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

“Fighting between the jihadis and the Druze, where people are being lined up and shot and all this. So, in other words, like there is no Syria, which is perfectly good with Israel, right? That like if they could do the same thing, I guess Jordan and Egypt are tame enough, but if they could just wreck every state in the region, I think, well, that would be according to the Oded Yanan plan. And I think that may have been their plan for Iran. Now, Lex, they tweet out pictures, and I forget, I'm sorry, which official it was. If it was the defense minister?”
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 you bin Ladenites. Like, what kind of real estate can they make there? It's going to be this guy, Jolani, has been to CIA finishing school, right? He clearly is, or he's under control of the Turks to a degree and has stopped chopping off heads and doing suicide attacks and bad public relations like that. But there's still a bunch of bin Ladenite coups. And he's really that tame. His own men are get rid of him soon enough anyway. So you see, like, you know, in far eastern, northeastern Syria, you have the Kurds under the protection sort of kind of of the Americans. But then so are their enemies, the Turks. And then you have The Alawites in the far west of the country who've been massacred in the thousands and you have Christians who are at least threatened that their civil status has changed.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Along the lines of the clean break too, where it's pieced through overwhelming strength rather than friendly and decent relations with the neighboring states. So anyway, like what's going on in Syria now is like, is there even really any such thing as Syria now? The Turks have a big chunk in the north. The Israelis are already taking a major chunk in the south, including Mount Hermon or Hernan. I always say it wrong, right outside of Damascus.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So here's what the thing says. It says, Oh no, the Soviet communists are sure to finish conquering the entire world real soon. And poor little Israel will stand alone against the one world communist state, which of course is exactly how it worked out, right? Said the Soviets were gone by the end of the decade it didn't exist at all anymore. But that's like premise one. The Soviets are going to conquer everything and poor little Israel's going to be all alone. So the only way we can secure our existence now will be to smash every Arab state into warring tribes where the worst armed enemy we have is a cook shaking a rifle over his head, right? And warring tribes by religious and whatever ethnic sectarian divisions that they can help to engineer to keep everybody else just completely divided and weak. There's no point in being friends with anyone. Let's just be way more powerful than everyone because that's the darkness of the world we face now. Even though the premise is false that still was the policy.”
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 I was saying about Netanyahu's speech before the UN, this is the new Middle East. Basically, I won the Netanyahu doctrine is we get everything we want and without compromising with the Palestinians. And then the last major enemy player on the board is Iran. And apparently they thought, you know what? Like having an incentive for these Sunni kings to be friends of ours is one thing, but actually just going ahead and getting rid of them and turning Iran into something like the chaos in Syria where there's no central state in Iran anymore at all and it's all just Baluki jihadis blown up suicide bombs and Kurdish leftists and whatever going on you know tearing the country apart is you know like the Odid Janan plan which I guess I'll explain that there's a it's really funny man if you read this it's it's so ridiculous it's ODED Y-I-N-O-N O-Dead”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Getting rid of the palette from the point of view of Lakout here. We're getting rid of the Palestinians at least of the Gaza Strip. West Bank is next. We got Hezbollah completely crippled. Their charismatic leader, Naserala, dead. We got Assad overthrown and replaced with friendly bin Ladenites in Syria. Of course, the Shiites still control Baghdad. There ain't no reverse in that, but Israel is essentially, you know, winning in many ways in the war over there, at least in the short term. And so, 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
“The dirty war of the Obama years in Syria as having fully backfired and not really accomplished anything that is up until last November, December when Al Qaeda broke out of the Idlib province and sacked Damascus. That was a major score for the Sunni side against the Shiites. By the Sunni side I mean America and Al Qaeda in Israel and Turkey and Saudi and friends, right? As I say, it made sense for Netanyahu to have an enemy in Iran to rally the Sunni Arab states against. On the other hand, Heyman,”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stabbed them in the back and took Saudi and al-Qaeda's side against the Houthis. But this is another example of the increase supposedly of Iranian power, although the Houthis are not nearly as close to Iran as, say, for example, Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, who you could, I think, fairly characterize as Iran's 51st state, right? In the case of the Houthis in Yemen, that's pretty exaggerated most of the time. And they were under total blockade. So all the propaganda about Iran shipping them all these weapons was exaggerated. But anyway, so the Iranian Shiite crescent has been empowered by American foreign policy. And by the way, until last December, we talked about the caliphate and the war with Iran against the Caliphate, right? Iraq War III, to destroy it again. But then in Syria, that left Assad far more dependent on Iran than ever before, more dependent on Hezbollah than ever before. So you could barely characterize.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It seemed to make more sense for Netanyahu to not really seek regime change in Iran, to hawk it up against him, you know, at all times, keep tensions high. But isn't Iran the basis of trying to rally all the Gulf states to come and be partners with Israel now that like, come on, we have to have a united front against the Persians, especially since Netanyahu's men in America convinced George W. Bush to go to Baghdad and put Iran's best friends in power there. In fact, we didn't talk all about the mechanics of the thing, but we did talk a little bit about the Yemen war. It was blowback from Obama's CIA anti-al-Qaeda war that threw a few complicated steps, as I outlined in the book, led to the rise of the Houthis coming and taking over the Huer Shiite group from the north of Yemen coming and taking over the capital city of Sana'a in 2015. As I said, America was backing them for a little while against Al-Qaeda before Obama.”
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 here's the question that you asked me that I never answered, which was so what is with Israel's hyper focus on Iran then anyway, like this obsession at this point? Since we talked about it's kind of a distraction for Rabin in the first place. And then, you know, the Lakud took Rabin's same demonization of Iran, but without the compromise with the Palestinians part, right? And that was the Netanyahu doctrine. And I always thought, well, not always, but, you know, it was an issue that potentially...”
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 Israel against Iran and their friends. Right. That's the danger. That's what if we get to Iraq War IV, it would be that.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think he would say that Iraq wore three and a half is what continues to this day. The worry is that it'll turn into Iraq War IV and we're going to end up turning around again and fighting against the Shiites that we fought Iraq War II and three for.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But they're very similar to the Bottom Brigade. Essentially adjuncts of the official army militia, they call them the PMUs, the popular mobilization units that once ISIS came to Western Iraq, the Ayatollah Ali Al Sistani, called on Alsiites to rise up and defend, you know, the new Iraqi Shia stand from them and all that. So that's where the PMUs, you know, really came into existence. And then, of course, they have their own incentive structures going on and are probably pretty close in relative power to the official Iraqi army itself at this point and are very much under, I don't know, complete control, but are very close to the Iranian Kutz Force Revolutionary Guard.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And killing the last of the bin Ladenite Sunni insurgency, which still pops its head up from time to time here and there. But of course it puts us our guys right in range of Shiite militias that operate sometimes independently and sometimes under the control, although maybe deniable control of Iran and groups like Katib al-Hezballah, which is very closely linked to the Bada Brigade. I say al, it's just Katib Hezbollah.”
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 Iraq War One and a half. Then W. Bush comes in and he and the neoconservatives lie us into Iraq War II. And that's the war that we fought through 2008 slash eleven, the worst the fighting was over by the end of eight. We'd won the war for our adversaries by then and then stayed and finally left by the end of 2011. Then we're gone for about two years, although, as I said, CIA was still doing drone strikes there. So we really hadn't stopped bombing Iraq that whole time. And then they built up the caliphate and launched Iraq War III in August of 2014, which ends at the end essentially of Trump's first year in power, 2017, maybe into the beginning of 2018, is when they wrap up Iraq War III. And now is what I would call Iraq War III and a half, which is America again embedded with the Shiite army hunting down.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Iraq War One is Operation Yellow Ribbon, Desert Storm, the First Gulf War, nineteen ninety one, january through february nineteen ninety one. Iraq War one and a half is from the end of that all the way through W. Bush. That's Bill Clinton bombing them on average every other day for eight years straighten.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then he launched the war in 2014. It was a brutal war, special operations forces on the ground mostly guiding air power to targets. They absolutely just decimated the cities that they liberated, including Tekri, Mosul, Ramadi, Fallujah, especially Mosul killed another many tens of thousands of people to destroy the caliphate that they had built. And when I say Iraq War III, that includes eastern Syria as well, because they ended up going to Raqqa, which was the capital. We call it eastern Syria. It's really sort of north-central Syria, but it's relatively east where most of the rest of the east is empty desert out there.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, I believe in his first term. But this is something that Dave deCamp does a really good job of covering this every day at antiwar.com, the ongoing war. It literally is America's longest war is against Somalia since December 2001 without stopping. And then on Iraq War III, Again, Obama finally launched it after using the pressure and the threat of ISIS to force Maliki out temporarily, and he's still not all the way gone. They replaced him with a guy named Almadi who was from the supreme Islamic Council. So again, take your pick, Dawa or Skiri.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. So, yeah, get those out of the way real quick. Just to say about Somalia, it's been the status quo. I have no new information for you other than it's been the sock puppet government failing to quell the al-Shabaab-based insurgency this whole time. Bush bombed them, then Obama for eight each. Then Trump per four, then Biden for four, and now Trump in his second term now has vastly increased the strikes. His counterterrorism guy, Sebastian Gorka, who's an idiot and a hawk and couldn't tell you the difference between this or that, but he knows he wants to kill them all. And he's one of these, you know, Fox News blow hard, no nothing idiots that Trump has hired and put in charge of there, and he's massively escalated the war against Al Shabab, but of course that means blasting men, women, and children into tiny pieces with high explosives and that kind of thing. And in fact, at one point, Trump even sent regular troops there for training and then pulled them back out.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He empowered the military greatly, especially when it came to fighting bin Ladenites. I don't ever want to hear somebody say that I didn't kill enough people in Somalia, and that's why it didn't work. I told James Mattis, you do whatever you got to do in Somalia. If they couldn't make it work, it still ain't my fault, right? That was the way that he played it, and that was the way he did the same thing in Afghanistan. He wanted out of Afghanistan from the moment he came in. Instead, he escalated the war for four years while he was negotiating with the Taliban, killed another extra couple of tens or hundreds of thousands of people even in a massive air and drone war, especially in Nangahar and in Helmand for almost his entire four years in power during 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 so he devolved command responsibility. Oh, and then he also changed the rules of engagement to make, to recategorize these sort of pseudo-war zones like Somalia and Yemen into full-scale active war zones. We're now the rules are less and essentially he told James Mattis, you do everything that you can and want to do within the law. That's it. You go as far as you possibly can on everything.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have no choice. And that Trump said, okay, and then not only that, because this was his policy, you know, the myth that America. A penny pinching and micromanaging the war effort. Well, that's been a big myth, H.W. Bush said. I ain't doing that, General Score Sworchoff, you do what you gotta do. I'm not right. Donald Trump said the same thing. Nobody's ever going to accuse me of micromanaging the military and preventing them from accomplishing their goals. So to that end, from the moment he took power in seventeen, he devolved decision-making authority as low down the chain of command as he possibly could, cut out all of Obama's lawyers and whatever who were in the way and second guessing.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the thing about that is the Times Square attack was committed by a Pakistani American named Faisal Shazad, who was live in the dream, and he had an advanced degree. He had a nice house and a wife and a kid and a car and was doing fine. And then he went home to Pakistan on vacation and he saw the results of one of Barack Obama's drone strikes that killed a family there. And he volunteered to sign up for the Pakistani Taliban that had never done anything to us. They had not targeted us at all, and it was the first time that they did they recruited him, taught him how to make a bomb, and then he went to Times Square and tried to kill a bunch of innocent people on, I think it was a Friday night or a Thursday night there. And luckily his bomb was just a dud and didn't kill people. So James Mattis is causing Times Square attacks. He's not preventing them. And then secondly, again, this is Madis told the post that he told Trump you have.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whole war to thwart once they went ahead and accepted them and empowered them al Shabab said you guys are traitors and sellouts and kept fighting. And by the way, Obama murdered men, women, and children with drones. He had our nuclear submarines firing cruise missiles at batched huts full of women and their daughters. That's what Barack Obama did, made that thing nothing but worse and worse and worse the whole time he was in there. When Donald Trump came in, this is according to James Mattis. He complained to James Mattis, his Secretary of Defense, and said, I want out of Somalia. Why are we in Somalia? Where's Somalia? What do I care about Somalia? Get me out of there. And Mattis said, two things. One, we're trying to prevent a Times Square attack type attack.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Financing their efforts. And when they did that, it was only then that they turned to the Saudis and accepted a sack of gold coins to declare themselves Al Qaeda. 2012 Eleven years after George Bush came to Somalia, he succeeded he and his successor Obama succeeded in turning them into bin Ladenit's. Only then the Americans killed the worst leader of the bin Ladenite faction, a guy named Godain. They killed him in twenty twelve or thirteen. Oh, I should have mentioned that the guys they overthrew in Bush's last year in power, Connolly Rice made a deal with them, that they can actually be the government of Somalia after all. Never mind our giant war against your Islamic courts union. You can be the president, a guy named Sharif. You can be the president after all, but it has to be in the form of our transitional federal government that we've built for you. So once those guys, their original enemies that they wish this”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Different groups that came together. That's why it was a union. But who was in charge? The elders, the uncles, the imams, the grandfathers, the old men of the village were the ones who were in charge of dispute resolution going on, right? But now once George Bush had Ethiopian vade, Christmas time two thousand six, well, guess who leads the insurgency? The boys. And that's why we've been fighting al-Shabaab in Somalia since 2006, because George W. Bush invented them with his horrific, satanic, demonic, murderous war that he waged there from two thousand one through two thousand six. Then self licking ice cream cone Oh look, we have a terrorist enemy we have to fight. In twenty twelve America kicked them out of Kismayo, or the Kenyans did with American support kicked them out of the port city of Kismayo where they had a black market charcoal operation going.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Capitalism and free trade among property owners, for what ails Somalia USA the regime is what ruins Somalia, our military, our CIA. And so by two thousand five, they formed their own little pseudo government in response to American intervention and aggression called the Islamic Courts Union. W. Bush then hired the Ethiopians to invade, to crush them their historical Christian enemies against this Muslim society and hired Ethiopia to invade and they did complete with mass rapes and torture and want and murder and just absolute war crimes. And that was what led to the rise of Al-Shabaab. Al-Shabaab means the youth, or I've been told more accurately the boys. And under the Islamic courts union, it was a group of thirteen.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Expansion of the cell phone industry, which was more extensive in Somalia at that time than any other place in Eastern Africa. And this was under de facto accidental libertarian capitalist anarchism, right? With no one in charge. And libertarians noticed that. And to this day, Freaks and Kuks and especially liberal Democrats like to say, oh, if you like freedom so much, why don't you move to Somalia? Well, excuse me, but George W. Bush, you know freedom himself has been destroying Somalia with the power of the most powerful regime in the history of the solar system this whole time since then. So only an American who knows nothing about America's responsibility for destroying that society could possibly be ignorant and idiot enough to blame libertarianism and freedom and liberty.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was the excuse for this intervention? The potential that there were three bin Ladenites in Somalia. So America started backing the warlords against them. More peoples started, and whoever their other enemies were, right, whatever they want to do, the more that they fight, the more they keep coming back to the CIA and saying, oh, man, you wouldn't believe how many enemies there are out there. And they make matters worse and worse. And this is at a time where people mock libertarians for noticing that without a government, Somalia was thriving. They had come from communism. Then they had a civil war of 50 warlords versus each other. But everyone was spent and nobody won. And so they had essentially a stateless country, but it was more or less at peace, and no one was powerful enough to gangsterize everybody else, and so the ports at Kismayo and Mogadishu were open with no tariffs, and they had massive trade, and one of the best ways to measure economic growth at that time was in the”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Washington Post. This is their version. There were three. Not 13, not 30, not 3,000, not 3, nothing, 3. Al Qaeda members, suspects, wanted for questioning by the FBI for their potential involvement in the USS Cole attack and the Africa Embassy's attack.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And all of those Saudi billionaires that got marginalized and arrested in there, all their property stolen at that time in a big move by MBS to make himself crown prince de facto king, which he is right now. And he did that in alliance with Mohammed bin Zayed from UAE, and they convinced Obama to do it, and it was an absolutely genocidal war against the civilian population of Yemen that whole time. I'd hate to leave that out. I guess we have to skip Somalia for, let me say about Somalia real quick. It's the longest word American history. George W. Bush sent J. Suck there in December and CIA in December of 2001, and they never left. We've been killing people in Somalia ever since then. And the first thing that they did was they took the bad guy warlord from Blackhawk down in' ninety three, and they tried to put his son in power. They built up his son. You bring us the scalps of jihadis. And get this, according to the CIA talking to”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In Brussels, this was the first, I think, ISIS in Syria attack was at a Holocaust museum in Brussels. So that blowback was coming all the way right away. But anyway, AQAP in Yemen, they were like real ass Al-Qaeda guys and they were coming for us. They weren't just like, oh, Al-Shabaab in Syria, right? These guys were real enemies. And Obama's willing to turn right around. And because the new deputy crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Solman wanted a promotion. He was the defense minister. He's a brand new, 29 years old. Defense minister and deputy crown prince. He wants to make a political move, so he launches a war in Yemen against the Nuhuti regime with Obama's support so that he can use that as a power play inside the royal family. This is when he arrests the crown prince, Mohammed bin Naef, and Talal.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're flying as Al Qaeda's Air Force in Yemen because this was at the time that Obama switched sides in the Yemen War, where America was giving intelligence to the Houthis, Wall Street Journal january two thousand fifteen, and Al Monitor by Barbara Slavin from the Atlantic Council, January 2015. America's passing intelligence, Lloyd Austin, Obama's, I mean, pardon me, Biden's later Secretary of Defense was the head of Central Command. He's passing intelligence to the Shiite Houthis to use to kill al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Our enemies, the ones who tried to blow up the plane over Detroit on Christmas Day 2009 with the underpants bomb, the guys who did the horrific attacks in Nice and in Paris, France, the Charlie Hebdo and the Eagles of Death Metal Concert, they attacked a kosher grocery store in France and a Jewish museum.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Good guys? No, man. They kill Shiites for us now They killed Serbs for us. We really liked it when they were helping kick in Serbs skulls. Just to wrap that up, Obama launched a war. He waited a couple of months to try to push out Maliki, and then he launched Iraq War III to destroy the caliphate again. In this time, in this case, directly on the side of the Iranians, he had Iranians on the ground, Quudsforce on the ground running the Iraqi Shiite militias, fighting for Decrete, liberating Tekte from the bin Ladenites with America flying air cover for them. At this time, John McCain complained, We're flying as Iran's Air Force in Iraq, but we're flying as Iran's Air Force against the bin Ladenite Caliphate that McCain had helped build up despite Iran for accepting our Christmas gift of fighting Iraq war two for them. So it was all John McCain's fault when he complained that, and then there's a guy named Michael Horton, no relation to me, but who is from the Jamestown Foundation and a terrorism expert. He says, yeah, John McCain complains that we're flying as Iran's Air Force in Iraq.”
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 by that traitor, Michael Duran. And Clint Watts. Who's Clint Watts? He's the guy, the former FBI agent, who was behind Hamilton 68 that lied and said that you and all your friends are all Russian bots and that you ought to be censored right off of Twitter. That's who Clint Watts is. He's a damned liar, and he later admitted to Buzzfeed, oh, I don't really know about that whole bot thing. He was the guy who did it, working for Bill Crystal. They created the Alliance for Securing Democracy. And it was Clint Watts who lied, that halt, and there were hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of stories claiming that Russian bots were behind it every time anything good ever happened on Twitter during that era. That's who Clint Watts is. And then they say, did you click the thing? Page up just a sec. What's the byline here? The good and bad of Aurar al-Sham? Oh, they deleted it. In the foreign affairs version, the subhead is an al-Qaeda-linked group worth defending.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Israel with a rocket and immediately apologized. Sorry about that. We like you guys. No offense. Forget that. You can read, let's look at this. As long as we're on this, I'm having so much fun. Type in foreign affairs. And accepting Al Qaeda. There you go. The enemy of the United States enemy. And just in case you're confused with a nice pig picture of Osama bin Laden and Imanal Zawahiri on the top. And the article is about how we're supposed to hate the Shiites more now. That's what our allies want. Regardless of who killed all those Americans in New York City, They ran another one. Type it in. The good and bad of Ar Sham.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“After he left being the ambassador, he said the exact same thing. And he's clearly reflecting Benjamin Netanyahu's view here. There's no question about that. And I have in and enough already. I have an entire section called Israel's role that showed how they were giving direct aid and comfort to the bin Ladenites by way of the Golan Heights. And there was even at one point, quite famously, there was an attack by local Druze on the Golan Heights, kidnapped prisoners of the Israelis basically who attacked an Israeli ambulance that was shipping bin Ladenites back to the front because the bin Ladenites had been killing Syrian Druze, their brethren. And so they attacked this ambulance and it became kind of a controversy. It also was a controversy when ISIS. Not even Nusra or Jeshal Islam or Aral al-Sham or one of these other groups. Actually, Isis accidentally hit”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because and what are his two excuses that Assad is responsible for every single death in the war when all he's doing is defending his state from foreign invasion by foreign backed superpower backed, bin Ladenite suicide bomber, he just said suicide bomber mercenaries, right? But no, Assad's responsible for every single one of the deaths, and then he lies again, outright, and says, and Iran has military nuclear technology, implying that somehow the Ayatollah has a bomb and he's going to give one to Assad or to Hezbollah. And so that's why we need to back Al Qaeda in Syria, both of which are, of course, complete and total hoaxes, and again he admitted in the middle of that after lying and saying he's only speaking for himself, he accidentally said from Israel's perspective. He also said the same thing again in an interview with the Jerusalem post, either right before he left or right after.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because he did just say Sunnis, but he also said we just saw them take seventeen hundred, Iraqi, he says, soldiers, but it was Air Force cadets at Camp Spitcher and massacred them in the field. Iraqi Shiites, that was Isis that did that just a week ago when he sang this. He's not talking about the mythical moderates. He sang the Sunni evil, let the Sunni evil prevail. He's talking about Baghdadi's bin Ladenite Caliphate.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, he just said from Israel's perspective, from the Netanyahu regime's perspective is exactly what he meant, and it's fine because we have plenty of Massad and military officers echoing those exact same statements, even Thomas L. Friedman says we shouldn't defeat the Islamic State yet. They're taxing the Shiites. Okay, there's no question of what he meant there. And by the way, is he talking about the mythical moderates, the Free Syrian Army?”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not true. Wait, pause it again. He gave an interview to the Jerusalem Post where he said these exact same things while he was still Netanyahu's ambassador to the United States. And this is treason. This man was born in the United States of America. Okay, 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
“One sec. Did I mention now? This is in the middle of June 2014. Okay, they sacked most and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi got up there at the Mosul grand mosque like a cross between Benito Mussolini and Osama bin Laden and declared himself the divinely appointed caliph Ibrahim, ruler of the Islamic State Caliphate. Is two weeks later. Okay, hit the button”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's going to come right up as your first YouTube link. It's going to automatically launch right there. There it is, right there. Sunnis versus Shiites in the lesser of two evils. And I actually met the guy who asked the question here, came up to me at a thing and said, hey, I'm the guy that asked the question at that thing. So kudos to you, buddy. Thank you. Lex Friedman, let's watch this clip and trip out.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From 2014, they took Mosul to Crete. It took them a little while, but they took Ramadi in 15. They took Fallujah right away. And they created an area landmass the size of Great Britain with a standing army at its highest, about 250 to 300,000 men, if you take, if you look at their troop strength in various places during that time. And then what did Obama do? This is in, oh man, you know what? We should watch this clip, dude. Let's pipe this in here. Speaking of Jonah Goldberg, type in Orin O R E N”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Patrick Coburn said they're the Islamist Kamir Rouge, right, like Pol Pot and the Communists, the most insane lunatics to ever be armed with weapons before, right? Nut cases Berserkers This is the junior varsity, the suicide bomber brigade the most dangerous one that's ever been created in history? And six months later they rolled right into Mosul and this is the picture you still have in your head of that long trine, that long train of Toyota Helix pickup trucks rolling into Mosul with their headlights on and all the jihadis in the back of the trucks with their rifles. And just as Patrick Coburn and I had predicted, the Shiite Iraqi army that had hardly any interest whatsoever in ruling Mosul or Takrete or Fallujah turntail and ran. And the Islamic State Caliphate then conquered all of western Iraq.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These guys are the vanguard of the Sunni insurgency that killed four thousand out of the four thousand five hundred of our guys that died in Iraq War II. These are the Zarkawiites. They're worse than bin Laden. They are great.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So this idiot, I'm sorry, excuse me for a moment, but don't you lie to somehow take the slightest comfort in the back that like Elise Barack Obama can read? At least he's like the slightest bit maybe interested in what he's doing compared to W. Bush or Trump who are clearly just winging it and W. Bush just forget it. Bill Clinton, of course, they would say he would know more about any subject than his briefers, and they better be on topic because he read six books about it, and he's a horrible child killer, but that's still true about him that he's a brilliant guy, or at least a brilliant consumer of data in trying to form his policies. He wanted to be in charge and know as much as he could. How could Barack Obama lex not know who Al Qaeda in Iraq is? How could he think that ISIS is the junior varsity?”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“then they just short of a year later they consolidate a state in eastern Syria just as he said just as I said again you can check the records all my all 6100 and something of my interviews are at Scott Horton.org if anyone ever wants to see whether I was good on this back when I claim I was and then Obama was asked Mr. President, what about the black flag being hoisted over Fallujah and Obama? This is Vanity Fair magazine. And he tells him, listen, just because the junior varsity puts on a Kobe Bryant jersey doesn't make him the Lakers.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We at antiwar.com, et cetera, are freaking out over this. Oh, and I was going to say about Mike Flynn. Mike Flynn was the head of the DIA that put out a report, a secret report that's now published Judicial Watch got it, and the Great Brad Hoff wrote about it at his great blog, Levant Report. People can find it. And what happened was The DIA put out a report saying our allies are backing bin Ladenite terrorists in Syria. Their goal is to create a Salafist principality in eastern Syria, and there is a real danger that this could blow back into western Iraq and Al Qaeda in Iraq could return to their old haunts in Mosul and Ramadi. He wore that in the summer of 2012.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wouldn't give him as much credit as the two of them. But Ron is in a class by himself, of course. I guess you could say that they're comparable because I disagree with her and pretty severely enough on enough things. But on the other hand, I think Bernie Sanders is sometimes disingenuous in a way that I don't find her to be without getting too far into that. But anyway, you're right, though, that you can see the people who are outside the norm usually and are treated as the outcasts up there if they're anywhere near the halls of power up there. They're the ones usually who are telling the truth about things and are getting things right. Okay, so now let's fast forward now. So, as I said, in January of 14, they hoist the black flag over Fallujah.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source