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

“The self licking ice cream cone. It's the military industrial complex. Hey, you know what? Don't you criticize it, Lex, it's called Now the Defense Industrial Base. And if you ask the Democrats, they'll tell you it's the number one best and most important reason for the Ukraine war is because it's a good subsidy for our defense industrial base. They ran out of arguments and they settled on that and they did not know how absolutely demonic they sounded. That's why we want to have a war is just literally like in your crazy conspiracy theory, you're crazy when you say it and you call it the MIC. But now it's the defense industrial base and it's awesome. It's spectacular and you better get on board for it. It's the best reason to have these wars. In fact, and we're not embarrassed to tell you, you can go read it in Politico. I don't know what else to say. This is straight out of the Democrats' mouths on the last war 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
“Our era, it sure as hell is, isn't it? It's the era of the phony wars, man. What do I got to do to put this war in your driveway to daylights? I tell you that they hate Islam. That the Islams hate your religion. They hate your mama. They hate freedom. Did I ever tell you about the Beirut bombing in 1983? What do I got to do to get you mad enough to do this with me? Right? That's why it's a constant bombardment of propaganda. They don't have a real case to make. They got to try to scare you and lie to you.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What do you mean the industry is trying to push H-bombs because of their awesome profit margins, and that we run the H bomb supply business the same way you would expect with M four rifles or combat boots? Yep, that's exactly right.”
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 what gets me, man, is this how the H-Bomb lobby works too. It's no different. Honeywell makes, and Lockheed, they make hydrogen bombs, and they will send a salesman to Capitol Hill talking about Senator, Senator, let me tell you, I got to get rid of some H-bombs here. What kind of deal can I cut? What do I got to do to get this H-bomb in your driveway by tonight? They are like supply side. You might have some, you probably didn't think it all the way through, right? But somewhere in the back of your mind is this, like, half articulated fantasy that... Nuclear weapons are a demand side business in this country where the military comes to the Congress and says we need exactly this many and then the Congress says to industry we need exactly this many.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wants free money because they're mad that we put these tariffs on China and disrupted some of their supplies and whatever. So they're going to put this one big company on the dole, and that's going to make somehow all of manufacturing in America happy. And that was their reasoning for doing it because Raytheon was demanding it. And then Raytheon will turn right around and go, hey, listen, Lex, don't come crying to me. It was the Democratically elected people of this country who demanded that we make these wares to provide your security, pal. I don't know what you want to say. They pretend that they're not dealing with the devil, but they are. And somehow they know it. Somewhere they know it. Somewhere this department knows that that's that department's job like we do hire lobbyists to advocate for policies, don't we? Yeah, of course. We do.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What we'll do is we'll commit genocide against the people of Yemen because that's what Saudi and UAE want, not because of anything that has anything to do with America's national interest. The Houthis were helping us kill Al-Qaeda guys a month before that. But we're going to do this for them. And because Industry”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The house, and only because of peace activists, there's no Houthi lobby in America, believe me, it was only Quakers and hippies and libertarians said please stop this and got Congress to pass a war power's resolution twice, to try to force Trump to end the war, they passed the wimpy kind that he's allowed to veto instead of the other kind that he can't, and so he vetoed it twice, but then guess what? Pete Navarro, his trade representative, we're talking Trump one term here. Pete Navarro, his trade representative, told the New York Times that the reason that they kept the war going and vetoed and refused to end the war was to pay Raytheon because Raytheon wanted the Yemen war because it was making them a bunch of money and the Trump people since they had done these tariffs that were frustrating big manufacturing firms in America, they said we have to find a way to put, talk about collectivism. We have to find a way to put manufacturing on welfare.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The ethics. Yes, and listen, I got to tell you, man, this is so important. I'm so glad that you mentioned this because you do have, in fact, like direct quotes from, for example, Raytheon is one coming straight to mind where they say, listen, I mean, these policies are decided by the government. Our job is to make sure that they have what they need. And that's to be decided by other people, right? But then, no, Raytheon will directly intervene in policy to make sure that the policy is what they want. For example, Barack Obama started a genocidal war against the people of Yemen in 2015, which Donald Trump continued, I'm jumping way ahead in our narrative here.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But their customers, the US government, and the U.S. government is a democracy that represents the will of the consensus of the majority adult population of this great free land.”
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 a narrower problem set that they're solving. It's just no different than a soldier. I mean, if you ask them, I know what they'll tell you. That ain't my job. My job is making sure this gizmo works.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I just remembered a great footnote for this. Your guys will love it, Lockheed Stock and two smoking barrels by Richard Cummings, and it's at my sight against Scotthorton. org slash fair use and you can also find it at Corp Watch as well as originally written for Playboy dot com and I interviewed the guy that was one of the first interviews I did when I started the show full time in January of 2007 and he says guess what all those neocons who are such lakud nicks and who are piling around with Netanyahu and talking about oil pipelines to Haifa, they were all unlocked's payroll. The only one who wasn't was Hadley, but Hadley worked for a law firm that had represented them. But the rest of them had, or not all the rest of them, many of, and I don't just mean to think the think tank guys, but like the guys in the W. Bush administration had some direct connection to Lockheed, including Dick Cheney's wife, sat on the board of directors. Not that he's a neoconservative, you understand.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, they're trying to figure out. Yeah, what are we going to do in the world, right? And then, but the idea is clear that look, if we control the think tanks and the think tanks decide the policy, then we can decide what kind of weapons we need to develop to have for sale. So are we building jungle gear or are we building desert gear? What kind of tanks? What kind of helicopters? If we set the policy, then we get to save money by developing by making good guesses about what kind of weapons the Pentagon is going to need because we're the ones deciding.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And as I show, we'll talk about this more in the Cold War section when we get to it later. But there's a real crisis at the end of the Cold War for the military industrial complex, and they were open about it. Like, what's going to happen to us now? Lockheed tried to get into administering welfare payments and stuff. They are not a free market operation. They're a government-connected regime that”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And Justin, when you read, when you get into Justin Romondo and you read Trotsky, Strauss, and the neocons and all this, you can see where he's talking about. There were arguments in the pages of the National Review about Trotsky and his legacy from some of these neocons at that time. And Justin talks about like how baffled must the readership of the National Review be right now? These are your leaders Trotskyites, this is who controls the Republican Party and American foreign policy. The world won't be safe till the revolution. And by the way, we got to start with all Israel's enemies first. It's nuts.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Could to push us into that war. Michael Ledine would write and Jonah Goldberger would publish over and over and over again. Michael Ledeen demanding faster pleas. We have to keep going to the rest of the terror masters, especially Tehran as soon as possible as Jonah Goldberg wrote Baghdad de Lenda Est, meaning must be destroyed, right like Carthage must be destroyed. And Baghdad DeLenda Est Part two, where he says It's the Lydine doctrine. He approvingly quotes the Lydine doctrine is that America, every ten years or so, we have to take some small country and throw them up against the wall just to show the world that we mean business. That's conservatism in the hands of these essentially bastard children of Leon Trotsky, the founder of the Red Army.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think the Committee on the Present Danger was previous to this. But I guess they recreated the Committee on the Present Danger. They had PNAC and the Center for Security Policy. Again, that's Frank Gaffney and his guys and whatever, the handful of others there that helped to boost that whole and created that echo chamber. And of course, along very importantly with, again, the weekly standard magazine. And Bruce Jackson from Lockheed is really the exemplar of this because he came in in the 1990s and he put up all the money for the Committee on NATO expansion and the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. And they focused mostly on humanitarian excuses for going in and helping the Iraqi people, but they were working hand in glove with Bill Crystal as, you know, one of the agents of the Axis of Crystal, as Justin called it, the guys lying us into war with the weekly standard leading the charge. And Jonah Goldberg and the National Review right behind him doing everything they can.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really, with this money is how they took over and the organization it provided was how they took over the Olin and Mellon and SCAF Foundations. They took over the American Enterprise Institute and Heritage. Then they created their own forest of all the new ones. Washington Institute for Neri's policy.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The end of the First World War. That's their center of gravity, right? Well, the neocons weren't all that welcome there, right? So they said, well, screw you guys, we'll make our own think tanks. And they made their alliance with the military industrial complex, who had a lot of money at stake, but not so many eggheads to write the studies about why their products needed to be purchased by their captive audience, the Pentagon. So this is where the neoconservatives come in very handy to the Military Industrial Complex. And of course, what's the center of America's relationship with Israel? Military support and security guarantees, right? That's what it all comes down to is America guaranteeing Israel's security militarily. So how do we do that? We do that by making Lockheed Ridge, making Israel armed. And so you have this perfect alliance between these factions. So in the 1980s, it was”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is a great author. His brother Patrick Coburn, I mentioned previously, is the most important, or at least in our era, has been the most important Western journalist, especially in Iraq, I would argue. Alexander Coburn is the leftist agitator, founder of Counterpunch, who died of cancer years ago. And Andrew is the author who writes the books. And his wife, Leslie Coburn, wrote the great book, Out of Control About the Iran-Contra scandal. And then Andrew wrote Rumsfeld, His Rise Fall and Catastrophic Legacy and Killchain about the Terra Wars, especially the drone wars and all that stuff. Brilliant guy. So he told me years ago, he goes, listen, here's the best way to understand the neoconservative movement. They're the cross between the Israel lobby and the military industrial complex, right? So we already have banking and oil. And banking and oil already has the Council on Foreign Relations.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Heart, motivating factor for the neoconservatives to want to launch this war. So how does the military industrial complex law start stepping into this whole picture? Great place for this question. So Andrew Coburn.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About the motivation for the Iraq War, and this is not something that you'll hear very much, okay? Saddam Hussein paid the families of Palestinian suicide bombers. Saddam Hussein would pay any family who lost anybody in to Israeli violence, no matter what, or no matter what. So that meant if the Israelis bulldozed some old lady in her home and murdered her, then Saddam Hussein would pay a bounty to her survivors. But it also meant if some guy went and did a suicide attack and blew up a pizzeria full of kids on a Friday night, Saddam Hussein would pay a bounty to his survivors too. So this was quite clearly incentivizing terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians, right? So that is a real security problem. Is And as Philip Zelikow said, This was a real”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A mile ahead here, and they're the ones who did it. I'm sorry, I'm getting the quote wrong. I think the nine guys was Seymour Hearst said it was nine guys. But Friedman said something very close to that to Haaretz, that it was the neoconservatives. There was this very small group of guys. This was their war. They plotted it, they planned it, they made the advertising push to make it acceptable. It was their war and they got it. That's what it was. Philip Zelakow, who was not a neoconservative, he was more of a council on foreign relations type with Connolly Rice and Robert Blackwell and some of those other guys who are not part of the neoconservative set in the same government. Zelikau, you might remember, was the principal author of the 9-11 Commission report. A lot of people don't like him for that, for whatever reasons good and bad probably. But Zelikau said, let me tell you something, okay?”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And their job was to dig through the sea's trash and the exile's lot. These guys all had this agenda, and man, it was. Zionism is at the core of it all, and there's really just no denying that. And in many cases, they admitted it. And there are very authoritative sources on this. For example, Thomas L. Friedman of the New York Times for a very long time, a reporter and is now, of course, the famous colonist, wrote the Lexus in the Olive Tree, and the world is flat. Bill Clinton said he's the most important public intellectual in America. is a somewhat conservative Jewish Zionist New York Times writer and a rack war supporter, okay? But he gave an interview, he's not a neoconservative and not really a fellow traveler of theirs. He's a guy who just lives in the same world as them, but he knows a hell of a lot. He's extremely plugged in. For people who don't know, look him up, okay? Thomas L. Friedman. Tom S. L. Friedman gave an interview to Haaretz, where he goes, let me tell you something, okay? There's nine guys within.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So then under Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense was Douglas Fythe, who is Deputy Secretary of Defense for Policy, and under him was Abram Sholski. And Scholsky was the guy who ran the office of special plans, which sounds innocuous enough, but this was the core of the neoconservative plot to launder lies from Ahmed Chalabi's exile group, the Iraqi National Congress, into the intelligence stream, along with whatever they could dig out of the CIA's trash that the CIA had decided already to ignore. And they had Michael Rubin and Michael Ledine and a whole group of, I used to know all of their names, the guys with special plans, six or eight of them. And across the hall was the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group, which was led by David Wormser. Again, he's traveling around. He's vice president's office. He's state. He's defense, wherever they need him. And that's Wormser and a guy named Michael Maloof.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stories about how Dick Cheney and Scoota Libby made fourteen trips to CIA headquarters to beat them over the head and say we need more against Iraq, come up with it. And they wouldn't come up with it enough. Well, Newt Gingrich did the same thing, went to CIA headquarters over and over and over again, saying give us the goods, we don't have enough, we need more.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The 1992 Defense Planning Guidance, along with Libby, and Stephen Hadley, who was the Deputy National Security Advisor, then you had on the defense policy board, you had Gene Kirkpatrick, who again was from the Social Democrats USA and the Young People's Socialist League before she converted to commentary magazine and Reaganism, making her a classical definition, and as a hardcore Zionist, of course, a classical definition neoconservative, along with Kenneth Adelman and Richard Pearl was the chair of the Defense Policy Board, which is a very important position, advisory board. And he was really the power behind the scenes, major ringleader of the group there. Then Newt Gingrich was another fellow traveler, the former Speaker of the House of Representatives, Republican, who you could consider him sort of like John Bolton in a way where he's like more or less one of them, but not exactly. But for example, you may have heard the”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They had all the power and influence they needed because they got it from Dick Cheney and George W. Bush. And what Powell said was this was a separate government inside the government that was run like a cell that was run by Dick Cheney. Wormser was known as Cheney's agent, his plant at state, where his job he and John Bolton, who is not a neoconservative because he's never any kind of leftist. He's just a conservative nationalist type, but one of their fellow travelers, very close with them. Bolton and Wormser's job was preventing Powell and Armitage, his guy. from preventing the war, to keep a leash on them in whatever ways that they could obstruct their efforts. And then, so in the vice president's office, he had Scooter Libby and Eric Edelman and Elliot Abrams. No, no, pardon me, Elliot Abrams was on the National Security Council with Zalmi Khalilzad, the same guy who was the primary author of”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These are the neocons in the W. Bush administration, in the vice president's office, in the State Department, in the Defense Department that lied us into war. Colin Powell called them the Jinsa crowd. Jinsa is the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, which at that time I believe was run by David Wormser. He was one of the most powerful guys there. And they were part and parcel with the American Enterprise Institute, the project for a new American century, the Center for Security Policy, and the other neoconservative think tanks that push for that war at that time.”
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 an individualist. I'm not a collectivist. I don't go around categorizing people by their religion and ethnicity and all this crap. I just don't. I want to raise that way. It's just it is what it is. This is bizarred talking to Chalabi's friends, okay? I'm quoting a guy, quoting a guy, quoting a guy, okay? Forgive me. I said to Ahmed, what are you doing running around with all these Jews? And he said, I just need them. Until I can get my war And then I'm going to stab him in the back, and we're going to get what we want. So, in other words, Richard Pearl is as stupid as he is evil. And David Wormser and Richard Pearl and Paul Wolfowitz and the neoconservative group Douglas Fythe, Scooter Libby, Hadley, and Joseph and Edelman and all of these guys who rode.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so in this article, man, it's brutal. In there, he quotes Douglas Fife. Douglas Fythe was, again, the third signatory on the clean break, although I believe he now disowns it and says, well, I never agreed with that part and this kind of thing, but whatever. And he helped run the, he was the Deputy Secretary of Defense for Policy in the first Bush term and ran the office of special plans with Abram Shulski that lied us into war using lies funneled into the intelligence stream by Ahmed Chalabi. It's a huge part of how they lied us in war. I'm kind of skipping ahead. I'm going to come back to that in a minute, okay? In this article, they quote, Douglas Fife's law partner, Mark Zell. And people might follow him on Twitter. The guy's a riot, dude, and meaning he's completely insane and a lot of fun if you're into insane Zionist Warhawk genocidal lunatics. But anyway, so he has these quotes in here, okay? And like, this is not me talking. I'm very careful with my words.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I know, it sounds absurd, and you probably don't believe me, even though I know you kind of like me and trust me, but this guy John Desard is from the Financial Times. He is a solid guy. I have a very brief acquaintance with him emailing back and forth, and he is no slouch, and this is not some woke, ridiculous propaganda this article is very good stuff. Go ahead.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Northern Iraq to Haifa Israel to make up for the pipeline that they just lost with the Iranians. Netanyahu bought this, and David Wormser and Richard Pearl bought this. This was one of the reasons, one of the major reasons that four thousand five hundred Americans and a million Iraqis died in Iraq War two, so Israel could save a nickel, a barrel on Iraqi oil because their own policies had cost them their access to Iranian oil, and so they were paying this extra premium after losing that source. And this oil pipeline to Haifa was a big deal, and you want to pull this up because you'll want to read it later and laugh and weep. It's called How Amid Chalabi Conned the Neocons. Okay, now for your audience, they need to know disclaimer. A long time ago, salon.com did journalism.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Huh? Well, again, magic wish. What's going to happen is our Sunni king will just enslave the will of the Shiite supermajority. And they'll be our cast pause and do whatever we want, and we'll lord them over Iran. David Wormser said, Chalibi assures us that a democratic Shiite Iraq will be a nightmare for Iran because the Iranians will want to live like the Iraqis in their wonderful new, awesome supermajority Shiite democracy, and so under the rule of their benevolent king, or however,'cause they end up changing it a little bit, I guess, and emphasizing the democracy part more later, but still it would be a nightmare for Iran, because what happened was I think the King of Jordan died and was replaced, and they said, okay, forget that. We'll just put Chalabi in power himself. He'll be the guy that we put in. Now, they also promised. Chalabi promised the neoconservatives we'll build an oil pipeline from”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of the thing. So, Chalaby's just telling these guys whatever they need to hear, that if we put a Hashemite king in there, then he will be able to tell the Shiite clergy They better stop being friends with Iran. And that they better tell Hezbollah to stop being friends with Iran. And then Hezbollah will be friends with Israel. And then the Israelis can finish stealing Palestine without having to worry about Hezbollah causing them problems on their northern flank. That's the clean break Now, here's the thing about this, ma'am. Picture the region in your head a little bit or pull up the map again if you need to. You got, here's David Wormser's argument, okay? He's saying Iran backs Hezbollah in southern Lebanon by way of Syria. So, what we want to do is get rid of Saddam Hussein, the secular Sunni, who's the roadblock to all this, right?”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The thing is about the Shiites revering people with the blood of the prophet, their Shiite clergy, it doesn't mean that they consider them to be infallible dictators whose will is their law and all of these things, like even the Pope says some things are my opinion, some things I'm speaking for the Lord, but sometimes I'm just saying I think this is how it should be. You know what I mean? So Ayatollahs do not exercise like a spell-binding power over these people through mysticism and like irrational demands of religious fealty to their every order or whatever, right? Like there's a much more consensual relationship than that or whatever. You know what I mean? It's not completely top-down sort of thing like that. And like where they have this magic spell of their bloodline then is like acts as hypnosis or whatever or demands total obedience. That's just never been the implication.”
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 deal is this. Yes, the Shiites do revere their clergy leadership who are descended from a Muhammad, and evidently can prove it, I don't know, apparently, right? And wear their black turbans, and that means that they share his bloodline and all that, okay? Well, the Hashemites also declare themselves to be his descendants, whether that's true or not, whatever. Fine, take it for face granted, and it is, but they're Sunnis.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That let's do a very, very elementary divide of the Sunnis and the Shiites here history lesson. Okay, the Shiites went off with Muhammad's family after he died. The Sunnis picked their own imams, right? So there's like kind of one hierarchy. It's a very, very, very inapt but very crude comparison between the Protestants and the Catholics. There's one Shiite church, basically, right, under the Ayatollahs and their system, and their inherited power through the bloodline and all of that. On the Sunni side, they picked their own ministers, right, like the Protestants, they have their own and do there. There are many more sects and different kinds of Sunnis and that sort of deal. If that makes sense on the most basic level here, okay. So not that I'm saying the Shiites claim to be priests or anything like more analogous with the Catholic Church. I'm not saying that. I'm just saying there's this order of Ayatollahs the same way there are of the cardinals and whatever, if you understand.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Trita Parsi explains that Iran didn't start backing Hamas until'95, or at least maybe they had given them a little bit or something. They had given them very little until then. And so it was provocations by Rabin against Iran had finally after a year and a half of this or more, I believe, if I'm remembering it right. I don't think it was 93. I think it wasn't until 95 that Iran finally said, fine then, if you guys are going to be that way and stop shipping the oil in. So now this becomes a major interest of the neoconservatives and the Lakud Party. And Ahmed Cholembi understands very quickly that this is what these guys want to hear, is that if America will put him and his friends in power in Iraq, they'll be friends with Israel. In the original clean break, they say they want to use the cousin of the King of Jordan, and they're going to put a Hashemite kingdom in their legs to rule Iraq. Now the magic theory here is...”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Peninsula is the port of Akaba there. And there was a secret oil pipeline that was run by Mark Rich's company, the guy that built Clinton pardoned on his last day in office, who was this corrupt financier and oil industry guy. And his company had the secret pipeline where Iranian ships would come and drop off oil and it would then go through this pipeline to Israel, right? Well, once Rabin turned on Iran when he turned the periphery strategy upside down, then the Iranians quit sending oil. In fact, it may not have been till 95 that they quit sending the oil because”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And now there's even a book. Called Tyranny's Ally by David Wormser with a forward by Richard Pearl. They all say the same thing. Okay? What they say is that where Israeli agents and Ahmed Chalabi sold us a bunch of crap and we bought it. And it's this magic theory about how overthrowing Saddam is going to be good for Israel. Now, oh, don't let me leave out that as part of Israel's secret relationship with Iran through the 1980s or their friendship continuing through the 1980s and into the 1990s, they had a secret oil pipeline from the port of Akaba, which I never say that right. I forget how to pronounce it right, but it's we're talking about the Sinai Peninsula in the Red Sea. is the Suez Canal on the gate to the Mediterranean Sea. On the eastern side of the Sinai Canal.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And both of these, well, certainly the first one is officially signed off on by Richard Pearl. And then, I should have hot links on those. I'm not sure why I don't, but there are three related articles here by Loenberg, Wormserin, and Pearl promoting the same agenda in the newspapers there in the Washington Times and the Wall Street Journal.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lebanon as part of that same doctrine. See, we're going after this Shiites now. And that was, again, the operation that motivated the lead hijacker of September 11th to join the Jihad against us right there. That was why he did that was part of that same strategy, right? But then Mont Perez's rule of a short-lived, and Benjamin Netanyahu first came in and became the Prime Minister of Israel for the first time in 1996. Now, David Wormser and Richard Pearl write this study for him. It's called A Clean Break, a New Strategy for Securing the Realm. Again, you can find that at scotthorton.org slash fair use. And in fact, I'm sure there are archive.org versions of it. You can find it with the This Israeli think tank published it. It wasn't an American think tank. It was the Israeli Center for Strategic Study or something like that. Posted it there.”
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 they just decided that this was important to do now. And so somebody's got to be the enemy. So now the enemy is going to be Shiite fundamentalist, Islam, revolutionary, Iranian threat. And in fact, it's one important Israeli strategist told Parsi, we needed new glue for the alliance with the United States. Now that we don't have the Soviet Union anymore, why does America need us? And the answer is radical Islam. And of course, that's great because you could be anybody as long as you're Muslim. You can be called radical Islam, and it doesn't matter how radical or which sect or whose side you're on or anything, right? You could just do anything with that, right? You apply that to Palestinians or anybody else. So that's a great one, like, for propaganda-wise from the Israeli point of view. And so then when Shimon Perez took over after Abin was assassinated, he launched Operation Grape's Wrath, reinvading.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is why, oh, I'm sorry in the reverse, I should have mentioned in the reversal of the periphery doctrine and negotiating with the Arabs, part of that was now turning on Iran and demonizing Iran because just for domestic political reasons in Israel, Rabin had to be tough against somebody. So now it's Iran that's the problem, and that's why we need to negotiate with the Arabs even, right? He makes that change in 1993, in fact, as a funny anecdote and treacherous alliance by Trita Parsi again, where the Clinton people were surprised and even laughed because what do you mean you hate Iran now? Last week, you were demanding that we like Iran along with you. Now you've changed your mind, but what happened? And all that happened was Israel changed their mind. They just had a different policy now. It wasn't any particular thing that Iran had done at that point to cross their line.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So Rabin says, nope, we're going to turn that upside down. And what we're going to do instead is we're going to negotiate with the Arabs, the closer states. And we're going to even make a deal with the Asser Arafat. And this is the Oslo peace process that were being started. Now, they weren't really going to give them an independent state. They were going to give them something like a Shinin Yan pseudo-sorta kind of independent state, which actually probably would have been the best solution, right? Would be you have your local police forces, but we are in one country together kind of a thing. There are lots of states that have kind of complicated arrangements like that and pull it off. But anyway, this was Rabin's plan. But then a Netanyahu fan murdered him in nineteen ninety five. This was when Shimon Perez took over. Now Shimon Perez had been the president. He's now promoted to Prime Minister, and he continues the same policy.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Early 1990s and Yitzhak Rabin. Now, Israel had a strategy, as I said, being friends with Iran. At the same time, they're friends with Turkey and friends with Ethiopia. Why? This was called the strategy of the periphery in Israel. It meant if you picture the map, okay, from Israel's perspective, support Turkey to divide Syria's attention. We want to support Iran to divide Iraq's attention. And we want to support Ethiopia to divide Egypt's attention. Does that make sense, geographically speaking? Yes.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In alliance with the more important neoconservative Richard Pearl, and also Douglas Fife, their fellow traveler, and I think there were two more people signed it. It may have been Charles Fairbanks Jr. and one other guy signed it too, I think. It was really Worms are in Pearl talking, okay? And it's called A Clean Break, a new strategy for securing the realm. Oh, man, you know what? Hell. As long as we're doing this, we want to do this, right? So, we want to talk about a rock war two lex. What we got to do is let's go back to”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Put their burn notice on him. So Ahmed Chabi is this important Iraqi exile. He was a banker in Jordan who then fled the country because he was wanted for embezzling money. And here he was selling the CIA on all of his promises about what he could do in Iraq, and then he was not coming through. And so that's sort of a minor part of the story. But then in 1996. David Wormser, who's an important neoconservative”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's do a rock. Here's where we're going to start Iraq. First of all, Wolfowitz and all them wanted to go all the way to Baghdad in 1990, one, and Sr. told them no and stopped short of that, also let Saddam crush the Iraqi up the Shiite and Kurdish uprising. Then, of course, we have the status quo of Bill Clinton's containment policy, dual containment policy from Iraq, from Saudi Arabia against Iraq and Iran through the 1990s, sanctions, no-fly zone bombings, and all of that. So, and by the way, there are two failed CIA coups in 1995 and 1996 against Saddam. One of them was the one that got Robert Baer in so much trouble because he was working with Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi exile, to try to overthrow Saddam. And it all went to hell because Chalabi was basically selling them. Chalabi was basically making a bunch of promises to them about how it would go that, of course, did not work out at all. And so this is where the CI first...”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that ain't just me, that's them, that's him. That's the guy who was the second CIA officer on scene in charge who wrote and you read his book, you know how editors do this sometimes when a CIA guy writes a book, they'll lead the redaction marks in the big black boxes because it's like good salesmanship to do that, right? So when you read Gary Bernston's book, he goes, and there I was, and me and my fellow CIA officers were talking about how frustrated we were that we could not understand why they wouldn't give us reinforcements while he's getting away. And then the next four sentences are blacked out. You know, and then same thing for Dalton Fury, Thomas Greer”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source