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

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Bin Ladenite, who wasn't even really Bin Ladenite yet, he didn't declare his loyalty to bin Laden until the end of 2004, a year and a half into the war. But they pretended, so six months later, but they pretended that he was already tied to bin Laden. He was one of the lies in Colin Powell's UN speech, that there's this guy named Zarkow, and he's tied to bin Laden and he's tied to Saddam. Well, he wasn't tied to bin Laden. He had told bin Laden, no, I don't want to join your group. And he wasn't tied to Saddam unlike the lies of Ahmed Chalabee and the exiles. He was not operated on by Saddam Hussein and given a peg leg in the Baghdad hospital. That was a hoax perpetrated by the weekly standard in the neoconservative set to tie those two together. In fact, he wasn't tied to either. And then only after the war, and America made him famous and claimed that he was bin Ladenite, did Zarkawi raise in stature. Zarkawi was like more apocalyptic and revolutionary and even nihilistic and”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Somehow a missile blew up his car. They're the ones who killed him, and when they killed him in March of two thousand four, that's what touched off the riot in Fallujah, where the four black water guards were murdered and burned and their bodies hanged from the bridge outside of town. And they had a giant prey darjamail the great war journalist was there and saw they had pictures of Yassin in their windshields. They called themselves the Al Yasin brigades, and it was this impromptu protest against Israel's murder of the leader of Hamas. And that's what caused that riot that killed those black water guards and then George W. Bush sent General James Madison there with his Marines, including now a couple of friends of mine who had to go in there and bite that thing and declared the thing a free fire zone like Vietnam and killed hundreds if not thousands of innocent civilians in the first battle of Fallujah, which they claim that Zarkawi,”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In January 2004, Old Sheikh Yassin with his big Santa Claus beard and his wheelchair says I give up, I give in. We need to go ahead and negotiate with the Israelis and settle for our measly stinking twenty two percent of historic Palestine just as Arafat had done in nineteen eighty eight. Months later, the Israelis killed him in a missile strike, just so they could lie to you, Lex, and say we have no partner for peace.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“two thousand nine. So I can also recommend Robert Dreyfus's book, Devil's Game, How the United States Helped to Unleash Fundamentalist Islam, Masterpiece, also again treated Parsi's treacherous alliance cannot recommend that book highly enough. That thing might go into its third printing just'cause of me. I'm telling you everybody's got to read that book, and then obstacle to peace by libertarian institute fellow Jeremy R. Hammond, wrote a masterpiece about Israel and Palestine and the fight over the occupied territories in America's role in making it all worse than the rest. It's a fantastic book, goes in deep study about this. Now, back to our anecdote.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The purpose was to build them up, to divide and conquer the Palestinians, to create a religious right wing alternative to the secular nationalist sort of pseudo commi PLO under Yaser Arafat. Wanting to divide and conquer the Palestinians. And so what they would do is they would finance directly finance Hamas, while at the same time arresting all of their competitors and holding them in prison, disarming them, weakening them, while bolstering the Hamas government. So they did not create Hamas, but they did very deliberately bolster its rise. Now Hezbollah is a different story where Hezbollah just really grew up in reaction to their invasion of Lebanon in 82 without any direct support from them in that sense. Although maybe I don't know enough about that, but certainly in this case with Damascus True, and you can also read Andrew Higgins in the Wall Street Journal, wrote a great piece along the same lines.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Washington Post and the New York Times with the Liberal Papers and the New York Post in the Washington Times of the Conservative Papers, if you got that right 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 January of 2004, Sheikh Yassin, who was the founder of Hamas, which was a breakoff of the Muslim Brotherhood it was originally like a charitable type organization that ended up growing into this militia with the aid and comfort of the Israelis. And there are some really great articles that you might like to peruse about this, including by Richard Sale in UPI, if you just type in Richard Sale UPI Hamas. I'm sure it'll just come straight up there. Israel gave major aid to Hamas. This is an in-depth study. It's based on CIA as well as Shinbet and Massad sources. Richard Sale, if people aren't familiar, UPI is the news agency most closely tied to the Washington Times, which would be the Reaganite Conservative newspaper in Washington. It's funny because it's...”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they came in there, and America and the Shiites pushed the Sunni insurgency into the arms of the bin Ladenites. And in fact, I'll tell you an anecdote about how that happened. So much of this is tied up in what's happening in Israel at this time as 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 that's what kicked off the real Civil War started after that. Now, there was already a predominantly Sunni based insurgency at that time, although it was not exclusively Sunni. It started out much more nationalist and mixed, but very quickly it was the Sunni tribal leaders and former Botist and military leaders realizing that they have everything to lose now and that they have the supermajority of the country backed by the United States is now taking power. And then so this pushed the Sunnis into the arms, the Sunni insurgency into the arms of the bin Ladenites, who were coming from all over the place just like it was Afghanistan or Bosnia or Chechnya again or Kosovo coming to all chip in to bite the holy jihad.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Dawa party and Motada Alsadar and his Mahdi army. Now, Dawa and Skiri had been living in Iran, and they were kind of more higher class types, whereas Mokt al Sader is like the son of important guys, it was much more like a street ruffian type, and the ghetto, the Shiite ghetto in eastern Baghdad, was called Saddam City. As soon as America invaded, they renamed it Sodar City, after his father, but he inherited a lot of that street credibility as like the most legitimate of the Shiite leaders on the ground there. So these three groups under the guidance of the Ayatollah Ali al Sistani who lived down in Najav. Under his leadership, her guidance or whatever they formed what was called the United Iraqi Alliance. That was the group that wrote the Constitution in the fall of two thousand four. That was a group that won the elections, the big purple fingered elections of two thousand five”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The most powerful Shiite groups that came together to form the new Iraqi government was the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, Skiri, which is now called Iski because we won their revolution for them. So now it's just the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Power when we invade Iraq a year from now, and then that's exactly what happened, is the, again, the Bada Brigade was the militia of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, and that was exactly who George W. Bush took all the way to power in Baghdad. So for the guys who fought in that war who were listening to this, who still don't know why they fought in that war, ultimately they fought on the Shiite side of a massive civil war against the minority Sunni ruling regime, and to replace them with a new, essentially Islamist theocracy, sort of pseudo-republic like in Iran, and that that's what it was for. It's not for freedom, was for one faction over the other. And in this case, it was the Shiites. And then, of course, the most powerful facts worth explaining, not of course, that”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Erasmus government did help to push this thing, even though Dubowitz is right that Sharone first said, no, Bush, you should go to Tehran first because that was his problem. It was, I guess, I don't know if I'd have to go back and see if anybody ever wrote about this, but I never saw like Sharone's opinion of the clean break. But it's easy to see how anyone could see through how stupid the plan was. We're going to weaken the Shiites by getting rid of the most powerful Sunnis standing in their way. That's pretty dumb, right? And especially if you really know about, for example, the history of the Iran-Iraq War, the history of the post-Iraq War I Shiite uprising, you might have real reason to worry. Justin Ormando at antiwar.com wrote in 2002, he said, hey, look everybody. The Supreme Council for his Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the CIA tried to give the money and they said piss off, we don't need you. We got Iran. And Justin said Better watch out. Here's who's coming.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He said. He didn't have to ask nicely. But according to Schuyer, he didn't have the courage to just go down there and say, give me the damn intercept. Why not? Scumbag. You know, he came from staff in the Senate. I think just wanted to please the real spies, you know? Like he was kind of the new kind, didn't really fit in, and was trying to be cool or whatever. And I don't know. Who knows? These people. So importantly,”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Happen and how the government failed to stop it. And then the shadow factor is really insightful on those lines because we often hear about the infighting between the FBI and the CIA. But the NSA also hoarded all their information and would not share with the FBI or CIA. And the CIA at one point and Michael Schuyer also tells the story. CIA had to create their own listening station on Madagascar to try to spy on Al-Qaeda hiding out in Yemen. The switchboard house in Yemen because the NSA would not give them the intercepts. They had to get their own, but they could only get half the conversation and not the other half. Talking to the terrorists in Afghanistan. And as Schuyer put it to me on my show, I don't know, 15 years ago or something, he said, yeah, because George Tennett didn't have the moral courage to just walk down there and demand the damn intercepts. At that time, the head of the CIA was also the director of central intelligence, which meant the boss like the DNI is supposed to be over all the other intelligence agencies. So George Tennett had the authority to command NSA to do what he did.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Manufactured fake intelligence in English to stove pipe into the intelligence stream to help lie us into war. And here's three authoritative sources on that. Julian Borger in The Guardian, the spies who pushed for war. And it's not the spies, it's the neoconservatives, is who he's talking about, not CIA officers. The spies who pushed for war by Julian Borger. Then there's more missing intelligence by Robert Dreyfus in the nation. Then is a pretext for war. 9-11 Iraq and the abuse of America's intelligence agencies by James Bamford. The Great Book by the Great James Bamford, the guy that wrote The Puzzle Palace and Body of Secrets and The Shadow Factory about the National Security Agency. Best author on the NSA. Pretext for war focuses on the neocons and the CIA and how the Neocons light us into war for Netanyahu and Israel. I don't remember. Oh, and the whole first part is about 9-11 and how 9-11”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And Wolfowitz, of course, always especially was an Iraq hawk. And so the confluence of interest here was to go to Iraq. Now, Sharon was smart enough to see that Iran, you know, the clean break wasn't him. That was Netanyahu and his buddies. Sharon, I think, was skeptical by what's going to happen when we overthrow Saddam Hussein and the Shiites take over, and this is where he tried to insist, and John Bolton did echo him in this and promise him that yes, and then we'll go to Iran and Syria and Lebanon and everywhere else next, because we can't just get rid of Saddam, and that's going to change the balance of power in a way that's going to benefit Iran in a way that Sharon did not prefer. However, Sharon absolutely did go along with the program and help lie us into war, and he had his own office of special plans that he created in the Prime Minister's office in Israel.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And JJ Goldberg, as long as I'm citing him, let me tell you, he says in there very clearly that he is not saying that the neocons bear even the lion's share of the responsibility for the war. Of course he blames George W. Bush for launching the war. And of course he's not peddling in some anti-Semitic conspiracy theory in the pages of the Forward for God's sake, right? He's extremely conservative in his statements and in his accusations. But what he's saying is that the Lakutniks in America are closer to Netanyahu than Sharon. And of course, George W. Bush wants to go to Iraq. He wants to go to Baghdad, not Tehran. 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
“So, the neocons, yes, they were the Deputy Secretary of Defense, and the Deputy Secretary of Defense for Policy and the, you know, staff in the vice president's office, the staff of the National Security Council. They were there operating, really, as I said, as Colin Powell called it, that separate government and operating mostly for Benjamin Netanyahu's goals. This is part of what we argued about me and Mark Dubowitz on your show last time was he insisted somewhat partially correctly here that Ariel Sharon wanted Bush to hit Iran, not Iraq. And Ariel Sharon, not Netanyahu, was the prime minister. And that was the occasion of him accusing JJ Goldberg of being an anti Semite because he had written in the Jewish Daily Forward about how Netanyahu wants to hit Iraq. Rather”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Interests are very different than ours, and that's why they spend so much money and effort lobbying in the United States to try to obfuscate that fact that what's good for them ain't necessarily good for us at all. Well, they have to make sure it's at least good for the people in charge here, if not for the country itself. And that's their object. And as Walt Merschimer say in the essay and in the book, that you can't blame the whole Iraq war on them. George W. Bush was the one sitting in the chair behind that desk, calling that shot. He could have changed his mind at the very last moment. It was on him. And now is the Congress's responsibility, but they passed that responsibility to him with their unconstitutional authorization that they passed in October of two thousand two. But like ultimately who pulled that trigger, George W. Bush did, and in conspiracy with his vice president and his secretary defense, and the rest of them.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A good place to pick up our story here would be John Mearsheimer and Stephen Waltz's book. We've talked about Meersheimer and Walt previously. Now, their book is called The Israel Lobby and American Foreign Policy. It came out in 2007. It started out as an essay that they wrote, first for the Atlantic Monthly that commissioned the story and then refused to run it. And they ended up running it in the London Review of Books. We also ran it antiwar.com. People can find it there. It's called The Israel Lobby in American Foreign Policy. It's a fantastic article. And then they made it into a book. And now these guys are, again, the co-deans basically of the realist school of foreign policy, one from the University of Chicago, the other from Harvard, both highly respected, neither of them haters or ideologues or any of these things. They were ruthlessly attacked as anti Semites for this, which is completely preposterous. And what they did, though, was say that, look, man, Israel”
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's where I'm coming from, and everybody understands that, and they know that I never deliberately try to make them think one thing instead of another. And if I did, they would obviously catch on to that. And then I'd be completely ruined and have to just go get a job deliver an auto parts or something, which would be fine. In fact, I like delivering auto parts. I've had that job before, although I'd rather drive at night if I got a drive. I'd rather, I guess, drive Uber at night.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Well, and that's my thing too is I don't have nothing to sell you other than my coffee sponsor and whatever, but like my sincerity is like all I got. I don't have any other argument from authority that I can invoke other than people listen to me. They know I'm not lying. And they can tell what my biases are. I wear them absolutely on my sleeve. You know what I mean? Every day I only try to quantify whether I hate Bill Clinton or George W. Bush more.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is Noam Chomsky's thing that he talked about where, look, if you're a primate that's intelligent enough to speak, then you are a genius. Right, then you are absolute miracle, unbelievable, impossible. You know, circumstance situation or very existence. And so we all ought to be taken like at that very level. You know what I mean? Like no matter who you're dealing with, there's something special in there.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, look, you know what? Well, I don't know if this counts anymore, but I spent a little bit of time in Denver listening to sports, radio, in Denver. These people are fanatics, man, but the point being that. You know, Jimmy, the air conditioner repairman? Smarter than you, dude And he knows everything, that every baseball team ever achieved and win and who and everyone on the teams, all their stats, all their everything, and why it mattered and it mattered a lot to them and the level of expertise there is no different than in your highest applied sciences or history or any other thing. You know what I mean? It all just depends on what you're interested in and what you want to know that much about.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And my message ain't for elite policymakers. My message is for my peers. Look at what they're doing. That's it. And this is why the Rothbardian-style libertarian populism really always appealed to me is because that's who it's geared toward. The Cato Institute wants an audience with the Senate. The Mises Institute and the libertarian institute and anti-war.com. We want an audience with the population of this country. That's who we're trying to talk to. That's who we are. That's where we come from. We're not Washington, D.C. folk. We're from out here and we're speaking in the third person about them, you know, rather trying to be part of the regime”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And no bumper music, no fanfare, no last name. You just jumped in the middle of a conversation, tune in, figure it out. And it's just beautiful. It's perfect. And then I modeled myself in the way I do my show on beginning on Free Radio Austin in 98 and 99, and then on Chaos Radio Austin from 2002 through 2010, I guess I was on Chaos, although it wasn't. Yeah, it was 2010 before they seized our last transmitter from Chaos, wasn't it? I think it was. So, yeah, over time. I did chaos for like, yeah, a long time. And then, so that was my whole attitude was, look, I am a regular guy. I ain't got to bake that. I didn't go to college. I dropped out of ACC”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Attitude, and they got all the time in the world. We're here every day for three hours a day. Ain't no thing. We're talking about, and they're just the nicest guys come back from commercial and go, it's Carl. We're talking with Terry about the thing.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To a whole bunch of people to get a bunch of people having the same conversation together instead of everybody just all spread out having their own little separate arguments and not interacting with each other. So to me, that was the brilliance of talk radio. And then where Rush Limbaugh and G. Gordon Liddy were all polished and had their little programs, the guys on 550 a.m. in San Antonio, especially Carl Wigglesworth, was my favorite. But him and all those guys, even Ricky Ware, who was the John Hagyite lunatic, but he was still such a sweet guy. And their talk radio, their version of talk radio was All right, Carwood's worth show everybody. But everybody's kicking back. Everybody's got this front por”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because in my world that I lived in, what you know about the branch of Idiotians is what you read in the Austin American Statesman or what you're told by Ted Koppel and Dan Rather. And that's all you get. What do you mean? I can interact with one. And then the callers are brilliant. The callers know they're not cooks. They know exactly what they're talking about. And they'll be like, I'll tell you what happened was on March the 19th, blah, blah, blah. Oh, okay. So this is why I'm like this. This is talk radio to me is like if you believe in the idea of like any kind of like so-called popular government, like if we have to settle for any sort of statism at all, you want the people to be able to have one big ass conversation with each other, right? That's why your show is so important. So you get hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of views and listens, maybe millions if you include all the podcasts. And so for a guy like me, it's like, yeah, it's a chance to talk.”
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 hit me like, what? There's even a branch Dividing alive, and they have a point of view, and you can hear it, and he's live right now and he's talking, and people can call in and they can, what?”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Deep on their knowledge of what they know, and whether on that issue or so many other things. The first real time I heard real AM Radio in Austin, I was 16, I was wait, nah, might have been all, it might have been eighteen. No, no, I was 16. The same year that the Davidians were killed. I was driving my first car down 183, and I said, you know, I've lived in Austin my whole life, and I've never listened to the AM band. I wonder what it is. And the first thing I hit was KLBJ AM, and it was Johnny Walker, the great Johnny Walker, the FM rock and roll DJ, was sub hosting. And his whole thing, he was a great guy, by the way, Rip Johnny Walker. But he goes, look, I don't know anything. I'm literally just hosting this show. The guest is this guy, a surviving branched Davidian, and we're taking your calls.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All of it, and mostly how stupid and wrong and horrible they are about everything, but also just how meaningless their drivel is, right? You be in the middle of the world's worst crisis and they're like, the liberals are trying to take God out of the pledge of allegiance. Like, dude, I prefer that you just shoot me in the face to listen to this for the love of God, please. Anyway, but I love the potential there. And in that era before the internet was what it is today, this is the real town square where you can have a host who knows something. You can have a guest who knows something, and you can have callers who know a lot more than you think they would, dude. And I remember listening to them talk about like the Texas Homesteading Act. They said you weren't allowed to take out a second mortgage on your house and whatever because it was to protect the little ladies and they were debating over whether they should have that law or not. And I remember thinking, wow, all these people know so much about this topic that I've never heard of before. And all of these callers are just so.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“See also, I'm a talk radio guy, man. I grew up in the radio of Rush Limbo. I'm driving for a living in the era of Rush Limbaugh and G. Gordon Liddy and all the local guys. And I mean, the... I'll go ahead and say this on the record too. The local hosts on KLBJ AM in Austin all suck and always have, all of them since Raleigh James in nineteen ninety six love her, everybody since then. I mean, I don't know who listens to Kelby AM at all, how they even stay in business at all. Their host's so...”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you're just like me, too, dude. When you read a 300-page book, it tastes what? Like if you want to read this thing, it's not like a chore, but like, oh, I want to read that. You're done in a day and a half or two. Like, it's easy to do. Once you set that precedent a few times, that's pretty easy to read a thing and jot down some notes and learn something from it and then teach it to somebody else and whatever. Well, yeah, welcome to adulthood or that's what we do. So like that's all it is. It's just, that's my only job is compiling reasons to resent these liars and why to know better than all their false promises.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wrong. He won. And they got out of the car going, screw you, Branch Cividian boy, and whatever. And oh man, that never happened to me again. You know why? Because I read like six books about Waco. I already knew more than enough about it. And then I decided that, yeah, no, actually, no one's going to ever beat me in an argument about that ever game, ever.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And these five people were there, and this is what they decided so you can go and Google that. You know what I mean? It should be specific enough that people can double check me. But then, yeah, so why I'm like this? I'm just a Ron Paul guy. I can't stand being lied to, and I can't stand all this violence. And I want to live in a free society and the empire's ruining it. And then, so why do I write? Why am I like that meticulous about it all is I don't want to be caught being wrong. I'll tell you one funny story and then we'll stop. One time I lost an argument about Waco. It was these three people in my cab and the one of them was this real jerk, and the other two were on his side because it was his friends. And I was arguing with him about everything, but the thing was he was like the son of a federal cop, and he knew their side of the story like down pat. And he really knew his stuff. And so, even though I was right.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's what it's for. As opposed to enough already, which I really wrote enough already for my people, my fans, to give to their brother-in-law and their dad and whoever. It's a little bit after the fact, as I said, I was in a real rush to get it done, so I don't have the citations. I do have the citations in Fool's Aeron about Afghanistan. And actually, we're working on now me and one of my guys at the Institute. We're working on putting the footnotes back into enough already and doing like the ultimate scholar edition with Overkill Homer Citations there. But I actually had footnotes on most of it. I turned them off and I just raced to the end because I was out of money and I was out of time. I just had to go. And so friends of mine rationalize it like, well, I think Bill O'Reilly has footnotes in his books, you know, get that thing out there, man, and so I did. But I did try to write it in a way where I either cite my citations in the prose, or at least I wrote it in a way where it's a very specific claim. On november ninth, they held a meeting.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hell am I going to fix that? Like I'm going to have to make you accept that I'm not lying to you when I put these things together. When you read that, you feel like I'm trying to get away with something, you're going to put it down. So I didn't write it for you to put it down. I think I've wrote a thousand page book for you to put it down. I want you to get through all the way to the end going, God dang, man, I didn't really realize it was as bad as all of that.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To the ends of to beat the dead horse all the way to death to prove the absolute fact of the position that I'm taking there. And then there's still probably a lot overkill on a lot of things. But as far as like the writing goes, I mentioned the Montenegro coup of 2016. It's just a short little thing. It's called the Vaudeville coup and it's kind of funny and it's a little mysterious. And then the different poisonings by the Russians or at least alleged ones. I have Litvinenko and this scripples and whoever. And I just, I was thinking it from the point of view of my accusers. Like, oh, yeah, well, what about this? Well, what about this? Well, what about that? I bet you left that out and like, no, I didn't, dude. I have it all in there. And I tried to write it in a way to satisfy my worst critics as best as I could. As a Declaration of Independence says, with a decent respect to the opinions of mankind. So I should assume that you don't agree with me and in good faith. And so how in the world?”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's really something different. So I double, triple, quad, triple check every goddamn thing I can until I'm like, I'm terrified of being caught out being wrong on a fact and I have The book is 477,000 words, and if it was six by nine and if the font was regular size, it would be 1,200 pages long. That's how long the book is. But it's not, well, first of all, a major portion of that is, like literally hundreds and hundreds of pages of that is footnotes, although I keep them all at the bottom of the page where you can see them. And damn anyone who doesn't do that. That's exactly how a book like this should be. But then So a lot of that space really is citations. But then also I don't dwell too long on any one topic. I don't think. The only two exceptions to that are in when we talk about the NATO promises against expansion and the Nazis in Ukraine because these I believe are the two most controversial subjects or stances or whatever in the book. And so I go absolutely”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And just spending a hell of a lot of time going through the archives. And I am an obsessive typer like there are absolutely times where I spent four days hunting one footnote that I know exists and I want to make this claim and I can't make it without my citation. I'm going to find this thing and I have gone to the ends of the earth in some cases for these, especially like about the Balkan Wars and stuff. Some of those articles are so hard to hunt down. But then, you know, I'm reading all these books and then all those books got all their own citations. And a lot of, you know, I learned this a long time ago, but this was reinforced in this book. And this is no slam against them. It's just against everybody. There's a lot of times the people that I agree with are wrong, and they will cite something, and then I go and read that something, and it does not say what they said it says. And I can see why they misunderstood it even, that they're not lying and not exaggerating, but that's not really the implication there.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mostly I'm marshaling evidence is the point of the whole thing that this is what these guys did. Here's what the war party says, and I don't straw man my arguments. I link when I say 7,000 citations, a third of them are to the bad guys, and this is their point of view, and I'm telling you, here's what they admit that they're lying, you know, that's basically how it's written. And I cite very little Ron Paul and very little Pat Buchanan in there, because as much as I revere them, I don't need them. I can quote Apparatchiks in charge themselves explaining how stupid the things that they are doing are, and then show why they did them anyway and all the consequences and whatever. So I don't need to cite the good guys. I can cite the involved.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, as you can see, the chapters are just H.W. Bush, Clinton, W. Bush, Obama. And, you know, if you ever get the chance to read the thing, you'll see that this is really just a giant collection of citations. I don't do too much writing in the book, much unlike Justin Romondo. I'm really not that smart and have a lot to say. I'm great on names and dates and I hold a grudge real well. But Justin could write a thousand words just of like wisdom and understanding and opinions about things that I'm just not really like that. So this book in a way is seven thousand note cards arranged by your maestro here to be hopefully to tell the story in a way that everybody can understand. And you know whatever. There's pros in there. I'm writing to you, but I'm.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Later, I stayed up all night doubling the length of the speech and gave it again. And this is, it's a four-hour speech I gave in Utah on, I think, March 2nd, 2022, right after the war started, explaining all the same stuff. And then that became the nucleus of that book, basically. And then it was just a matter of filling it out.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just like with the book about Afghanistan and the book about the Middle East, I was already ready to write the book before I started writing it. I already know the whole story. Obviously, I had to do a lot of research and fill in a lot of information and correct myself on things I had wrong or oversimplified or whatever and learned a lot while I was writing it. But I already knew the story overall because I've been working on it for a very long time. What are the main things that Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden did to cause the New Cold War with Russia and the war in Ukraine? I already know those things. Already have the bullet points. That book started as a speech I gave in 2020. In fact, it was Leap Day 2020 Carol Paul's birthday and the day that Donald Trump signed the peace deal with the Taliban to get us out of Afghanistan. I gave a speech to the Libertarian Party of King County in Seattle, Washington called The New Cold War with Russia is all America's fault. And that's published at antiwar.com. And then two years later.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a bit after the fact. This is written, provoked is written in the middle of the war. And I'm trying to change people's mind and really get them, not just to regret the stupid things they believed in a minute ago, but to change their mind and get on board and let's see if we can bring this thing to a more reasonable conclusion sooner than later and get it done. It'd be like if I wrote enough already in 2005 or 6. And so I knew I wanted it to be as bulletproof as it just possibly can be because I don't have argumentation from authority. I don't have like, oh, yeah, I'm from here and I can tell you that. I'm a reporter. I'm a linguist and I've read 10,000 Russian newspapers going back to whatever, whatever. I don't have any of those things. What I do have is I've been working for antiwar.com this whole time. I've done 6,000 interviews with the best experts. We covered the Orange Revolution when it happened. We covered the Maidan Revolution when it happened and everything in between and all of these things.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the air is over. The Bush Obama era capstoned with Trump one is just at an end. And after all, it's the true beginning of the decade is january twenty one, right? And so I knew that this book has to come out now, but this is really about the terror wars that are over mostly, not that we're completely done in the Middle East, you understand, but like,”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like where you discovered, how the hell did you do this? Okay, I could think of an answer to that, which is that. Like, unlike all your Harvard professors and all of this stuff, the burden of proof is really on me, right? Like it's because I'm just a skater cab driver from Austin who didn't go to your Fancy Pants College. I don't have, there's no reason that you're supposed to defer to me. And that book is about how everybody's wrong except me. So if I'm going to tell you that, then I better be able to really demonstrate it and I want you to go, oh yeah, well, but what about that coup in Montenegro in 2016? Well, turn the page. I got a whole section on that. I didn't leave out nothing. And I wrote it in that kind of defensive posture. People are going to not like this. They're going to say I don't know what I'm talking about. Now, when I wrote enough already, the war was over. Enough already came out in January 21. And I was in a race to get it done because Joe Biden's going to be inaugurated on January 20th.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's the guy, dude. Could have been. Hey, and if you doubt me, just go to antiwar.com slash Paul and read the last 30 years of everything he's had to say about everything. What can I tell you, man? Rigor. You talked about the”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source