In this latest episode of the Scheer Intelligence podcast, host Robert Scheer welcomes recurring guest Ray McGovern. McGovern, a former CIA analyst, reflects on his Cold War-era experience, contrasting past apolitical intelligence with today’s politicized and misleading assessments, particularly on Iraq, Ukraine, and Russia-China relations. The two also discuss U.S. foreign policy, including Trump and Biden’s approaches that lack strategic foresight. This includes Gaza, where Trump’s plans for a U.S. takeover and subservience to Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel follows a repeated pattern of U.S. policy.
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This transcript was produced by an automated transcription service. Please refer to the audio interview to ensure accuracy.
Robert Scheer: Hey, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of Scheer Intelligence. And this is a whole new chapter after just about– just short of 10 years doing this for KCRW, the NPR station in Santa Monica. That came to an end in this era of Trump, you can talk about all kinds of factors in relation to media.
But I remember… I followed a principle for the longest time in my career at the LA Times, at Ramparts Magazine. I wrote for Esquire, I wrote for Playboy, I wrote for a lot of people, did a lot of stuff. Then even did Good Morning America there for a while. And I remember something that New Yorker media critic A.J. Liebling said. He said, “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.”
And you know, this time around, I, with the help of my wife, we set up ScheerPost. This is after, you know, well, other ventures. And, you know, for better or worse, you got to pay bills. But, you know, we do own it. We get some support, a lot of support from readers.
So ScheerPost will be the new host for Scheer Intelligence, which makes perfect sense. And everything else remains the same, except I’m no longer locked into just showing up on Friday in a podcast on NPR. I can do them as often as I want.
And so let me, for the people who follow this on some kind of regular basis, let me just say, I want to be more on top of the news. There’s a lot of news and I can’t sleep at night. I might as well get up and as soon as somebody I know in some other time zone gets up that I want to talk to, I can talk to them and find out what the hell is going on!
Which is what I’m going to do with our guest today, Ray McGovern. And Ray McGovern I’ve known for a long time. Actually, we were in an adversarial situation. I didn’t know him personally, but he was, you know, we both come out of the Bronx. He went to Fordham. I went to City College, they have a great school there.
I won’t speak about Fordham, it’s okay. The Jesuits do a good job. But anyway, Ray went into the CIA. I went into, first graduate school at Berkeley and did a stint there with Chinese studies and other things in economics. And then I went into alternative journalism for a while and then I even went into establishment journalism at the LA Times for almost 30 years, 29 years and so forth.
But during this time, not only did our paths… our paths didn’t cross, they converged. They converged. And I consider Ray, it’s an honor to be able to talk to him on a regular basis. We’ve worked it out that he’s now going to talk to me every Tuesday. It’s going to be Tuesday with Ray, right?
And so check in on what’s going on in the world and I have questions for him… But just for people, everybody should know who Ray McGovern is. But he was with the CIA for 27 years. Before that, he was also in service in the military. And during that time, he rose to be head of the whole Russia desk, Soviet desk in those days. And he briefed three presidents, Richard Nixon, Joe Ford, Nixon had a step down, and Ronald Reagan.
Now, back in the old days, one would have thought that’s a pretty fierce crowd, you know, and there were a lot of liberal people I hung out with, know, “Hey, Nixon, man, he’s terrible.” And then here’s Reagan. What’s he doing?
Well, those guys look like saintly moderates or something by comparison. So why don’t we just begin this new series that we’re doing? And as I say, there’ll be other people like Ray McGovern, John Kuriaku, Ben Norton said, he’ll come on once from over in China can be reporting on what’s going there.
And lots of other folks that write for ScheerPost and other publications. So I’m looking forward to this. But Ray, what the hell is going on? Would you take it from there? And we’re here for a better part of a half hour. So tell me what’s going on, whether it’s about Gaza, right now, the CIA, what have you.
Ray McGovern: Sure, Bob, and thanks for having me. I guess I would start out by disabusing anyone of the notion that since I worked on the president’s daily brief under Nixon, Ford, and Reagan, that I was some sort of Republican type appointee to do that job. Back in those days, believe it or not, we were extremely apolitical.
It was a feature of providence or coincidence that I was free when, unusually, it happened that we ended up briefing President Reagan and his chief national security associates one on one. That was an accident of history. Now with Nixon and Ford, we sent the president’s daily brief down with a courier. It was pristine, pure. was excellent.
And it was hardly ever read by Nixon or Ford because Henry Kissinger would take it and say, “Well, that’s ridiculous.” Henry Kissinger, of course, knew everything. So to the degree, he read something, put some marginalia and gave it to Nixon. That didn’t happen. That didn’t happen with Reagan. Why? Well, it’s a story. Maybe I’ll tell you.
When he became candidate, Republican candidate for presidency, two of my colleagues with great enterprise had little IDs made, “CIA briefer” and appeared on the Pacific Palisades unannounced one morning at seven o’clock.
“Secret service.” “Who are you?” “CIA briefers.” “We don’t have any word about this.” “CIA briefer…” “What were you?” It went on for about two minutes then. Reagan comes down the steps in his bathrobe. “What’s going on here?” “CIA briefers.” “Well, come on in.” And they got in.
This was very, very good substantive people who would tell it like it was. They were my associates, one step higher than I at the time.
Now, Reagan liked that so much. These people rotated one week, one week. And when he got to Washington, George Bush– George H. W. Bush, his vice president, who knew all about this briefing, said to the president, “Now Mr. President…”
Scheer: Well, you should explain he was head of the CIA.
McGovern: Well, he had been head of the CIA in mid 70s, right?
Scheer: Yeah.
McGovern: But now he was vice president, right? OK, 1981. Whoa. OK, so he goes to President Reagan, says, “President Reagan, now that we’re in Washington, how do you want to handle these presidents’ daily briefs? I know one on one is perfect because they can answer your questions. I really, it was impossible for me to be, could I be briefed the same way? And I think maybe Secretary of State.”
And Reagan said, “Yeah, great idea. Great idea. Here’s what we do. Eight o’clock” — was really great when I was a candidate — “I think maybe you all should get this treatment one-on-one from the PDB briefers about, you know, as early in the morning as you want. And then why don’t we meet at 11:30 and we could talk about what they told you and what we should discuss or what we should decide.”
George H.W. said, “You got it.” And he helped us arrange these one-on-one briefings. I was on a team, there were two of us, we would alternate one day to the other. And any combination, depending on who was in town; vice president, secretary of defense, secretary of state, the national security advisors, and later we added the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff— Jack Fessy was a triff guy.
So on any given day, I would be briefing some assortment of these people. And then they would know what each other were being told by the CIA. They would see the president at 11:30. It worked beautifully. Very seldom did I see the president himself, but this was almost better because they had a chance to worry about Schultz worrying about what Weingerberger was going to say. Weinberger worried about what was said by Schultz. So it was really neat.
And I was a Russian expert. That’s my whole field since 1963, if you can believe it. And so I was able to tell them what I thought of Mikhail Gorbachev when he came into the fore. And I could give them the real deal about what real Russian analysts felt, namely that he was the real deal.
He was not just a clever commie as our nominal boss, Bill Casey, and his surrogate, Bobby Gates, kept telling everyone who would listen. So it was the best duty ever. Four years, 1981 to 1985, one went on to other fields. Now, why I say all that is because it was the last time, in my experience, that the PDB briefers had that kind of access one-on-one. We were all senior people. We all had been around for a while.
And we’re all dependable on telling the truth because our bridge chief, fellow named Chuck Peters, saw to it that we did precisely that. And we didn’t spew the party line from Casey and Gates about this Communist Party, the Soviet Union, never, ever, ever giving up power without a struggle. Got Butch off being just a clever commie, all that kind of stuff. So it was really heady experience.
I lasted for a few more years until I could retire, take early retirement, reduced annuity, but at least at age 50, I could get enough money to pay for the 40 semesters of college that my kids incurred. And I could make a decent living if I got a job, a nonprofit job in the inner city, which is what I did.
Then I saw my former colleagues, people I worked with had been corrupted to the point of manufacturing intelligence to justify a war against Iraq. It was clear to us what was going on. We established a little group called Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity because there wasn’t a lot of sanity going on in Washington in those days.
And to our credit, I don’t mind saying, three memos before the attack on Iraq warned President Bush, in chapter and verse, that he was doing the wrong thing because there was no damn evidence that Iraq was either having weapons of mass destruction or that it had ties, some kinds of ties with Al-Qaeda.
Those were two blooming lies and we told the president that, but of course, we had assumed the president didn’t know that, but of course he probably knew that all along. So that’s how we became honorable dissidents.
And if you fast forward now to the four memos that we wrote to President Biden about Ukraine, you can see that we have kept our integrity in that they are 180 degrees away from what he was being told by the head of the CIA and the national intelligence director.
Namely, as they told him, they told him in July of 2023, Putin has already lost. His army has been discredited for the whole world to see. July, 2023. December, 2022, the head of National Intelligence telling everyone, including the director, “We got it made. Russia is running out of ammunition and Russia has no indigenous capability to construct, to produce the kinds of weaponry that they’re leaving on the field as those clever Ukrainians are taking the charge.”
Give me a break. That’s what’s happened to the intelligence community. Is there some prospective change? Now there is, it’s a long shot, but if Tulsi Gabbard becomes confirmed as well as nominated, and that decision should come down this week, I think, then there’s a chance that Trump, who presumably knew that Tulsi would speak her mind, will be counseled in a way that helped him avoid the kinds of stupid stuff that went on under Bill Burns, under Averill Haynes, director of national intelligence, and the rest of them.
So there’s a little peroration of where it comes from and why I’m so damn mad about what has happened to the intelligence community. We could talk more about substance if you like, because this has been one hell of the last 10 days, as you know, Bob, with the president telling these phantasmagoric stories about he taking over and owning the Gaza Strip and making sure that it’s rebuilt to be a really nice Mediterranean Riviera.
And as far as the Palestinians, well… Well, who cares about…
Scheer: Let me cut you off there a little bit, even though I promise to talk much less in this iteration of Scheer Intelligence. But for people who don’t really know this history, we have to remind people you were there during a very critical time and it pertains very directly to considering what Trump is up to and so forth.
Because the irony, first of all, is we were obsessed, not with Chinese communism, but really with Russian leadership of an international communist movement. And by the time you were briefing the Sino-Soviet dispute, the dispute between Chinese communists and Russian communists was very pronounced.
It had been there even before the Chinese were in power when they were still fighting Chiang Kai-shek. But the reality was that communism didn’t turn out to be a solid, monolithic, international conspiracy, but there weren’t two communist governments in the world that could get along or didn’t have serious differences that began with Tito and Yugoslavia.
But even right now, there’s tension between communist Vietnam— which we fought a war and lots of people died… 59,000 Americans and estimates of what, five million? Certainly at least four, well, McNamara once had three and a half million, but that’s before he stepped down, you know, five million Indo-Chinese people in Laos and Cambodia and Vietnam.
And ironically, now the US wants and, hardliners in our society, want to get China and they bring up communism occasionally. But the real problem is the Chinese are better capitalists and they want Apple and others to shift their products, productivity to Vietnam which is still a communist country.
And there’s tension between Vietnam and China. They’re still fighting about some islands that they have always fought, you know, and they have a thousand years of tension as well as friendship. On the other hand, Russia, that you were an expert on, that’s why I keep bringing up the Soviet Union, is deliberately a non-communist country. Putin, you know, had been, yes, and a colonel in the KGB, you know what, but nonetheless, he broke, and he was one of the early ones to break before Gorbachev actually.
And he was, well, when Yeltsin came in, and he was picked by the US when Yeltsin was a hopeless drunk to be the one to save and defeat the return of the communists in an election. And he did, he won, but now Putin is supposed to be the bad guy, but ironically… And it takes us back, the war, basically the Cold War really started to end and ended when Nixon went and met with Mao Zedong, the baddest communist of them all, the leader of the communist China.
But you have another sort of contradiction here is that the Democrats were smearing Trump. You know, this is hard for me to say a positive word about Trump, but the fact is he was smeared as being a Putin agent and having the, you know, totally, literally in bed with some Russian communists.
And so at least, he is in a more critical mood to accept the return to sort of simplistic Cold War thinking. And ironically, now even in relation to China, he seems to be picking more of a fight with Canada and then Mexico than with China or Russia. So in that sense, we are in different times, strange times. I don’t want to minimize them. They’re really quite frightening and so forth.
And then you brought up Gaza. And now Gaza is a problem issue that carried through every administration. Just as immigration, by the way, the other, you know, alarm here. And none of them dealt with it successfully. At first it looked like maybe Trump would be doing something. At least there was a ceasefire.
Now he’s embraced Netanyahu. So why don’t you, since you brought it up, maybe you could talk a little bit about it.
McGovern: Sure, Bob. I’d like to go back to some of the first things you said, because there’s one tectonic shift in the correlation of forces internationally that dwarfs everything else that has happened during my lifetime. And as you know, that’s 85 years…
Scheer: A child. A kid, a kid!
McGovern: That shift is simply that Russia and China have formed an alliance that has no end. They do not characterize it as a mutual defense agreement, but as everything short of that. The tectonic shift is that they hold all the cards now. The US, which used to be at the equal arm of this triangle, now it’s not equilateral any longer, it is isosceles, if you remember your geometry.
And the US is at the very short end of the stick. The problem is Biden’s advisors didn’t have a clue that was the case. Biden advisors thought that they could play China off against Russia when it was Biden’s advisors and Bajau himself who forced these people to come together and then that could be separated anytime soon.
Which for me, quite ironically, is 180 degrees away from the way when I came in in 199— when I came in in 1963 as a Soviet analyst, my portfolio was Sino-Soviet relations. And in those days, as you mentioned, we had great difficulty persuading people that the Sino-Soviet rift, the conflict, the aggression was very real.
And it took us a long time to persuade people that it was real. And one of the things that I tend to look back on with great pleasure is that when Kissinger and Nixon came to us and said, “Okay, you’ve been following the SALT negotiations, Strategic Arms Limitation negotiations.” “Yes, they’re there in Helsinki and they’re in Vienna. And we have one of our analysts with those teams and, you know, watch it closely.”
“Okay. You think the Russians are serious?” “Yes, we think they’re serious.” “Why?” “Well, number one, they don’t want to get into a spending contest with the U.S. They don’t want to drain all the resources, trying to contend with ABMs and ICBMs and all that stuff. But number two, they’re afraid. They’re afraid that China is going to steal a march on us in developing cordial relations with the US.”
Now, we told Kissinger and Nixon that. Next thing you know, we didn’t even know it. Kissinger had gone to China, set up this visit for Nixon in January of 1972, and the Russians bent.
I was branch chief of Soviet foreign policy, okay? First things the Russians did was come to an agreement on Berlin, four-part tight agreement on Berlin. My God, they had never done that before, but they showed new flexibility. There were several signs of that. Why? We thought it was because the Russians didn’t want the Chinese to steal a march on them.
And so when we came to Moscow and I was there in May of 1972, and Kissinger came to us and says, “Look, we’ve got a deal going. You said they’re interested. It looks like they are, but it’s a matter of doveryai, no proveryai.” Okay? Trust, but verify. Now Kissinger of course used English words. He says, “Now can you verify if we trust? Are the Soviets gonna, are they gonna cheat?”
And I said, “Don’t know, probably.” “Well, how soon will he be able to tell us that they’re cheating?”
Well, I went back to all the folks that run the satellites and all the other technical means and I said, “How long?’ And they said, “Maybe a week, 12 days.” I went back and Kissinger said, “That’s enough. Now, sign that agreement.”
It was the stable factor in US-Russia relations and in world strategic relations for 30 years until Junior Bush got out of it for unexplained reasons. Why do I mention all that? I mention all that because the CIA and some parts of the Defense Department were able to make this agreement possible because they could verify it. And that’s the key.
It was also true back in 20… just before 2019, just before Trump left office, when he got out of the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Agreement. Now that had been in place since Gavrilochev and Reagan agreed on it in 1987. Okay, so that had been 32 years in existence. And what did that involve?
That involved destroying intermediate range nuclear missiles in Europe and in the USSR, destroying them in place, the nuclear warheads as well. And my friend, Scott Ritter, was the first inspector on the scene to doveryai, no proveryai. Trust would verify they did it against all kinds of opposition. So what I’m saying here is that to the degree, honesty prevailed.
And we were able to tell the president that, the Russians are interested in doing a deal here, but it has to be verifiable. Okay? That was a big service that we performed. And lately there’s only one other like it that I can cite, but I won’t bore you with that right now, unless you’re interested.
And now the CIA and the defense department and the people who are asking for information are really not interested in old facts. They’re interested in how we can play this in a PR way and how we can weaken Russia, which is a fool’s errand. What we’ve done over the last decade is strengthen Russia. And it’s not all to, not all the blame for that, if you will, should be placed on Putin… but our advisors to our presidents.
Scheer: Well, there’s something going on which Trump hinted at or talked about that there are active negotiations with Putin. You know, maybe, I mean, desperation, I’m trying to look for some bright spot of what’s going on. I mean, at least, you know, after all, Trump did go to North Korea with the face of quite a bit of opposition, he wasn’t able to pull off the deal, but at least that was an incredible start.
And if one believes at all in negotiation and trying to avoid war, which unfortunately that thread seems to have been lost in American politics, if they could make a deal on getting more control over these nuclear weapons, that would be a big deal. You think that’s possible or?
McGovern: It is possible and the start agreement in draft or at least the start agreement is due to expire in a year. Now, most technical people say that’s not enough time to update it to current realities. I think it is. There are all kinds of ways to address what can be addressed now and postpone other things for another couple of years.
But the Russians have made it clear that they’re not going to continue with the start provisions, which include having inspectors come and look into what the Soviet, Russian ICBMs are like and vice versa.
They’re not going to do that when the U.S. says that they’re at war with Russia, that they’re going to weaken Russia, and that when they’re, as the Russians say, they’re hosing, they’re flooding Ukraine with weaponry. Now that’s going to stop. That’s the good news, in my view.
The Biden supplemental of all kinds, they’re all running out in the next month or two. It seems to me pretty clear that Trump was not going to ask Congress to throw more good money after bad. What does that mean? Well, it means bad news for Ukraine, of course. Worse than that for Ukraine. Trump has said this, and most people don’t know this because our press is very, well, not very good.
Trump has said this, “You know, I can understand why Putin wouldn’t like a nation armed to the teeth like Ukraine joining NATO, which is the block against Russia and wants to weaken… I can understand that. Whoa. Well, that’s 80 % of the problem for God’s sake. If Trump can understand that, then he will know what Russia did, what it did in February of 2022 and come to terms.
The only problem is that Putin has four aces in his hand. Trump got a pair of deuces. Now, if Trump can understand that, there’s still leeway for the agreement, in my view. Others say no room for agreement.
Scheer: Yeah, you know, we’re assuming we have rational poker players here and that they’re using their own money, you know, their own livelihood and they don’t want to be losers or winners. And foreign policy has rarely been a rational exercise, certainly not in the Cold War period. But I want to keep these things short.
You know, it just seems that we’re bizarrely disinterested in this possibility of nuclear war that under every other president up until, you know, quite recently, that was the major concern. You know, now, you don’t have to act like a madman. Both Biden and Trump have acted like madmen in terms of their indifference to the destruction of life on this planet through, you know, confrontation with nuclear power and so forth.
But we have just a few minutes left. I, you know, the wonderful thing now that I don’t have– I’m not just having these things to do one weekly. I can get back to you. But what’s your concern about high noon on this Saturday in relation to Gaza? Let’s end with that.
McGovern: Well, on Gaza, it’s high drama. There’s a chance, I suppose, that Hamas will give in and say, “Okay, here are the hostages.” I don’t think that’s going to happen. So we’ll see if they call the bluff of not only Trump, but Netanyahu, who has also said the same thing just today, namely that all…
Scheer: Today being Tuesday, I guess I’ll post this today. Yeah, okay.
McGovern: Yeah, this is Tuesday. So Saturday, high noon, know, Gary Cooper walking down, you know.
Scheer: Okay, but cut to the chase there. You’re suggesting Trump can be rational dealing with Putin and trying to end that war with Ukraine as well. And he did promise no more wars, but it seems in the case of Israel, and I know you followed that very closely, he’s just gonna give Netanyahu a blank check and not be able to pull off or even make…
I mean, at first his advisory sent there, his fellow real estate expert seemed to be able to tell Netanyahu that, you got to step down. But that doesn’t seem to be true right now.
McGovern: Yeah, that was theater. Okay. That was to show that Trump could do what Biden couldn’t do. Now it’s much more serious. Now it comes down to the existential policy. And the question was, of course, whether Trump has Netanyahu strongly under his thumb or vice versa the other way around.
And I was arguing from the outset that no, no, Trump has given this crazy scheme about Gaza as a special chip for Netanyahu to brag about how firmly that the US is supporting Israel. And that more important, facts on the ground, Trump has asked Congress for seven to eight billion. Billion with a B, okay!? Of supplemental aid, arms aid, bunker buster bombs for Israel to use in Gaza.
So it’s going to start, I think it will start Saturday evening or time…. start again. And the objective — my friends, let’s face facts — the objective is to extinguish those Palestinians who still want to live in Gaza, their homeland.
Scheer: Well, that’s a stark warning. But you think that you don’t think this is bluffing or pushing the deal. Why? You don’t think that just Trump playing the mad man or something that this is…
McGovern: No, I think this is… What Netanyahu said in 2001 in a video session with some folks, some supporters that he didn’t know was being videoed. He said, I quote, “You know, the Americans will always do what we want them to do. It is absurd.” His word! Well, it is absurd.
And as long as Trump is firmly in Netanyahu’s camp, it’s equally absurd. So I don’t look for any difference here. And the proof is in the pudding, the pudding being those $7 to $8 billion more of weaponry. Now, I was asked in a recent interview, well, “Wait a second, they destroyed 80 % of Gaza. What else have they got?”
Well, they got bunker buster bombs that explode and emit such a radius of carbon dioxide poison that those people within the tunnels, those people hiding in basements are extinguished as well. So let’s face up to it, folks. Extinguishing the Palestinians is the name of the game. Now, if they can get some of them out to a neighboring land, that’s fine.
But if the Palestinians are totally extinguished over the next three years, let’s say, it won’t be our fault. It will be blamed on those Arab countries in the neighborhood who refuse to take them because that’s our real estate. We’re going to own it. God, God help us.
Scheer: Okay. And everybody else in the world will go along with it? Including these Arab leaders, so-called.
McGovern: Well, there’s one group called the Houthis, Ansar Allah, okay? They’re not gonna go along with it. As soon as the ceasefire breaks down, the Red Sea will be not navigable. They will be able to interdict traffic up there. That will be an economic real, real problem for Israel. Whether the US can come up with even more economic as well as military aid to fill in the cracks… It’s another question.
Scheer: So I, unfortunately, I mean, I keep saying I want to keep these under half hour now. Let’s aim for under 40. We’re definitely ending at 40 minutes. When you briefed presidents, you were in Washington. You’ve been there. And for a lot of people, they think Trump is off the rails. This is… they think there are no restraints. There’s no realpolitik. There’s no Kissinger.
There’s even religious fanaticism by people who think this is the end of times and so forth. Maybe Trump himself thinks he was saved by an almighty to wage war and so forth. You’ve been around presidential power. How irrational is it now?
I mean, clearly committing genocide, which is what you’re talking about, eliminating the Palestinian people is a stain— I mean, I don’t know, as a Jewish person, it’s a stain on Israel that you don’t recover from, you know.
I guess the Germans recovered, I don’t know, but at least it required a change of, a radical change of leadership and defeat and so forth. You know, I mean, it seems so beyond any sense of propriety, morality or anything that you just, when you utter the words, it makes my skin crawl. You know, you’re just gonna kill men, women and children or…. everything has been destroyed around them.
And what could be from a realpolitik, from a rational, this is not something one could imagine, Nixon or Reagan or Ford or anybody else that when you were in the CIA that you folks were giving— I mean, I can’t even imagine anyone in the CIA would go along with that or wanna go along with that. So what is going on? Are we in the hands of a mad man?
McGovern: Bob, I was trying to think of a word, an adjective to describe Trump’s recent actions. Phantasmagoric comes to mind. I said to myself, is that a word? And I looked it up. It is a word. Look it up yourselves. He is deranged in a sense. He’s also a sociopath. He doesn’t give a rat’s patootie of what happens to people. Okay?
So that’s what we’re faced with now. And in my years watching presidents very, very closely, starting in January, 1963, I have never seen the like of it. Question is, is there someone to rein him in? Will the deep state rein him in? Not much chance of that, even if Tulsi Gabbard and Kash Patel get confirmed. So what is it up to?
Well, those of us who look on what’s happening! And this is distinctive about these years, we have iPhones, we have photos, we have videos of what’s happening every day in Gaza. And when, on one recent interview, the moderator played a little clip from, from Trump in his plane, Air Force One saying, “My God, look at those, look at those emaciated prisoners of— that Israel had in there. But then the Hamas, treat– they looked like they hadn’t eaten for a month.” And I couldn’t stop and said, “Hey, let the freaking trucks in for God’s sake. Nobody’s eaten for a month in Gaza.” So… sociopath? Trump doesn’t give a rat’s patootie about any of these people, and neither does Netanyahu. Okay?
So, who’s it up to? It’s up to us because we have the videos, we have the pictures. We know that nobody’s going to step up to represent us. The churches? The synagogue?! Give me a break. The churches are just as silent as they were 1933 up until 1945. They cannot find their voice, even among genocide. So it’s up to us. Now, are there enough of us?
Yes, there are enough of us, but we’ve got to get off our rear ends and into the fray and put our bodies into it. And a special appeal to those who look like me or Bob with this kind of hair. Americans don’t like old people getting beat up. Little young people have it coming to them. Yeah. They’re rowdies. You know, but old people like us? They don’t like it. Okay. So you’re not going to get killed. You probably won’t even break a bone.
But, if you get beat up for standing for justice, America is going to care about it. Go out and stand where you need to stand and make sure that somebody is speaking for those poor people who are being extinguished as a people. And the name for that, is genocide.
Scheer: So we promised some cheer, but at least there’s a perspective. And let’s see what happens. We’ll be checking back with you, Ray. That’s it for this edition of Scheer Intelligence, now hosted at ScheerPost.com and available wherever you can listen to podcasts. We’ll try to get it out as far and wide as we can.
I want to thank Joshua Scheer, our executive producer. The whole archives, and Josh is working on that now, that we had with KCRW at the NPR Station in Santa Monica. There’s an agreement that they’ll be transferred to ScheerPost so they won’t be lost. It’s always a concern, but it’s 10 years of work, so we’ll assume that it’s gonna happen. Diego Ramos, who writes the introduction and is our managing editor ScheerPost. Max Jones who does the video.
I want to thank the JKW Foundation in the memory of Jean Stein, a fiercely, wonderfully independent writer from a very prominent Jewish family who cared about Palestinians, as well as all other people on this planet, for giving us some funding to help us keep going.
And I want to thank Integrity Media and Len Goodman also from a very prominent Jewish family also for supporting these shows because as almost all the Jewish people I know were very upset about what’s going on in the world and certainly found this alliance, renewal of alliance between Netanyahu and Donald Trump to be really unnerving.
And I hope these last words you uttered never come to pass because this is on us, all of us. So on that note, see you and we’ll keep checking with you every week. Ray, more often than we have to, and others and we’ll see everybody next time we’re up. But this will go up right away.
McGovern: Thank you, Bob.
