Scheer Intelligence

Joel Whitney joins Robert Scheer to talk about the lives of poets George and Mary Oppen, two admirable Americans persecuted for their leftist ideals.  

Director Sam Pollard did a deep dive into the FBI’s surveillance of MLK under the leadership of J. Edgar Hoover in his documentary “MLK / FBI,” released by IFC Films earlier this month. Listen to the full conversation between Pollard and Scheer as they discuss the implications of that question, as well as address the highly controversial summaries of the FBI’s MLK surveillance tapes discovered by King’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, David J. Garrow in 2019. 

In the second part of the “Scheer Intelligence” interview with Jonathan Alter, the author of “His Very Best” examines the former president’s mixed foreign policy record.

Raised in privilege amidst the barbarism of segregation, the oft-maligned president eventually embraced the New South liberalism that just swept his native Georgia’s election.

Clay Tweel’s HBO Max documentary on the New Age “cult of cults” that claimed dozens of lives raises powerful questions about the checkered histories of various religions. 

Matt Tyrnauer, director of the devastating Showtime documentary blockbuster “The Reagans,” reveals how Donald Trump was the logical heir to the Reagan Revolution beginning with his plagiarism of the Gipper’s “Make America Great Again” slogan and ending with the abysmal failure to confront a medical pandemic.

Historian Jon Wiener, who wrote “Conspiracy in the Streets” on the subject of the Netflix film, sets the record straight on this week’s “Scheer Intelligence.”

In the second part of a two-part interview, Thomas Frank explores how anti-populism made liberals comfortable with plutocracy. 

Robert Scheer sits down with professor and author Benjamin Madley to talk about a little known part of California's history.

Thomas Frank examines the history of American populism, and how it was distorted by Democrats and co-opted by Republicans. 

Dennis Kucinich, former Ohio congressman and mayor of Cleveland, weighs in on what the Democratic Party keeps getting wrong.

Publicly-funded media models make a lot of Americans nervous, but Victor Pickard argues it may be the only way to repair our tattered democracy.

Political anthropologist David Vine argues that the most visible evidence of the country’s global empire are the thousands of military installations it has around the world. 

Attorney Ronald Goldfarb offers a scathing indictment of American law and lawyers in his new book, The Price of Justice. 

The epic battle by Steve Donziger to get Chevron to pay a $9.5 billion judgment he won in 2011 for its “mass industrial poisoning” of Indigenous Amazonian tribes in Ecuador has left him under house arrest for 13 months, disbarred, with a lien on his home, frozen bank  accounts, $32 million in legal fees and no way to make a living.  The judgment has not yet been paid.

James Steyer is taking on Mark Zuckerberg and other tech barons and he wants to empower the rest of us to do the same.

Rabbi Michael Lerner, a lifelong progressive, talks about his new book and what he found lacking in the Democratic Socialist’s presidential campaign. 

The movements of the sixties, which are captured in detail in Mike Davis and Jon Wiener’s new book Set the Night on Fire, are seen as wildly successful. Is it possible Black Lives Matter will be even more significant?

Journalist David Dayen examines how the greatest danger to our American society doesn’t come from the White House, but from a few obscenely powerful corporations. 

“The Great Influenza” author John Barry gave us a warning 16 years ago that is extremely relevant to today’s Covid-19 pandemic: It is always fatal to allow politics to trump science.