People working within the US government or military who report something wrong related to their work can face a life of ostracization, criminalization and even torture. After serving 10 years in the Marines, Matthew Hoh, who later became a foreign service officer, decided to stand up to the war machine and become the first US official to resign in protest of the Afghanistan War. His stance for peace did not serve him well when he recently ran for the U.S. Senate in North Carolina, having had to go to court just to get his Green Party on the ballot.

Joining Scheer Intelligence this week with host Robert Scheer, Hoh comes fresh off his new mission to effect change in the country. Ten-plus years after his internationally publicized resignation, Matthew’s Senate campaign focused on inequities and injustices, from universal healthcare to antiwar commitment to rent control. Hoh hits the core of much of what’s wrong in the US today. Armed with vast experience serving the country and standing up for progressive issues, voters could not see through the fog of war, media reports and identity politics that inhibited Hoh’s candidacy.  

“There is a very real connection there between what I had experienced in the military [and] in the government with this race, in terms of the dissonance that exists between the narrative and the reality of things,” Hoh said. He is often able to relate and compare his experiences in the military to that in the civilian world, where things like corruption, careerism and fear mongering affects the actions of others and too often prevents good from prevailing, leaving the least among us to suffer while the war effort prospers.

Robert Scheer

Joshua Scheer

Robert Scheer: 

Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of Scheer Intelligence, where the intelligence comes from my guest. And, you know, somehow I say I’m the poor man’s alternative to the CIA also, but actually the great thing about this show for me is that I can learn and I can learn from people who have been exposed to politics and all sorts of social issues in a different way than mine. And Matthew Hoh, our guest, who was your captain in the Marines and was in Iraq on several tours of duty and then worked for the US government in Afghanistan and resigned. And I think he was the only individual at that point who had resigned from these adventures. And you know, I’ve been the journalist, I’ve been in some war zones and so forth, but it’s always been, as someone who could leave, who was writing about it, who was not, you know, there and so forth and you’ve had an incredible journey. And we’re not going to talk about it because neither you or I have seen the Jon Stewart Show where I gather Hillary Clinton and Condoleezza Rice defend everything that was done by Democrats and Republicans in Libya and Iraq and so forth. And we could do another show up the road. But it’s interesting how few witnesses we have from the inside who will speak honestly about it. I have to believe that Hillary Clinton knows these have been disasters and that Condoleezza Rice, I happen to have been in the Stanford arms control group with her that 30 years ago or 20 years ago, I guess it would be. And I know she has a brain and they know these things are disastrous and they, at the very least, represent the horrible overextension of the US military and they have nothing to do with solving our real problems. So anyway, one reason I wanted to talk to you is that you’ve been there, but also you’re someone who tries to be a good citizen. And you just went through a race for the Senate with the Green Party in North Carolina. And I’m accused of giving too long winded introductions. But I just want to tell you where I want to go here. And, you know, you did what a lot of these so-called realists say you shouldn’t do. They believe in the lesser evil, support the Democratic Party, Trump is such a nightmare, it should freeze all thought of alternatives and so forth. And for my money, you had the guts to run as an educational campaign. You know, hopefully maybe the Greens someday, as they have in Europe, will win a lot of the elections. But you really took it to your community where you’ve lived, you’ve been very supportive in your descriptions of North Carolina and you decided to run for Senate. And I should mention that you’ve had a hard time with the military. You were disabled by your actions, I believe 100%, you’ve suffered the consequences of war. So I want to turn it over to you and just tell me the whole Matthew Hoh story. 

Matthew Hoh: 

Well, thanks for having me here. The whole story, huh? Yeah. I mean, I think it’s a story that a lot of us find ourselves in. Many times we’re not given the opportunity to have a full appreciation for our history. And you end up taking part in that history when you don’t understand that there’s been a continuous line through history where you think your generation is different. Or as I think you alluded to, and I haven’t heard it either yet, this conversation between Jon Stewart and Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton, where there’s a whitewashing or an apologizing or a justification for the wrongs that allow current generations to say, okay, you know, it wasn’t as black and white, it wasn’t as clear. And because it was not as clear, that means that it could be done better, you know, so it strips the morality, the ethics, the human aspects out of these wars and reduces it down to just a question of whether or not these things could have been done better. And I certainly grew up with that. I was born ’73, April ’73. I think that’s the same month the U.S. pulled its last combat troops out of Vietnam. So I certainly grew up with that, with this idea that Vietnam could have been done better. It wasn’t a question that the war, the war was wrong. There was no talk as I grew up and I understood it. And, you know, I was a big history student. I won my high school’s history award, you know, I mean, I went to a good private college. But, you know, I never read Zinn or Chomsky or Angela Davis or Malcolm X until, you know, I was in my thirties. These things were not presented to us. So the idea of, say, going back to Vietnam and our understanding of who we are as a nation, that somehow you could have this understanding of the Vietnam War, where there had been a French occupation, followed by a Japanese occupation, followed by a French occupation again, then the American occupation, and somehow understand it as being separate events, somehow as being events that weren’t, that could be compartmentalized. And, you know, I mean, the same thing to this is what you see with the war in Afghanistan, say, where it’s as if the war begins in 2001 in terms of all contemporary American understanding of the war, including, you know, United States military and foreign policy decisions with the complete exclusion of everything pre-2001, including more than 25 years of warfare. You know, I mean, that’s a thing that you could go up to, I would argue, that you could go up to almost every U.S. military officer, intelligence officer, diplomat who had spent time in Afghanistan and ask them how many people died in Afghanistan prior to the Soviet Union’s invasion in December of 1979? And they would have no idea that the fighting had already killed 100,000 people by the time the Soviets invaded. I mean, like that type of and that’s just just one minor aspect, not minor, of course, hundred thousand dead people, but one very telling aspect about how we get ourselves into these things, I think both personally and as a society, because we just don’t have a full appreciation of what we are truly entering. And we also, too, we cut out again that spiritual, moral, ethical component of what we’re talking about and just talk about how we could have done it better off. We just have one more aircraft carrier or two more divisions or something like that. 

Scheer:

Yeah. You know, there’s a deliberate ignorance to the enterprise because for instance, Vietnam was actually a country I went to report on when we had very few troops still, you know, and well, quite a few, but ’64, there were flood control advisors when they were first put in and then it was growing and so forth. But anybody who went to a library—I happened to go to the 47th Street Library I think in New York, and just pulled some books and everything and then I was at Berkeley—would have known that the assumption of that war was that we were really checking China. The communist Chinese revolution. And how did that happen? Who lost China? As if it was ours to lose. And then suddenly the emphasis was on Vietnam. Oh, we’ll beat them there. We didn’t quite beat them in Korea, we’ll beat them there. And that will tell China and the salient fact of history that China had occupied Vietnam for a thousand years and that Vietnamese nationalism, whether it comes in the guise of of the Catholic Church, as it was a Ngo Dinh Diem or it came with Ho Chi Minh with some sort of communism, was going to be inherently nationalist. And what happens we lose in Vietnam. The thing everybody said, you can’t just get out. You can’t lose. We have the most ignominious defeat we’ve ever had. And what happens? They don’t invade San Diego. They don’t have any ability to come to the United States, Vietnam and China, two communist countries that go to war. They go to war over their border and over islands, which they’re still fighting about. And now we want to punish China, so we want to say, oh, no, make those iPhones in Vietnam. You know, make it in the good communist country, not in the bad communist country. I mean, so there’s an insanity to it. And what I found very impressive about your campaign, your writings, your speaking is you’re willing to address the essential madness that we don’t have adults watching the store. We have irrational people making decisions. And folks like yourself, you know, you spent 10 years in the Marines. You know, we should talk about that a little bit. And then you go over there trying to do something through the government agency in Afghanistan and you’re up against the reality that logic and fact don’t seem to be in play here. And yet people who have very good educations, I happen to go to City College in New York, so I didn’t you know, go to Harvard, but, you know, people who have on paper a better education than I’ve had anyway, they don’t seem to have even pulled one book off the shelf on any of these subjects. I mean, you know, people have written about it. So take me there, you’re in the middle… Why don’t you just take me through your career? I don’t know. Let’s take the time to really spell this out. You say you were, you know, you hadn’t heard all this history and so forth. What happened? Was your original intention to have a career in the military? To save democracy? What brought you in? 

Hoh: 

No, no, I. I went to college and I graduated from college. 

Scheer:

This was Tufts. 

Hoh:

Tufts University. So I graduated in 1995 and spent about two years working in Boston, Manhattan, for publishing companies, doing finance and operations type stuff, primarily finance. And I was bored out of my mind, and I ended up joining the Marine Corps because I wanted to be part of something bigger than myself. I wanted to do serious things. I wanted to be part of that big hand movement of history, you know, and so a lot more into that. But that’s basically it. I was bored and want to challenge myself and so I end up going off to candidate school, become an officer in the Marine Corps. I spent time at Okinawa, Japan, and then I get sent to the Pentagon in 2002, where I am the Marine Corps’ White House liaison officer, among some other duties. So I kind of Forrest Gump’d myself into a very high position just because I was available, basically. And from there, that became, you know, a good part of 20 years seeing things from the inside of Washington, DC, how these war policies were made, how senior figures decided things. That allowed me to get a position with the U.S. Embassy team in Iraq in 2004. So at that point I’m now a Reserve Marine Corps officer and I’m there in Iraq as a Department of Defense officer, a Department of Defense civilian. And I’m on a U.S. embassy team in Iraq for a year doing reconstruction and political work, have a ton of money. I mean, the most I ever have in my possession at one time is about $24, 25 million in cash used to keep it in the safe in the room. I slept in, you know, used to walk around with a .22 caliber Llama pistol in my suit pocket, you know. I mean, so you’re basically, you know, handing out tens, hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars at a time, you know, basically acting like Scarface over there. The whole idea being is that money, while it’s ostensible purpose, is to put people to work. It’s to improve the communities. It’s to, as in the counterinsurgency language would say, you’re connecting the people to the government. You know, the idea that trying to show people that in Iraq, that if you favor the occupation, these good things will happen. We will rebuild the water treatment plants and the electrical generation facilities and the roads that our bombs destroyed, you know, like those kinds of things, as opposed to supporting this nationalist insurgency. And so the madness of it. So we would spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a week in the province. We were in more than that sometimes. And in 2004, the insurgency just deepened and strengthened and grew. And what you would see is that you go to these briefings and the intelligence officer would get up there and he talk about the insurgency and would put the insurgency up like an organizational chart like you see in television crime shows. Right. This idea that all we got to do is X out enough of them and then this whole thing will collapse, not understanding what actually motivates the insurgency because it was forbidden to say what motivates the insurgency. So you could go to all these briefings and you would never once hear the reason behind the insurgency, because you were not allowed to say that the insurgency is primarily motivated by resistance to occupation. They would say things like, oh, it’s criminal. It’s the old Baath Party wanting to hold on to power. It’s jihadist. It’s, you know, this is what happens when you have a vacuum, you know, etc., but you were just simply not allowed to say that it was because of the occupation. I mean, we weren’t even allowed to say the word occupation until around 2005. You know, I mean, there’s different reasons for that. But, you know, primarily it was because that runs counter to the prevailing narrative that drives, as we were talking before about Condi Rice and Hillary Clinton, that drives their politics, that is the foundation of their ambition. And so, you know, I saw that quite clearly. And then I go back to the State Department in 2005 and I’m on the Iraq desk and same thing to kind of Forrest Gump myself into a position where I can see very senior things happening and you know, I mean, among one of my other one of my duties was to every week produce what’s called the Iraq Weekly Status Report. And this was a document that went to the president, went to the vice president, went to the secretary of state. There was a classified and unclassified version. And the whole purpose of it was to. You know, ostensibly right to give a status report on what’s happening in Iraq, a weekly status report. But, of course, it was all cooked, right? Of course it was all you know, all the stories we put in there, all the reporting we put in, there was good news. And I spent half my time trying to find a good news story to put in there because there was no good news. So then you would do things, you would the story would get amended or certain things would get left out of the story to make it seem like good.  The one thing you couldn’t do is you couldn’t really at that point, they did later in the Afghan war under Secretary of Defense Panetta, they started cutting back on a lot of the information that they put out. But you couldn’t hide the amount of casualties. You couldn’t hide the amount of Iraqi security force casualties. You couldn’t hide the amount of attacks the insurgency was waging. So all these metrics that tell you that the war was getting worse and that meant, of course, the insurgency was growing its support. And why was that? And, you know, you look at the classified reporting and certainly you would see very clearly and this was reported publicly as well, eventually, 97% of the insurgency was nationalist based. We would capture and the insurgents that we would capture that were coming from overseas, from other places from Libya, say, or Egypt or Yemen or Saudi Arabia to fight us in Iraq. When they were interrogated and they were asked, why did you come here to Iraq? They would say, because of Abu Ghraib or because of Guantanamo Bay, or I came here because I want to defend my people, my land, my faith. So, again, even for the folks, even for the people that were coming from other countries to fight us in Iraq, it was in defense of Iraq. It was not out of some type of holy jihad or holy war venture that they want to go upon. So, I mean, so those kinds of things happened over and over again. I go back to Iraq with the Marine Corps. You know, I’m back at the department… 

Scheer:

Before you go back to Iraq, let me just take those first years. Okay. So you had already been at Tufts University, right. Which is a famous university, right? I mean, it’s highly regarded. And you had studied what foreign policy or what? 

Hoh: 

No, I actually was a comparative religion and literature major, and I studied a lot of philosophy. 

Scheer: 

Okay. Well, that’s even better. 

Hoh:

And a lot of political science. 

Scheer:

Okay, so that’s even better. You had studied religion, so forth. And you knew by then when you got there and all your colleagues in there, they’re officers and everything, they’re all well-educated. They’ve taken a lot of classes and so forth. And in the military as well. Did they not know that the fundamental excuse for this war in Iraq, the invasion, was a lie, that, after all, Saddam Hussein had been our ally against Iran. Iran, which was a Shiite country, was supposed to be the main enemy. Right? And then we were suddenly changing the politics of Iraq to make Iran, supposedly our enemy, our ally now. Right? Because there were two kinds of opposition. There were the Sunni and the Shiites. So one fact was Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. Indeed, it was the one country where, you know, Saddam Hussein could keep Al-Qaeda out. And so there was not one person on the airplane or anything that attacked us, 15 of the 19 were from Saudi Arabia, our big ally. Right? But okay, so here you are, a college guy, educated about religion and what would happen in these discussions. Do you ever say, wait a minute, this guy, Saddam Hussein, he was our ally fighting against Iran. Somehow we’ve lost him in the thread here. Now he’s the enemy. And so we kill him, get rid of him. But we unleash all these Sunnis, right? And now we’re fighting them. And we somehow have the support of these militias that are trained in Iran and supported by them. We’ve made holy war here in a country that actually didn’t have much experience. I’m just asking at that moment, what do the smart people you’re hanging out with in your briefings and everything, how did they deal with that? And what do they tell the Hillary Clinton’s and Condoleezza Rice’s about what’s going on? 

Hoh:

Nothing really is said about it being you know, those conversations weren’t really had. You would have, this is where the Great Lie, you know, comes into play, where you wrap yourself around it. And then you protect yourself as you’re in the military, if you’re in intelligence or if you’re in the diplomatic corps in the sense that you don’t create policy, you execute policy. So you give yourself those excuses as well. And I mean, one of the things, clearly, was that when you’re over there, you are so busy that you don’t have time for these things at the that the missions that you’re on, that what you’re doing is so pressing that it gives you a reason not to open up the aperture, not to have those discussions. So we really did not discuss these things. Of course, guys would say things. Of course people would say, “Can you believe we’re doing this?” You know, but that would be it would just be like a moment of blowing off steam, of an expression of, you know, just venting something. But the actual conversation, like you can imagine of us sitting around at the chow hall or whatever, and you’re discussing that, I don’t recall once. It was just something that we accepted and put our heads down and you lie to yourself about it. And this is what happens with me and with many others. Now you get into this concept of moral injury where which I believe is the driving factor behind, you know, combat veteran suicides, of which we see, you know, which which well, well, well elevated over what civilians go through. This idea that you have transgressed, that you did something like this, that you took part in the Iraq War, you lied to yourself all throughout. You made excuses to yourself. And now here you are on the other side about it. And what are you going to do about it? You chose to do this. And guess what? Your regret and your shame is so great. You have ripped out the entire moral foundations of who you are. And this is what we see over and over again. And this is what occurs. And I mean, because you do, it’s a process. How did I go to war three times? Because I lied myself into it. Because I was a coward, because of different things, because I thought I could do better. I mean, there’s all kinds of different reasons. The first time I got there I guess it was April of ’04, May of ’04. And my thought process is while I know this war screwed up, but my thought process, basically I can be a moral actor. I can act morally in this circumstances and, you know, completely naive and wrong about that, because the war itself is such a natural for such a controlling, for such a living thing of its own, that its immorality is going to make an agent of anybody who is involved in it, no matter how moral that person thinks they are. You know, when I go back, when I leave there in a year, I’m disgusted with it and upset with it. The idea being like, well, you can’t quit. You’ve got to stay in and make things better. And then when you’re a senior person, you can do something about something like this, you know? So either you lie when I go back with the Marines, when I take a Marine Corps company back over there, it’s well, you know, “I’m a pretty good officer. I can bring home alive Marines and sailors who probably wouldn’t make it back with some of these other guys who would be company commanders.” So, I mean, it’s just a continual process of lying to yourself. So, you know, it’s there. It’s clear. I mean, we weren’t dummies. I mean, certainly we were reading the newspapers, you know, I mean, you knew that. You know, I knew guys in the first year who were going out looking for weapons of mass destruction. You know, I knew that the commander of the engineer battalion in the province I was in, and they will go out repeatedly with their equipment and dig and look for it because they got something that said, hey, there’s a stash of mustard gas buried next to this town and they will go out and look and of course, find nothing, you know, and as well, too. And this is the corrupting effect. The really nefarious aspect of war is that whatever intentions you go there with, what you’re met with, like the reality of it, that corrupts you and that corrodes you. And then you turn into the person who looks at these people that you are supposedly there to help. Right? I’m sure if we were to listen to that Jon Stewart interview of Condi Rice and of Hillary Clinton, it’s all about helping people. It’s all about getting rid of dictators. It’s all about bringing democracy and liberalizing nations and giving people a better way of life through rifles and bombs, which is absolutely insane. But that’s the argument. And so ostensibly what you’re there for you now, because these people are, this is how you phrase it as, these people are gracious. These people are not, you know, expressing gratitude for us getting rid of Saddam Hussein. That resentment turns into hatred. And then what happens, of course, is while their resentment towards the occupation turns into them supporting the occupation. And, you know, you see how that cycle exists to where you come to really hate the people that you supposedly are liberating. Well, of course, you were never there to liberate them in the first place. So that all compounds. Right? And that’s this is the crux of the moral injury that so many go through. 

Scheer:

You know, we’re really getting near the core of the whole thing of why we have wars. And it’s not just in our society. Every society wants the good war. 

Hoh:

Right. 

Scheer:

The good war enhances careers. It enhances national power. It covers real failings in society. And if it’s a virtuous war, which, after all, when the French went into Vietnam or Algeria or anywhere, they said they were bringing civilization, which is true of any imperial power. And people forget about Vietnam because now we’re dealing with Ukraine and Russia and yeah, we’ve got the good war and these are good people and so forth. They’re not to take any one thing away from people we support in any situation, but the cynicism becomes dominant and I remember in Vietnam, people forget that it was supposed to be a virtuous war. These evil communists that were against religion, the Virgin Mary was being you know, the image of the Virgin Mary was being defiled in the north. We find this guy studying in a Catholic seminary in New Jersey, Ngô Đình Diệm, and we put him in power. He’s going to be the George Washington of his country and we’re going to back them against the evil commies. And, you know, there were a lot of criticisms you could make of the communists in Vietnam. You know, they certainly were not great democrats with a small D and all that. And yet how does that end? Nobody ever seems to know. What happened to Ngô Đình Diệm? Well, the fact of the matter is, we killed him. Yeah, we killed George Washington in Vietnam. We hunted him down in the sewers of Saigon, for God’s sake you know, and right? When he was inconvenient to us, you mentioned Afghanistan, which we should talk about, but everybody forgets. You know, thankfully, we have that one interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski, somebody I actually got to know in the earlier part of my life and interviewed him when I was working at the L.A. Times and all that. But, you know, speaking of… Brzezinski was, you know, our national security adviser in the Carter administration, and was very candid about that. We provoked the Russians to go into Afghanistan. And what does he say there? He said, well, so what? We get a bunch of riled up Muslims… But look at that. We’re going to destroy the Russian empire, the Soviet empire. And so the cynicism that this where I want to get the link between you as that young Marine officer and one way you could have approached this is to say, hey, this is going to be a good career because I go from captain, you know, right up the line and you are the rare person, the very few, who reject that. And so you don’t internally brainwash yourself when you start to have doubts about it. But what I really want to question is, I mean, after all, Hillary Clinton is a product in the way of the ’60s, it’s true she had a Republican family. But nonetheless and Bill Clinton certainly knew that the Vietnam War was wrong, but they didn’t get any of the lessons of it. The ease with which you can lie about it and so taking you, you’re still this young Marine officer. Yet, you know, as you mentioned, of Forrest Gump, you get access to all these people. And what I’m after is, why are there so few of you? It’s the question I put to Daniel Ellsberg when I interviewed him, when you first came out with the Pentagon Papers and he was on trial. Why do we have so few whistleblowers? You know what got you to say… Oh, you know, because David Petraeus, for instance, who you probably encountered, he’s now a professor at, I think, four different universities. It’s a nice life. He somehow survived, letting his mistress see the most secret documents. So, you know, he’s not in jail anywhere and so forth. So careerism as well as profit making, of course, is critical to the enterprise of war. And you were there and you could have taken a different fork in the road. And yet it caused mental problems for you when you found… Well, wait a minute, I’m not going to shut up and go along. 

Hoh:

Yeah, there’s I mean, there’s a lot to say about that. Why we don’t have more people speaking out? Why do people not step forward? Some of it’s pretty simple. Golden handcuffs. You know, a number of men and women who have said to me over the last years, I wish I had done what you did, but I’ve got two kids going to college. I mean, that’s an aspect of careerism as well. You know, the lies we tell ourselves, like I said earlier, about, well, you know, either I execute policy, I don’t make policy, that type of excuse making as well as that when I’m a senior person, I’m not going to let this happen. You know, I was in the Marine Corps in the late nineties. I went in January ’98, and we had plenty of colonels and generals who had been in the Vietnam War. And sergeant majors, too, and master gunnery sergeants and, you know, a number of them who would say things, you know… We will never go into it, we would never let another Vietnam happen. You know, this being said, 1988, 1999, 2000. Right. And then, of course, we were in two Vietnams within a few years. 

Scheer:

No, no, let me correct you. What they said that would, and by the way, I happened to go to college with Colin Powell at City College, who was not a big friend or anything. But I did get to talk to him over the years until quite late in his life about Vietnam and all that and why he went along and then Iraq. I mean, I remember a conversation here in Los Angeles where he said, you know, he could, he knew he could see the lies while it was happening. So I could follow that career trajectory. But what they learn from Vietnam is don’t have a draft and keep down the American casualties. And they learned that big time. Big time. Right. And you know what? They reduced war for most people to a video game. And so the two of us are sitting here now and we don’t have a big outlet. This is just a small venture. Hopefully we can pick up some tens of thousands of people to watch it or what have you. But even the Internet now has been cut way back into what you’re going to get out there, even compared to three or four or five years ago. You know, it’s heavily regulated, right, by private companies. So it does even warrant constitutional protection you get, you know, YouTube or something to censor it. And the fact of the matter is, by making it a video game and allowing certainly more affluent people to avoid the whole experience. You know, basically, cynicism drives the whole enterprise, you know, and I mean, that’s what is so maddening about it, you know? I mean, if you kill a lot of Afghans or Iraqis or Ukrainians, well, you know, that’s them. And you’re probably doing them a favor. And really what you’re up against, and I want to get to your campaign for the Senate, you know, when you were trying to do something as a private citizen, the fact is there wasn’t even one Democrat, Barbara Lee, was opposed to the Iraq War. She happens to be somebody I voted for in my life from Oakland and so forth. But this time it wasn’t one person who spoke out about Ukraine or even, you know, provoking China over Taiwan and everything. You know, it’s like it’s all now once again fashionable and everybody votes for a bigger military budget. And you, I want to bring up, you did this… You’re running as a Green Party candidate. And they would all tut tut about that. Oh, how immature, how childish was the Green Party? You know, why aren’t you a good Democrat, right? Yeah and the Democrats are now the war party. Let’s face it. You know, there seems to be more opposition, for whatever reason, than the Republican Party. At least there are some you know, people talk about the cost of it or what we are doing and so forth. But, you know, I want you to know, you tried to take this message of peace. I’m looking at the clock. I mean, I could talk to you for hours and I’m actually quite happy to do it. But I want to make this trajectory from the reality you experience. We haven’t really talked enough about Afghanistan, but, you know, no one can say you haven’t seen this reality, you lived it, and then you try to make it a political message and run as the candidate in North Carolina for Senate. And, you know, what do people say? You’re not being a realist? You’re not realistic? You have tasted war. You’re not a realist?

Hoh:

It’s very similar to what we’ve been talking about with the deliberate ignorance, the willful ignorance, one of the things we would say is that we tried to get media attention. Look, we’re the only campaign that’s calling for Medicare for All. We’re the only campaign calling for a universal health care, single payer type system. This is what the majority of Americans continually express that they want. We are coming out of a pandemic that has killed a million people. I mean, what statistics do I need to throw at you to just describe and to make sure it’s clear how much of a horror show our healthcare system is? And how is that not worthy, then, of having a voice in this race? And there’s that dissonance that, you know, I would say to journalists. Okay, find me on my issues page which does not have majority or plurality support among the public, because it’s all your fringe issues and everything. What is fringe? What is… And it was just a dissonance between what was being said, the narrative and the reality. So you could have a campaign like mine that would be completely ignored by the media as we have rents in North Carolina going up anywhere, depending on what part of the state you’re in, anywhere from 25 to 75%. Rents are going up. Yet somehow it’s not conducive to the debate, to the race to have someone included who is arguing for rent control. Right? I mean, you know, I mean, so there is dissonance that occurs. That’s a deliberate dissonance, you know, and then it’s the media themselves who would bemoan, oh, it’s just all about identity politics, you know, and not about the issues. And they themselves would be the ones who write these 18 paragraph long, 20 paragraph long articles on the U.S. Senate race here in North Carolina or what have you. And there’d be nothing about issues. It would all be like an identity piece. And so you mean… It is. It’s the same type of thing that I was expressing before about how you can have this understanding that we all knew that the Iraq insurgency, the Afghan insurgency, was motivated by resentment towards occupation. And then that just gets cut off. That’s not allowed to be communicated in the same way that you can have a US Senate race in North Carolina where we are seeing the effects of, you know, the worst state in the nation for workers as described by Oxfam continuously. And yet there is not a candidate in the media present who is arguing for workers rights. Yeah, I mean, like so there it was, there is a very real connection there between what I had experienced in the military, in the government with this race, in terms of the dissonance that exists between the narrative and the reality of things. And I think that it is one of the things that continually pulls people away from being involved in government, you know, is why we see low rates of participation in elections. You know, the cynicism you described, you know, I mean, one of the things New York Times had a poll back in October, and this is seen in other polls and this is what I hear from people over and over again. The one thing that almost everyone believes is that the government is corrupt, that the government is stealing our money and giving it to the rich, and that goes across all lines. I think almost 70% of Americans agree with that in the New York Times poll from October that was the single highest thing of everything that people agreed upon. And, you know, but that discussion is, you know, so that’s the whole problem is how do you make a difference? How do you make an impact? How do you change this corrupt system when it’s the one that’s in charge of itself? 

Scheer:

So let’s talk about that corruption and why we have so few whistleblowers. And by the way, I would include people who might be conservatives, who are whistleblowers as long as they’re being principled, you know, and tell us what’s going on. And it’s interesting, though, is this word we’ve used, careerism. You are the rare person who subverted your career, abandoned it or what have you, and you are on your way to a very successful career, as long as you were consistent with the aims of the military industrial complex, a phrase that we honor because we honor General Eisenhower turned President Eisenhower was still… I remember I wore a “I like Ike” button in the Bronx when I was a kid. I was an Eisenhower fan. I think I was the only one in the whole Bronx. But I saw them as a young kid, I know that this guy’s speaking the truth. He’s experienced war. He was against dropping the bomb, you know? I mean, there was I think… Are you connected with the Eisenhower Institute? 

Hoh:

I am, yeah. 

Scheer:

And I love the fact that they’re honoring him. Not that he was perfect and not that everything was great. But still he was one and the other president, ironically, I bring this up from time to time, who warned us about the military was George Washington. And in his farewell address, we always talk about Eisenhower’s farewell address, in George Washington’s farewell address, which was a piece of paper in his desk. He warned us about the impostures of pretended patriotism. Probably never heard this phrase, right? Okay. So after this show, you’ll probably if you’re like me, you’ll look it up as they did. George Washington. 

Hoh:

Writing it down right now. 

Scheer:

Yeah. Did George and I always do that after the show? I said, did I make that up? Did George Washington really warn? And he did, it’s in his farewell address. And he said gentle means yes. He wasn’t an isolationist in the sense of being indifferent to the world. He said, let’s have commerce trade contact with the world, but by gentle means, don’t force anything. And he said, “beware the impostures of pretended patriotism.” Your battle is with the impostures of pretended patriotism. It’s Daniel Ellsberg’s battle. You can go down the list of, not very long list, of people who had a good career before them and being pals with the powerful people and financial community of Wall Street, which is what Hillary and Bill Clinton did, you know or the military industrial complex, and the value of the Green Party let me just say this it’s small, it’s probably incoherent in a lot of ways, you know, it’s not taken seriously by design. It’s broken through internationally. Green Party, I think in Germany right now. One of the top ministers is a veteran of the Green Party. You know, there had some impact, although now Germany is going back to a military budget and embracing nuclear power and all that. But the fact of the matter is, your life story, in so far as I can understand this, I hope somebody makes a movie about it or you write some… No, I mean, it’s really worth examining. Why do we, at a society, where basically we still don’t torture our own people we’re not yet there in 1984, Orwell’s world, you know, why do so few people speak out? You know, I mean, come on. There’s got to be people right now on these congressional staffs who know. I mean, where’s Bernie Sanders on this stuff? You know, and you make this, you know, sadly pathetic campaign for the Senate. But what you’re saying should be commonly accepted, right? You know, it should be common sense. Common sense. And now, of course, we have once again another good war in the Ukraine. So we could put the most advanced military equipment in. We can say, oh, forget about nuclear war, or let’s just poke our finger in the eye of, you know, Ho Chi Minh. Now we’ll do it with Putin, who’s not even a communist, he’s an anti-communist, but we forget that whole business. Well, let’s poke in the eye of the Chinese or what have you. And there’s not, as far as I can see, a single progressive representative in the US Congress who dares to question this narrative. Not a single one. I don’t get it. You know, if it was an overtly totalitarian society, and they’re going to, you know, jab, you know, rifle butts into your head at random, you know. We do have torture. We do have that. But come on. What? Why are you the lone voice there down in North Carolina as a Green Party candidate? Where are the progressives? 

Hoh:

First let me go back to that Washington quote I had not heard. 

Scheer:

Did you look it up? 

Hoh:

I’ve written it down.. 

Scheer:

Look it up now, people watching this….

Hoh:

For me to do this and talk at the same time you’re really going to exploit my limitations here. But a few years ago, I did write an essay on Pete Buttigieg, you know, the current secretary of transportation, former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, and I had entitled, this was when he was running for president in 2020. And I entitled the essay something along… “Beware of men who live in the illusion of danger.” And very similar to that Washington quote, I can’t remember where the quote I took came from. And this idea, it was an examination of Buttigieg supposed military career, which is paper thin and really was a window dressing for him to go on for his political career. I mean, he had that idea that he was going to use that. You could see that ambition all the way through. The crux of that essay, though, was about the unit that he was attached to in Afghanistan, which was the counter-narcotics intelligence unit, and about how the whole aspect of the whole drug war in Afghanistan, the major drug lords in that country were our allies if everyone knew this. And you can see reporting in the Washington Post, New York Times, I mean, everything I mean, the biggest drug lord at one point is, in the world potentially not just in Afghanistan, is Ahmed Wali Karzai, the president of Afghanistan’s half brother is the biggest… I mean you have this bright, shining reality, this lie that everyone just ignored. Everyone ignored and ignored and ignored. And I mean, I think some of this comes back to, in fact, too, when I wrote that essay, the attention seemed to be on the fact that I was swiftboating Buttigieg, which was not the point at all. Which proved the point of the article that, you know, if you put up this window dressing, if you put up this pretend patriotism. That will have such an effect that will be overwhelming. And I think a lot of this to get back to the whistleblowers. Why do people not step out? Because it’s very dangerous. It’s very hard. It’s financially ruinous. It’s emotionally destructive. There are aspects of this that, look, when I resigned in protest from the State Department over the escalation of the Afghan war in 2009, my intention was just to go home and really drink myself to death at that point. You know, I mean, there was no intention for me of speaking out or anything. What’s interesting is that the guy who had hired me for that job, who was the head of Afghanistan operations for the State Department, when Holbrooke got my resignation letter and demanded, like, who is this guy? Find out what’s going on. And I get this call from Henry. The first question out of his mouth is, are you going to go to the press about this? And I had never thought about that, never contemplated. It’s not until I’ve been home for a month or so that I contact the press when my anger gets to that point, you know. It was just simply I wanted to write an op-ed for The Washington Post saying, this is why I resigned from the Afghan war. This is why we should get out. Nothing more than that. And it turns into a big media thing. I became this media darling for many, many months. But you know, I mean the reason why… How come not many others? A lot of it’s the dangers of it. You know, you get to the point where you’re able to speak out, you’re going to lose a lot. And a lot of it’s got to do, I think, with the psychological nature of being human. A lot of this has got to do with societal evolution, the fear that we have of not being allowed to be kept at the campfire and I can’t remember the names of these studies, but there have been various, some very famous studies done that show that type of group psychology that explain groupthink, right? That explains mob mentality. Right? I mean, this is something that we know we can appreciate. And when people are put in those circumstances, the brain will start pushing chemicals to keep you with the group. I mean, and so there’s depression, anxiety, and you see that most whistleblowers have these mental health issues. They have emotional issues. They have, I mean, to this day, somehow don’t speak about much. But so I resigned in protest 13 years ago, more than 13 years ago. To this day, and it’s never happened, but to this day, if I get an email from one of my former Marines or someone I served with, my initial gut thought, my initial feeling, the initial anxiety I have when I see that email is that they’re going to be telling me off, right? You traitor. How did you do it? Why did you do this? Why did you betray us like this? It’s never happened. But still in my brain someplace, my brain is saying, “Look, if you leave this group, you’re going to face these consequences.” And then, let alone what the government does, well I mean the government, it goes after particularly the beginning of the Obama administration, the way it’s gone after whistleblowers using the Espionage Act, the way it’s made examples. 

Scheer:

More than all other presidents before the Obama administration. Why do we ignore… I voted for Obama. I even have a collection of T-shirts I contributed the first time beyond my means. I bought, I think, $1,000 worth of T-shirts the night before the election. I just happened to be speaking in San Diego, and somehow it’s still close. Right there. I went with my wife to her place. She was a, you know, one of these, what do they call them that wrapped funds together and, you know, gave me these T-shirts. 

Hoh:

Bundler. 

Scheer:

Yeah, I know. And I’m not, by the way, thinking of Obama. First of all, I don’t know, I’m not going to talk about symbolic value, but I think it was very important to have a non white male president. I’m not going to deny any of that. But why do we look the other way when we praise his administration? And what was that about, this war on whistleblowers? You know, now they’ve reinvented Daniel Ellsberg as the good whistleblower. I love Daniel Ellsberg, I’ve known him forever. And I was a witness, going to be a witness at his trial and so forth. You know, and when I met Daniel Ellsberg, I never thought of him as a kind of radical. He was a real solid Cold War thinker, you know, and just the reality of the Pentagon Papers. And, you know, he had been to Vietnam, he carried a gun and so forth. But when he ran, he said, wait a minute, this whole history has been a lie and people have a right to read it. It was the most obvious, correct response. And, you know, but he was still pretty conservative in a certain way, you know, well believed in the establishment. And at the time, everybody forgets they wanted to do to him what they’re now doing to Julian Assange and Julian Assange is not even an American. And he wasn’t working for the government. Daniel Ellsberg was, but anyway, Daniel Ellsberg and he’s commented on this, has been reinvented as kind of the good whistleblower, you know, and everyone else now who is more contemporary is bad, you know. And the question is, are, you know, I’ll put it to you directly, why don’t we want to know a different point of view? Forget about the truth, just a different point of view. Why can’t we hear a different point of view? And I think there is an understanding that it’s always a tissue of lies and it will fall apart if you examine it. That’s what I mean, I just think… My wife did a book with Pat Tillman, his mother, about the experience and Kevin Tillman, his brother was, you know, was with him. And she spent years and I love his mother. I think she’s an incredible woman, Mary Tillman. And yeah, that was it. These two brothers go there to save a democracy. Why shouldn’t you know? Why should an athlete who’s making a lot of money go? Why shouldn’t it be somebody who needs the job? I mean, they were so virtuous, these guys. And I’ve read everything about them. And as I say, my wife, Narda Zacchino, was the associate editor of the L.A. Times. And I remember his mother called me up and said she had read a column by me again, it was like you said, I expected that she would start yelling at me. Yeah, I thought it would be. “Oh, my God. I dared to question how it was handled and what happened.” And she said, “no, you got it right.” Would you like to come over and read all these documents I’ve been able to get? And then, you know, my wife took over. She was working for the Hearst Corporation up there in San Francisco. And they wrote a very good book called Boots on the Ground, a terrific book. But again, you know what? Here, the government lied about the death of Tillman. You know, actually denied his true patriotism, his search for truth, his courage. And no one takes the right lesson from it. It’s amazing. You know, and Petraeus is a hero. Right? 

Hoh:

Right. Or I mean, the general who… That whole cover up after Pat Tillman was killed, you know, people who are not familiar with the story, he was an NFL player. He goes to, after 9/11, he joins the Army, becomes an Army Ranger, gets deployed to Afghanistan. He’s killed by his own troops’ friendly fire incident. And, of course, the U.S. military covers it up, says he was a very heroic death, you know, and you know, in the general who is in charge of all that was Stan McChrystal, the general who then leads U.S. special operations forces in Iraq, but then more famously or infamously leads the Afghan war surge of President Obama, that escalation. You know, you go back to Dan Ellsberg and I have on my wall here, I’ve got a photo of Dan and I, along with Ray McGovern and Leo Tolstoy and Saladin. That’s who’s on my wall right there. And, of course, Julian Assange is behind me a free Assange poster. 

Scheer:

Move your head. I want to see the Julian Assange… Oh, yeah. Look at that. There’s nobody speaking up about that, hardly now. 

Hoh:

No, you know, it’s, I think with that, as I when I try and talk to journalists about that, I find two things with journalists, with Julian Assange, American journalists. One, they don’t have an understanding of what’s occurring. So they honestly believe because they haven’t put any effort or time or, you know, and because the construction and explanation of what’s going on is so faulted and so twisted and such propaganda that the Assange case is something that has to deal with an actual hacking event where government computers were broken into and secrets were stolen, and that’s the explanation for it. Or that he is an actual Russian agent and he was in the employ of the Russian government. And again, all these things that are completely untrue, that are deliberate misinformation operations, you know, I see that in journalists. This is what they actually believe. And the other aspect is they don’t want to get involved. They don’t want to stick their neck out. They don’t want to because, again, the prevailing establishment view is you don’t want to alienate the government. You don’t want to alienate the national security, you know, agencies. We live in a time of access journalism where it’s very important for them to maintain that access and certainly… 

Scheer:

Also the money, for God’s sake. 

Hoh:

The money as well. I mean, we can get into all the aspects of that. The same banks. You know, I’m a big fan of Paul Jay’s work, you know, the journalist Paul Jay. And a couple of years ago he did this really great exposé on how with 5% of I’m sorry, 95% of the S&P 500 is owned by about five different banks, you know, five different institutions, BlackRock, State Street, Vanguard, you know, a couple others, own 95% of the S&P 500. They’re the principal shareholders in all those. I mean, so everything is tied together, if you understand that. And I mean certainly that… Why then would you stick your neck out? You know, why would you go against the narrative? Why would you do something different than what your peers are doing when there is no reward, when, as you can see, the results may be like what John Kiriakou went through, what Tom Drake went through, what Chelsea Manning went through, what Daniel Hale is going through right now. You know, and for the journalists as well, what’s it going to get you? You’re going to lose your access. You’re probably going to lose any chance to get a job with The New York Times or anything like in the future. I mean, look at… Oh, shoot, what’s his name? Ken Dilanian, who used to be at the L.A. Times and was at MSNBC. And I forget where he’s at now. He was clearly exposed as sending his stories to the CIA to get their approval for his stories. And when that was exposed, all it did was get him promoted. He went from the L.A. Times to MSNBC. I think, you know, Maggie Haberman, the White House journalist for The Post or the Times, remember, one of the things that came out in the Clinton or the Podesta emails was how, you know, send this to Maggie because she’s a reliable ally of ours. Right? I mean, this is a senior, one of the most prominent White House reporters in the nation. And the Clinton campaign is describing her as a reliable ally. I’m paraphrasing, of course, and she doesn’t lose her job. You know, so it’s not just the sticks, but it’s the carrots that are also available if you go along, you know. I remember, you know, I had this experience where in late 2009, at this point, in 2009, Dan Rather had his own show on Discovery Network or something like that. It was an hour-long, weekly, in-depth news show that Rather was doing. And they bring me up to New York and I sit with Rather for two or 3 hours interview with him. And he’s very agreeable to what I’m saying. And then when we’re filming B-roll, walking around Midtown Manhattan or wherever we are, he says to me, I know you’re right about Afghanistan because I’ve been going there for three decades. And as I’m leaving, his producer comes up to me and he says, Hey, what do you think of this? And it’s an email from this strategic communications firm, a public relations firm employed by U.S. Central Command, which is the war fighting organization for the Middle East, so both the Afghan and the Iraq War, headed by David Petraeus at that point. And the email basically says, you know, look, I know we know you’re talking with Matthew Hoh. You can’t trust that guy. He’s made up a lot of stuff. And if he’s the type of person that you want to talk to, we don’t think anyone in Central Command, we don’t think you’re the right type of people for us to work with. And so I say this is, you know, bullshit. What do you want me to say about this? You know, and he says, okay. And a month or so later, when that special, a Dan Rather special on Afghanistan goes to air, I’m nowhere in it. But there’s like the correspondent, it wasn’t Rather it was somebody else, flying around in a helicopter with Stan McChrystal. Right? So I went through that. I mean, you had like, you know, they had hired a firm to discredit me and to put that out there. And because I got this repeatedly from other producers, other reporters, you know, this, hey, we’re getting this email saying you’re not who you say you are or saying, you know, on and on. And so there is like a real it’s not a passive attempt, but a very real aggressive function of the… Look, the Pentagon’s got the biggest public relations operation in the world. When you include their recruiting and everything else, their public relations budget is something like $8 billion a year. The largest PR firm in the world is less than a billion dollars. I mean, so by itself, by a factor of eight, it’s got the biggest PR firm in the world. So that’s what you’re up against. So, you know, again, getting back to why don’t people step out against it, you know, okay, I’m going against a group. What are my peers going to think about me? Okay, look what they’ve done to these other people. Look what they did to Chelsea Manning, what was said about them as well as then, too, you know, what chance do I have? You know, what chance do I have to make a difference? Because what I’m up against is Leviathan. And how am I going to fight against that? I’m going to get crushed. So all those things cause people just as well as too internally, you know, one of the things that you have in the wake of WikiLeaks and Chelsea and Julian is the US Department of Defense’s insider threat program, where it’s this construction of making sure that everyone knows within DOD that you’re supposed to turn on people, that you’re supposed to rat your peers out. I mean, this idea, they have to go and sit through briefings and every time you on board with a new unit, you go through another briefing about this insider threat program, about how you have to be, you know, be very cognizant of what your peers are doing and let us know if you suspect them of doing, you know, what Chelsea Manning did. I mean, so you have that as well, this massive I mean, this was massive that goes across the board all throughout the Department of Defense up and down this insider threat program. So it’s also there as well, like a kind of Orwellian type of thing, where now everything you’re doing is on a computer, of course, is being monitored. And so now you don’t want to do anything. You don’t even want to go to the wrong website. You certainly don’t want to read an article by Robert Scheer or some heresy like that can get you in trouble, you know? So there’s all these things at that compound that are a real effort to make sure that there aren’t any more whistleblowers. 

Scheer:

You know, let me say, since you brought me into this, I’ve had moments of respectability also and that’s why I understand the game so well. First of all, I worked for mainstream organizations as well as for counter ones, Ramparts, where I certainly started. But I was at the L.A. Times for 29 years and I, you know, been around and in that capacity, I by that point, I went from being a national reporter to writing columns for the L.A. Times. And I actually defended Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky thing. I’m not very proud of it, but I thought this was not a good way to get rid of a president, you know, and there were a lot more important things to be… Well, I don’t know, the exploitation of a human being is important, but there were big policy questions and so forth. So I was one of the people saying, why are we spending all of this time? And so I endeared myself to the Clinton White House. And at the end I got invited to a big White House dinner where I was at Bill Clinton’s table. And Hillary Clinton, as I was going through the receiving line, said, you know, a Marine announces your name. She said, oh, Robert Scheer, my favorite columnist in America, no, in the world. You know, and Bill Clinton said, oh, you didn’t answer my last letter and so forth. So I know how the game is played. Yeah. If you’re a rebel, you can, you know, have your taxes audited. You know, God knows what else they’ll do to you. And if you, you know, happen to be the flavor of the month and endorse them, you know, you can be well received, you know, and it’s made clear at every turn in your career. Everyone’s career, you know, and for instance, the Pat Tillman case and Kevin Tillman, his brother, who, you know, had the same noble motives and joined up to save and protect the country. You know, you can give these people jobs or you can destroy them. But it’s that simple and it’s kind of, you know, maybe it’s a good way to sort of wrap this up, I sometimes think, where are we headed in terms of a dystopian future? Because things look pretty depressing. And so I teach actually using Orwell and Huxley, comparing, you know, Brave New World and 1984’s two views. And what we seem to have going on now is a mixture of the two that, you know, if we can do it without violence and the overt symbols of totalitarianism, the club, you know, breaking down the doors and everything and with surveillance, you don’t really have to break down doors. You can enter people’s space without even knowing it, or you can seduce them, which is what Huxley was all about. And right now, we seem to have a mix of the two that is quite effective. You know, I mean, there’s what we’re doing to… We… What’s being done to Julian Assange is incredibly brutal. You know, he’s not even a US citizen. He hasn’t been convicted of anything, you know, and yet you got him under harsh confinement and you know, in England and you mention all these other cases. And, you know, John Kiriakou was a guy who dared to talk about torture and, you know, had everything taken away, his benefits and all that. You know, he had actually captured what was supposed to be the highest member of Al-Qaeda at one point, you know, really was out there in the field, Afghanistan and elsewhere. So, you know, we’re up against a really very sophisticated process of totalitarianism that can blend in different flavors and different strokes. At the core of it is individual corruption, careerism at the core of it. And, you know, and then you can rationalize that, oh, I’ll be able to help my great grandchildren and I’ll, you know… Right? And then and then people like you speak out. You have the burden of failing your community? Did you fail your family? Did you bring it upon yourself? So why don’t we just mean, we’ve gone much longer than expected to and maybe we could break this in two parts. Probably not. So let’s just sort of wrap this up, though, really what… You know, I want to remind people, you are somebody who paid your dues. You were there, right? Ten years in the Marines, right? 

Hoh: 

Yeah, a total of 10 years. Yeah. 

Scheer: 

Yeah. And then you are in the government in Afghanistan and everything and, you know, and and then you even get it together to run for the Senate in North Carolina as a Green Party candidate, try to work within the system. You’re not throwing bombs somewhere you know? You’re actually trying to make the thing work. And I was struck by your campaign because I knew nothing about it. Frankly, I knew nothing about it. And, you know, one of the people that works with me on this, you know, a former student of mine, he said, you know, why don’t you get this guy on? I just saw something he did, you know, and I really had not followed your campaign. I have to be honest about it. You know, I didn’t have information, I had to go do some research and everything. And why is that exemplary behavior? Here’s a guy who has had real life experience within American policy. He’s paid his dues. You know, he’s been out there in combat and everything. And so why isn’t it wonderful that he now takes his message to the voters and at a time when, I have to repeat this, not one single elected Democrat in the Congress has spoken out against the big military budgets that are going on, the use of, you know, very advanced weaponry to provoke, I don’t know, World War 3, nuclear war is off the stage. Global warming is off the stage. Everything is no, we’re finally got another good war. They’re always good wars until they’re not good wars. You know, remember Shock and Awe worked in Iraq. Right. Was going to be another good war. And knew. And we’re here now. Correct me if I’m wrong. I find this one of the most dangerous moments. I’m 86 years old. I’ve been doing this for over 60 years. You know, I’ve been in a number of battle zones or tension areas. I was at the end of the Six-Day War in Egypt, Israel. I was, you know, in Cambodia before and after the massacres and Vietnam and I was in Cuba, you know, before and after the missile. I’ve been around the block a lot. And there was always a kind of peace movement. There were always people, whether it was Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre, whether you know what the neutralists in Olof Palme in Sweden, Nehru in India. There were always people speaking out. Now there is not a semblance of a peace movement. You know, I mean, nothing. You know, I remember in the Vietnam War, you had some Democrats and Republicans speak out about it, you know, quite boldly, you know, in the Congress, you know, now nothing. And somebody like yourself who speaks out and you have this rich experience can be totally ignored. It’s all about manners or something. 

Hoh:

Well, yeah. I mean, you don’t want to be offensive. I mean, the simple truth of it is corruption. I mean, institutional and personal corruption is not just the military in foreign policy. It’s in banking and finance. I mean, any one of you explain our economic system, our financial and monetary system, too. And, you know, it’s a casino that’s, you know, where… And, you know, the whole aspect of it, no one flinches from that. I mean, our health care system, no one flinches from that. Our system of how we are, agriculture, all these things, it’s all corrupt. And the media is no exception. The media is maybe the most prominent case where it is corrupt. You think of something like MSNBC, where you could just go through a litany of MSNBC anchors who have either been fired or forced to resign or, you know, never made it on the air. I mean, because of their kind of truth telling, whether it be Phil Donahue or Jesse Ventura, Cenk Uygur or Dylan Ratigan, Krystal Ball. I mean, I know there’s a few others as well. All of the last 20 years have been prominent people on, you know, the major left wing news outlet who have left and have said this is corrupt, this is wrong, you know, and there is no backlash to that. This channel just gets more popular and further they further entrench themselves into kind of identitarian politics. We are the Fox News of the Blue Party, you know. I mean, but it’s that corruption that is just undeniable. Everyone sees it again. Public opinion polls show this. Who’s talking about this, you know, a little while before, 70, almost 70% of Americans think that government corruption is the biggest problem and they’re not talking about, the Times was very clear in that when they talk about that poll to make it, this is not about January 6 or Mar-a-Lago or anything like that. This is about overall how Americans feel in general about their government. So this is well known. It’s appreciated. But corruption is such that as long as you have… I think that corruption is all the money, right? And so as long as you have personalities who are willing to personally be corrupt, personally go along to get along, do all the things we’re talking about, whatever industry or field that they are in, the money will be there to sustain them. And of course, what we’re rushing towards now is the possibility of nuclear war, you know, where billions can die tonight. I mean, you think about that. That’s something that really always stops me, is this notion that billions can die tonight, billions. That’s not academic, that’s not theoretical, that’s the reality. And more likely, a smaller scale nuclear war, 100 nuclear weapons go off while 3 to 4 billion of us die over the next five years. We get to watch our children starve to death because of the consequences of nuclear winter. And then there’s also the climate change, the climate crisis that exists. So we have these two existential threats that are standing in front of us as if they were in this room with me or with you that are that real. And yet we go on as if there is nothing wrong, as if it’s okay, as if something is going to come and rescue us and no one is coming to rescue us is going to be no deus ex machina here like we are in something that is existential. I mean, you can’t use any other word than that. And the corruption of it all allows us, as a society, to keep walking along, expecting things to get better. And I agree, we’re in a very, very dangerous place. As my friend George says, it’s perpetually 2020. We can either die 20 minutes from nuclear war or in 20 years from climate change. 

Scheer:

So we’re going to end this now, but I would like to invite you back after you and I, I have not looked at the Jon Stewart, the cultural hero, I guess, who sought to be a center of virtue from his earlier stuff and his discussion with Hillary Clinton and Condoleezza Rice, two human beings who had a lot to do with the direction of America during this period in which you saw active duty, service and work in government on different levels. And I would like to take that as a case study of whether we have adults watching to store. These are two well-educated people. As I said, I was a fellow with Condoleezza Rice in the arms control center at Stanford for a while. And I’ve had encounters with Hillary Clinton that were quite friendly. So, you know, respectful. And I would like to really talk about that interview from the description I’ve heard of it, again getting basically to your question of who’s in charge and can you count on them to be responsible? I mean, if you take your child over to a daycare center, you want to know who’s in charge. That’s your country. That’s your future, your history. Who are these people? And I think you’ve had an interesting vantage point. So let’s put it this way, we’ve gone further than I usually go, but I think it’s a really important discussion and I would like to continue it. And in that future discussion, talk about your fellow whistle blowers, because I really think this is what the big glaring omission in our discussion. Why don’t we honor people who speak out, even if you disagree with what they’re saying, if they speak out and they’re coming from a place of having inside information and known for. Why wouldn’t you and certainly people in the media, why wouldn’t you treat that as: okay, let’s hear what you’re saying. And, you know, just to remind people, Matthew Hoh has been there. He’s paid with his service, his duty, and he’s tried to make it better and he’s dishonored for it if by no other reason, when I say dishonored, I just mean to ignore a candidate for the U.S. Senate who is actually the only or how many were there that actually raised these fundamental issues of war and peace and social justice and so forth. In this campaign, you were one of the rare voices, so rare that I didn’t even know you were running during most of it, frankly, and I think of myself as a pretty informed person. So, you know, I’ve put that on myself. Okay. That’s it for this discussion. We’ll be back. I want to thank Laura Kondourajian and Christopher Ho at KCRW, the NPR station that posts these podcasts. Joshua Scheer, our executive producer and the JKW Foundation in the memory of a very independent, strong writer, Jean Stein, who supplied us with some funding to help do these broadcasts and see everyone next week with another edition of Scheer Intelligence.

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