Jeffrey Epstein’s list reveals more than just people who relied on him for sexual interludes, though I think it’s perfectly fair to conjecture about documented regular passengers on Air Epstein along those lines.
But if you look at some of the people on the latest list and add it to revelations from last May and before, it becomes clear that Epstein was pimping more than sex. He was managing money. He was arranging access between one kind of famous person (Noam Chomsky) and another kind of famous person (Ehud Barak). What he was offering in all cases was exclusivity and privacy, allowing people who were on a certain tier of power—or who wanted to be seen as such—to interact without fear of having their time wasted, without danger of accidentally ending up in a room with a nobody. And especially not a nobody who doesn’t know who the billionaires in the room are, or talks to them like they’re just another guy.
Epstein was collecting name-brand scientists and professors as much as he was procuring young women. He was funneling money and attention to a handful of institutes and projects in elite higher education where he could hear about the next new thing from people who were great at elevator pitches and polished slide decks.
And Epstein was toying with Bard College President Leon Botstein, who has been just comically awful in his reactions to having his attempts to wheedle money from Epstein revealed. Botstein: “We looked him up, and he was a convicted felon for a sex crime, but we believe in rehabilitation.” Also Botstein: “Among the very rich is a higher percentage of unpleasant and not very attractive people,” a statement that must have made Bard’s senior director of development facepalm pretty hard—but which also suggests the magnitude of unequal standards applied to university and college presidents when you compare what’s happened in the last month to other leaders with Botstein’s unshakeable longevity at Bard, which rivals that of any one-party autocratic ruler in modern world history, and not just in the length of his tenure there.
But there’s something to what Botstein says (his I-make-the-rules approach to academic leadership has allowed him from time to time to make valid observations in public that none of his peers would indulge in). The truth of his take on the extremely rich has been very visible in the past month’s doings, most especially in the hostility of certain wealthy alumni of Penn and Harvard towards their now-resigned presidents. That hostility is just a more intense and concentrated version of a generalized rage among the super-rich towards the academic elite that is increasingly breaking the traditionally amiable, old-school-chum, hazily pleasant and usually hands-off affection that has generally pertained between the successful and wealthy alums of elite institutions and the current leadership and faculty of those institutions.
Why would people who have more or less won the game of life give a fuck what is happening on campuses? Occasionally it’s because they’ve got a big money bet down on ed-tech and they want to collect, but even then it’s not generally because they need that money to come in. There’s something else at stake in winning that bet.
The generalized answer is embodied through Bill Ackman’s history of engagement with Harvard University. The issue shaping that engagement was not principled concern for anti-semitism or campus activism or plagiarism. It was born out of the rage of an exclusive class at not being in charge of everything and everyone, of having to rely on anything but themselves.
Ackman and his peers hate that academia is still the only reliable source of cultural capital, that they can’t simply buy prestige and respect for their children and associates but instead have to enroll them. They know that just hiring private tutors and keeping them inside the manorial walls of extreme wealth will make their children and grandchildren into inbred Hapsburgs, unable to function outside those walls.
They hate that they don’t outright own academic institutions. They’ve smashed their way into hospitals, into government, into think-tanks, into auditing firms, into everything else where money concentrates and power resides. They’ve laid waste to businesses, to health care, to non-profits, squeezing out all the juice and throwing away the rind. But not academia, not quite yet. They have influence over academic institutions, to be sure, and all the more so where the institutions are as wealthy as Harvard and Penn. That’s not because Harvard and Penn need the money, but because the more exclusive institutions are attracted to the scent of power like a zoo bear is to peanut butter hidden in their enclosure.
That makes someone like Claudine Gay the petitioner to the powerful, rather than the other way round. But increasingly what the exclusive class want is to just have the petitioners mutely listen and obey, and have the only criteria for access be “I am powerful and I am wealthy”, not “I have valuable insight and am building a healthy reciprocal relationship with you”. University administrators—and even more, truculent ordinary faculty with their prattle about governance—are the kind of nobodies that someone pimping exclusivity is supposed to protect you from. It used to be ok to walk into a cocktail reception or a meeting and have institutional functionaries and mere professors take up your time. Now it’s not. They just want to end the pretense that there’s anything at all that can’t be owned and commanded directly.
The billionaire class wants a final end to anything remotely public: no tracking of their jet flights, no disclosure of their legal doings, no scrutiny of their finances. They don’t want to answer to anyone or depend on anything that they can’t hire, fire and discard at will.
I think it’s why so many of them flirt with the possibilities of a Trump Administration. They don’t believe they’re vulnerable to economic or geopolitical catastrophe, or even really to some form of political transformation. They do think, maybe, that he’ll bring democracy and public life to a formal or informal halt, and that they’ll be done with non-player characters once and for all. The last piggybanks will be hammered open, and the graves will receive the corpses of an open society and a public sphere. You won’t need pimps like Epstein any more. No more chance of showing up in a room and having some nobody waste your time. No chance of some administrator not taking your calls, some faculty calling you out, some official telling you that they can’t do that, no reporter publishing information about you. No rules for the king.
this is a masterful weaving together of issues Tim. really great - thanks
Wow, and so, Tim, when will you get to the bad news?🤔😉