Scheer Intelligence

In a special Scheer Intelligence from a March 2019 conversation,  Robert Scheer talks with his lifelong friend and legendary poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who passed recently in San Francisco at the age of 101. The two discuss a host of topics, including the importance of not selling out and the founding of San Francisco’s landmark City Lights bookshop, where Scheer worked as a young man. 

Middle East scholar Juan Cole joins Robert Scheer to discuss what the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Films like “Palmer,” released on Apple+ in late January, are redefining how global audiences understand gender constructs in previously unthinkable ways. 

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.”