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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“Thank you. Yes. So, first of all, I'll take my responsibility for that part. I literally had a long drive and a long flight and four hours sleep and no food in my stomach whatsoever. And I quite honestly absolutely despise Mark Dubowitz. And I have for a very long time. And so 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
“That's right. Yeah, we're reaching out to everybody. We're here to inform everybody again, as I always mentioned during the short break there, that hawks read our website too. Because if you want really the best briefing of what's going on in the country, like we do hear from them from time to time that like. I gotta admit, those guys really do have the most comprehensive coverage of the stuff I'm interested in, even if from their point of view the wrong point of view.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And see, of course, there's partisanship is all built into this. Is everybody supports their guy because the other guy is, we can't let them win. So we can't undermine even when we disagree with our own guy, we can't undermine him or we're helping the other guys are going to get him in the midterms or they'll get him in the next election. So people close ranks around things they even disagree with just because they consider, again, the alternative worse. That's even from the point of view of voters a lot of times that like, you know, even Murray Rothbard endorsed George H.W. Bush, who had just done the Iraq War because Rothbard's like, well, at least he hates Yitzak Shamir, and at least he's not bringing Hillary Clinton and the leftist cultural revolution with him, right? So, you know, people got to make these choices and make their comparisons of, you know, what they favor or what they value at any given time and make those compromises, you know.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ultimately determine the fate of mankind. But there's a lot of Yankee busy bodyhood that is built into this, and of course the Scotch Irish like to get drunk and get into fist pies for fun, and I take responsibility for that as a bit of my background too. I'm not being a racist bigot, but like that's part of our culture is like being a tough guy and being able to get in a brawl and win one or even suffer a defeat. And not cry about it, you know what I mean? And”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he also financed the project for New American Century of Bill Crystal and Robert Kagan. He financed the weekly standard magazine. And the agenda was like, let's sell NATO planes in Europe and let's push for war in the Middle East. And so there's a lot of self-interested reasons there. But I think overall, like you've got to take these people at their word when they say, we know we're heroes. We know we're doing the right thing. We know everybody's better off without us. We know that we have to. This is our morality-based foreign policy. We just can't allow that bad thing to happen any longer. We have to do something worse to stop it. And this kind of thing is very like you could tie it back to like whatever. I'm not this smart to talk all about the influence of the pilgrims and their glorious mission, you know, in ancient Massachusetts to create the new city on the hill, to be like the new Zion.”
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 that really is what they call the Wolfowitz doctrine. It's not just, hey, let's go to Iraq for Israel. That's a huge part of it, but it's let's America, our military power is always beneficial compared to the alternative. And so we should be the ones to guarantee the peace or the war. But in our case, if it's war, it's only because the alternative was worse, we promise. And so that's the doctrine. And there is an ideology of American Empire here. I don't want to dismiss the corruption. It's a huge part. I mean, if hopefully we have time later and talk really about the new Cold War with Russia, we can talk a lot about the role that Lockheed and the other military-industrial complex firms played in pushing all these policy.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Us, it would be somebody else, and it would be worse. So that's it. And so it is our responsibility. We're the most mature and adult and responsible stewards of global power. And so it has to be us to do this. And that was what it said in the defense planning guidance. And now it's true that Bush lost that election and the Clintonites came in, but as Paul Wolfowwitz bragged again in the national interest by the end of the decade, that they all adopted the Wolfowitz doctrine anyway. You know, like, for example, Bill Clinton going right around NATO to do the war in Kosovo in nineteen ninety nine because he wanted to. And Russia had a veto on the UN Security Council. And so, well, forget that. We just go around that. That's straight out of the Wolfwitz doctrine, right? That it's what's good for us and our predominance of power in those regions of the world is what matters the most. And these other considerations will have to take a back seat to make sure that we can be the guarantors of our world order regardless of what the treaties everybody signed up for.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, but Francis Fukuyama knew better. He said no, it's the end of history. And America has proven that more or less democracy and more or less free market capitalism, as like Bill Clinton would define them or something of that era, that that's the future of mankind. We proved it. They tried every other way of having a modern successful society, and this is the one and only way to do that. And not only that then, but that's obviously America's mandate and all his neocon friends took it as America's mandate that we're going to force the world to accept our ways in that same way. Of course, the British justified their obviously very self-interested empire in the very same way that we're going to teach you to have a separate independent judiciary at any cost, right? It's all the, you know, I hate to say it, but the white man's burden type of argument. And they say this to this day. Look, if it wasn't us, it would be the Russians. If it wasn't us, it would be the Chinese.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Said, That doesn't make any sense to me. Right? Like, if it doesn't just sound right to your average guy, you tell me we had a face down Hitler, all right, we had a face down Stalin and Mao, that makes sense We got a bomb Kadapi? There's not a better way that we U SA number one can handle that You know, same kind of thing going forward here and this is why you know these and I like to emphasize this so much is that in the aftermath of Vietnam people think that oh peace is just hippies and leftists and anti-Americans of one stripe or another people who are just no good in a fight anyway So what do they know about security, right? Jack Nicholson, I stand on that wall even think about what a joke that was he is down in Guantanamo Bay Keeping Castro at bay for me yet thanks a lot dude I can't handle that truth whatever you're burying down there a lot of torture later but anyway”
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 why the Berkshire's turned against the Cold War during Vietnam. Robert Welch, I mean, you can't get more anti-communists than that guy, the leader of the Birch Society. But he goes, wait a minute, why are we turning our country into a communist country in the name of containing communism over there? And he was being very liberal with the use of the word there, but meaning, why are we building a total state here when that's everything that we're trying to oppose in Vietnam? But we're building it here at home as crazy. We need to save this money. We need to build our country and lead the world by example, not by force. It was the obvious thing. It was that obvious to Robert Welsh and to Ron Paul during the Cold War. Then after the Cold War, you gotta make up a bunch of crap about Saddam Hussein as Hitler and he's killing all the babies in their incubators and these kinds of Belgian babies on bayonets and related hoaxes to keep the thing going. Because again, as Richard”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There must be another explanation, and the other explanation is he is learned, he knows more about this than you, and he knows why you shouldn't do this, because this is what's going to happen if you do. And that's the kind of guy he is. And that's why he and his paleo-conservative friends said, okay, enough, we want to come home. And so Jink Kirpatrick, she didn't really join with the Paleocons, but she was certainly aligning with him on this issue at this time that now's our chance to go back to being a limited constitutional republic with a free economy, a usually successful commercial republic, I believe she says, in the peace, and which had a typo because it said unusually, but she couldn't have meant that. 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
“Same one we still got and see Pat said okay, look, I was buying it when the enemy was in Moscow. But now that there's no enemy in Moscow and world communism, the threat of world revolution is dead and gone. Well, I don't want to hear it about why we have to suffer this anymore. We're supposed to be, and then again, this is why I cite Jinker Patrick. I could just cite Ron Paul to you all day long here, right? But everybody knows that Ron Paul is good on everything. The point is here, is these are people who are very hawkish when they feel like it needs to be. You might even, your readers might, or your listeners, viewers might think that Ron Paul is just too biased for peace. Well, Pat ain't, okay? Pat is willing to fight, but not if there's not a good reason to. And that's the big qualification. Why would a guy like Pat be anti-war? We know he's not a hippie.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Emergency. Even with Truman at the reins of it all Because of the need to face down the Soviet threat, and you need a powerful domestic empire that's capable of forcing the American people to enforce a world empire to contain the threat of Stalinist Soviet communism.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He was adamantly cold warrior until the Soviets were gone and then the empire continued to expand. And then he went, wait a minute now. I taught a generation of students that we were holding the tide back. What's all this about we're the tide now? That's not right. And in fact, I like to cite this because it's just so astonishing to people that William F. Buckley, one of the major that he was a neoconservative, he wasn't, but he was one of their main godfathers, basically, the founding editor of the National Review. He wrote an article in 1952 in Common Wheel magazine. Again, you can find this at Scott Hortorton.org slash fair use. It's called The Party in the Deep Blue Sea. It's about the Republican Party, I guess, is what it means. Party in the Deep Blue Sea. And in there, he says, we must accept a totalitarian bureaucracy on our shores for the duration of the American.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And see, Pat is the perfect avatar for this, him and his buddies, you know, Scott McConnell and Jude Waniski himself had been a former neoconservative. But there's this whole group of paleoconservatives who nobody can question their patriotism. This is Ronald Reagan's guy. This is a guy that puts words in Ronald Reagan's mouth, right? And he's saying, okay, you guys promised. The empire was a defensive measure, right? We don't want an empire. Chalmers Johnson is another one. Chalmers Johnson was a professor at USC, who was a hardcore, ardent cold warrior. You're familiar with him. I'm sure he wrote the book Blowback and then Sorrows of Empire and Nemesis or the trilogy that he wrote about the American Empire then.”
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 right. In other words, she is here. She's lying with Pat Buchanan. Now, for people who aren't familiar with Pat Buchanan, he's a Catholic, paleo-conservative. He was Nixon's speech writer and Reagan speechwriter. To this day, he's retired, sweet old guy now, but he's lifelong Cold Warrior and doesn't regret it. The commi threat absolutely had to be contained. Vietnam had to be done. He's a wonderful guy. He really is. And he's written just a grip of great books. I mean, I don't know eight or ten 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
“Here's what she says in here. She says, We should eschew the burdens of superpower status. She sounds like George Washington. She's sang okay, the commies are gone, the Cold War is over, the emergency is over. So now we can go back to being what we were supposed to be, what we used to be before, that we put on hold, because we had to wage the Cold War. Now we can have a real return to normalcy, meaning. Right? Before the permanent world empire was built for the purposes of destroying the Nazis and then containing the commis.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the national interest called a normal country in a normal time. The only place you can find it is on my website, scotthorton.org slash fair use. And I won't tell you where I got. And it's, and don't ever sue me National Interest. I love you guys. And the thing is So it's in there somewhere. You have to page down. I'm not. Oh, there it is right there. Normal country in a normal time. March, oh, that's the date I published it. Fall 1990.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Second ambassador to the United Nations, who was widely respected by the Republicans as a conservative hawk and a very like American interest-oriented type. And she would even rail against the UN itself in almost a bircher sounding kind of way that appeals to me, although she didn't really mean it. She was just mad that they would ever get in our way rather than that they really are threat to our independence in any way. But the point is this, man, that I'm trying to get to, is that at the end of the Cold War, a year before the Soviet Union was even gone, In the fall of 1990, so she must have witnessed in the summer of 1990, this is a year before the failed Kami coup, and the final unraveling where the Russians overthrew the last of the Soviet Union government at that time at the end of'91 is a year before that. And she, importantly, right on the confirmation bias trick again, it's Gene Kirkpatrick, right? Not Susan Sarandon, it's Jean Kirkpatrick, who wrote this piece.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Muslim Brotherhood to rule in Egypt because they won barren square, parliament, and the presidency just barely. They won in fair elections, and after all we've done in the name of democracy, don't we have to allow them to have a chance? Well, Frank Gaffney was like, are you kidding me? Like, I'll go overthrow him myself right now. Are you crazy? He's got an H bomb going off over his head. Is anybody going to deny that Frank Gaffney is a neoconservative just because he differed with Robert Kagan on his order of importance in democracy in this or that instance? Give me a break. Gene Kirkpatrick came from the Neoconservative left. She wrote for commentary magazine with Norman Pothortz and all the guys. And I don't mean again just a leftist. She was with the Trotskyites, Mac Schotman, and the Young People Socialist League and the Social Democrats USA. So she's like a card carrying neoconservative. This is what it means to be a neocon. And she wrote, and then she was Reagan'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 so the defining characteristics, and he was saying, well, she didn't believe in democracy as the single most important thing in the whole world. And of course, she had written this article in the national interest that had gotten Reagan's attention in the first place, saying that it's okay to support authoritarians as long as they're right-wingers and anti-communists, that anti-communism is more important than democracy, and so we should put, for example, we should support people like Somoza in Nicaragua and things like that in order to keep the commis at bay, that that's number one. And so some of the neocons disagreed with that. Dubowitz was trying to say that's what makes her not a neocon, but that's really not true, because neocons, there's about a hundred of them or something, and they disagree about all kinds of things. They sure do work together on lots of things, but sure they disagree on things. I'll give another example on democracy, where Robert Kagan said in 2013 that we should allow”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Total dominance in Asia as well. And this is what Charles Krauthammer called our unipolar moment again and said we should stop short of nothing less than total world domination. That was the quote. And at that time, Jean Kirkpatrick, who had been a neoconservative, she was a member of the Young People's Socialist League of the Social Democrats USA, which were the Trotskyites under Max Schachtman, who was Trotsky's most important guy in the United States. And this is something that Mark Dubowitz tried to deny and argue with me about whether she was a neoconservative or not. Well, she was like James Wolsey, a Presbyterian. Now, most neoconservatives are Jewish and or Catholic, although you have Bizalme Khalilzad and Francis Fukiama and others who are of other cultural inheritances, you might say there.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, more on the neocons here, too, before we get too far into Bill Clinton In 1992, a year after the end of Iraq War I, under Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfwitz, his deputies Scooter Libby and Zalme Kalzad wrote what was called the Defense Plan and Guidance for nineteen ninety four for fiscal year nineteen ninety four, and it caused a huge upset. It was late to the New York Times and it became a really big deal because what it said was America is essentially world police. We're not going to tolerate the rise of any near peer competitor against us in the world. Like we'll fight them before we allow them to get powerful enough to even be one. We will not let any nation or group of nations become powerful enough to ever even be able to think about challenging our military dominance on the planet. And of course we're doing all this in the interests of world peace and that means that we have to have total military dominance in the Middle East. We have to expand NATO and have total military dominance in Eastern Europe.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the guise of the United Nations, Baby Blue Flag and all of that, for PR purposes more than the real agenda, he was saying American power is the guarantor of world peace, and we will enforce it through war, right? And that's the deal of it. Nobody's allowed to bite or we will intervene. So it's just essentially it's the irony, right, that any government powerful enough to keep the peace between the 50 states is powerful enough to try it for the rest of the world as they can. They do this. We're just extending our security umbrella. Everybody who joins up with us is guaranteed nobody's going to ever mess with you or else they'd have to mess with us, except for everyone on the outside who now are put in the position of having, you know, not just the United States, but all their allies lined up against them and fill that much more threatened name.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So before we get too far into Bill Clinton, I should say because I did say these words I know the New World Order thing, that was a very popular conspiracy theory in the 90s and even before that, which was about building a one-world government under the United Nations and subsuming the United States under it and all that. That's not what I'm talking about. And I actually was a New World Order Kook in the 1990s, but I was a kid. It's fine. I grew out of it. But the point being, Bush Sr. did use that phrase repeatedly. And what he meant by 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
“That's how I knew antiwar.com was for me the first day I laid eyes on it. My friend said, Look, they run Ron Paul. And I went, I like these guys.”
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 right. And we're very close with the American conservative magazine, for example. Pat Buchanan is a good friend of ours, and we ran his articles for many years. Ron Paul, of course, as well, the greatest American ever.”
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 reassuring. And you see our spotlight article is by Bronco March Teach, and he's a leftist, but we love him. He does absolutely fantastic work.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everything every day. We have our top news, we have a frontline section, and then at the bottom, we have every region of the world where there's conflict breaking out.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The main Think the most, yeah, the most important thing is readantiwar.com every day for a long period of time in a row, and you will have a very good handle on what the hell is going on in the world. It was founded by Eric Garrison, Justin Romondo, who are both a couple of libertarians. Romondo was a student of Murray Rothbard's, or at least one of his mentees, you know, learned a lot from heir of his foreign policy thought. Murray and Rothbard, the best libertarian. And so that's where we come from is that tradition. And, you know, Ron Paulian non-interventionist types. But the news, but our opinion pieces come from all over the spectrum as long as we're anti-war. We're not sectarians at all. So one issue thing, and really we just do the hard news more than anything. We have a lot of great editorials as well, but it's Eric Garris and Dave DeCamp and Kyle Anzalone who get the lion's share of the credit for the actual work that goes into the site every day.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was her father, was the one who spun up this story. So in other words, the same guy who spun up that story was the same guy who spun up this story about the assassination attempt against Bush Sr., which everybody still believes and which I'm sure Bush Jr. believed at the time that he launched that war probably. Was he Seymour Hirsch? He doesn't know. And it was just conventional wisdom. And I was still just a teenager in the 1990s, but I don't remember, wow, that assassination against Bush thing was debunked. I don't remember that ever getting around. You know what I mean? I don't know who was reading Hirsch at that time. It was pre-internet times by a year, right? It just wasn't a hot enough topic. You know what I mean?”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So now America has to stay in Saudi Arabia to balance against them both. And Bill Clinton resisted this and resisted this until the big fake assassination attempt against Bush Sr., which again, I don't have any reason to believe the Israelis were behind that. The Kuwaitis who rigged up, oh, did I leave out that it was the girl who pretended that she saw the babies thrown out of their incubators?”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The H.W. Bush policy of staying in Saudi Arabia in order to patrol the so-called no-fly zones over Iraq to keep Saddam Hussein from killing the Iraqis and enforce the blockade which was enforced by world law anyway, right? Like there's some smuggling going on or whatever, but no nation state is violating the embargo against Iraq here. So it's completely unnecessary on both counts. But the Israelis, and this is Rabin's government, Yitzhak Rabin's government, is, I guess, in agreement with this Lakud guy indic on this. They're pushing for a policy that they called dual containment. And the point was that Iraq, now that we beat them up so bad in Iraq War I, Desert Storm First Gulf War? Now they're not powerful enough to balance against Iran.”
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 it was Martin Indick who was Bill Clinton's advisor. Who was he? He was an Australian who'd been working. Well, former terrorist murderer, and then Lakud Party Prime Minister of Israel. And Indic had gone from there to go work in, I don't know exactly the time off a year or so. He stopped and went to work for Clinton. In the meantime, he founded the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Winep, which was directly a spinoff of APAC. APAC put up the money. That's the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the heart of the Israel lobby. They put up the money for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, which you have heard that name a million times, and you're going to continue to hear it because they are always cited as middle of the road scientific experts on American foreign policy when they were, and this is not the same about all neocon think tanks, but this one was literally created by the Israel lobby in the United States. Then he became an advisor to Bill Clinton, and he was insisting on this policy essentially.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And here's the other thing. Bill Clinton, I think, foolishly said something about how he would like to normalize relations with Iraq or at least look into it or something. And boy, he should not have said that because people got all upset and tried to figure out how to stop it, including the Kuwaitis. And what happened was, I know you're familiar with this we all are, and virtually everyone gets this wrong. The myth that Saddam Hussein tried to murder George H.W. Bush with a truck bomb assassination attempt in Kuwait in nineteen ninety three. Total hoax debunked by Seymour Hirsch by the end of the year in an article for the New Yorker called Case Not Closed. He shows it was just a whiskey smuggling ring that they embellished into this plot against Bush.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, what happened was Mohammed Atta and Ramsey bin Al Shib, they read that Declaration of War, and that was when they decided to join Al-Qaeda. It was based on the Khanamaskar that Israel had perpetrated in Lebanon. So again, we're skipping ahead in the story. We're going to do the whole nineties here, but Literally on September 11th, you had Egyptians volunteered for a Saudi Sheikh to slaughter Americans by the thousands as revenge for American support for Israel killing people in Lebanon. That, my friend, is why George Bush said they hate the Taliban did it because they hate your freedom. Right, because I couldn't tell you that”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just a couple of months later, bin Laden put out his first declaration of war against the United States. It's called Declaration of War against the Americans occupying the land of the two holy places. Pretty subtle, right? And then on the first page, he goes on and on about the Khana massacre and says we'll never forget the severed heads and arms and legs of the babies and the children in Kana. He told Robert Fisk, I believe. How come your blood is blood, but our blood is water? Well, we'll see about that.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So when Shimon Perez launched that war, Mohammed Ata, the ringleader of the september eleventh plotters in the United States, pilot of Flight eleven, I believe. He and his buddy Ramsay bin al-Shib. They were Egyptian engineering students studying in Hamburg, Germany. And when this invasion started, they both signed their last will and testament, which their friends and family and neighbors and whatever said was their expressed intent to like their joining the army. They're deciding, forget engineering, I want to join the Mujahideen and go fight the good fight somewhere, whatever.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In what was called Operation Grapes of Wrath. During that invasion, It's hard to believe this. Wait, don't Google yet. Search this part. It was Nafali Bennett called in the artillery strike on a UN shelter and killed one hundred and six women and children in Kana, that's QANA in nineteen ninety six.”
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 not the point. The point is. What did he say that got anybody to listen to him and do what he said? He was in charge of a government, he had no coercive apparatus at all. His organization is purely voluntar based. And he's asking people to blow themselves up over something important enough to blow yourself up for it. It's not virgins, it's we have a policy. I should stipulate virgins after you die. It was we have a policy and we were trying to provoke a war with the United States of America and you're going to help us do it. Why? Because of these six reasons. That's why. And that was what worked to recruit people to attack the United States of America. Major, important case in point. Whatever. The timeline jumps around here a bit, but major case in point is in 1996 when Israel under Shimon Perez reinvaded Lebanon.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The dictators, especially in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, but around the Middle East. They put pressure on those dictators to keep oil prices artificially low to subsidize our economy at their expense. Just think of all the times you've heard presidents say, I'm telling the Saudis, they better ramp up production and get the price of gas down for election day, right? As Blatant as can be. But what does that sound like to a poor person in those countries? Money supposed to go to them. And then, as Bin Laden would say falsely, turning a blind eye to Russia, India, Kazakhstan, and China in their persecution of Muslims. So they say they love us so much, but they don't really because they don't say anything when this group or that group are the ones killing us. So these were the things, and look, let us stipulate Lex, okay, that Osama bin Laden is a mass murderer, and by tradition, I don't take the word of mass murderers for meaning very much, and I don't expect you to, okay?”
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 totally true. But so in this book, he makes it so clear there are six overriding reasons that bin Laden cited for why the United States should be attacked. And he compared this directly to the Ayatollah Khomeini, who would relentlessly criticize our culture. And, you know, licentiousness and Hollywood R-ratedness and all of that kind of stuff, as like the degenerate society, but you can't recruit people for a war over that. You know what I mean? Not that he's really trying to, but that only inspires so much resentment, you know, and conservatives don't like libertinism, right? Like that's okay, but it only goes so far, right? Bin Laden, on the other hand, said they occupy the land of the two holy places. They help Israel, kill Palestinians and Lebanese.”
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 such an important thing. There's this great book by Michael Schuyer, who was the former chief of the CI Bin Laden unit. It's called Imperial Hubris. And I will say that he went a bit crazy in later years and said really mean things like we ought to help all the Muslims kill each other and we ought to have a civil war over Russia Gate, which I'm very, very opposed to Russian Gate Lex, but I wouldn't go that far. So he went a little nuts later on, but he's a very bright guy and a very honest guy for what it's worth, a very straightforward guy, I should say. I don't know if he's ever told a lie or what”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Embargo United Nations Security Council full global sanctions regime against the Iraqi state, which led to, at the very least, three hundred thousand excess deaths, although a UN study later embellished that and bin Laden would embellish the numbers even higher than that to 600,000 or a million. But whatever it was a ruthless economic war of collective punishment against the entire people of the country, even though they had their chance to overthrow them. USA encouraged it. and then let Saddam keep his helicopters and tanks while we were standing right there and let him crush the insurrection. Now the Bush administration and later the Clinton administration's position was the sanctions stay until Saddam is gone. But he's still young and in pretty good health and no one in Iraq is in any position to do anything about this. So is just this the policy that Clinton inherited from Bush and ended up keeping?”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Groups from around the Middle East. These are more or less stateless groups. They're in some cases backed by Saudi, you know, more or less at different times, but they're jihadists from all over the place. Egyptians and Saudis and Syrians and Azam himself was Palestinian raised in a refugee camp in Kuwait. But yet all these different people. And then so bin Laden's genius was to figure out the one thing we can agree on is let's attack the United States because America is at the root of all of our problems. And just like We had helped them to bog the Soviets down in Afghanistan, they wanted to do the same thing to us. And so this was the beginning really of Al-Qaeda's war against the United States. Began at this time in reaction to the declaration of this new world order, the permanent stationing of troops in Saudi Arabia and what became the permanent, the unrelenting full global”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The main reason, and there are many this is the main reason that Al Qaeda turned against the United States, was that Osam bin Laden was outraged, that the king had allowed the United States to liberate Kuwait instead of him and his men, which is like they have a bunch of mountains to hide out in in Kuwait, but he wanted to try it to kick Saddam out. And then he was just driven crazy by the fact that the king allowed white Christian combat forces to come and occupy the holy land. It's not just their country, but their holy land where Mecca and Medina, the birthplace of Muhammad and the birthplace of the religion of Islam are, and the two holy places bin Laden called them, I guess they all do, and that then we didn't leave. The ultimate outrage, right? And this is the main overriding reason for the bin Laden night, well, at least for his jihad, which was really based on the idea of trying to get all the disparate.”
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 right. So when we talk about Al Qaeda, what we're talking about is eventually the merger of Egyptian Islamic Jihad and the Azam group. After Azam was killed, and I don't think anybody really knows who killed him, Osama bin Laden took over his group. And Osama bin Laden so then,”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, and including bringing them to the United States and having our special forces train them in car bombs and sabotage and assassinations and everything. Yes. Full scale U.S. support for building up the bin Ladenite movement as long as they're killing Soviets.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. So it's a big new Brasinsky. He's trying to bait Russia into invade Soviet Union, into invading Afghanistan, and then they wanted to extend the war. So America had a deal with Saudi Arabia. We would match them dollar for dollar, and we would work with their intelligence services and the Pakistanis to support local Mujahideen like Google Din Hekmachar and Jalaladin Hakani, who later became America's enemies in our Afghan war. But then, and various other Pashtun warlords of different descriptions.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is, and I really screwed this up, man. I'm sorry. When we talked about Afghanistan before, I should have dwelled a little longer on the fact that as we all know, when we talked about bogging them down into their own Vietnam, the Soviets in the 1980s, that America supported not just the Mujahideen of Afghanistan, but what became the international Islamic brigades. Meaning Arabs and other Muslims from all around the world, especially from Arab lands, to go to Afghanistan to bite on the side of the Mujahideen against the Soviets. And this included Egyptian Islamic Jihad and what was called then the Azam Group, which was the main group that was controlled by the Saudi intelligence services during the 1980s.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source