Tag: presidency

Imagine, for a moment, that you first heard the name Larry Summers last week, when he showed up on what I’ve called Planet Epstein. That planet is an information ecosystem where all major global events are connected to the sex-trafficking conspiracy that supposedly rules the world. This is a metaphorical place, but not an imaginary one—you can find it on YouTube and in certain corners of TikTok and other social-media platforms. As a moderately informed citizen of Planet Epstein, you have recently learned that Summers set much of the economic policy for three Presidents, including Bill Clinton, whom you already suspected had his own list of mentions in the Epstein files, which you are impatiently, if not optimistically, waiting for the government to fully disclose. You have also learned that Summers, who corresponded with Epstein as late as July, 2019, was previously the president of Harvard University and used his considerable influence not only to bring in money for pet projects—including a poetry initiative spearheaded by his wife—but to help shape the direction of higher education in this country more generally. You learned that this lifelong liberal appeared to be seeking a romantic relationship with a mentee and was asking Jeffrey Epstein for advice about it. You learned that the woman he seemed to be chasing is the daughter of China’s former vice-minister of finance. You even heard that Summers and Epstein had a code name for this Asian woman, Peril—possibly in reference to “Yellow Peril.” (After the exchange between Summers and Epstein was made public, Summers released a statement saying that he was “deeply ashamed” of his relationship with Epstein.) And what have you learned about Summers’s more recent activities? Well, until last week, he was on the board of OpenAI, the company that you believe will shape the entire future of America. And, above all, you learned that the most powerful men in this country are more pathetic, predatory, and corrupt than you or any of your friends.

What conclusions do you draw from your quick introduction to Summers, which, presumably, you stitched together from YouTube Shorts, Wikipedia, and ChatGPT? More to the point, if you believe yourself to be a rational person who draws inferences based on the evidence in front of you, what should you believe?

In the past few months, I have been trying to gauge how much of the American public is now convinced that a cabal of pedophiles runs the world. Polls have shown that a significant majority of the country believes that the government has been hiding information about Epstein’s clients and about his death. But there is a difference between suspecting a coverup and going full Pizzagate-conspiracy mode, drawing connections among Summers, Epstein, Trump, Bill Clinton, Mossad, and the sudden rise of the A.I. industry, which now seems to be propping up a large part of the world economy—and then concluding that some shadowy group of oligarchs rules us all.

There are some indicators, however, that Planet Epstein has begun to eclipse our previous home. Congress, for example, voted 427–1 to mandate that the Department of Justice publish “all unclassified records, documents, communications, and investigative materials” linked to its investigation and prosecution of Epstein. That result owed a good deal to Marjorie Taylor Greene, who used to garner national attention primarily as the butt of jokes, but who, prior to her surprise announcement on Friday that she will resign from office in January, had become one of the most visible—and, yes, increasingly respected—politicians in the country. And the fall of powerful figures such as Summers, who escaped scrutiny in the earlier flareups of the Epstein story, suggests that there is a capitulation taking place. Anecdotally, I do not know a single person in my life who truly thinks that this is the end of the story or that every guilty party has been revealed. More crucially, Trump, who can usually count on a third of the country to accept whatever version of the truth he offers, found almost zero audience for his claim of an “Epstein Hoax”—the narrative that continued attention to Epstein is a Democratic plot to embroil his great Administration in scandal and distract from the “greatness” that Republicans are accomplishing. At the very least, elected officials—including those, such as Greene, who have spent the past decade serving as faithful Trump acolytes—have begun to fear the public’s wrath on this issue.

I believe we are in the middle of a quietly revolutionary moment in this country, which began with the pandemic and the protests stemming from the murder of George Floyd by a police officer. (I suppose that this column is, more than anything, an attempt to chronicle that revolution.) The precipitating factors can be traced back as far as you like, but the shift became evident during the lockdowns, with the sight of millions of people taking to the streets and the displays of supposed capitulation from members of Congress kneeling at the Capitol and major corporations meekly putting out “social-justice” messages on social media—which, of course, occurred alongside red-state fights about quarantines and, later, vaccine mandates. That moment did not lead to a change in the world order, but it decimated whatever authority “the establishment” had left in this country. The subsequent unrest has taken on a variety of forms, including a continued and drastic decline in trust of the traditional news media and attacks on universities from both the left and the right. It was also channelled into Trump’s 2024 campaign, which was less about any one issue than it was about a renewed and utterly hollow promise to drain the swamp all over again.

What that insurrectionary energy sought was a single theory of the world, ideally one that did not rely on partisan leanings—or, really, on politics at all. Epstein has provided that. Lest we forget, Epstein died more than six years ago now, and although the story certainly had not been forgotten by the public, it had at least been moved to a low-heat back burner when Greene; Thomas Massie, a U.S. representative from Kentucky; and a handful of other politicians began to talk about the Epstein files again. The ham-fisted response from the Trump Administration certainly didn’t quiet things. The fact that an increasing number of Americans, spurred on by the war in Gaza and by new-media commentators across the political spectrum, were starting to question the influence that Israel had on Washington, D.C., has also played a role.