Welcome to Scheer Intelligence, hosted by the legendary journalist Robert Scheer.

In this episode, Scheer sits down with media scholar Nolan Higdon to dissect the explosive revelations emerging from the Epstein Files — newly exposed documents released under the Epstein Files Transparency Act.

At nearly 90 years old, Scheer says he has never seen anything like this.

This isn’t gossip. It isn’t tabloid scandal. It’s a rare, unfiltered look into how power actually operates in America.

From Silicon Valley giants like Peter Thiel and firms such as Palantir Technologies, to Wall Street titans and political elites spanning both parties — from Bill Clinton to Donald Trump — the files reveal a bipartisan ruling class operating beyond traditional accountability.

This week’s revelations focus on Epstein’s Zorro Ranch in New Mexico, alleged connections to gene-editing ambitions, intelligence networks, and a global web of influence reaching from Washington to Tel Aviv.

Scheer calls it “techno-fascism” — a fusion of concentrated wealth, surveillance technology, elite universities, and intelligence agencies — where power believes itself immune from moral restraint.

How did Silicon Valley become intertwined with the national security state?

What role did academia play?

Why does religion get invoked in public — but ignored in practice?

And why are so many lawmakers still silent?

Higdon, who has been combing through the primary documents, breaks down what’s real, what’s speculative, and what the public still hasn’t been allowed to see.

This is Episode Three of their ongoing weekly deep dive.

The question is no longer whether Epstein was powerful.

The question is: what system made him possible — and who’s still protecting it?

In this second installment of our weekly deep dive into the Epstein files, Robert Scheer and media scholar Nolan Higdon unpack a wave of newly unredacted documents that expose the scale—and the culture—of Epstein’s elite network. In the last 24 hours alone, Congress forced the release of additional co‑conspirator names, revealing ties that stretch from Wall Street to Harvard, Silicon Valley, global finance, and even the intellectual world of Noam Chomsky.

Higdon walks through the emerging picture: a ruling class that treated Epstein not as a pariah but as a peer, confidant, fixer, and ideological fellow traveler. The files show billionaires, academics, and political figures trading favors, seeking image management, and in some cases engaging in coded exchanges about trafficked girls—all while U.S. institutions look the other way.

Scheer and Higdon connect these revelations to the broader crisis of American democracy at its 250‑year mark: a Second Gilded Age defined by impunity, eugenics‑tinged technocracy, collapsing accountability, and a political‑economic system engineered by figures like Lawrence Summers to shield the powerful from scrutiny. This conversation asks the question the mainstream press won’t touch: Is the Epstein network a window into the true culture of American power?

In this conversation, Robert Scheer and Nolan Higdon dig into the contradictions at the heart of America’s elite class — the philanthropists, technocrats, and political leaders who publicly preach democracy, equality, and women’s rights while privately orbiting Jeffrey Epstein long after his crimes were known. Higdon walks through the documents, the lies, the intelligence connections, and the cultural implications of a scandal that refuses to fade. What emerges is a portrait of a society where wealth shields wrongdoing, institutions collapse under their own corruption, and the public is left to pick up the pieces.