Scheer Intelligence

A tenured professor can spend decades building a career, win awards, earn lifetime recognition, and still be discarded the moment political speech crosses an invisible line. That is what happened to Dr. Sang-hae Kil after she supported Palestinian protest on campus. Her teaching record was untouched, her scholarship praised, and a faculty panel ruled unanimously against punishment — yet San José State University fired her anyway. The message is unmistakable: on many campuses, academic freedom survives only until it collides with Palestine.

The newly released Epstein files don’t just implicate a handful of powerful men—they expose an entire architecture of American power built on impunity, secrecy, and the quiet expectation that the rules apply only to everyone else. As Robert Scheer and Nolan Higdon dig into this week’s revelations, the picture that emerges is not simply one of individual crimes but of a political and financial aristocracy that treats the law as a suggestion, democracy as theater, and vulnerable people as expendable. From Harvard boardrooms to Clinton‑era fundraisers to Trump’s Justice Department slow‑walking disclosures, the documents reveal a culture where fixing, hiding, and protecting the powerful is the real bipartisan consensus. What’s breaking open now is not just a scandal—it’s a portrait of a system that was never meant to be fair in the first place.

Former congressman and longtime peace advocate Dennis Kucinich joins Robert Scheer for a stark assessment of what he calls the most perilous moment in modern U.S. foreign policy. With Washington openly coordinating military action with Israel and escalating toward direct confrontation with Iran, Kucinich argues the United States has reached the terminus of its imperial project — a point where decades of overreach, militarism, and economic decline collide. Drawing on his years in Congress fighting unauthorized wars, he warns that the killing of Iran’s leadership, the collapse of diplomatic credibility, and the fantasy of American omnipotence have created a crisis with no clear exit. Scheer and Kucinich trace the roots of the disaster from the 1953 coup against Mossadegh to Trump’s current campaign of regime change, asking whether Iran may become the graveyard of American empire — and what it means for a world no longer willing to accept U.S. dominance.

As the U.S. drifts deeper into an era shaped by concentrated wealth, surveillance technology, and political strongmen, Robert Scheer sits down with Jonathan Taplin to examine what he calls the rise of “techno‑authoritarianism.” Drawing on decades at the intersection of culture, media, and technology—from producing Bob Dylan and The Band to directing USC’s Annenberg Innovation Lab—Taplin traces how corporate monopolies, AI, and political intimidation have hollowed out the counterculture that once challenged American power. In this wide‑ranging conversation, Scheer and Taplin explore the collapse of artistic independence, the fusion of Big Tech and state authority, and the dangers facing a generation coming of age under unprecedented surveillance and economic inequality.

Abby Martin, journalist and documentary filmmaker behind Earth's Greatest Enemy, digs into how the U.S. military drives climate destruction. She recounts distribution battles, Pentagon influence on media, veterans’ human costs, Arctic extraction, bipartisan militarism, and strategies for grassroots distribution and movement building.

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.

On today’s episode of Scheer Intelligence, Robert Scheer sits down once again with former CIA analyst Ray McGovern for a rare, unvarnished look at the war in Ukraine, the collapse of nuclear arms control, and the dangerous return of great‑power spheres of influence. McGovern, who spent 27 years briefing presidents from Nixon to Reagan, argues that the conflict was provoked, that Russia believes it has already won, and that the real negotiations now bypass Europe entirely. Scheer pushes back, insisting on the human cost and the moral urgency of ending the war now — not after another round of geopolitical maneuvering. Together, they cut through media narratives and political posturing to expose what’s really at stake: the future of global security, the erosion of diplomacy, and the lives caught in the crossfire.

Today on the show, Joshua Scheer speaks with award‑winning investigative journalist Peter Byrne about the explosive conclusion to his 10‑part Project Censored series on the militarization of artificial intelligence. Byrne’s reporting uncovers how Silicon Valley billionaires, the Pentagon, Wall Street, and corporate media have fused into a single war‑driven superorganism—one that feeds on conflict, surveillance, and profit while pushing humanity toward nuclear brinkmanship.In this conversation, Byrne dismantles the mythology surrounding companies like Palantir and Anduril, exposes the New York Times for cheerleading a $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget, and explains why China is not the existential threat Americans are told to fear. He argues that AI is already embedded in a self‑propelling war machine that may be beyond meaningful human control.This is a deep dive into empire, technology, and the death‑driven logic of American militarism—and what it will take for life‑affirming movements to resist it.