid to take a few opinion polls with a grain of salt.
Much like how Dems rate their party poorly but still turn it against Trump, I'm not sure MAGA discontent with have any real impact on elections.
Didn't Bondi say there was thousands of hours of video of sex abuse? Was that made up?
Just throwing it out there, but forget Epstein, I'm sure most of us would not believe what NYT is sitting on in general. This is effectively a defacto global intelligence gathering service. I bet if we could read through a lot of that we'd all be gobsmacked and just stop believing in humanity altogether.
I understand most of what we haven't seen is uncorroborated, but it would still make for interesting reading if we didn't have to worry about falling down an elevator shaft onto some bullets.
This doesn't accord with experience. MAGA is notorious for rationalizing anything Trump says or does.
The uniparty is a rotten, spiraling race to the bottom.
They're just different bubbles.
Liberals and conservatives have methodically and deliberately avoided holding their leaders accountable for decades. The only people who can't see that, are, frankly, liberals and conservatives.
What we have now is an opportunity to sweep everyone from Trump on down out of office. Anyone who would work for Trump or Clinton should have their judgement questioned at a minimum. And they should pray we don't look any further into what they've been getting up to.
This is a golden opportunity to scrub the walls clean and put in new people en masse. But I'm not naive. I know the corruption of the incumbent power brokers and parties will undoubtedly win the day. You can bet your bottom dollar that conservatives and liberals are cooperating and they've got the courts, Homeland security, CIA, everything.. out cleaning up for them. I just wish they'd get what's coming to them for once.
I did say the "uniparty", right? So on what basis do you make this claim?
In case you're not familiar with the term, it refers to both the Republicans and the Democrats, viewing them as effectively one party with two factions (with the former merely trailing behind the latter, typically).
In this particular case, MAGA is showing that it's okay with hypocrisy, because, hey, didn't Democrats rationalize Clinton's misdeeds and throw his victims under the bus for the sake of the party?
So, yes, the uniparty is rotten.
Cannot count the number of times people forget how powerful algorithmic bubble making is. It isnt a “you are in a bubble so ur dumb” it is more of, “all of our information is algorithmically fed to us be aware!”
To add to this, I have a friend who has two kids. One is lefty trans and the other is becoming a christian conservative. They are Indian zoomers. Two totally different algorithms at work. One got the Charlie and the other got Hassan. Really makes one wonder what is in your own information feed.
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2005/2/18/full-transcript...
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/07/why-larry-summers-sh...
>Dirty' Industries: Just between you and me, shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging MORE migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [Least Developed Countries]? I can think of three reasons...
...I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that...
...I've always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted
My conclusion from information so far - this is a small subset of the files, and yet this seems like in a country where power should be divided to be balanced, a congealed network has been selecting and pulling the elites they want to the podium. The curation mechanism (may not be the only curation mechanism) has been people who are easy to manipulate by the network - too deep into perversions to ever come out of prison if they ever lost power. Thus more power and money becomes the only survival mechanism.
If you want a real constitutional democracy in the US, can you EVER have it if past presidents, or the networks underneath them, or party leaders who have no term limits, have control over who gets nominated to that power next? It’s not two parties. It’s one party that seems to be playing a show for the masses while taking Yin and Yang turns at the helm.
That his madam (Ghislane) was the daughter of the guy who got Israel nukes and had some deeeeep ties to the Mossad is no surprise. FWIW said guy also had ties to UK Intelligence and the KGB, and he died mysteriously on a boat in the middle of nowhere.
And now all their only remaining defense is "our masks don't even look like that."
"I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that."
Even his defense of it was not that an argument that it was tongue-in-cheek. His defense is that it was an attempt (apparently by illustrating problems with the apparent logic of the existing draft) to get his staff to clarify the economic logic in a draft report.
> The measurements of the costs of health impairing pollution depends on the foregone earnings from increased morbidity and mortality.
> ...
> I've always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City. Only the lamentable facts that so much pollution is generated by non-tradable industries (transport, electrical generation) and that the unit transport costs of solid waste are so high prevent world welfare enhancing trade in air pollution and waste.
It's obvious to me that this is an argumentum ad absurdum indictment of the way the "cost" of pollution is calculated. It has about as much subtlety as "why don't we eat the starving Irish kids?", although its form differs from A Modest Proposal.
If he didn't also hang out with a paedophile and argue that women are biologically bad at science, he'd be a funny guy.
“She must be very confused or maybe wants to cut me off but wants professional connection a lot and so holds to it,” Summers wrote in a March 2019 exchange to Epstein
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/11/17/summers-epstei...
Yes, it would in that context make sense as something akin to A Modest Proposal, but directed at the World Bank's liberalization policies.
The problem, of course, is that Summers was not an opponent of the World Bank's liberalization policies, he was the chief economist of the World Bank, and a supporter of those policies, and actively seeking stronger support for them, so it doesn't work that way coming from him.
No one was sexist ever, they were just joking and all feminists were stupid not understanding that, until their quite sexist messages got released by inside a pack of messages to known abuser. This is literally the case of Larry Summers.
And you want to play that game again, with literally the same person. Of course no one believes it, it is not being sophisticated, you are asking people to pretend they are stupid. Nothing in Summers career suggests he would sarcastic out of care for Africa or environment. That is not what his work was, at all.
I think it can be hard to accept that sociopaths are serious, if you aren’t one yourself. In the USA right now the federal government is committing incredible crimes and human rights violations, and people reporting them from direct observation and even video aren’t being believed, because it sounds too much like comic book supervillan stuff.
I would say this easily goes either direction, that someone capable of this level of introspection and empathy would be very good at accomplishing the various evil aims he seems to have been capable of. This is often what people are abbreviating when leveling accusations of psychopathy anyway.
Not sure how the second bit follows - one can be a serious psychopath, sociopath, cartoon villain etc and it wouldn't change that the tone of the memo I is pretty obviously farcical, despite what the contemporary media read it for.
You don’t need to. The target audience was people to whom that’s obvious in the first few lines and then who keep reading to see how far he can take it with a straight face.
If Kevin Spacey had written a private note to Woody Allen that said, "Now that we've been chased out of the film industry, let's become day care workers," then it would be a very different kind of "joke" than The Onion writing the same as a headline.
Just because he claimed to have been sarcastic about something, doesn't mean he is not also guilty of it.
And if it's a joke, what is the punchline?
DATE: December 12, 1991
TO: Distribution
FR: Lawrence H. Summers
Subject: GEP
'Dirty' Industries: Just between you and me, shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging MORE migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [Least Developed Countries]? I can think of three reasons:
1) The measurements of the costs of health impairing pollution depends on the foregone earnings from increased morbidity and mortality. From this point of view a given amount of health impairing pollution should be done in the country with the lowest cost, which will be the country with the lowest wages. I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.
2) The costs of pollution are likely to be non-linear as the initial increments of pollution probably have very low cost. I've always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City. Only the lamentable facts that so much pollution is generated by non-tradable industries (transport, electrical generation) and that the unit transport costs of solid waste are so high prevent world welfare enhancing trade in air pollution and waste.
3) The demand for a clean environment for aesthetic and health reasons is likely to have very high income elasticity. The concern over an agent that causes a one in a million change in the odds of prostrate[sic] cancer is obviously going to be much higher in a country where people survive to get prostrate[sic] cancer than in a country where under 5 mortality is 200 per thousand. Also, much of the concern over industrial atmosphere discharge is about visibility impairing particulates. These discharges may have very little direct health impact. Clearly trade in goods that embody aesthetic pollution concerns could be welfare enhancing. While production is mobile the consumption of pretty air is a non-tradable.
The problem with the arguments against all of these proposals for more pollution in LDCs (intrinsic rights to certain goods, moral reasons, social concerns, lack of adequate markets, etc.) could be turned around and used more or less effectively against every Bank proposal for liberalization.> what is the punchline?
It's akin to saying "This establishment's high Google/Yelp ratings indicate it's leaving money on the table. There's clearly room to raise prices, cut costs, and really degrade the customer experience."
I don't know if Summers is telling the truth about his intent. But as far as jokes go, it's decent.
> argumentum ad absurdum indictment of the way the "cost" of pollution is calculated.
The closest it gets to being a joke is that it is mockery and derision directed at underlings as a form of feedback on work product.
Yes. See also:
“A young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragout.”
Kind of what I mean. I hadn't heard of this guy before today, and this memo openly laments that it's challenging to bring Africa into the world pollution economy because moving solid waste there is a logistical challenge. If this memo was about how cool it is to traffic and rape children, as some people in this thread and a few others today seem to be interpreting it, I'd probably be less inclined to lend it the benefit of this tone, but I'm just not sold on the premise that someone who is demonstrably evil in some dimension is incapable of making honestly benign bureaucratic jokes in a presumably private context. It kind of knocks the legs out of genuine criticism if the dude can't chew bubblegum without taking flack.
I've always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City.I don't think it is. What's the old saying? There's a grain of truth in every joke.
Worse than that, actually: to get to 0 pollution by only deleting things, you'd also need to remove one of the main sources of pollution in third world countries: cooking with fire.
Invention has already given us renewable electricity, and using that to cook is much better than inhaling wood smoke.
Necessary, because using any other way to cook is polluting, and no matter what else you eliminate you can't eliminate cooking. (And good luck convincing everyone to not live where heating is needed).
Even wood fires for cooking is a way to get all the lung damage of heavy smoking for all the same reasons, just without the nicotine addiction.
Not sufficient, because while renewables can be made in non-polluting ways, those might not be the cheapest, and people vote with their wallets.
That, plus all the chemical processes that just pollute directly, like cement and steel currently do.
Yes, they are fully awar of what that means and they have lived without electricity, devices, and transport.
Embrace of bleeding edge tech isn't universal, hell even the embrace of the past 100 years of tech isn't for every human.
Both groups from my neck of the woods, both groups I've spoken to, both groups with significant time spent sans modern society. Both groups with members that turned back to isolation and non western lifestyle after a few years exposure.
Many more similar people have been exposed to society with electricty, phones, etc and happy to live as far apart from that as they can still manage - it's hard to escape such things - Starlink has polluted the skys once untouched in the Murchison.
And if you do still want to sympathize with such, maybe examine that motivation for like three seconds.
https://clickhole.com/heartbreaking-the-worst-person-you-kno...
> And if you do still want to sympathize with such, maybe examine that motivation for like three seconds.
This sounds like a theat - "hate the person we all hate too, or maybe you yourself are a threat to the group's values, and since we can't actually get to the guy we hate, we'll punish you in his stead for being a sympathizer"
If you're going to engage in satire, its best the satire be obvious.
I believe there are capitalist economist types who believe what Summers wrote unironically.
And Summers himself is one of them- he spent most of his career making things analogous to that essay actually happen
From context, GP's "I believe there are capitalist economist types who believe what Summers wrote unironically" obviously meant "I [perhaps ironically] believe there are capitalist economist types who unironically believe what Summers [perhaps ironically] wrote."
The next rhetorical question is: what does it even mean to believe something ironically? Sounds like the sort of grammatical blivetry that would have gotten 17th-century critics up in arms.
> Many times he [Shakespeare] fell into those things [which] could not escape laughter — as when he said in the person of Caesar [...] "Caesar did never wrong but with just cause."
It was 20 years ago but he has not changed his views, in one of his emails to Epstein (in 2017) he "observed that half the IQ in world was possessed by women without mentioning they are more than 51 percent of population..."
With the caveat that IQ tests scores are now provably something one can learn to be good at (because LLMs do much better on public tests than private ones), was the claim about variably actually justified at the time, or was it nonsense even back then?
(I don't know why I'd like to know, thinking about it at a meta level…)
Hey, turns out the dude trades "how to flirt with women in workplace whem they do presentation" advice with literal child abuse sex ring leader.
Surely he could not possibly be sexist, nah.
Based on an interview that I've seen of him a few years ago and these emails between him and Epstein he seems kind of... not smart?
It raises a really interesting question which is how do people like him climb so high up the ladder?
I listened to an interview with Summers in the run-up to the 2007-8 financial crisis, and what he was doing was obvious to any grade school student who has ever witnessed someone else sucking up to an authority figure.
I think about things like this...
Some people enjoy watching horror movies, and some people don't. Some people enjoy watching game of thrones, and others don't.
And I know a lot of smart people disengage from politics because it is a big mess.
In the same way, I think lots of people on and around the ladder disengage in the same way, and these people rise (and feel empowered).
I also remember reading how steve jobs would figure out if someone was a good employee. He would go to their coworkers and say "I hear xxx is shit". If people would defend xxx, then maybe he was ok, while if they didn't say much, maybe xxx was shit.
so... this might be the pattern.
From experience, every dumb as rocks leader eventually gets tired of hearing that they are doing the wrong thing and finds someone who agrees with them completely, ie, as dumb or dumber than they are.
Seems anecdotally true.
I think ladder climbing is its own skill only loosely correlated with intelligence.
"Funnily", if you read Epstein's contributions to a lot of his emails, he also gives off that same vibe.
The real world is not a meritocracy. Awful, greedy, immoral people protect and promote each other. They also have an insatiable appetite for power, status, and wealth. You're rewarded for playing the game, for lying, and especially for keeping terrible secrets.
It might look different if tax payers funded Law enforcement via different means, but it would never be allowed to happen, by,,,the elites.
"Public Prosecutor" wasn't a salaried job with the power to effectively pardon people by not filing charges. It was a contract job to prosecute a single case.
It's very depressing what grand juries have been turned into.
I see, because you think he's "not smart"… Yeah, I think "smart" and "makes smart choices" are two different things.
> Summers's ties to Epstein reportedly began "a number of years...before Summers became Harvard's president and even before he was the Secretary of the Treasury."[59] Flight records introduced as evidence in the 2021 trial of Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell show that Summers flew on Jeffrey Epstein's private plane on at least four occasions, including once in 1998 when Summers was United States Deputy Secretary of the Treasury and at least three times while Harvard president.
And on the wikipedia page of Summers' wife:
> In an email to Epstein released in 2025 by the House Oversight Committee, New mentioned a recorded but unreleased episode of Poetry in America featuring Woody Allen, who was introduced to New by Epstein. In an email to Epstein, New mentioned she would reread Lolita (a book Epstein was known to have by his bedside) and, separately, recommended he read My Ántonia by Willa Cather, describing both as stories of 'a man whose whole life is stamped forever by his impression of a young girl[20][21].
I recently listened to a podcast about Robert Maxwell[0], the father of Ghislaine Maxwell and in the second part of the podcast they went into great detail about Maxwell's publishing empire and how he apparently started the modern academic publishing industry as we know it.
It seems like Epstein learned from Maxwell's father the technique of finding academics who have desirable resources whether they be intellectual or social and then cultivating relationships with them by offering them what they always wanted but never felt they had be it academic recognition from peers in the form of positions at journals or conferences or dates/sex with young beautiful women and/or girls.
Attention from peers and women/girls is like a kryptonite to nerds like Larry Summers, his wife, or Marvin Minsky and Epstein was able to parlay that influence on these nerds to influence the wealthy and powerful.
But the question of how Summers got into the position that he found himself in still remains. You listen to the man speak and he isn't very smart. He continued a personal relationship with a convicted pedophile and sought dating advice from this person. The more you dig into this Summers guy and his wife the more you realize they're just... dumb.
As an outsider looking in I'm starting to wonder if this world is just a bunch of academically capable but socially stunted individuals being preyed on by socially voracious people like Epstein with no morals?
[0] https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/part-one-robert-maxwel...
The present-day tech world seems like a pretty extreme version of this phenomenon. Many of our sociopaths (e.g., Musk, Zuckerberg) got a boost from actual technical abilities along the way, which I suppose is similar to Epstein—he seems to have been pretty talented at finance.
(Edit: Musk and Zuckerberg are not socially talented in the usual sense, but have still been extremely successful at getting other people to do what they want.)
The only talents Epstein really had were in cozying up the right people at the right time with the "right" stuff (which we all know about now).
[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/stephen-hawking/113...
Summers is just weather vane for current economic thinking. He's not a particularly brilliant at anything.
It's a bullshit world we're living in, but I guess it's always been the same?
It seems for the wealthy, raping children is an acceptable pastime and we're just supposed to accept that it's ok?
One metric of change would be that statutory (underage) rape wasn't a crime anywhere 200 years ago. In some countries, it still isn't. Mass rape and kidnapping is going on right now from Nigeria to Sudan. Wealthy old men can still marry 12 year olds across much of the Middle East. The fact that sex with minors has become relegated to something like a luxury designer drug for the elite hypocrites in the US and UK, and the fact that they're now being exposed for it, is in many ways an unexpected victory for humanity. The previous 5k years of recorded history, and probably the whole million years before that, were wall to wall with war, slavery and raping children. As well as the elites having such rights as prima nocta and simply executing anyone they wished. So I think we are making progress.
What does your precious Harvard and US Treasury Department have to say about that?
> The three freedoms that most of our ancestors enjoyed, but which most modern humans lack are:
> The freedom to leave.
> The freedom to disobey an order.
> The freedom to create new ways of relating to one another.
https://drdevonprice.substack.com/p/the-three-fundamental-hu...
And example: we tend to inject too much of our modern viewpoint onto the old monarchies—that Henry VIII would not have thought himself ruler of the "state" of England although we talk about him in that regard from our modern perspective.
> It seems for the wealthy, raping children is an acceptable pastime and we're just supposed to accept that it's ok?
This category of malcontent (about out-of-touch elites engaging in all sorts of depraved perversions while the poor starved) at Versailles eventually caused most of the former to lose their heads during the French Revolution.
The smart ones know that they need to keep up appearances, the dumb ones behave like they will never face consequences.
Wonder how it would have turned out if the French revolution happened before the American Revolution? What could we have learned from them?
On a side note, did Epstein have employees on his sex island and what happened to them?
Those who seek those things -- money for money's sake, power for power's sake -- often tend to see their success as somehow making them "above" others. They derive perverse pleasure in seeing just how much they can flaunt society's rules. 'The rules don't apply to me' is like a drug in itself.
I grinded fairly well enough in my 20s, just as many other people I know who did. We're much better off than 99.99% of the world. That doesn't make us think of sexually abusing children and adolescents one bit because we need to "flush that shit out of our system" and "recapture our lost youth". I have better ways of recapturing my lost youth, by computer games, more time for hobbies and fucking closer to my age like rabbits.
PS:- being in the upper echelon does mean you have a somewhat easier access to the circles that engage in these vile activities, and yes you'll be completely excluded if you say no to them. Many are okay with that, while those who aren't are the ones in the files.
people who miss out on life experiences often try to overcompensate them or live vicariously, or never find out how to do it naturally. people who have much leisure time in college and 20s come to understand their demons, discover their true character... as opposed to silitron vale or wall st types
guy who never made football team bullies his kid into football
guy who never dated in his 20s makes tonnes of money by working 100 hours a week and in 30s fumbles into bad relationships created from status flexing with no depth, never experienced adolescent loves with womans his own age
woman who grew up poor gorges herself on mcdonalds binge once a month due to repressed trauma of always missing out on mcd as a child
you see this with extravagant childrens birthdays a lot too
> guy who never made football team bullies his kid into football
That is much less of a think you are making it to be. A guy who values football, was good at it is significantly more likely to force kids into football.
> guy who never dated in his 20s makes tonnes of money by working 100 hours a week and in 30s fumbles into bad relationships created from status flexing with no depth, never experienced adolescent loves with womans his own age
You made up that guy!
> woman who grew up poor gorges herself on mcdonalds binge once a month due to repressed trauma of always missing out on mcd as a child
Not a thing either.
> you see this with extravagant childrens birthdays a lot too
Those are status competition among adults.
The thing that perplexes me is that these people aren't in poverty or victims of some violent trauma. They are among the elites of the country -- and yet this is still how they behave -- are these people a niche group or am I?
Why not both?
A lot of middle class and wealthy people are victims of trauma. If you grow up in a house with violently racist and hateful authoritarian parents you will be deeply traumatized, and likely end up just like your parents. Wealth does not protect people from emotional trauma.
Ah yes, no one else has ever tried to ingratiate themselves into the world of the rich and famous. It's spies all the way down!
> i'll bet your entire net worth x 10. the anaconda is the worst kept secret of silicon valley...
I think the truth is probably that insecurity does not prevent success. Some argue that it might be the source of it. But probably the truth is there are secure billionaires and insecure billionaires and the latter are very obviously insecure because despite their success they do things like this.
For the most part, the threads are a mix of:
- Really cringe dating advice
- Epstein connecting Summers with other important people
- Dishing on Trump and his inner circle
Given there were many more prominently featured people with more dirt in here, I wonder if Summers is worried there's a lot more that's about to be revealed.
it's way beyond cringe
She is approximately 43 (college grad '04) and he is 70.
The text messages were 6 years ago.
> this week, thiel, summers,bill burns, gordon brown, jagland, ( council of europe and nobel chairman ). mongolia pres , hardeep puree ( india), boris ( gates). jabor ( qatar). sultan ( dubai, ), kosslyn ( harvard), leon black, woody. you are a welcome guest at any.....also if you >think there are interesting people in town, everyone here for climate summit, clinton ,security council, holy shit im on for next 30 minutes
https://searchepsteinfiles.com/file/text/HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028...
He also regularly provided research funding for universities.
he can "fix" you up with a teenager who will give you a private "massage"
The broker connects people, especially in the pre-Internet / young Internet days . The clients at ebsuy doing their main activity.
... while being videotaped. Those recordings provide him an immense amount of power and ability.
If so we are getting a window into a world we rarely see. For some of us this is confirming our priors, for others this will be profoundly shocking.
At this moment in time, this is the most serious crime to those in charge
It was not the "fair play in bar" kind of situation at all.
It doesn’t make it any less grotesque though. What I was really commenting on is the men in positions of power who think that that power is enough to get them laid. Nope. Turns out that women are attracted to... can you believe it? LOOKS!
But then you see them fumbling around like this doofus. He doesn't even know what the hell he’s doing. It’s sad.
He has no game.
Also a reminder, he was texting with Epstein up until the day before his arrest in 2019. Well past the point where Epstein was basically a meme for child abuse. Absolutely horrifying.
Supporting background:
> "Summers went on to describe what he saw as his “best shot”: that the woman finds him “invaluable and interesting” and concludes “she can’t have it without romance / sex.”
> "Throughout June, Summers fed Epstein updates about the woman’s workload and continued contact. Epstein urged him to play the “long game” and keep her in what he called a “forced holding pattern.”"
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/11/17/summers-epstei...
In those consultations, he used a racial slur to refer to the young woman.
There are other contrary positions you can take, it doesn't have to be that this was okay.
There's a reason it's considered morally and ethically heinous to demand sexual favors with people whom you have power over, and if you can't understand why it's so heinous, then you do not deserve to have power over anybody.
You have no issue with that?
It's quite disgusting, but also totally believable. Importantly, the soft explanations don't excuse the behavior.
Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell sit at the nexus of an international pedophile ring that threatens to bring down many billionaires and even some governments. There is a concerted effort to prevent the release of this information and we're far from done yet.
A lot of effort was made by the administration to prevent the discharge petition reaching 218 signatures. For anyone unfamiliar with how the House of Representatives works, the majority party chooses the Speaker and the Speaker decides what bills get a vote. But if a majority of the 435 representatives (so 218) want the House to have a vote, there's a procedure called a discharge petition. If it gets 218 signatures, the Speaker has to schedule a vote within a week or so (I forget the exact time line).
The Speaker Mike Johnson went so far as basically putting the House in recess for 8+ weeks to avoid this happening. He avoided wearing in an Arizona congresswoman for that same period because she was going to be the 218th signature. The government was literally suspended to avoid this outcome.
Then the Speaker changed tactics to try to pass the bill with a procedure called "unaminous consent". Basically, if no House member objects, the bill passes. Why would he do this? To avoid having votes on the record. This was good politics to force a role call.
The Speaker continues to play defense here because carve outs were added to the bill to exempt files for "national security" reasons and anything under active investigation. That's brazen obstruction and the least surprising thing is that the president announced an investigation this week. It's explicitly to prevent the release of some evidence. Make no mistake.
It's not unique to this administration either. the previous administration sat on all of this for 4 years doing absolutely nothing.
Where doe sthis lead? Foreign governments and intelligence agencies who were not only aware of what was going on but they (allegedly) actively benefit from and participated in this trafficking ring to get access to and/or blackmail powerful people. That's the "national security" interest.
As many of us are aware by now, Ghislaine Maxwell's father was the British media mogul Robert Maxwell who was a Mossad asset and got a state funeral in israel for his contributions to the state of Israel going back to suplying militia wth weapons in World War Two that were ultimately used for ethnic cleasning. And how did Maxwell die? He mysteriously fell off his own boat and drowned, his body being found the next day I believe over a hundred miles away somehow.
If this stuff gets out, many heads will roll in government, in business and in prestigious colleges. Look no further than one Alan Dershowitz. Harvard in particular has unclean hands and is elbow deep in all of this. And certainly whatever you do don't look into how Kimble Musk met one of his "girlfriends".
This is only the beginning.
i know we like expanding the categories of all sins and then only refering to things by category name without the specifics, but.
Maxwell had been stealing from his worker's pension fund and it was all starting to come out. It is plausible that he killed himself to avoid the consequences. He was a monster.
We are at a dangerous point in history. I personally believe that inequality is inevitably going to end in violence and we're beyuond the point of avoiding this with electoral politics. People are struggling to eat and survive at a time where we'll likely mint our first trillionaire in our lifetimes. This simply can't continue.
I'm personally for outing wealthy and powerful pedophiles who are meaningfully making all of our lives worse to accrue completely unnecessary extra wealth.
The people he robbed in that fraud were regular Joes who were cheated out of their pensions, not some kind of shadow-government-global-conspiracy types who have the means to remote-program your toaster to kill you.
Him killing himself is not the most surprising way out of that situation.
First, extremely wealthy people are by and large sociopaths. It's how they get rich. They will never view themselves as responsible or deserving or prosecution. Many are so rich they never consider getting prosecuted a realistic possibility. They will use various legal means to hide assets from being reclaimed by victims. Alan Bond, an Australian entrepreneur, also raided pension funds (which he ultimately went to jail for) but he mysteriously got divorced from his wife (who got a large property settlement) before it all went south and he stayed on good terms with her even after the divorce. Weird, huh?
Second, it's weird that nobody on his yacht noticed he was gone. For hours. That... just doesn't make sense if you know how luxury yachts work. The principal or the owner will dictate the entire schedule of the boat. If they get up at 6am, staff will get up at 5am to make sure their needs are being met. Beverages, breakfast, whatever. At all times the bridge will be manned (ie have someone on watch) who will be looking out for hazards but also at cameras on the boat. They are on alert for things like a fire breaking out or a VIP being up so they can alert other staff.
So could he have slipped through that net to throw himself overboard? Sure, it's possible. It's not icnredibly likely however. Also, is that how a rich and powerful man who was once an arms dealer commits suicide? Again, it's possible but it doesn't seem like the most likely method.
Lastly, if you're going to kill somebody but don't want it to be seen as a murder, this tops the list of how you'd do it. Why? Because, being in the water is going to wash away evidence and there are multiple ways of inducing a heart attack that are essentially undetectable (eg potassium overdose). And the delay in the body being found will likely get rid of any potential evidence there too.
The whole thing just stinks to high heaven.
I also don't believe Epstein was murdered. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and there's no such evidence of the murder claims. More to the point, the onus is on people making such claims to provide the evidence, not everyone else to disprove it.
But Robert Maxwell's history is well-documented and verifiable. And there's so much evidence that Epstein was mysteriously well-connected. The jobs he got. A match teacher at a prestigious school without a college degree. Power of attorney over Leslie Wexner's assets. The access he had to the wealthy, world leaders and academics. The fact that nobody really knows how he made his money. He's been dubbed a financier but this just isn't documented. There are thousands of bank accounts that haven't been scrutinized for where money was going and why.
And of course Ghislaine Maxwell was convicted of trafficking people to... absolutely no one. Nobody has been named let alone charged. Her conditions on jail aren't appropriate for someone with her charges. She has a bunch of privileges in a Club Fed prison she shouldn't be in. The president fired the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York so only his former personal lawyers met with Maxwell for a proffer session.
And of course the connections to intelligence agencies and certain governments is both entirely believable and it fits a ton of evidence. There are credible claims why this is why he got the most lenient sweetheart plea agreement in 2006 despite Palm Beach police having the testimony of dozens of underage victims.
And perhaps the end. If its as serious as you claim it is nothing will come out of it.
But now that I think about it, the email leaks show that he was sexually harassing women while he was at Harvard too. So he was terrible at all three jobs.
FriendFeed shutdown same day Facebook was incorporated - these things are important for continuity
Here's another POV: why did Micro$oft $ide again$t the PhD$? Hmm, I gue$$ it make$ $en$e why they cho$e $ummer$.
Two of the committee resigned in protest, Kissinger almost turned it down because it was also being awarded to Lê Đức Thọ, Lê Đức Thọ actually turned it down because the peace it was supposed to be about hadn't happened yet, Kissinger accepted in absentia as he did not want to be targeted by anti-war protestors when getting the peace prize, then he later tried to return it only for the committee to say no.
It's one of the few Trump grievant that is legitimate.
Hardly. What does it have to do with Trump? The only reason it's a "grievance" is that Trump feels he should get the prize. While he supports a genocidal nation and tries to start wars.
Then they give the prize to guys who don't deserve it like Obama and overlook Trump, who even his biggest haters cannot claim hasn't done a lot of war ending over 2 terms.
But fundamentally I don’t think we should make moral judgements over things like chemistry. A chemical process to create ammonia is a tool, and tools can always be used for good or evil. Even explosives are just tools that can be used for good or evil. Sometimes those explosives are even the same substance that is used for fertilizer. The morality of the use of the tool is provided by the user of the tool, not the creator of the tool.
We can celebrate the people who make the tools while saving our condemnation for the people who use tools for evil.
I agree about the Peace prize though, that one’s generally worthless.
If you give a school enough evidence. Like, say, this email. Your career there is done.
And that's any school.
Good riddance.
Don’t forget Epstein’s circle of rapists and rapist-enablers still had friendly communication with him long after he was convicted and known pedophile.
I have doubts about officials’ ability to get real justice. I’ll still me shouting for blood in the streets, though.
I don’t even know how to answer that question.
> The things I’m listing are occupying virtually none of the national focus right now, for example.
Have you forgotten why the government was shut down last month?
What an embarrassing comment. I hope you don't mind me linking this back to you once the files are released in full.
My gut feeling is also that its been largely overblown, and releasing the files might actually take some of the wind out of the conspiracy theories built on the lack of this data.
can you give examples?
A lot of the posts listed there are: * obvious joke/sarcasm/tongue-in-cheek etc * taken out of context, or editorialised to similar effect (e.g. missing nuance that often exists in the same thread) * based on the disbelief or disapproval of equally unqualified reddit-bros * flagged/dead or heavily downvoted, the opposite of being 'encouraged'
In other words, a lot of low effort 'gotcha' point scoring against alleged 'tech-bros' which may or ma not mean everyone in HN is a SV start-up pitcher, or that no one really know what a tech-bro is.
If you think this is possibly true, I think we are far apart the discussion wouldn't go anywhere. Not a judgement, just trying to be better about my online engagement style.
My perception is a 'tech-bro' is someone in a tech hub (i.e. SV) with access to large amounts of capital (e.g. VC funding), likely involved in start-ups, or with some sway in tech companies (the prototype is often Elon Musk, et al); and their tendency to treat technology as a cure-all, especially in naïve or overoptimistic way, overestimating their own grasp of technology, or applications of technology, to various pursuits. There might also be a machoistic 'frat' element to it as well. A large group within HN perhaps, but probably not a majority of HN-ers.
This definition is not a million miles away from the sentiment of 'I could build that in a weekend' from the dev-side, or 'I just had a great idea (a clone of something well know etc) - you implement it, I'll be compensated equally as the "ideas guy"' from the biz-end.
In contrast, I think some (per r/SHNS) believe a 'tech-bro' is any man with a background in tech (usually software, maybe hardware), and hence most (the majority of) of the male population (still significant majority..) of HN.
By this definition, we aren't a million miles away from the gendered insult/accusation of 'mansplaining', which is basically arrogance, but when a man does it (or specifically, in respect to a woman), with the implication of them misogynistically underestimating women; Not clear if there is an implication that they otherwise treat other men differently - most anecdotes cover the former case without establishing a baseline of behaviour/arrogance.
What I'm saying is, as the term is weaponised, there is a scope-creep in direction of greatest utility / weaponised potential - It's inconvenient to establish someone is actually involved in the tech industry, SV-culture or tech-start-up-mentality, such as to critique those things in any relevant or substantial way, so instead any rando is a 'tech-bro' purely because they post on HN, i.e. HN-er == tech-bro, and it just become bashing men in tech; From my perspective 'man involved in technology', generalised across all tech-scene and cultures, isn't a meaningful or relevant distinction or discussion.
Thank you for sea lioning techbros though this was beautiful.
Also, it appears that tclancy is also male, so I don't think it qualifies on that count either.
As for the accusation of sea-lioning, assuming this definition:
"..a form of online harassment where someone persistently and politely pesters
a person with a relentless stream of questions and requests for evidence, all
while feigning sincerity and ignorance"
No, the purpose of sarcasm (and what distinguishes it from mere irony is having this purpose) is to mock or inflict emotional pain.
It may involve humor (irony, which sarcasm is a specific use of, is often, but not always, humorous), but that is not the purpose of sarcasm.
I just hope that the fallout doesn't begin and end with Prince Andrew and Larry Summers.
But I believe there are some subject matters including sexual assault and more specifically pedophilia that are pretty much never in good taste or useful to parody. Apparently this position is somewhat outspoken here.
Swift's Modest Proposal mentions eating babies which is very obviously an extreme behavior that is not tolerated by anyone anywhere, which is a distinct contrast to sexual assault which has victims in the millions if not billions.
Also just to note that the comment I replied to is now dead and flagged, so I guess I'm not the only one with these opinions.
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45983044 and marked it off topic.
Now, just for certain ex-Brit colonies to follow their example! Quick... who can think of a popular leader who is, ehhhm, quite intricately linked to the same, ehh, gentleman with pretty specific tastes?
Anyone?
We in western democracies used to regard with disdain those corrupt, ridiculous leadership figures in so-called banana republics and third-world dictatorships, with their openly corrupt dealings and amoral excesses.
Now that the moral posturing of the west is unraveling, the question is really what comes next. Fukuyama talked about western liberal democracy being the "end of history", but it is more and more evident that this is a system ripe for disruption.
Not that I wholly disagree, but in the interests of robust conversation, I feel compelled to ask:
When?
Like this most recent headline from AppleInsider:
"Cook controversially dines with Saudi Crown Prince at White House"
Now, I'm no Saudi Crown Prince stan, but would the word 'controversially' have been used if Cook dined with Biden - who funded and supported a genocide, in which hundreds of journalists were killed? Why was the word 'controversially' not used to refer to also being at the table with Trump there?
Yes, it's controversial that Cook had dinner with the Saudi Crown Prince. In my view it's even more controversial to be having dinner with Trump.
This is just the most recent headline I can give as an example. But there are many like this.
There's nothing that quite makes me feel like humanity has undergone speciation than the fact that this STILL HAS TO BE FUCKING SPELLED OUT FOR PEOPLE.
Hero worship is sycophancy of the highest order. Ugh, and I know you're so right.
That's Barack Obama. Among other things, he's not 80 and still has the vigor of youth. Clinton is just old at this point.
I think the real question is why didn't the Biden administration release the files. How many very powerful people left and right are in there?
If I had to guess it's because there's nothing incriminating about Trump in them. Otherwise we all know they would have been leaked a long time ago.
This will also be Trump's (false) reason for not releasing them.
I suspect it's been the false reason the whole time.
No one is investigating anything, only wiping hard drives and tying up loose ends
Huh? Bill Clinton has been a relatively invisible ex-president compared to the other modern ones (aka Carter & Obama, Biden hasn't been gone long enough for data).
Perhaps that's because he didn't want to overshadow Hillary, but it's at least partly because of the Lewinsky affair.
That's NYT-speak for "they joked crudely and overtly about pressuring the woman into unwilling sex". You can dump the New York Times and read competent writing here:
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/11/17/summers-epstei...
> "Summers went on to describe what he saw as his “best shot”: that the woman finds him “invaluable and interesting” and concludes “she can’t have it without romance / sex.”"
I think it remarkable how the NYT buries (far down on the page), and CNBC omits altogether, the underlying story about what Larry Summers was actually doing. CNBC euphemizes the whole thing away to vapor (there were mails—the end). These aren't good expositions.
(Speaking of the NYT' coverage, there's a new revelation one of their reporters actually helped Epstein evade scrutiny—it's another bit from the recently-disclosed email tranches. Their reporter Landon Thomas secretly tipped off Epstein that one of his NYT coworkers was "digging around" into Epstein—even gave Epstein the guy's name).
https://bsky.app/profile/chrisgeidner.bsky.social/post/3m5hn... ("Fall 2017: Then-NYT reporter literally warning Epstein that someone is "digging around again.")
What undergraduate? According to the link you provide, she graduated in 2004 and was the subject of discussion between Epstein and Summers in 2018.
I always thought that powerful guys got laid without really having to force anyone to sleep with them. You know, the stereotypical "be confident, look prosperous and healthy" and women will be attracted to you. The weird thing is, I think that actually does work! Even if you're not famous, having a few of those qualities has seemed to work for most guys I know.
So why are there so many famous guys who end up getting caught forcing themselves on multiple people? If you look at how few cases end up going to trial, there must be even more guys who are getting away with it. Not only that, the extent of the numbers. A guy like Weinstein must have been a full-time sex criminal. Constant, multiple times a day, like a busy salesman who meets clients three times a day. I don't want to make a joke of something so serious, but don't you get enough? Isn't it tiring and tedious?
The other side of this is the club. How can it be that they all seem to know each other? Most people tend to keep their sex lives private. If you're committing a crime, AND you're a public person, why would you find other people to do that with? It that part of the power trip?
The thing that surprised me most growing up was learning how inevitable sexual assault is for basically all women. I've never been close to any woman who couldn't tell me multiple stories of being harassed, assaulted or coerced.