The Jeffrey Epstein Story is Beginning to Smell Like Russiagate

Once again, inference zooms past fact in a mania with Trump as a target

From CNBC:

Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers said Monday that he was stepping back from all public commitments amid fallout from the release of emails between him and the notorious sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

“I am deeply ashamed of my actions and recognize the pain they have caused. I take full responsibility for my misguided decision to continue communicating with Mr. Epstein,” Summers said in a statement obtained by CNBC.

“While continuing to fulfill my teaching obligations, I will be stepping back from public commitments as one part of my broader effort,” said Summers, a former president of Harvard University…

Larry Summers is a rare perfect 10 on the celebrity-repugnance scale. He’s everything most normal people can’t stand about the current crop of “elites”: an arrogant Davos fixture whose toad face always looks pleased with his legacy of disastrous policy decisions, and who personifies his class’s habit of lavishing exalted academic titles on intellectual mediocrity.

Now he’s pioneered a new ritual, auto-cancelation. “I will be stepping back from public commitments” is cancel-culture seppuku, a way to give the mob a win before it gets going. That’s always a questionable tactic, but especially with the Jeffrey Epstein story, which is fast acquiring a familiar shape: a factually diffuse moral mania used as a disciplinary weapon by a media sector hungry for pelts.

The exchanges between Summers and Epstein are head-poundingly banal, like 99.9% of the documents in the just-released “trove” of Epstein-related documents. Summers is guilty of knowing Epstein and having pseudo-intellectual discussions with him about a mistress nicknamed “peril,” who Summers feared might stray. Epstein compared the possibility to finding life on other planets, and tried to cheer Summers up by flattering the ex-Treasury Secretary’s fascination with Bayesian statistics:

Odds are limited to binary outcomes… since you are immobile. Do some homework… I concede your point on pessimism but would under bayesian rules. Feel comfortable. As humans are biased toward bad outcome avoidance… She is never ever going to find another Larry summers. Probability ZERO

It went on. “Send peril flowers,” Epstein advised. The two men briefly discussed whether Ehud Barak would be Prime Minister (this was July, 2019). Then Summers wrote, “At cape w mother brothers kids and nephews nieces. Bit of an Ibsen play.” Then it was “better than [sic] checov.” When the two pals from there plunged into a Google-aided discussion of Lady With Lapdog, I shut the computer off.

Congress voted yesterday to compel the Department of Justice to release in “searchable and downloadable format” all files related to Epstein within thirty days. The House vote was 427-1. Though Ro Khanna, Thomas Massie, and Mike Johnson all voiced concerns, only Louisiana Republican Clay Higgins actually voted no, saying that “this type of broad reveal of criminal investigative files, released to a rabid media, will absolutely result in innocent people being hurt.”

Predictably now Higgins is being teed up as a cancellation target, as social media fills with Meet the Lone Dickhead Who Voted Against Releasing the Epstein Files-type stories, each of which lists every maybe-naughty thing Higgins has ever done. This format, seen a lot in Russiagate with dissenters like Devin Nunes and Tulsi Gabbard, usually comes as prelude to a flood of Stubborn Ownthinker Faces Calls To Step Aside pieces, another fun part of the cancelation ritual.

For the record I’m very much in favor of releasing any Epstein files. The country deserves to know whatever there is to know about this mess, and if it exposes systemic wrongdoings, those need fixing. However, it’s extremely suspicious that a story that was deader than Epstein himself for years is suddenly the Most Important Thing now that Trump is back in the White House, especially since a lot of the techniques used to drive a media panic in the first Trump term are back. The fact that some of Trump’s top officials stoked public outrage about this subject en route to higher office does change the karmic equation this time, however.

Between Epstein’s beyond-suspicious death, multiple prosecutions for sex crimes, inexplicable $600 million fortune, and breathtaking Rolodex of powerful friends, there’s a lot to be curious about. But the public’s fascination with Epstein is based on the notion that he was not only operating an organized blackmail ring, but doing so on behalf of intelligence agencies, probably Israeli. That story simply isn’t there yet, and a lot of people who should know better, myself included, have assumed it is. It could be true, which is why releasing documents is a good idea. As of now, though, it’s closer to Russiagate, in which confirmable facts are overshadowed by a mountain range of inference: