Joanna Coles welcomes back journalist Anand Giridharadas as they dissect Donald Trump’s incendiary rhetoric on Iran and what it reveals about power, language, and intent, before diving into what Giridharadas calls the most overlooked thread in the Jeffrey Epstein files: a disturbing email exchange that lays bare how elite institutions like Harvard and MIT enabled a system of influence built on money, access, and intellectual flattery, exposing a hidden network of “kept scholars,” transactional relationships, and quiet moral compromise where Epstein’s behavior was widely understood, carefully rationalized, and ultimately absorbed into the machinery of power.

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