YouSaid · the spoken record

Scott Horton

lines on the record: 802
first: 2025-08-24
most recent: 2025-08-24
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Really hoping in August, maybe not. So you can watch, first of all, this awesome video by Dan Smotts, who's the most talented video editor in the world, but then also just enter your email address. Then you'll be the first to know when we go live and launch the Scott Horton Academy.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A hell of a thing, man. And we got a bunch of great guys doing really great work to put this thing together. So that's at Scott HortonAcademy.com.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Regular writer with us, a regular contributor at antiwar.com, good friend of mine, wonderful man. Then we also have William Bupert on how he's an Army infantry officer and expert on debunking the bankrupt counterinsurgency doctrine of David Betraeus and James Mattis. They call it coin in Afghanistan and Iraq. He debunks all that and is from the chasing ghosts podcast and he's going to do a course on how America lost every war since nineteen forty five. And then the great historian Dangerous History CJ Kilmer is going to be doing a course on how Woodrow Wilson is the worst person who ever lived because of course he is the father of Lenin and Stalin and Stalin and Hitler and World War II and for that matter the American Empire to contain communism after it was all over to. And so it's going to be”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thank you very much, Lux. As long as here I'll say one more thing, which is if you've ever heard of the Great Libertarian Tom Woods from the Mises Institute and the Libertarian Institute. He has something called Liberty Classroom, where it's him and his professor friends telling you the truth about the things that they were supposed to teach you in school but didn't. Well, he built me my own Liberty Classroom. It's called the Scott Horton Academy of Foreign Policy and Freedom. And if anybody got all the way through this podcast this far, they might be interested to know we plan on going live next month. And it's two huge courses on the Middle East and the Cold War with Russia by me. And then I also have the Great James Beauvard, the most successful and important libertarian journalist in world history, current writer for the New York Post and fellow at the Institute, great author of Brilliant Men, is going to be doing a course on his entire career of investigative journalism. And then we have Ramsey Barud is going to do the story of Israel-Palestine, the great Palestinian refugee in exile, writer of the Palestine Chronicle.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, from the Russian point of view, let's say they take those four oblasts. Well, look at all the people in Dnipro Provost and all the people in Sumi and Kharkiv, who are Russian speakers, who of course the Russian government is going to say need our protection, especially now that they're a smaller minority in the country than before, when their side will never win an election again, a national election again? Going to have to go all the way to the river now. It only makes sense, man. It's a government program. It's a disaster. And it's going to keep getting worse and worse and worse.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is going to constantly be a disruption. Well, what you do is you finish cleansing them into Poland and Romania. You just kick them all the way out and reabsorb the entire place. That is the obvious solution from the Russian point of view. And that's how they fight their wars. They just move very slowly with artillery and wipe out everything in their path until they own it. That's the mess that America has gotten Ukraine in. I don't see how this ends anytime soon or any time that really.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Conflict since the end of the Soviet Union. Well, man, from Crimea we can see Odessa and from Odessa we can see Transnistria and we can really punish those Ukrainians by completely cutting them off from the Black Sea. And then still you have a frozen conflict with a bunch of right wing, radical severely anti Russian grudge holding national socialists. And so now what is anybody going to do with them? You know, that's who the new Ukrainian government is going to be dominated by his people who are far to the right of conservative men. And then what? And then so now put yourself in Putin's point of view. Again, this is a government program. It gets worse and worse and worse. Well, the next option is now that you've created, I'm assuming some things, but still, you created a radical right-wing rump state of Ukraine.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's Naziism, all right. That's exactly what that is. There's no mistaking it for any other thing, and these are the proud grandsons of the Galatian SS and, you know, Stepan Bendera and the UPA and OUN do it before the UPA was OUN, who had served the Nazis in the Holocaust in the Second World War. And these are their proud grandsons and legacies. And this guy Beleski is from, it's called the Patriot of Ukraine, which is a group out of Kharkiv that was, again, descended from these Nazis. And he and his ilk are very likely to be the leaders of the new Ukraine. And so how's Russia supposed to deal with that now? Well, now we've got to go to Odessa, so at least we can take that great and important port city from them. And geez, now we can see Transnistria from here, know that little strip of land that Russia controls on the Moldovan side of the river, on the Moldovan Ukrainian border, that's Russian control land of frozen.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Those days are over. So, who's going to win now? My biggest fear is it's going to be Andrew Beleski, who's the leader of the Azov Battalion, which is now known as the Third Army Corps. It went from the Azov Battalion to the Azov Regiment to the Third Separate Infantry Division. Now it's the Third Army Corps, and Baletsky is the guy, the famous quote I'm sure you've heard about leading the white race against the semite led Unter mention. That's him. And I quote at length that whole speech which I found on Archive. org, you know, the official Azob Battalion website is down, but you can find the Wayback Machine version of it. That whole speech is absolute insane Hilarian lunacy about Aryan values and the nation of Ukraine is a single living organism and every egg and every sperm belongs to the state for the greater glory of the Ukrainian Empire.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it used to be that the people who leaned more or less, people always said Yanukovych was Putin's puppet or whatever is not actually true. It was a separate tangent. But the more or less Russian-leaning guys from the parties in the East, they would win. That's why America had to overthrow the government there twice in ten years in the Orange Revolution and the Maidon Revolution. Well, that's never going to happen again. All of those people are never going to vote in the Ukrainian election again. And who's going to be dominant if they ever do hold elections? It's probably going to be somebody to the right of Zelensky that wins. Remember, Zelensky was brought in because he was Jewish meant he wasn't ethnically Russian. He wasn't ethnically Ukrainian or like culturally whatever the sectarian lee with those he was kind of a third choice and he was from Kharkiv so he wasn't from all the way in the Donbass right but he's still a Russian speaker and ran on peace that was supposed to be his charm right”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so, but anyway, in other words, I'm not trying to oversimplify it and say, oh, yeah, everybody in Dawniesk was just begging for Russia to invade or whatever. Some of them were. Some of them, of course, were not. But anyway, By drawing the line where he has now, he's now taken everyone who could even be potentially pro-Russia out of Ukraine permanently.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think about the map for a minute. Putin just went in there and drew a line around all the pro Russians. Not that everyone who's an ethnic Russian and a Russian speaker in Ukraine wanted to join the Russian Federation, but I'm sure you've seen the election result maps where it goes from dark blue to dark red and a real kind of grayscale fade in between there, where when you get all the way in Donetsk and Luansk, you have people who are, you know, have a lot of intermarriages and mixed families across the borders and very much consider themselves to be Russians, even living inside Ukraine. And I read a study of Ukrainian nationalism that was about how the only Ukrainian nationalists are the Nazis out west. Most Ukrainians really identify with their city more or their region more than really considering themselves overall Ukrainian patriots in that larger nationalist sense, according to some pretty in-depth surveys about all that they had done in the”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The state army has been able to hold. We're recording this thing three and a half years into the war, and the state army still exists. They've still been able to pour arms in there all this time and keep the thing going for now. But as I predicted in that speech, I said, you know, this could be a real Pyrrhic victory for the Russians and Rush's government is a government program, and all they do is fail upwards in their self-licking ice cream going fashion. That's not a speciality about Americans. That's a speciality about the economics of government monopolies on security forces, right? And so”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In vans, beating people up and kidnapping them and throwing them in the back of the van and taking them off to the front to be killed in a few hours miss a horror show over there, man. And I don't know if Ukraine is going to survive because, see, and this is part of my argument, and I said this in my four-hour speech right after the war began, that, and I was assuming then as a lot of people did, that the Russians were going to have a lot more success a lot sooner and that the Ukrainian military would essentially be smashing. They'd be fighting an insurgency here. Which is what that was plan B. Plan A was to warn them, don't you do it. Plan B was we're going to back the Mujahideen. In other words, the Nazis, right sector, and Azov and whatever, because the military will be smashed and Russia will dominate the entire east of the country, at least with the presumption going in by the American side. So we're now on like plan C was actually better than Plan B, right?”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ages have way more artillery and way more time and they can just move very slowly and make sure that actually the defenders die at a much higher rate than they do. And they're not running out of artillery and they're not running out of men. They've not even launched a full-scale mobilization for the war. People know that they're winning and so they're volunteering to go and get some. And they can afford their economy is not crushed. And so they can afford to pay bonuses and have people sign up. And while meanwhile Ukraine's on a conscript army that's had at least tens and some reports say more than a hundred thousand of deserters flee the front lines, refuse to fight. There's been at least hundreds of people have drowned to death in the Denister River on the border with Moldova trying to escape. People oppress gangs riding around.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An airdrop bombs and moved slowly to preserve Russian soldiers' lives and make the other guys die more. Now typically, and this is in some specialized stuff out of my purview, but it's like they say that you'll lose it's three to one disadvantage for the advancing army on a defensive position or whatever. That doesn't hold in all cases. And I think I may even have said that wrong. Somebody tried to correct me on that recently. It's not exactly that way, but the thing is, it's more dangerous, obviously, to move on a defensive position than to remain in one like all other things being equal, I guess. But then...”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They have virtually 100% of Luhansk. They are making major gains in Donetsk, and they're making moves in Dinipro Provost, which is the big, I can never say it right, but that's as good as I could ever get. The oblast between the river and the Donbass there. And of course, there's Sumi and Kharkiv in the north. And all of this is still in danger of being taken. Oh, and I'm sorry, because I never really answered your question right about Trump. Trump's problem is, Lex, that he got just elected and inaugurated at the wrong time for his second term here. And the Russians, they annexed those territories, but they don't control them. Daniel Davis, our tangent here. He explains that this strategy in the war is to bite a war of attrition, to grind up Ukrainian forces with artillery.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He's a wonderful guy. I'm afraid he's got cancer right now, but he's hanging in there and he's just a brilliant analyst of the war. You'd really like him. And he goes day by day by day he shows who's taken how much land. This is why I could only shake my head at Wesley Clark the other day that I'm going, listen, the Russians are ascending on the battlefield, dude. There's no reversing this. Believe harder Come on, man. And he acts like, what are you talking about, Horton? The Russians aren't winning. It's like, yeah, they are, dude. They are. Danny Davis and Willie OM, they're not wrong about that. You know, these reports, this depends, I guess, on who you're reading, and I do see some kind of wishful thinking from people from time to time. But no, Lord, they are losing. Provosk is about the fall.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He's got stars and things, too, man. But the most heroic thing he ever did was quit and tell the truth. Anyway, I trust his analysis of the war better than anybody else. There's another guy I really like named Willie O AM. His name is Matt Williams. He's in Australian veteran of the war in Afghanistan. You'd really like him. He's a brilliant war analyst. He looks at the maps every day and analyzes day by day by day. Oh, see, there's where he interviewed me.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then, as Ho had put it, like, how am I supposed to write a letter home to this guy's wife and say that he died a good death when I know it's not true? And same thing with Davis, like these guys, you know how military guys are. They talk about these are my men. They're mine. And so, what do you do when they're dying for nothing? And so Davis said enough of this and came home and did what he could, told the truth to end the war. And he's a great American patriot, and you're right, he's a brilliant genius too, and he's a brilliant war analyst on all the wars, particularly Ukraine right now. That's his show as Daniel Davis deep dive.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Afghan surge of 2009 through twelve. And then at the end, Davis was the whistleblower who broke ranks testified before the Senate and published an article in the Armed Forces Journal saying that David Betraeus is a liar, and that America has not achieved what Patraus called success because he wouldn't dare call it victory in the war in Afghanistan. And that here's the real truth. And here's how Davis knew is he had a special job, which was arming and equipping all the guys all around the country whatever they needed. His job was to go and give them whatever equipment, so that gave him a special insight into the work because he was going to all areas of the country and see in the guise everywhere that they were. And he said the same thing that Matthew Hoe said. So these boys are getting killed for this.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Least since Iraq War II. Now, I don't know if you know this about Danny Davis. I guess you probably do, but your audience doesn't. He was the heroic whistleblower of the Afghan war in 2012. Do you know that story? So in 2009, there was a former Marine Captain turned State Department employee named Matthew Ho. And he warned Obama not to do the surge. And his boss, the ambassador I can bury, he had been the general in charge of the war previously, and Eichenberry backed up Ho and said, Don't do the surge. That's all Obama needed to hide behind was I can bury in Ho, and he could have said no, and instead he gave in and he ordered the escalation he had already sent forty thousand troops. Then he announced he's sending thirty thousand more for a total of seventy thousand additional troops. The giant horrific failure.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely does. As I mentioned, an eon ago when we began this interview that in Iraq War I It was Colonel McGregor with McMaster and Davis under him that did the Battle of seventy three Easting against the Iraqi Army and whooped the Soviet tanks where they all three come from. McMaster sold his soul to Satan and McGregor and Davis have been Go guy well.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then he was just angry. His men were humiliated on the ground there. And he said, Oh, yeah. Well, I hear Bianics, two more oblasts. Then they passed a law in the Duma and he signed it. I guess it's two houses. He signed a law and said, we've now redrawn the Russian border here. Okay, but now if you look how they're fighting the war, and I'm not a military expert on this, but I know some. And for example, Colonel Douglas McGregor and Lieutenant Colonel Danny Davis, I think Davis is the one I trust the best.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely, and it's been all downhill from there. And the worst thing probably of all is that Putin said, oh, yeah, well, I hereby annex the Prussia and Kurson too. These are the two provinces between the Donbass and the Crimea, and he hadn't claimed them yet, now this is the so called land bridge. Importantly, the Ukrainians gave him a real motive to do this because they had cut off the fresh water. There was a canal from the Nieper River down to Crimea and to collectively punish the people of Crimea. They cut off the water resources there, which they still had enough for drinking water, but they did not have enough for any agriculture or anything else, and it really hurt them a lot. They already had their pretext there to take that territory so they could reopen that channel of fresh water to Crimea.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't have an answer to the second one. I don't know what the hell he's going to do. I'll tell you what. The backstory here is that in September of 22, the weekend of September 11th, in fact, of 22, Ukraine had their best few days. They had a brilliant feint where they started building up forces in Kherson, and they convinced the Russians to move forces to Kherson. Then they made a huge move in Kharkiv and forced all the Russians out of Kharkiv and back into Luhansk. And then they also hit them in Kherson down at the river and kicked them back across the river. And so maintain that one-third of Kerson on the right bank, I guess I'd call it the right.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Our Zionist friend would say that I just blame the Israelis for everything. Well, the only role that the Israelis play in my book is Naftali Bennett, the guy who caused the September 11th attack. It tried to end the war, tried to negotiate in good faith and do shuttle diplomacy between Ukraine and Russia and tried to stop the war right after it started in the spring of 2022. And that's all I have to say about the Israelis' role in any of this part, other than it was their fit column, the neoconservatives in America who really got our policy off this way in the first place. And Robert Kagan's disgusting wife, Victoria Newland, who really was the ringleader behind the overthrow of two thousand fourteen, which was even what Carl Gershman, the head of the NED, called it the overthrow of the government there that they did.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that works on people. Somehow people don't just rebel against that and say, wait a minute, are you calling me stupid or something? Why would you mandate that we call it that in such a way if you weren't lying and covering up for the fact that you provoked it and you know you did, which is clearly the case. That's why they called it that. You know, you could call it an unprovoked attack sometimes. They called it an unprovoked attack a hundred thousand times because the public relations firms decided that this is the lie and this is the best way to stick it to the American people. It's absurd how easily moved the Americans are. Just give us some lies. And by the way,”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Our America put Ukraine in the position of getting their ass by their bigger next door neighbor in this way. That's the lie under the whole thing, the same way that Clinton lied us into Kosovo with the hundred thousand dead Kosovars, Bush with his weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Obama with his impending genocide in Benghazi and Libya. Give me a break. All of these lies. That's the lie of this one. Unprovoked attack, unprovoked attack. It's like white separatist Randy Weaver. You have to say that. You can't just say Randy Weaver. You can't say Randy Weaver, survivor of a boy and a dog and a woman. His wife, who were slaughtered by federal agents. No, you have to call him white separatist Randy Weaver. Well, Russia's attack has to be unprovoked attack. Oh, look at this shiny coin. Unprovoked attack.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And if they put hypersonics there, they could hit Moscow in five minutes, he said it's like a knife to the throat. Now, you don't have to sympathize with the Russians at all. You could hate them and want the Chinese to kill them all for you, I don't know, but you have to admit that these are serious incredible security concerns. This is not a bunch of bluster and a bunch of bluffing and a bunch of ideological, you know, you know, garbage or propaganda. And it's not the nationalist theories of some romantic swept away by visions of lost, glorious past that he wants to regain and all these things, as everyone says. As I said to Pierce Morgan the day before yesterday, that's the weapons of mass destruction of this war. Is that Putin woke up and started this war because of what an aggressor he is? And that there's no backstory that anybody needs to know about how.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If they put ballistic missiles in our Kivy, they could get here in 10. Their new nuclear ballistic missiles that they are making after they have torn up the intermediate nuclear forces treaty of nineteen eighty seven.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“NATO alliance so that if NATO ever fought the Russian Federation, just like Germany and Lithuania and Hungary and Poland and the rest, the Ukrainian army would be one other auxiliary army fighting under United American NATO command. That's what we were doing with them. Without the Article 5 we're guaranteed that we promised to come protect you. But still normalizing and integrating their military force with ours is one standard thing, constantly training with them, changing their equipment, changing their command and control structure, everything to mirror NATO standards. And so It was a legitimate threat. Putin said in his speech when he declared war he said if the investigation Tomahawk cruise missiles in Kharkiv, the Huba Flight Time to Moscow at twenty five minutes.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not our concern, and it's not to say that, oh, yeah, no, it's fine for Russia to invade and kill and dominate this place with violence, because hey, that's their sphere of influence. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying it was suicidal madness for them to go along with America's push, for them to join our military alliance. That's as much respecting of Russia's sphere of influence as they needed to do, was not mess with that. That's what got them in trouble. That's what made the Russians say, look, it's either sooner or later, it might as well be now, the longer we wait, the more the Americans build up their forces, and we're going to end up having to fight them anyway. They were making them a de facto member of NATO with what they called interoperability, normalizing their military forces with ours as much as possible, making them a de facto auxiliary of the NATO.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On Berlin call me. They're rollin' on London, they're going to nuke London. Man, I'd hate to see the world end that way, but maybe we would have to fight for the Brits, Lex. I'm really more of a continental defense kind of guy myself, to tell you the truth. But that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about... Czechoslovakia, now the Czech Republic and Slovakia, that's Central Europe. Or maybe the Czech Republic is Slovakia, that's Eastern Europe. Bulgaria, Romania, that's Eastern Europe. Ukraine is east of Eastern Europe, right? Brent Skrokov said, we only wanted to liberate Eastern Europe, not Ukraine. Okay, this is too far away.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Northern coast of the Black Sea, that's so far beyond our jurisdiction, and this is Kagan's words not mine legs. He and I don't agree with him about this at all. But he says you understand his context what he means here. He says The Soviet Union dominated Ukraine the whole time after World War two, and we think of those as the good old days. No, I do not. I know people who are enslaved by the communists in Ukraine in those good old days. There's nothing good about them at all. Okay, but what he was saying was America never had a problem with Russian dominance in Ukraine. We always called it the Ukraine, and we always pronounced it Kiev. And what are you talking about? What are you talking about? No, dude, makes no sense. And the map is HBOMs burning hotter than the sun, so we cannot fight them, and certainly not over this.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They are willing to go much further than we are, and then he says to Goldberg, he challenges him, and he says, this is after Obama's coup has put whatever transition of power has led to the loss of Crimea. And he says, Jeffrey Goldberg, you tell me who in Washington says that we ought to put American boys on the ground to secure the independence of the Donbass from Russia. Can you name me somebody's ready to do that right now? No, of course not. So the rest of Washington pipe down. Right, you keep saying we're not doing enough, but there's nothing we can do. And as even Robert Kagan, I'm ruining the end of the book now. Even Robert Kagan said, you know what? It actually doesn't matter to the United States who runs Ukraine.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Austria and Finland had this neutral status in the last Cold War, and they said, well, that's what we want to do again. That's what we need to do for Ukraine. That's again Kissinger and Brzezinski, who were not neoconservatives, but were very hawkish on NATO expansion and on Russia and on NATO expansion being bore the purposes of containing Russia, no foolin' about it. But in this case, man, if we try to take Ukraine away, the Russians are going to break it. Because in fact, it ain't going anywhere. It's stuck next to Russia. This was another thing that Obama explained to Jeffrey Goldberg, that well Jeffrey Goldberg, Russia's always going to have escalation dominance in Ukraine. Because it's right there, and it means a lot more to them than it does to us.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And this is not just some deal where we just get to do what we want. We have to take into account how deeply complicated this is and how deeply riven Ukrainian society is, especially on who do we want to run with. And they said, so what we have to do is we have to create a special status for Ukraine just like we had for Austria and Finland in the old Cold War, where Austria and Finland were not members of the Warsaw Pact, nor were they members of NATO, and they did not have troops while they did have Soviet troops still occupied Austria for a while. They finally didn't, I don't think they withdrew until the fifties, but they eventually did withdraw, but they were not members, they were not forced to be made members of the Warsaw Pact, like all the rest of the Eastern European states were. They had no choice but to join with SOC puppet comming dictatorships run out of the Kremlin and everything.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which, as I was saying before, in this book, I don't quote a whole lot of Buchanan and Paul. I give them the credit that they deserve, but I make a special point to constantly quote Kissinger and Brasinsky and their contemporaries. Where they admit these are the vanguard of the NATO expanders, and Brasinsky especially was an anti Russia hawk. He's the son of Polish aristocrats and fierce anti communists and anti-Russian even still to after. And they all said, we have to come up with a special status for Ukraine because it's so closely intertwined with Russia, dating back hundreds of years to even the foundation of Russian civilization began in Kiev before traveling moving to the center of gravity to Moscow later. And as Kissinger said, Ukraine's been part of Russia for 300 years.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For advice for decades, this guy, since the 1970s, since before I was born, Henry Kissinger, the most important counselor to Richard Nixon about what are we going to do about the Soviet Union and China, he told Trump, yes, Trump. I agree with you, that's what we should do. We should do what it takes to befriend Russia so that we can contain China. Now, I'm not a China hawk, but whatever men. That's the point. And there's another major point here to mention too.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm doing this because I talked to Henry Kissinger, and Henry Kissinger said, wow, you're the tallest, smartest, most handsome, wealthiest, successful person I've ever met, and you have a very smart Russia policy, which is to split Russia away from China Because they have a blackmail P tape of Donald Trump and his prostitutes? No. It's what Henry Kissinger, Nelson Rockefeller's man wanted. The Grand Republican, grand strategist of American foreign policy, for he only died a few years ago, right, and he was still writing books. I mean, they were still turning.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People did. I know for a fact people did. I know stories of people who were driven crazy by that stress, of believing that every Arab they see is a murderer terrorist trying to kill them. People believe in that. People think that their leaders wouldn't lie to them, Willie Nelson said. They wouldn't lie to me. None of my own damn TV. Yeah, they would too. The ones you love the most, you're a Republican. It's the Republicans that are lying to you. You're a Democrat, you have no idea how much they despise you. They'll lie right to your face. And they think it's funny when you believe it. They enjoy your terror because your fear and upset makes it easier for them to do wrong. That's what it's about. That's what it's all about. Why they do this to Trump? Because he said he wanted to get along with Russia. He wasn't going to give him our nuclear codes. He even”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Usurbed Hillary Clinton's rightful throne, and he hates all the blacks and the trans he's gonna murder them all and start and attack Canada or whatever. They were terrified. They were terrified. It's no less cynical than what W. Bush did when he said, oh yeah, be afraid, be very afraid. You won't be safe until a year and a half from now when I get to invade Iraq. You know how many people on the edge of sanity went over?”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I have so many problems with Donald Trump, but man, I hate his enemies, and I would love to see him ruthlessly lawlessly persecute these people. They deserve to suffer for what they did. To him and to this country, putting us through that. Think of how many women bankrupted their husbands with therapy bills because they were that convinced that the Russians had done a coup d'etat and installed the Nazi fascist white supremacists to overthrow us they heard it on national public radio. They're freaking out, man. I mean, you could come up if you wanted to, you could have a conspiracy theory where it was the drug companies that did this just to sell more Zoloft to these people. They drove them up the wall like CLEX the problem is you know better dude, but pretend for a minute that you're one of these idiot women that listens to Mara Eliasen on National Public Radio and she says the Russians did a coup.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We are talking on the level of the branched dividends killed themselves, on the level of Saddam Hussein is making nuclear weapons to murder you with. Bashar al Assad woke up one morning and decided to murder the entire population of his country, so it's a good thing that USA and Al Qaeda are here to protect the poor population of Syria from his wrath. It's on that level of lie. It is unbelievable what they did to him.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now we know for a fact we only just found this out. Read Aaron Mate at RealClear Investigations. And we know for a fact now that the FBI and the NSA gave pardon CIA and NSA FBI and SA? FBI and NSA gave it only low to moderate confidence. In other words, none of this information came from the National Security Agency. They're the ones who would really know. And the CIA and the FBI had both already debunked this stuff before they started to pretend to believe it again, and part of it is because of compartmentalization inside the agencies. These analysts are in charge of looking at this. These analysts are in charge of looking at that. But Brennan and Comey are in charge of ignoring all of the disputing information and cherry picking out all the rest to try to make it look true. And man, what a fraud.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And more of that's coming out all the time about just how not true it was and just how not true they already knew it was and I have so much in there and I beg your audience to read the Durham report. There are newly declassified appendixes to it that are just being released as we record this. One came out yesterday. And so we're going to get much, much more about the origins of Russia Gate here. But at the bottom line, they go, okay, after it all falls away, still Russia hacked the DNC and gave it to Wikileaks. Nuh as a lie. And it was crowd strike that made up that lie in combination with the Georgia Tech team and DARPA at the Pentagon. I have trouble keeping track of exactly it all. People should follow Undead FOIA on substack. He's brilliant, anonymous guy, brilliant analyst of this stuff. The core allegation there, there's no proof of that whatsoever.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Amendment hire a special counsel to pretend to investigate him for another two years, these people should have all of their property confiscated, they and their families should be exiled from the United States forever, everyone involved in that plot, everyone involved at Perkins, Koi, everybody involved at the Georgia Tech team, everybody involved in Glenn Simpson and his fusion GPS, everyone at the FBI and CIA and NSA and any of the government agencies who went along with that plot ought to all be kicked out of the United States forever and their great-grandchildren.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It all came to a head essentially in the Biden years. It could have, Trump, I think, could have solved it if they hadn't a framed in for Rushgate. By the way, I have 75 pages on Russiagate in there. It's the most thorough takedown of Russia I think you can find anywhere. Although I don't take credit, I give credit to the great Russiagate journalists who absolutely destroyed those lies. People like Paul Sperry and Matt Taibi, Aaron Mate, and Robert Perry for that matter before he died, Gareth Porter, of course, and so many others who did such great work on Russia Gate. This is absolute one hair away from just blowing the guy's head off in Dallas. I don't know what's the difference. It's unbelievable to have the CIA and the FBI come at the president of the United States this way, become a major party candidate for president this way. And then the president-elect, and then the sitting president United States talking about trying to overthrow him with the 20 potential.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stories and all of that. But I'm not dodging your question about Trump, by the way. I do want to talk about that, but I wanted to make it clear that. I'm not just saying Bill Clinton expanded NATO in the 90s. W. Bush did too in the 2000s, Obama did too in the 2010s, and Trump did too. Brought Montenegro and Northern Macedonia into NATO. There's the color code of revolutions and the missiles and all of these things. And so.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source