EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,038 words- 0:00 – 0:02
Intro
- JRJoe Rogan
[upbeat music]
- 0:02 – 3:50
Studio warm-up: audio setup, gifts, and media nostalgia
- JRJoe Rogan
Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night. All day. [upbeat music]
- SHScott Horton
Do I sound okay? Check, check, check.
- JRJoe Rogan
You sound great.
- SHScott Horton
This is my normal complaint volume right out of-
- JRJoe Rogan
Are you one of those one ear on-
- SHScott Horton
Yeah
- JRJoe Rogan
... one ear off guys?
- SHScott Horton
Yeah, my right ear hurts a lot from-
- JRJoe Rogan
Ah
- SHScott Horton
... years of this.
- JRJoe Rogan
There's a volume-
- SHScott Horton
And so I usually just leave it off.
- JRJoe Rogan
There's a volume adjuster thing too, so if, if it's too loud-
- SHScott Horton
Oh, that's nice
- JRJoe Rogan
... you can turn it up or turn it down.
- SHScott Horton
You sound good.
- JRJoe Rogan
What's, uh-
- SHScott Horton
But no, it's just, I have a pain in my right ear, so I try not to antagonize it.
- JRJoe Rogan
And thank you very much for the gift, ladies and gentlemen. Scott Horton gave me a professorial pipe. And, uh, like I was saying-
- SHScott Horton
Awesome
- JRJoe Rogan
... Metzger uses a pipe now because of you.
- SHScott Horton
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Like, he, he-
- SHScott Horton
I love that guy.
- JRJoe Rogan
He's the best. [laughs]
- SHScott Horton
He's so funny, dude.
- JRJoe Rogan
He's such a nut. When he corners you-
- SHScott Horton
He comes into the room, he just blows the room away.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- SHScott Horton
He, he's just a force in there. It's incredible.
- 3:50 – 6:41
From radio legitimacy to podcast reach: Scott’s career scale
- SHScott Horton
It's just everything's changed. When I first started doing podcasting, it was the archives of the interviews from my radio show, and it was so important to me that I'm on the radio, 'cause that's real legitimacy. That means somebody hired you, somebody thought you were good enough to be there. Whereas podcasting, any jerk can do from his basement, and it just doesn't count. And then that just became not true, and I kind of clung on to my radio show. I actually gave up my last radio show on KPFK in Los Angeles last year.
- JRJoe Rogan
[laughs]
- SHScott Horton
After, I mean, where it didn't matter anymore anyway, and podcasting has completely changed the entire market, you know?
- JRJoe Rogan
Do you know how many people were listening to you actually on the radio before you quit?
- SHScott Horton
I think it's, like, probably high thousands, but not 10,000. You know?
- JRJoe Rogan
[laughs]
- SHScott Horton
KPFK in LA.
- JRJoe Rogan
Isn't that crazy?
- SHScott Horton
It's the most, it's the most powerful FM transmitter west of the Mississippi River.
- JRJoe Rogan
[laughs]
- SHScott Horton
It's grandfathered in at 115,000 watts, but it's ... But the thing is about it, too, and it's always been like this, the, the programming on there is so inconsistent that you're listening to Latina lesbians one hour, and then you're listening to crystal worship, and then you're listening to hard-hitting news, and then you're listening to, like, leftist union organizing, or then, just whatever. You know what I mean? But it's just, there's no, like, real rhyme or reason to it, so it's hard to follow, you know?
- JRJoe Rogan
What kind of a channel is it?
- SHScott Horton
Oh, it's, um, you know, left of the dial, um, at 90.7 FM, so it's, you know, comparable to, like, KUT-type. It's not actual public radio, but it's no commercials, all donations. And-
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh, wow
- SHScott Horton
... yeah, I mean, they were good to me-
- JRJoe Rogan
A regular radio show that's no commercials, and it's not public?
- SHScott Horton
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
That's interesting.
- SHScott Horton
Yeah, it's like, um, I don't know if the co-op still exists here in Austin, um, uh, cooperative-
- JRJoe Rogan
You must have made a lot of money from that. You must be so rich from doing that.
- SHScott Horton
Yeah, not as much.
- JRJoe Rogan
Like, a leftist radio with no, no ads at all, just donations.
- SHScott Horton
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Boy, you must be raking it in.
- SHScott Horton
No, they never did pay me. But-
- JRJoe Rogan
[laughs]
- SHScott Horton
... I looked at it like they let me be on there for 14, 15 years or something. And, um, you know, like, even when I was, uh, writing my book about the Russia-Ukraine stuff, I would do my radio show once a week, and I was able to still cover what was going on in Palestine, and in a way that I felt like-... you know, you know, you know, something meaningful that I can do even though my attention was completely diverted elsewhere. I still got all my guys from the Libertarian Institute and antiwar.com and I can interview them once a week. And, and then when I left KPFK, I got some response. They're like, "Oh, no, where are you going?" kinda thing. So I mean, some people were caring for it at the time. I don't know.
- JRJoe Rogan
Did you let them know, "Hey, I have a podcast. You could see 'em all, all these episodes will be archived"?
- SHScott Horton
Yeah, I kinda always let them know that. You know, I've done 6,200 something interviews since 2003-
- JRJoe Rogan
Good Lord
- 6:41 – 8:57
Scott’s early 'New World Order' phase—and why he abandoned it
- JRJoe Rogan
Before we get into any of these subjects, like how did you get into this?
- SHScott Horton
Um, well, you know, in the '90s I was, you know, when I was younger, I was much more of like a New World Order, uh, truther type. And, um, but then I basically dropped all that. I grew out of that basically.
- JRJoe Rogan
How do you, how do you define New World Order truther type?
- SHScott Horton
Well-
- JRJoe Rogan
Like, I mean-
- SHScott Horton
Okay, well, I mean, the New World Order conspiracy was that American foreign policy ultimately is about building a one world federal government under the United Nations that would ultimately dominate the United States, the John Birch Society-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right
- SHScott Horton
... sort of idea of how... And, and I, uh, I really like those guys. Um, and I believed that for a long time, really through Clinton, and even the, into the beginning of W. Bush. But then I could... I finally realized with the way that the Iraq War was prosecuted, that this is not about building up the UN Security Council. We got the National Security Council, and Cheney and his neocons, and they have their own separate policy that just disproves the, that sort of New World Order theory. And the American... And, and in fact, so what H.W. Bush meant by that was just the era of the American Empire with no one to stop us this time-
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm
- SHScott Horton
... was all. It was never to build up the UN as the world government. It was to build up Washington, D.C. as the world government. And of course, they've been failing and flailing at trying to establish that ever since.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah. Um, so the conspiracy was that the United Nation would, would be the government of the entire Earth-
- SHScott Horton
Right
- JRJoe Rogan
... and that all other governments would somehow or another give up their power to the United Nations. For what reason?
- SHScott Horton
Um, 'cause they're all in on it together in secret, whatever.
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, but, but-
- SHScott Horton
And that's the point, is it ain't right. It's not true
- JRJoe Rogan
... well, the, my-
- SHScott Horton
There's no-
- JRJoe Rogan
... my question would be like-
- SHScott Horton
Too many people would have to... Exactly. Too many people have to sacrifice the power they do have-
- JRJoe Rogan
Exactly
- SHScott Horton
... to somebody else-
- JRJoe Rogan
And-
- SHScott Horton
... when they don't have to
- JRJoe Rogan
... money.
- SHScott Horton
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
That's the other thing. I mean, as soon as you lose power, then you lose access to-
- SHScott Horton
Yeah
- JRJoe Rogan
... insane amounts of wealth.
- SHScott Horton
Yeah. So we don't want... You know, uh, obviously it's the ultimate nightmare would be that you would have some kind of one world government and then some kind of totalitarian regime take power-
- 8:57 – 12:22
Rules-based order as empire: Wolfowitz Doctrine and permanent dominance
- JRJoe Rogan
... you don't think there's any push towards centralizing things in that regard? Like, wasn't the World Health Organization trying to push for-
- SHScott Horton
Oh, sure
- JRJoe Rogan
... something where the entire world would have to respond to their pandemic rules?
- SHScott Horton
Well, look, uh, so yes, there, there's always, you know, the widening and deepening of the international law as much as they can.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- SHScott Horton
At the end of the day, there is no actual world state to enforce that law other than just the United States of America, but there is no one world army, one world police force to enforce these things. It's all about coercing and cajoling governments to go along. And-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right
- SHScott Horton
... which goes to show, I mean, this is the whole thing about when they talk about... You know, what, what H.W. Bush meant when he talked about the New World Order is the same thing that Joe Biden meant when he would say the liberal rules-based international order of just doing what America says.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- SHScott Horton
Right? That's what it is. You know, it's a pseudo empire. It's not exactly the ex- the same kind of empires and, you know, colonialism that we've had in the past, but it's sort of a neocolonialism where if we can overthrow your government with some money, then we'll do that. A little bit of CIA help, we'll do that. And if we have to-
- JRJoe Rogan
Bomb the rebels
- SHScott Horton
... if we have to bomb your capital city, we'll go for that if we think so.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- SHScott Horton
And it does go back really to the Wolfowitz doctrine, you know, of various degrees, but this is of reference to right after the First Gulf War, Paul Wolfowitz at that time was the Deputy Secretary of Defense for Policy. And him and a couple other neocons, Scooter Libby and Zalmay Khalilzad, they wrote up this document called the Defense Planning Guidance, and it was saying this is going to be, you know, the posture for the post-Cold War era and the post-First Iraq War, Gulf War era. Um, and what it said was, "We're going to be the most dominant power on every continent anywhere in the world, and we're not even gonna tolerate any other nation or alliance or group of nations anywhere to try to join together to balance against us. We will be dominant everywhere, and we'll never let anyone get that far ahead, or at least we're gonna try to construct an order where our power is essentially permanent and they don't even try it." And so that's what they've been trying to do with expanding our footprint in the Middle East, expanding our footprint into Eastern Europe, and of course, you know, working hard at least on building their alliances and, or tightening them and arming their alliances in Eastern Asia. And it's, you know, it, under the theory that if it's not us, it'll be somebody else and it'll be so much worse, so we have to stay and dominate everything forever. But of course, you can look at the debt and just see, well, we can't afford it, so I don't know how anybody else can, but we certainly cannot afford to keep doing this.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right. And if you look at Wolfowitz, if you see POPA image of Paul Wolfowitz, he looks exactly like the kind of guy you would expect to make something like the Wolfowitz doctrine.
- SHScott Horton
Right. And by the way, they did rewrite it 'cause it was a scandal. It was leaked to The New York Times, and so they went back and rewrote it, and they just said, "Well, we'll bring our friends, you know, from the international institutions along too."
- JRJoe Rogan
That picture right there where your cursor is, right below, right there. No, to the right of that.
- SHScott Horton
That.
- JRJoe Rogan
That one.
- SHScott Horton
Yeah, there you go.
- JRJoe Rogan
Look at that. That looks like [laughs] That completely looks like the type-
- SHScott Horton
Yeah
- JRJoe Rogan
... of guy that would do something like this.
- SHScott Horton
So listen, there's a, there's a book about the neoconservatives by Jacob Heilbrunn called They Knew They Were Right.Which is of course-
- JRJoe Rogan
That's hilarious
- SHScott Horton
... right? Like, the, yeah, these guys who have no idea what they're doing.
- JRJoe Rogan
[laughs] Really, you know. That's hilarious.
- SHScott Horton
Let me try this.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- SHScott Horton
Does it fit right on my little head?
- 12:22 – 17:38
The 'seven countries' plan and the neocon network behind Iraq
- JRJoe Rogan
Like I said, you can fuck with the volume on that little knob and turn it up and down. So, um, this was a, the, this, one of the things that, um, when Coleman Hughes and, um, our buddy Dave Smith got into it with was about whether... And when, you remember when, um, they brought up this seven countries thing.
- SHScott Horton
Mm-hmm.
- JRJoe Rogan
That, you know, and he was saying that there was no real proof that that exists, that he didn't actually read it. He was told that we were gonna go into seven countries. But, you know, uh, I was talking to Dave about this the other day, it's like I, y- if y- you just look a- at the fact that we did everything on that list except Iran. Every single one of them-
- SHScott Horton
Yeah
- JRJoe Rogan
... took place, except Iran. Like, he's like, "I really wanna go and do that debate again, and I can't get Coleman to sit down with me." [laughs]
- SHScott Horton
Yeah. You know, yes.
- JRJoe Rogan
[laughs]
- SHScott Horton
For people who are interested in this subject, you know-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah
- SHScott Horton
... long-term, uh, there's no mystery about the connection between the neoconservatives' doctrines and then the activities that the W administration engaged in-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah
- SHScott Horton
... you know, subsequent. I mean, what happened was y- you have, you know, Andrew Cockburn, the great journalist, Andrew Cockburn, says that the neoconservatives are a cross between the Israel lobby and the military industrial complex. The fighter bomber salesman needed eggheads to justify their policies, and the neoconservatives wanted to support Israel, wanted to support American hegemony, and so took all the military industrial complex money to build their think tanks, to create their consensus, to build their policy. S- you know, their own kinda thousand little Council on Foreign Relations to get what they want. And then when, you know, the seven countries thing is-
- JRJoe Rogan
So what we're talking about, just to clarify-
- SHScott Horton
Yeah, sure
- JRJoe Rogan
... is Wesley Clark was given, well, was-
- SHScott Horton
Yeah
- JRJoe Rogan
... he was on some television show. I forget what the show was. Do you remember him?
- SHScott Horton
There's, there's two different statements. One of them I know was with Amy Goodman from Democracy Now!
- JRJoe Rogan
That's right, that's right, Democracy Now!
- SHScott Horton
Yeah. And basically what he's talking about is, um, you know, he says that a general, or, I'm sorry, a military officer of some rank told then retired but still with access former General Wesley Clark, who had been the Supreme Allied Commander of NATO forces in Europe under Bill Clinton, did the Kosovo War, so a very prominent four-star general, and he said, the way he told the story was he told him, "Hey, you know, we're g- they're planning for a war with Iraq." And he said, "Iraq? Why?" And the guy said, "I don't know." And then the second part of the story was he came back a week later or something, and the same guy said, "There's this memo that has this seven countries, and they say they wanna take them all in five years." So they meaning the Office of the Secretary of Defense, so that's Donald Rumsfeld, who's not a neoconservative. He's his own separate thing here. He's the Secretary of Defense, but all of his guys, all of his most important guys are neoconservatives. So the Deputy Secretary of Defense is Paul Wolfowitz. The Deputy Secretary of Defense for Intelligence is Stephen Cambone. The Deputy Secretary of Defense for Policy is Douglas Feith, and then under him is Abram Shulsky and Bill Luti, and all of these guys, uh, Michael Rubin and others, who were all working on this project to get us into Iraq. And this is the neoconservative network of power. You got Scooter Libby and, um, David Wurmser would travel around from state to defense to the vice president's office. But you got Scooter Libby and John Hannah in the vice president's office. You got Zalmay Khalilzad and Elliot Abrams on the National Security Council, Robert Joseph and, and, uh, Stephen Hadley and, and, uh, Eric Edelman. All of these guys were already the network of guys who agreed with this policy going back through the 1990s. It was what they had founded the Project for a New American Century on. And so what they're saying is, "We should not tolerate any..." And remember the time. In, in the d- they, this was the stated doctrine. We will not tolerate the existence of any Middle Eastern regime that supports terrorism, and supports terrorism can mean anything, right? Like Abu Nidal died in Iraq before the war even started and was a washed up old terrorist from a previous day, but, like, that's good enough. You got Mujahideen, he called commie terrorists who've worked for us ever since, but at that time was a good enough excuse to invade Iraq. They would invoke that. And so they made up that doctrine of-
- JRJoe Rogan
The Mujahideen were in Iraq as well as Afghanistan?
- SHScott Horton
Well, this is a particular sect of Mujahideen kooks that, who were Iranian communist cultists who were, had left Iran and gone to work for Saddam Hussein, and then were, you know... He supported them. They had nothing to do with anti-American terrorism at that time except, you know, uh, I guess committing it when they, uh, had worked for Iran previously during the Iranian Revolution. But by, I mean, by the time we invaded Iraq, Donald Rumsfeld inherited them, and they've worked for America and Israel ever since then. They have a base in Albania now. But they w- in other words, though, this wasn't Al-Qaeda. This was not any real excuse. They would just invoke the, a doctrine of fighting terrorism in order to check off this list of all of these governments that they didn't like. And coincidentally and incidentally and very importantly, of course, is this was really, in many cases, Israel's list of enemies, where if it was, say, Colin Powell, which is what people thought they were voting for in the year 2000, by the way, "Well, I don't know about this W Bush, but at least Colin Powell will be up there. We can trust him," they all said.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- 17:38 – 23:29
Clean Break strategy: Iraq as a lever for Israel’s regional goals—and the blowback
- SHScott Horton
If it had been up to him, we would've done a two-state solution in Palestine and solved that issue, and then we would've had probably the most limited of wars against Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, and that would've been it. The rest of it would've been police and/or special forces action. There would've been no invasion of Iraq, which he did lie us into that war, and he's responsible for that. But that was not his policy. That was the policy that came out of the vice president's office and this neoconservative setAnd it's really as Dave Smith correctly says, it's all based on the clean break doctrine, which David Wurmser and Richard Perle... Oh, I've, I neglected to mention Richard Perle and his friends on the Defense Policy Board. But, um, Perle and David Wurmser had written up this policy paper called A Clean Break in 1996, and they wrote it for Netanyahu when he was first prime minister the first time back then. And what it said was, instead of going along with the Oslo peace process and making a deal with the Palestinians, we should just forget all that and just we'll have peace through a position of strength and total dominance over our neighbors. And so, but the problem of course is we, and, and of course meaning continue to devour Palestine, what's left, the 22% of what's left of historic Palestine in the West Bank and Gaza. But the problem is we have Hezbollah on our northern border, and Hezbollah is backed by Iran by way of Syria. So if you just picture the Middle East, you know, um, if you want, you can throw up a map, uh, and just kind of show there's this arc of power from Tehran in Iran through Syria and to Hezbollah, this Shiite militia in southern Lebanon. Now, Saddam Hussein was the Sunni roadblock in that arc of power. But these guys are stupid, the neoconservatives. Uh, they're as stupid as they are arrogant, you know, and certain in their policy. And they believed in this harebrained scheme essentially, that the Jordanians and the Turks would be dominant in the new Saddam Hussein-less Iraq, and that even though it's a super majority Shiite Arab country, those Shiites, they just love being told what to do by either, their original plan was the Hashemite king, the cousin of the King of Jordan, and then they threw that out, and it was the guy who sold them this line that this was possible in the first place, an Iraqi exile you might remember from that time, Ahmed Chalabi, the head of the Iraqi National Congress. They said, "Well, we'll just make him the guy instead," which ended up not happening. But that was their plan, and they said the new Shiite-dominated Iraq will then, the religious leaders in Iraq will then force Hezbollah to stop being friends with Iran and start being friends with Israel instead.
- JRJoe Rogan
[laughs]
- SHScott Horton
And they'll even build an oil pipeline to Haifa or reopen the old British oil pipeline to Haifa, Israel. And they were sold this bill of goods, and they really believed it. And so, and you can find this on my website, scotthorton.org. I have A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, and then the companion piece is called Coping with Crumbling States: A Balance of Power Strategy for the Levant. They're both by David Wurmser, signed off on by Richard Perle. And then they wrote a book where Wurmser wrote the book and Richard Perle wrote the forward. It's called Tyranny's Ally: America's Failure to Remove Saddam Hussein. Get that? America's the ally of Saddam just 'cause we won't launch a war to regime change him there, right in the title, and then based on the same harebrained scheme. And what's funny about this is this guy David Wurmser now tries to defend himself, and he did a interview on a podcast not too long ago with this, uh, born again Christian about September 11th and stuff. And, but he talked about this, and he's like, "Yeah, no, that's still right. They'll do whatever the Hashemites tell them to do, those Shiites. They just worship and revere anyone who claims to have the blood of the prophet." But if that was true, as Dave Smith pointed out, well, then how come you can't just call the King of Jordan right now and ask him to ask the Ayatollah to knock it off? Call him and ask, have him ask Hezbollah to stop being friends with Iran. Why couldn't they have just done that this whole time? Why do you have to have a regime change in Baghdad before you can make this magic wish come true? And the whole thing is completely stupid. And the Shiites do revere some of the lineage of the family of the Prophet Muhammad and, but one, it's not a magic spell of hypnosis and total control over them, and two, that has nothing to do with the Hashemites, who are Sunnis in a whole separate line and are the British sock puppet kings of Jordan-
- JRJoe Rogan
So-
- SHScott Horton
... who used to rule Iraq back 70 years ago or something but have no purchase there whatsoever. And of course, what happened, just real quick, what happened then in the war was they just empowered Iran. They didn't empo- empower Jordan and Turkey and America and Israel over the Iraqis. They just gave Iran even more power than they ever had before. When it was all meant to screw them over, it blew up in the Americans' face.
- JRJoe Rogan
This episode is brought to you by ZipRecruiter. It's good to be passionate about something. Exploring what interests you adds more color to your life. It makes it more fulfilling in a way. And that's not just limited to your personal life. If you run a business, you know how much of a difference it can make when the people on your team are excited about what they're doing. And if you don't, well, it's time to find out with ZipRecruiter. Try it for free at ziprecruiter.com/rogan. It's been rated the number one hiring site based on G2, and that's because ZipRecruiter is always looking for ways to improve the hiring process, including its newest feature that lets you see the most qualified and, more importantly, most interested people for your role to make sure they're some of the first you start talking to. Find candidates who really want your job on ZipRecruiter. Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. Try it for free at ziprecruiter.com/rogan.
- 23:29 – 29:02
Was Iraq incompetence or a profit engine? The incentives of forever war
- JRJoe Rogan
That's ziprecruiter.com/rogan. Meet your match at ZipRecruiter. Do you think that that is because of total incompetence and stupidity, or do you think that it was a scam, and that they were, they kind of knew this was gonna happen in the first place, but what they really wanted to do was sell a lot of weapons, sell a lot of war, make a ton of money? I mean, the amount of money that was generated... How much money did we spend on the Iraq War?
- SHScott Horton
Oh, I meanOn Iraq alone, at least five or seven trillion. I think it was probably 10 trillion for the whole terror war.
- JRJoe Rogan
So let's stop and think about that.
- SHScott Horton
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Five or 10 trillion. Let's just say five. Let's be nice.
- SHScott Horton
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Where's that money going? How many defense contractors were deeply enriched by that? How many defense contractors are involved in, you know, lobbyists, policy, influencing change-
- SHScott Horton
Yeah
- JRJoe Rogan
... influencing certain actions? And why would they do that? Why would they do that? Why would they push a harebrained scheme? Is it because of stupidity, or is it because they, they don't give a fuck what the excuse is-
- SHScott Horton
Both
- JRJoe Rogan
... let's get the party started.
- SHScott Horton
I think-
- JRJoe Rogan
Let's get some missiles. Let's get some new planes.
- SHScott Horton
Yeah. Okay, so-
- JRJoe Rogan
Sh-boom boom.
- SHScott Horton
But, okay, so we can see right in front of us right here where Netanyahu convinced Trump this would be easy, and then it wasn't, and I think that's the same thing here. Iraq was supposed to be easy, and it was easy after all, right? You send the Marines to take Baghdad, they can take it. The, the, the 3rd Infantry Division and the Marines were done regime changing the place in what, five weeks? But then it was a matter of occupying the place and the whole thing devolving into civil war and all that, and I think... Well, I'll put it to you like this. In The Clean Break, we might be in Coping with Crumbling States, but it might even... Yeah, I think it's in Coping with Crumbling States, which is the same thing as-
- JRJoe Rogan
Are we back?
- SPSpeaker
Yeah, yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Okay.
- SHScott Horton
It'll be that too.
- JRJoe Rogan
Sorry about that. We had that-
- SHScott Horton
So
- JRJoe Rogan
... stupid glitch again.
- SHScott Horton
Yeah, this is my-
- JRJoe Rogan
Did we, did we get a new computer?
- SPSpeaker
I did... I've done everything, even, yeah, I've, I've talked to the company. They don't know what's going on.
- JRJoe Rogan
Motherfuckers.
- SHScott Horton
Hey, burner.
- JRJoe Rogan
Um, yeah. Anyway, um-
- SHScott Horton
I'm sorry. Let me, uh-
- 29:02 – 33:51
Ukraine: why it vanished from focus—and how the conflict was 'set up'
- JRJoe Rogan
That's wild. It's wild that it's true. Um, one of the things that's not talked about at all since Iran, it, it, I mean, rarely talked about, i- is Ukraine.
- SHScott Horton
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
It's so strange how that kind of just left people's consciousness. It's like they now are just concentrating entirely on this Iran thing.
- SHScott Horton
Mm-hmm.
- JRJoe Rogan
And the, uh, Ukraine thing is fascinating, too, because it was one of the few wars that I saw leftists support. It was very interesting. It was, like, kind of right after they put the masks and the syringes down from their profiles, then it was Ukraine flags.
- SHScott Horton
Right. Metzger had a joke about that.
- JRJoe Rogan
Did he?
- SHScott Horton
Where he, like... Yeah, he starts out like, "Hey, invading Ukraine is bad. Can't we all agree on that?" Like, he really gives a, like, he, like, leans on, "Can't, can't we all agree that it's bad?" And he's like, "But it was a cure for COVID, you gotta admit."
- JRJoe Rogan
[laughs]
- SHScott Horton
You know? Um, and it was. They just switched from night to day on that, and then, yeah, the other thing... And, uh, look, a big part of that is Putin... is a great stand-in for Trump. If you're a angry liberal something, you gotta be angry at something, and he represents... Now we're the-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right
- SHScott Horton
... common turn, and the Russians are the more conservative Christian force. And so like if, not that Trump's a Christian, but you know what I mean, and they're anti-right everything, that the Russians are the right. Not the, the Ukrainians are the left, but whatever. And Russia is obviously the, uh, the much larger country, and the one that invaded, that crossed the border first here, and, and, and they are the aggressor in the war. So it's, as far as the narrative goes, it's easy to justify sticking up for those, you know, plucky defenders, which is, you know, I was actually surprised, but I shouldn't have been, right, when I went to Oxford and lost that debate, was that was who was... It wasn't, not that they were leftists, but they're liberals, you know, or progressive-type-
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm
- SHScott Horton
... you know, college kids, and they're just totally on the side of Ukraine. And in fact, the question of the debate was, this house would rather go to war with Russia than lose Ukraine. And I thought that was just the most ludicrous thing in the whole world. That's not even debatable. They've got H bombs, 7,000 of them, and we're not having a war with Russia. I don't even know what you're talking about. This... And then w- I should have made my case better, because they did not like me or my case at all. They were so just staunchly for Ukraine that they were willing to support that, that they think that Britain should get into a war with Russia over the Donbas, which is just absurd. But I take responsibility for not framing my argument well enough. I just thought the question was so ridiculous in the first place, I would barely have to make my case. I just thought I'll just make a H bomb joke, and that'll be the end of that, you know? I said, "Haven't you ever seen Threads?" Have you ever seen Threads? It's like the British version of The Day After, where Margaret Thatcher gets them nuked in a-
- JRJoe Rogan
No
- SHScott Horton
... in a war.
- JRJoe Rogan
It's a movie?
- SHScott Horton
In... Yeah. Remember The Day After from 1983-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah
- SHScott Horton
... with Steve Guttenberg in it?
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- SHScott Horton
So this is the Russians' version from the same timeframe.
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh.
- SHScott Horton
And, um, and I was like, "Haven't y'all seen Threads?" Which of course they haven't. They're a bunch of little kids.
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, they probably think it's that social media app.
- SHScott Horton
Yeah, right. [laughs]
- JRJoe Rogan
The Instagram one.
- SHScott Horton
Yeah, exactly.
- JRJoe Rogan
Um, we should talk about, like, how this whole thing got started in Ukraine-
- SHScott Horton
Okay
- 33:51 – 44:06
NATO expansion and the broken promises: the long fuse to the New Cold War
- JRJoe Rogan
So why did the United States, um, get involved in Ukraine, and why did they stage a coup?
- SHScott Horton
Yeah. Well, so it's been a contest for dominance there ever since, right? And so back to the Wolfowitz Doctrine, the, and, and they talked about this in Rebuilding America's Defenses, the, uh, PNAC strategy document from the 1990s, 1998, I guess. Um, and I believe in, in the defense planning guidance of, that he wrote in 1992, uh, Wolfowitz, um, that we gotta expand NATO into Eastern Europe, and this is... The debate at the time was whether to include Russia or not. But n- but... And in fact, in the '90s, there were some people expo- who opposed expansion altogether. But then there was another school of thought that just said, "Well, we'll expand, but we'll bring the Russians in," but then they never did. And so they ended up expanding the military alliance up to Russia's border in a threatening manner and in a way that did not include them at all. And they had alternatives, like the Partnership for Peace, and before that, what we still have, the OSCE, the Organization for Security, or yeah, Security and Cooperation in Europe, where those had been brought up as alternatives to NATO, where NATO would be more political. This is what James Baker and, uh, under H.W. Bush and Warren Christopher under Bill Clinton had promised the Russians, is that we're gonna make NATO a political organization, and we're gonna have, as a security organization, it'll be the OSCE or the PFP, which will include you guys, and which was not true. They're basically, you know, never really meant to live up to those promises. So, um, it's not a perfect analogy, but imagine if America had lost the Cold War from all the spending in the 1980s, and then the Soviets had come to dominate Western Europe, and then they started moving into the Caribbean, and then they started overthrowing the government in Canada when they-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right
- SHScott Horton
... voted wrong.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- SHScott Horton
And this is, Ukraine is Russia's Canada, right? Kazakhstan's their Mexico. Ukraine's their Canada. It's their most important neighboring state, other than maybe Belarus, but it's same difference here. And so, um-
- JRJoe Rogan
That narrative gets lost here.
- SHScott Horton
Yes, it does. And look, I'm not-
- JRJoe Rogan
But it's, it's weird because it's so obvious. When you lay it out like that and when you look at the agreement that was made at the fall of the Soviet Union, that they wouldn't push arms closer to the border of Russia-
- SHScott Horton
Right
- JRJoe Rogan
... and yet they consistently did that.
- SHScott Horton
Absolutely. And by the way, so let's talk about that for just a second, 'cause people dispute that and say it's not true, but it is true. And in fact, H.W. Bush gave the first promise to Gorbachev in Malta in December of 1989, that if you let the Eastern EuropeanWarsaw Pact states go, not the Soviet republics, but the Warsaw Pact states, "If you let them go, we promise not to take advantage," like full stop. That's it, 100%. And then from there, and, and I cover all this in my book, Provoked, um, and I, I... It's even overkill on the research, 'cause I wasn't sure where to stop, so it's all there for you, where it wasn't just on February the 9th. It was all of these meetings over the course of months where the Americans, the British, and especially the Germans, but with the Americans standing right there in many cases to affirm to the Russians, the Soviets and then the Russians over and over again that, "We're not coming. We are not going to integrate Poland. We're not gonna integrate Hungary," at then Czechoslovakia, which hadn't split apart yet. Um, and, "We have no intention of doing that." And that was, you know, came from Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the foreign minister of Great Britain, as well as Helmut Kohl, the chancellor, uh, Margaret Thatcher and John Major, the prime ministers of England, and, um, Douglas Hurd, their foreign minister, and, um, even Francois Mitterrand, the president of France, and along with George Bush's government, over and over again promised them that, "We're not going to do this." And then they just went ahead anyway, and the Clintons, uh, you know, went along with it, too. And in fact, in the, in the Clinton years, one of the major proponents of NATO expansion was a guy named Strobe Talbott, who originally opposed it. And by the way, so when all of the... Anybody in that era, whenever they... On, um, on America's side or on the West's side, whenever they opposed this, it was always for one reason. There was no, like, variety of reasons. It was always one reason. This is an unnecessary provocation against the Russians. These are our friends who just overthrew the communists for us, so why would we pick a fight with them? Why would we disrespect them? We should be doing everything we can to integrate them into the West, into Europe, into everything, and this is totally unnecessarily antagonistic. That was the one and only reason, and it was brought up by a lot of people, including famously George Kennan, who had coined the containment policy against the Soviet Union in the 1940s and, you know, uh, was... Had been ambassador to Moscow, and he was the one who said, "We gotta contain communism." Well, now he's saying, "We should not be trying to contain Russia when they didn't do anything." And he said, in fact, in an interview in The New York Times in 1998, Kennan said... And he was the most highly respected Russia expert out of all of the old so-called foreign policy great bears. And he told Thomas Friedman of The New York Times, he goes, "I'll tell you exactly what's gonna happen here, okay? We're gonna expand NATO right up close to Russia, and we're gonna get a negative reaction from the Russians. And then as soon as we do, all of the people who are now telling us, 'That'll never happen. Don't worry about it,' will then say, 'Aha. See? That's how the Russians are. That's why we have to do this.'" Which is exactly what they say now. "See? The Russians are coming. That's why we need NATO more than ever before," when it was building up NATO more than ever before was what created this antagonistic relationship in the first place. And then, you know, and I should specify, I am from Austin, Texas. I don't have any connection to Russia whatsoever. I don't give a damn about Russia whatsoever. This has nothing to do with favoring their side of the story or whatever. This is, like, whatever. I... What can I say? I reluctantly admit that... And I'm not saying this is a good enough reason for war, but I'm saying that this is true, essentially. Uh, in his declaration of war, when Putin said that basically, "We tried independence. We tried letting Ukraine be an independent country, but it turns out that no, it just became a colony of the United States of America. It's c- totally controlled by America. So w- we're... But we're just not gonna stand for that, you know? So we're gonna intervene. We're gonna do what we have to do at least to mitigate that. If America's still gonna control Kiev, then at the very least, we're gonna control the Donbas and the south, uh, southeastern coast here." And so I'm not saying that's a good enough reason to do what he did, but I'm saying that was essentially true, that America had, you know, almost like it was a, a British colony, just had total sock puppets in charge of that country. In fact, there's a, a clip that I quote extensively. It's one of the only block quotes in my book, 'cause I got rid of almost all of them for space. But I ha- I think I have the block quote of Victoria Nuland testifying. That's Robert Kagan's wife, um, very important neoconservative, worked in Dick Cheney's office in the W. Bush years and everything, um, helped, you know, cause all of this problem. And she goes on and on describing the level of what can you call the infiltration, essentially, of the Ukrainian government by the United States, that she says, "We have our people, State Department people and whoever, working at every level of the Ukrainian government, throughout their police services, throughout their military, throughout their judicial branch, throughout, you know, and, and out in the provinces and everywhere. We're doing everything we can to control everything that's going on in that country." And, you know, the, the WikiLeaks are very, uh, beneficial on this story, 'cause they show where the Americans understand clearly... By the Americans, I mean Washington, the State Department, whatever, these guys, that, um, they know good and well that Ukraine is deeply divided p- especially politically on questions like whether they should join the NATO alliance or whether they'd rather be closer to Russia or try to split the difference and stay out of it or anything like that. And so they say, "Well, so we just have to push then. We'll just have to spend tens of millions of dollars on massive propaganda campaigns, and we'll just have to make sure to support the candidates that support us and our wishes." And essentially, it's America. You know, the, the book is called... Sorry, I keep mentioning the book. But it's how Washington... Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine. I'm not blaming it on Kiev. I'm blaming it on essentially Bush Senior through Joe Biden, that they, all of them, had such a ham-handed Russia policy that it led to this
- JRJoe Rogan
It's just fascinating that this perspective is not being discussed or wasn't being discussed when it was in the news every day. When people were talking about Russia and Ukraine, it was always that Russia had done this horrible thing-
- SHScott Horton
Mm-hmm
- JRJoe Rogan
... and attacked Ukraine, which was horrible.
- SHScott Horton
Of course.
- JRJoe Rogan
But no one gave any background.
- SHScott Horton
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
No, no one really talked about-
- SHScott Horton
Or-
- JRJoe Rogan
... and make, made the comparison to imagine if the Soviet Union or Russia rather, took over Canada.
- SHScott Horton
Right.
- JRJoe Rogan
You know, or was proxying Canada.
- SHScott Horton
Yeah, exactly. Or if they went back at all, they would go, "Well, you know, this all started when Russia seized Crimea."
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- SHScott Horton
But of course, they seized Crimea as a direct reaction to America overthrowing the government in the so-called Revolution of Dignity in February of 2014, and, uh, so then it's a complicated mess, but Crimea happened after that. But they just wanna start history at places where it's the most convenient for them.
- JRJoe Rogan
And there's a- also, the control of Ukraine is a- also connected to resources, right? I mean, there's-
- SHScott Horton
Yes
- JRJoe Rogan
... immense amounts of minerals, natural gas. There's trillions of dollars of that stuff there that, and this also connects Burisma to the Biden administration, right?
- SHScott Horton
Yes. So like, I would not buy anyone arguing that these minerals or these resources are somehow crucial for the United States of America, for the American people, for our betterment or anything like that. Only as Ross Perot called them, the special interests, right? Chevron wants that oil, and Cargill, and Archer-Daniels-Midland, and Monsanto have investments in those grains, and so this is about them, but that isn't necessarily us.
- 44:06 – 58:23
Cost-imposing strategy: RAND 'Extending Russia,' Nord Stream, and shadow-fronts
- SHScott Horton
These are all the free riders. These are, you know, the excuse makers for this kind of policy. But essentially, I think what it really is, is just trying to keep Russia weak and off balance as much as possible. And, you know, like, there's this, um, uh, really important Rand corporation study that was published in 2019. So the Rand Corporation is a Pentagon-sponsored think tank, but it's out in Santa Barbara. They put it in California, so it would be somehow a little bit less political, a little insulated from East Coast stuff, and be able to come up with their thing. But that's, that's basically who they are. So of all the think tanks, they're, like, the most directly connected to the Pentagon itself. And they came up with this thing, it's called Extending Russia, and by extending Russia, they mean overextending them, mean, in other words, how to provoke them into overextending themselves, right?
- JRJoe Rogan
Like during the Cold War.
- SHScott Horton
Right. Exactly. So w- w- cause small trouble for them in as many places as we can just to bog them down with expenses and commitments. So we wanna, at that time, the, the pipeline wasn't complete yet, so we want to intervene with sanctions, whatever we can to disrupt the Nord Stream pipeline. They said maybe we could try to overthrow the government of Belarus again, which they actually did in 2020. Um, they had done it before in 2005 and 2001, failed all three times. Um, which if they did that, boy, that might lead right to a nuclear war right there. I mean, you don't wanna succeed in a, a, especially a bloody, if it turned bloody, a coup in Belarus. My God. Um, but anyway, uh, then they said, "We could increase, uh, weapons to the jihadists in Syria. We could try to overthrow the government of Kazakhstan. We could increase support for the, uh, Ukrainian military." And what's interesting about this, so in other words, see how they're saying, "Do all these things to essentially agitate the Russians, to keep them off balance, to keep them bogged down, to keep them spending money they can't afford to spend," right? But then all throughout it, they have all these disclaimers where they say, "Don't listen to us. If you do this, it'd be terrible. Like, if you overthrow the government of Belarus, the Russians might just invade it immediately and station nuclear weapons there," [laughs] to make the point, right? "If we support the jihadists in Syria, they could break out of the Idlib province and sack Damascus, and then we'd have an Al-Qaeda government in Damascus," which is of course exactly what happened at the end of '24. They said, "We could increase support for the," what was then the ongoing civil war that had broken out after the revolution in 2014, "and we could increase support for the Ukrainian side of that or the Kiev side of that war, but then that could provoke the Russians into a full-scale invasion of the country, which would of course be terrible for Belarus... I mean, for Ukraine, and terrible for the United States, at a massive expense for us, a humiliation for as far as our international standing and prestige, and of course untold chaos for the people of Ukraine. And so we better be real careful about pursuing these policies." And then I swear, you look at how Biden ran things, and it was like he got that memo just without any of the disclaimers.
- JRJoe Rogan
Hmm.
- SHScott Horton
And they just went ahead and did all of these things. And in fact, they were doing, they were messing around... It, it was actually the last year of Trump that they, uh, tried to overthrow Belarus. Uh, so that was independent of, of Biden's wishes. That was already going on. And then they were messing around in Kazakhstan in January of '22, right on the eve of war, right when you might hope that the entire, you know, pressure in Washington was to try to figure out a way to avoid war, to prevent this from breaking out. What kind of deal might we have to make with Putin to try to prevent him from invading Ukraine, as they're threatening to do, and had, were building up their forces in preparation for it? And then what do they do? They support an armed insurrection in Kazakhstan, which is, that's the big one, right on Russia's southern border there. Out of all the 'stans, it's the most important one, which is just madness. B- And it goes to show that that's essentially what they're up to when it comes to that, is just, you know, "If we can't overthrow Putin, we're gonna still weaken him, hem him in, surround him, agitate him, and force him to make commitments." And of course, this is what, this is why the war's been going on for four years. America could tellKiev, under Biden or under Trump, that, "Look, you guys are just gonna have to compromise here, obviously. You've lost, you know, all of Luhansk and most of Donetsk and, you know, at least half of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, and so just make a deal, figure it out, and, and we're not supporting you anymore." Instead, what'd they say? Remember they said over and over again, "We want to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia. Russia might win the war, or... But no, we promise they won't. But yeah, but if it takes a long time, good." And in fact, I have a collection of quotes in the book where politicians and pundits and all these people would say, uh, and maybe they still say this, "We're getting such a good bang for our buck in Ukraine, 'cause just think about it. Russian soldiers are dying, but American soldiers are not. So all we gotta do is we just give them money, and then they go fight." And then sometimes they wouldn't even make any reference to the Ukrainian soldiers at all, hundreds of thousands of whom have been killed, hundreds of thousands who, of whom have been horri- uh, you know, horrifically maimed. Uh, the, uh, a major part of this country completely destroyed. Huge segments of their population fleeing the country as refugees, many of whom to never come home again, right? A total destabilization of their culture and society in every way. And then, but you can tune into Fox News or, hell, the Democrats too, talking about, or maybe worse, that, "Oh, but we're getting such a good bang for our buck, 'cause we're killing Russians. We're sending them home in body bags. We're sending them home in coffins. We're even killing their generals in the field." But-
- JRJoe Rogan
None of our guys are dying. Heh, heh, heh
- SHScott Horton
... as though the Ukrainians don't matter at all, and that's the way they think of it. This is inflicting costs on the Russians. Joe Biden would say that over and over again. It's almost like the Underpants Gnomes thing with the first you steal the underpants, then question mark, question mark, question mark, and then profit. Not really sure.
- JRJoe Rogan
I don't know what that is. What are you talking about?
- SHScott Horton
Oh, on South Park, the poor... I think it's Butters. The Underpants Gnomes are stealing his underwear, and they're trying to explain how this is supposed to work, and they don't really have it worked out what they're gonna do with the underpants, but they're sure they're gonna make a lot of money in the end. And that's the same kind of thing here, where they skip the step about, well, is this really weakening Ru- uh, Vladimir Putin's regime, or maybe it's strengthening his regime? Is it, you know, increasing American power and influence in the region? Or in fact, we're shown as sort of a paper tiger ourselves, and we've done more than, uh, you know, you could have imagined to push Russia towards China and toward the rest of Eurasia. Um, you know, Joe Biden is essentially deliberately trying to prevent them from being part of European civilization to, and to emphasize their turn to the East. That seems to me to be a terrible mistake, you know? And I think part of it is part of the longer term Cold War with China too, and, and they're... You, you hear them talk about this, Joe. They'll say, you know, essentially, "Russia's friends with China, so there's two things we can do there." And this is what I think Trump would prefer to do, would be just make friends with Russia and pull them away from China. Maybe he's already decided it's too late for that or he doesn't know how. Um, and then the other side was, "No, lure Russia into Eastern Europe. Bog them down so they're no use to China. Um, you know, weaken their power. Give, inflict them, uh, on them this strategic defeat in Ukraine so that then they won't be as useful to China in our Cold War with them, or worse." And which I think is stupid and didn't work. I think that was the, the choice that Joe Biden made, and I think it was totally wrong, 'cause it just strengthened the relationship between Russia and China. And the Russians have a huge new pipeline that they opened, well, not that new, about 12 years ago, that they opened to China, and they keep adding to it. So they're able to sell all the hydrocarbons they want, and the Chinese will burn every hydrocarbon you got. So, you know, they really don't need Europe. Uh, you know, Joe Biden kicked them out and basically solidified their economic break with Europe, uh, totally unnecessarily, but in a way that didn't really hurt Russia.
- JRJoe Rogan
And the blowing up of the Nord Stream pipeline was a part of this?
- SHScott Horton
W-
- JRJoe Rogan
This was the d- to disconnect their oil supply or the natural gas supply to Europe?
- SHScott Horton
Yeah, in fact, more specifically, right, it was to, to make this break between, to solidify the break between Germany and Russia. So the previous German chancellor, Angela Merkel, she had this project she called Eurasian Home, and, uh, and what she was trying to do was balance American and Russian interests in Europe. And then they were closing down all their nuclear stuff, all the green movement, you know, environmental stuff.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- SHScott Horton
They closed down all their nuclear in Germany, and then the idea was, "Don't worry, we're gonna import all this clean burning, uh, CH4 from the, uh, Russians." And then, but to the Americans, this is the worst thing that could happen, would be an alliance or this strengthening, any, any part of a, any strengthening relationship or, or budding relationship between the Germans and the Russians. Because with, um, uh, you know, German manufacturing power and Russian raw materials and both of their at least potential military strength, that if they have an alliance and dominate Eastern Europe, they can keep everybody else out. And so I think that has always been the British and the American fear there. And, you know, there's, um, here in Austin, there's that sort of, uh, corporate CIA, Stratfor, run by this guy George Friedman.
- JRJoe Rogan
What is it?
- SHScott Horton
Stratfor, it stands for Strategic Forecasting. They do dirty tricks-
- JRJoe Rogan
That's here?
- SHScott Horton
Yeah, it's here in Austin.
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh, no.
- SHScott Horton
They, they do some dirty tricks, but I think-
- JRJoe Rogan
[laughs]
- SHScott Horton
... they mostly, like, do, like, you know, pseudo CIA briefings for corporations and stuff, let them know what's going on in the world, that kind of thing mostly. Their emails got leaked on, uh, wikileaks.org, uh, years ago, and, you know, they're involved... They're, they're close with some of these color-coded revolutionaries. And anyway, I don't know them or anything, but their leader is a guy named George Friedman. And I'll give him credit, I know he opposed Iraq War II in 2003, 'cause I heard him on the radio back then. But, um, I mean, I'm not vouching for the guys like, uh-a good guy or whatever, but just to say he's sort of like a realist school foreign policy analyst type.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- SHScott Horton
Um, not too ideological or anything like that. And he gave a speech years ago where he says, and this is the key words, "primordial fear." This is the primordial fear of American, you know, imperial policy planners, is that you would have an alliance between the Germans and the Russians, and so anything that we can do to prevent that, we'll do. Now, I don't know exactly who blew up that pipeline, but I'm sure they had at least the support of the United States. Seymour Hersh has it that it was American military guys who did it, um, which I think... I don't know. And then there's a whole cover story about this yacht, and then there's six different versions of who rented this yacht and whether it was used, and whether it was robots or whether it was divers or whatever, and it's all meant to confuse and... But-
- JRJoe Rogan
This episode is brought to you by Visible. Ah, spring is in the air, which means time for some spring cleaning. We're cleaning out the garage and finally tossing those mystery cords. But while you're cleaning out your junk drawer, take a look at your wireless bill. Don't fall for wireless traps, tacked on fees, confusing bills, and empty promises. Join Visible and cut out the nonsense. With Visible, you get unlimited 5G data and hotspot on Verizon's network for one flat cost. Just $25 a month, taxes and fees included. It's everything you need and nothing you don't. Plus, for a limited time, new members can get the Visible plan for just $20 a month for one year using code FRESHSTART. Refresh your wireless with Visible. Head to visible.com to get started. Terms apply. Limited time offer. Subject to change. See visible.com for plan features and network management details.
- SHScott Horton
So what it had Seymour Hersh-
- JRJoe Rogan
The bottom line is nobody wants to know, right? Seymour Hersh, what did he say happened?
- SHScott Horton
He said that it was, um, miners based out of Pensacola, Florida, meaning not pickaxe miners or children-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right
- 58:23 – 1:06:07
Kazakhstan unrest as a pressure point—and the broader 'always hit them' doctrine
- JRJoe Rogan
Jesus. So the Kazakhstan, Kazakhstan thing I'd never heard of. I'd, I'd, I hadn't heard a peep about that. I had no idea that we were meddling in Kaz- Kazakhstan.
- SHScott Horton
Yeah, it was one of those where, much like what just happened in Iran in January, where there's a protest over some economic policy. I think in that case they had cut the gas ration or something like that, and, and it's, you know, it's a country that's divided by ethnicity. Those borders are in all the wrong places and whatever, so you have sort of the ruling caste and the people on the outs and whatever. So you had a big protest movement, and then all of a sudden there's armed gangs of guys killing cops, seizing police stations, trying to seize airports, and-
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm
- SHScott Horton
... and this kind of thing. And, um, and then what happened was the Russians invaded. They sent regular troops across. They were asked by the government there to come and intervene. They sent troops. They crushed the insurrection. And then it was funny 'cause Antony Blinken said, "Oh, there's a lesson. When the Russians come, they don't ever wanna leave." And then the next day they turned around and left, and then they invaded Ukraine. They haven't left there since, but, um-
- JRJoe Rogan
So-
- SHScott Horton
Yeah
- JRJoe Rogan
... who were these insurrectionists?
- SHScott Horton
I don't know. I mean, I think presumably they worked for the CIA and probably the Turks or something. You know? I don't know.
- JRJoe Rogan
Just mercs.
- SHScott Horton
Yeah, them too.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah. And so this whole thing was just what you were saying earlier, just to try to get Russia to be spread as thin as possible, spend as much money as possible, cause as many problems in as many places as possible.
- SHScott Horton
Yeah. And in fact, the same George Friedman from Stratfor, I think it's in that same speech or maybe a different, uh, one where he says, "Yeah, when, when Iran is doing a little bit better, you hit them. When Russia's doing better, you hit them. When China's achieving a thing or two, you hit them. You do whatever you can to always be effing with everybody all the time in order to... You know, that's how to press your advantage," which I think is totally just shortsighted. It's high time preference, you know, sorta government thinking, right? That, like, "Well, if we can get away with this now, we should," without really thinking about the long-term consequence. In fact, that was one of the, um, the things that failed to impress at Oxford that I brought up that, that I thought was crucial that is in my book, is, uh, Strobe Talbott, Bill Clinton's guy who-... or- originally opposed NATO expansion and then later championed it in 2018 when it was the middle of the war, uh, the, the civil war, so-called, with America supporting Kiev and the Russians supporting the so-called rebels on the other side. Um, a New York Times reporter named Keith Gessen went and interviewed Strobe Talbott, and it just kinda went without saying that, like, clearly what is going on here is the project of NATO expansion has sorta blown up and caused all these problems. You know, "What are we gonna do, and, and what do you think now, pal?" I forgot exactly the way he phrased it, but it was sort of, you know, "What do you have to say for yourself, Strobe?" And so Strobe Talbott says, "Well, listen." He goes, "When you're in power, you have one job, and that is to pursue your nation's national interests. And if you don't do that, well, then you won't be in power very long. So that was what we had to do." But then he says, "Now, maybe should we have had a higher, wiser conception of our national interest? Maybe." In other words, at the time, what they were thinking is, "We want Lockheed dollars and we want Polish votes for 1996." Illinois is a crucial swing state, right? So... Or was. I don't know if it still is. Uh, so that's why we gotta do this, 'cause it's in America's national interest that Bill Clinton get reelected and we all get to keep our jobs. So we're gonna, we're gonna make these promises to these people and pursue this policy for our narrow interests as rulers of the empire. But then if he had had a higher, wiser conception of America's national interests, he might have thought, "Wow, are we scheduling a military conflict with Russia for the next century? Maybe we shouldn't do that. Maybe we should look at it like actually nothing in the world is more important than America continuing to get along with the Russians." And again, when the communists are long gone, so whatever problem you have with these guys, it ain't Stalinism and it ain't evangelical Marxism at the point of a rifle, right? I mean, this is just, whatever it is, we can deal with it. And, um, and so no, they chose the lower, dumber conception of America's national interest instead of the higher, wiser one, and they blew it, you know?
- JRJoe Rogan
Is there, uh, anyone that's ever made the argument to you l- like, where you've had these debates, where you have a utopian perspective on international relations, and that this libertarian ideology of, like, staying out of people's business, staying out of the... W- what you'll do if you don't fuck with the Russians, you don't keep them spending, you don't keep them stretched out, they'll just amass more and more power, and then they'll start to try to take over what was traditionally the Soviet Union, what was or- originally the Soviet Union?
- SHScott Horton
Yeah, you know, it, it just so happens, right, that America never leaves anybody alone, so we just don't have a controlled experiment, right?
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- SHScott Horton
We're constantly provoking, and everything that we see them do is clearly a reaction.
- JRJoe Rogan
I understand, but-
- SHScott Horton
And it's just like when we talk about terrorism, again, I'm not in any way justifying it, but I'm just saying you have so much intervention preceding the terrorism, you have to be able to attribute that.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yes.
- SHScott Horton
But now, so how would things be otherwise? For example, if H.W. Bush had just said, "Okay, well, we won the Cold War. Pat Buchanan's right. Let's just come home," and had brought the empire home from Europe, then what would happen is the Germans would've reunified, and then they would've joined into a new European Union army with the British and the French and probably the Poles, and then it would've been on them to keep the peace between each other, to police the smaller countries in their region, and hopefully strike a long-term security partnership with the new red, white, and blue Republican Russians. And, you know, if people wanna say, but... And, and in fact, the other side in that debate at Oxford, Daniel Fried, said, "Yeah, but it was Poland wanted to join our alliance. It's not like we made them. They wanted to." But the thing is, yeah, they might have reason to fear Russia based on old things, but the question is, why are we obligated to be the guarantor of their independence?
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- SHScott Horton
It's, it's too far from here, and it's something that we're no good at, we only cause problems, and something that the other European states, who are all Western Christian capitalist democracies and friends of ours, that they can all work together and solve on their own. I mean, when Germany reunified, it's not like the commies were taking over. It was the West that was dominant in the new Germany, right? These are our pals. There's no reason in the world Am- that America should've had to have... Well, for example, like, a, a big part, part of the horrible war in the Balkans was because of a contest for power between America and Germany over who's gonna be dominant in the former Yugoslavia. We should've just let the Germans have it. Or I mean, not have it and kill everybody or whatever, but God, it could hardly have been worse than what America helped to cause there by trying to compete with the Germans for dominance in a land that's quite literally 6,000 miles from here.
- JRJoe Rogan
But is the fear, uh, from the American side that if you let other countries consolidate power, if you let them grow in influence without fucking with them and keeping them spread out like we're doing with Russia-
- SHScott Horton
Yeah
- JRJoe Rogan
... that they'll eventually get stronger, and then they'll become a real problem?
- SHScott Horton
I mean, maybe.
- JRJoe Rogan
And they keep them weak, keep them distracted, keep them engaged in this Ukraine conflict and Kazakhstan and anything else you can cook up-
- SHScott Horton
Yeah
- JRJoe Rogan
... and that keeps them down.
- 1:06:07 – 1:16:14
China, Taiwan, and chips: industrial reality vs war logic
- SHScott Horton
Well, it's like this. When it was the Cold War against the commie Soviet Union, I was a kid, and it's... I'm not a expert on all of that history. I think there were real questions about the dangers of world communism at that time, where at least I'd be willing to hear you out. But since the end of the Cold War, no, there's just no justification for it, because as Bill Hicks would say, right, like, "Just spin the globe, man. There's no countries out there," right? Every power in Europe is our friend and no threat to us and mean us no harm whatsoever. There are no powers in-In Egypt, or I mean, pardon me, in Africa that count at all except for Egypt, which is our friend. India will be a power in 100 years from now. Uh, China is a rising power, but we've been their friends for 50 years, even when they were still communists. Nixon went and made friends with them in the early 1970s.
- JRJoe Rogan
Friends.
- SHScott Horton
And then the Soviet Union, yeah. And then the-
- JRJoe Rogan
But aren't they constantly infiltrating our d- different universities and people who-
- SHScott Horton
Wow. I ain't endorsing that. You can keep them out. But-
- JRJoe Rogan
Well-
- SHScott Horton
But it's nothing-
- JRJoe Rogan
But Chinese infiltration is kind of crazy, like what they're, what they're doing in America. It's like if you're saying they're our friends, you know, the mayor of Arcadia just got busted.
- SHScott Horton
[laughs] I saw that. Yeah, that was funny.
- JRJoe Rogan
She was a communist spy. She's a fucking mayor of a city in-
- SHScott Horton
Okay
- JRJoe Rogan
... California.
- SHScott Horton
I'm putting that on the FBI Counterintelligence division. That should have never been allowed to happen in the first place. Um, and no, I don't mean that they're totally benign. But look, uh, worst case scenario, China invades or just surrounds and forcibly reintegrates Taiwan. That doesn't mean they're gonna invade Korea, and it doesn't mean they're gonna invade Japan or Australia or, or have the appetite to want to do that. I think China's already a pretty overextended empire, and it's very poor in many parts of it. And they have something, is it 14 or 15 neighbors that they gotta deal with already. You know, their, their greatest ambition is to build this, um, a, you know what, a highway and, and, and fiber optics and whatever from Shanghai to Lisbon, right? This, what do they call it? The... Why am I forgetting the name of the damn thing? The, the great, uh, the, the great new highway they're trying to build all the way across Eurasia.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm.
- SHScott Horton
Um, they can't do that by intimidating everyone and lording it over everyone. They gotta cut through Tajikistan. You know, these are wild lands. They gotta make deals the whole way across if they're gonna do that. If, you know, they're... And, and if you look at the way they're building their empire so far, it's all just briefcases, you know?
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- SHScott Horton
Government-backed businesses making deals and buying up resources and stuff. But I, I, I really don't think that Xi Jinping is looking at George W. Bush and Barack Obama and Donald Trump and Joe Biden and going, "Yeah, that's what I wanna do for my country is blow my own brains out trying to take over the whole rest of the planet Earth."
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, and-
- SHScott Horton
You know?
- JRJoe Rogan
... you know, just to point to what you're saying is like China's not invading anybody. They're-
- SHScott Horton
They're not
- JRJoe Rogan
... they're not doing what we're doing.
- SHScott Horton
And I'm not saying they're nice guys or whatever.
- JRJoe Rogan
No.
- SHScott Horton
But they don't rule us, and they're no threat to North America. They have no need to pick a fight with us. People say, "Oh, you got all your microchip factories on Taiwan." Well, then move them to Austin. We've had advanced micro devices here for 30 years or whatever, 35 years, maybe more than that. They can build that stuff here.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right, but it's... They can, but they tried. It's very difficult. The thing about what they've got going on in Taiwan, the reason why Taiwan is the head of it is that they're far more advanced than anybody else in the world at doing it.
- SHScott Horton
Bring them.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah, you would have to... You- the- it- that's a lot. You see-
- SHScott Horton
I thought you were gonna say it was something special about the saltwater over there or something. [laughs]
- JRJoe Rogan
No. No, no, no, no. They're just way ahead of everybody else. I mean, in fact, didn't Samsung try to do a, a chip manufacturing plant in Texas? And I think their yields were so poor, uh, I don't know what the actual story with that is. So I'm speaking way over my pay scale here, but I think what it is, is you have to have, like, certain tolerances when you're creating these chips, and they weren't achieving what they were trying to achieve with- despite spending an enormous amount of money. So it's not as simple as build a plant, the schematics are there, you just crank out chips.
- 1:16:14 – 1:25:29
Iran war reality check: base vulnerability, escalation dominance, and missile saturation
- SHScott Horton
Hey, look, uh, one of the lessons of the war in Iran is the empire's good for nothing anyway, right? We have H-bombs that are enough to deter anyone from attacking us, but America's military empire in the Middle East is completely bankrupt, right? That whole thing was a hollow bluff, and the Iranians just called it, and we lost. I mean, our bases have been evacuated. They keep coming out, y- you, I know you, I think you talked about this on your show, right? How they were covering up the satellite photos.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- SHScott Horton
They weren't letting Americans have access to the satellite photos when you could get them online, whatever other countries had them. And then you've had The New York Times, and I hate to cite CNN, but it was a well-sourced story, where they got all these great satellite photos and went and showed how the Iranians reached out and touched 18 bases from Erbil in northern Iraq all the way down to Muscat in Oman and, and took out all radar stations and pitted our runways, hit refueling tankers and AWACS radar planes and took out the entire, not the entire, but a huge percentage of the, uh, overlapping radars for the missile defense systems over there.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- SHScott Horton
Left our allies in Saudi, Qatar, UAE, Bahrain wide open. Uh, you know, our, our naval's, uh, Fifth Fleet station at Bahrain is destroyed and offline. I read this thing, said the Qataris, our, our main air base in the Middle East, the headquarters of Central Command and our main air base at Qatar, the Qataris made a deal with Iran. "Please stop hitting us," and they promised to not allow America to fly any sorties out of Qatar, our main air base during that war. And so as Justin Logan from the Cato Institute said, "Well, what good is a military base that you can't fight a war from?" You know, it's just like that, um, I know you've seen this, right? That, um, that old meme that says, "Well, if Iran doesn't want trouble with us, how come they put their country so close to all our military bases?" And it has all the-
- JRJoe Rogan
[laughs]
- SHScott Horton
... the map of all our bases in the region. But the thing is, what Donald Trump I guess didn't understand was that those were a tripwire that were essentially, we were making our own guys hostages of Iran to prevent war. Those bases were preventing war because it should have been out of the question that we would attack Iran 'cause all those bases would be up for grabs against them.
- JRJoe Rogan
So how do, how are they so-
- SHScott Horton
They were by then
- JRJoe Rogan
... poorly defended? That's what I don't understand. Like, how is it so easy for Iran to attack these bases? And did they have any foreknowledge of this? Did they understand?
- SHScott Horton
Oh, yeah. So why they were so poorly defended, that's gotta be political decision-making among the brass, right? About like, "Well, we don't want to admit that we need these fortifications in the first place," maybe, or just the other general said, "Don't," so we don't wanna fight with him about it for office politics reasons or what. Like, I don't know.
- JRJoe Rogan
So it's not-
- SHScott Horton
No good excuse
- JRJoe Rogan
... gross underestimation? It's not a gross underestimation of-
- SHScott Horton
Well, it can't be because listen, I'll tell you, man, um, in January of 2007The chiefs took W. Bush down to the tank in the basement of the Pentagon and they told him, "Look, we'll do your Iraq surge where we increase the war in Iraq, but we really don't want to go to Iran." And they told him, "The reason why not is because the Iranians have escalation dominance, or at least we won't have it." That, I, I shouldn't have said that. That was overstating it. We will not have escalation dominance there, and that means that, you know, it's a Pentagon term for if we're gonna get into a fight, we don't want to fight at all unless we know we're going to control every stage of that conflict. And in the case of, say, invading Iraq, there's nothing Saddam Hussein can do about it, right? As Paul Wolfowitz said, "Iraq is doable." In the case of Iran, they have, most importantly of all, a short and medium-range missile force that we cannot defend from. Now, we can defend from it some. We have our Patriot missiles and our other type of interceptors, but they can pour on volume that there is no magic Star Wars shield that can protect from. And we had, at that time, a hu- more than 100,000 guys in Iraq, 50,000 in Afghanistan, and then plus still, as we still do, um, tens of thousands Air Force and Army in Kuwait, Air Force and Army in Saudi Arabia, Air Force in Qatar, Navy at Bahrain, uh, I guess Air Force and Army in, in UAE, and I didn't know in Oman, but yeah, of course, in Oman they had, you know, some naval presence there as well. So, and they knew then that all of that stuff will be up for grabs, and then the Strait of Hormuz will also be at risk. And in fact, it's true, um, in, at antiwar.com, you can find in the archives there, I wrote an article in August of 2005 called Who's Behind the Coming War with Iran? And I say in there they can close the strait, and they can inflict economic damage, drive the cost of a barrel of oil up t- above $200 a barrel, and all of that. So there were people a lot smarter than me who were writing about that at the time that I was interviewing on my show at the time who were just saying, "Look, we can start a war with Iran, but we don't really have a good way to finish one."
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm.
- SHScott Horton
And so, and we can talk about the nuclear program and how unnecessary all this was in a sec too, but point being that you want to do a regime change, as you just said, you kill the ayatollah, it doesn't do any good. They have a new ayatollah. You can kill the whole ruling council that appoints the ayatollah, but then they'll just appoint a new ruling council. So then you can dump in the 80, uh, Second Airborne Division, but they can't occupy and control Tehran. There's no good land route to invade the country. They have two massive mountain ranges.
- JRJoe Rogan
And one of the most preposterous narratives was, like, getting the people to rise.
- SHScott Horton
Oh, yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Getting the-
- SHScott Horton
We're gonna arm up some Kurds.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- SHScott Horton
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, not just the Kurds. They were trying to get the, just the Iranian civilians.
- SHScott Horton
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
With no arms.
- SHScott Horton
Yep, and they'll talk about, you know, arming the Kurds and arming the Baluchis, which I don't know if there are other factions, but that seems to be a direct reference to groups like Jundallah, who the Obama and, the Obama administration and the Israelis both backed about 15 years ago, who were Bin Ladenite head chopper suicide bomber guys. They were, you know, no different from Al-Qaeda or ISIS, and they, you know, John Bolton on Piers Morgan, uh, that, the same show that I was on, was saying, "Yeah, we could arm up the Baluchis." And this stuff is crazy. I actually wrote in that article at that time, the neocons daydreamed that if we just start the war, then the people will rise up and create a new pro-American government there, but that's crazy to bet on that. There's no reason to believe that. And so, and there's video of me in 2010 warning the same thing, and I'm not claiming any great insight. I didn't go to college, man. I just, you know, I'm interested in this stuff, and I, I, you know, have a show where I was interviewing all these experts about it at the time, and it was just complete consensus. Everybody knew they can reach out and, and boy, over 20 years, I must have said this 1,000 times. They can not only hit all of our, uh, military stuff in Iraq, in Kuwait, in Bahrain, in Qatar, et cetera, Saudi, et cetera, but a trillion dollars of economic targets all up and down that gulf, which is exactly what they did. They hit refineries. They hit chemical plants. They hit, not just at the Strait of Hormuz, they hit American oil tankers up near Kuwait just to show that, like, we pwn this entire thing now. So back to my original point when I got on this tangent was that America's conventional military empire is bankrupt, that Donald Trump just blew his big bluff that we're the big player in the region. We're actually not in the region. We're here. The region is over there, and the entire, you know, threat of our dominance over there is basically called. I mean, obviously we still have aircraft carriers and planes and bombs and even nukes and all that, but can the leaders in Bahrain, in Qatar, in UAE, and Saudi rely on America to defend them?
- JRJoe Rogan
Right. And haven't we-
- SHScott Horton
Or are they gonna come up with their own different policy now?
- JRJoe Rogan
Haven't we also used up, like, two-thirds of our Patriot missile supply?
- 1:25:29 – 1:28:45
Apocalypse theology in the ranks: Armageddon narratives and war justification
- JRJoe Rogan
One of the things that-
- SHScott Horton
Five
- JRJoe Rogan
... disturbed me to no end, and we talked about this a couple times at the podcast, was, um, there was, uh, one of the guys who was over there who, uh, attended a, uh, a briefing, and they were told that this is bringing about Armageddon, and that Trump was anointed by Jesus Christ, and that this war in Iran was going to cause Jesus to return, and that this was actually being told to a bunch of military people that were having a war debriefing.
- SHScott Horton
Man. So-
- JRJoe Rogan
And then, and then the guy had a... Whoever this officer was that was tell- s- talking about this said that the guy had a giant smile on his face-
- SHScott Horton
[laughs]
- JRJoe Rogan
... when he was telling this, which made it all the more creepy.
- SHScott Horton
Oh, good, the end of the world. We g- nobody wants to die alone, right, Joe? But they were saying there that-
- JRJoe Rogan
It's all about to go down
- SHScott Horton
... they, that there's a faction in the military that is these religious fundamentalists-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah
- SHScott Horton
... that actually believe that it's bringing about Jesus's return.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- SHScott Horton
So look, there's a guy named, um-
- JRJoe Rogan
"Commander claimed Trump was anointed by Jesus to cause Armageddon to justify Iran strikes."
- SHScott Horton
So there's a guy named Mikey Weinstein.
- JRJoe Rogan
This is... But look, look at this.
- SHScott Horton
Who is-
- JRJoe Rogan
Let's just go over this real quick-
- SHScott Horton
Yeah, yeah
- JRJoe Rogan
... 'cause this is so crazy. 'Cause this... Go up to the top, please. Right there. So, no, but at the ti- So it's where it says who it was. So it's a military commander, uh, told a group of non-commissioned officers that President Donald Trump, anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth. Yeah.
- SHScott Horton
Uh, and then that's, that's Mikey Weinstein right there, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation. He was, I believe he was an Air Force officer. Maybe he was a Army officer, and then he created this group to advocate against this kind of stuff in the military. And I, it's been a long time since I spoke to him, but he was saying to me years ago that it's especially in the highest ranks of the Air Force, the highest ranks of the Air Force, they really believe this stuff. "It is time to bring on the apocalypse, and it's a good thing that they are the ones in charge of the nukes so that they can use them according to the divine plan" and this kind of thing.
- JRJoe Rogan
[laughs]
- SHScott Horton
It is scary stuff, dude.
- JRJoe Rogan
People need to know this. Uh, go back to that please, 'cause there's one quote that, that's below that. This is, uh, this is so fascinating. "He urged us to tell our troops that this was all part of God's divine plan, and he specifically referenced numerous citations out of the Book of Revelations, referring to Armageddon and the imminent return of Jesus Christ." Can you imagine if you're over there, you already think the war is sketchy, like, "Why the fuck are we doing this?" And then this guy comes down, you're like, "Oh my God, we're cooked."
- SHScott Horton
This is a big part of how they justified Iraq. I mean, there's so many Protestant ministers out there who told their people that this is the Bible. Get it? Middle East, year 2000 sorta-ish.
- JRJoe Rogan
Man. God.
- SHScott Horton
Um, this is how you're gonna get raptured up to heaven in your body-
- JRJoe Rogan
[laughs]
- SHScott Horton
... and all you have to do is support this aggressive war, and all this magic stuff is gonna come true. And in fact, this is why there's such a massive crash in evangelical support for Israel and these kind of foreign policies now, is 'cause people just don't believe that anymore because that's what the Left Behind series at Walmart said 25 years ago-
- 1:28:45 – 2:04:15
How Trump got pulled in: Netanyahu influence, flattery, and the nuclear misunderstanding
- JRJoe Rogan
So how do you think we got talked into this Iran thing? 'Cause JD Vance, very against it. A lot of people, Tulsi Gabbard, very against it. So what the fuck happened?
- SHScott Horton
I think that Netanyahu essentially... You know all this talk about, um, four-dimensional chess and whatever, I think what it is is it's just checkers, right? Is Netanyahu goes, "Listen, for Iran, for Iran to have a civilian nuclear program, come on, that's just cover for really a weapons program. That's just a stage in a weapons program. We know eventually they're gonna make nukes, and then they're gonna attack Israel with them. And we also know that, um... "And, and you already said that you're not gonna let them have nukes. Well, having a nuclear program at all is having nukes. Same difference, and you already agreed to that, right? Right. Okay. Well, and they won't give up enrichment. So what do we do? W- we gotta attack." It's just like Obama's red line on the fake chemical weapons scare in Syria there, that once you agree to this thing, now it's written in stone, and now, like, we got you on this technicality. Double jump. Y- you already agreed with the stupid things I said, and so now you have to do the thing that I said. And then Trump goes, "Okay." And then plus on top of that, just the flattery. And like, you know, honestly, this is the most obvious thing. Back when he was on Twitter in his first term, I used to tweet at him and I would say, "Wealth, strength, gold, get out of Afghanistan, height, power." And w- like, just tell him, like, things that he likes, right? With get out of Afghanistan in the middle.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- SHScott Horton
And so this is what Netanyahu does, is he goes, "Listen, you're greater than Abraham Lincoln. You're greater than George Washington. You're a world historical figure. You're sure to go to heaven now. You're like if FDR had done the right thing and invaded Germany in 1935 and prevented that whole thing from ever happening," right?
- JRJoe Rogan
But you're just guessing that this is how he talked to him, right?
- SHScott Horton
Well, kinda, but-
- JRJoe Rogan
Wouldn't it be awesome to be a fly on the wall?
- SHScott Horton
'Cause he repeats a lot of it. Oh, it would. It would be great. But he repeats so much of it back-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right
- SHScott Horton
... that I think that, like, yeah, you could pretty much tell.
- JRJoe Rogan
Okay.
- SHScott Horton
This is what they're saying to him, and then this is what he's responding is, "Obama wasn't man enough to do it. George Bush wasn't man enough to do it. He knows what has to be done. He's willing to do it." And he's ill-informed enough to believe-That it makes any sense. That if you just bomb their nuclear program, that somehow it'll go away. If you just hit 'em hard enough, then eventually they'll just do what you say. It doesn't work like that. It oftentimes does not work like that, and with these guys, they've made it clear that we're not making bombs, but we absolutely reserve our right to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes, and we will suffer your airstrikes. We will not give up that right. And so that's it, and, and they've been completely clear about the, that this entire time. But Netanyahu convinced him, right? This is why he also believed that the Strait of Hormuz was not at risk, 'cause Netanyahu convinced him, "Once we hit 'em, once he killed Ayatollah, the whole thing's gonna fall apart. There'll be no one to close the Strait of Hormuz 'cause we'll have already won by then."
- JRJoe Rogan
But what do you think happens if Iran does get nuclear weapons?
- SHScott Horton
Hmm. Probably, um, the other s- states in the region will. You know Darryl Cooper, who's my partner on our show Provoked, and I know a good, uh, friend of yours.
- JRJoe Rogan
I love Darryl.
- SHScott Horton
He, he is so great, and, um-
- JRJoe Rogan
He's awesome
- SHScott Horton
... and he was pointing out that-
- JRJoe Rogan
That guy gets... Boy, does he get fucking misrepresented online.
- SHScott Horton
Oh, he does. It's-
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh my God.
- SHScott Horton
He does.
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh my God.
- SHScott Horton
Heroic guy, man. Um-
- JRJoe Rogan
Very fucking smart, and if you listen to Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem, anybody who listens to that and thinks that guy's antisemitic is fucking crazy.
- SHScott Horton
Yeah, no.
- JRJoe Rogan
You're crazy.
- SHScott Horton
He's-
- JRJoe Rogan
All that stuff is so balanced
- SHScott Horton
... just a smooth... Out of context stuff. Yeah
- 2:04:15 – 2:13:09
Israel’s undeclared nukes, JFK tensions, and the politics of taboo topics
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, wasn't there an issue with JFK and Israel over their ability to acquire nuclear weapons?
- SHScott Horton
Yes.
- JRJoe Rogan
So to this day-
- SHScott Horton
He was demanding inspections of Dimona, their nuclear facility there
- JRJoe Rogan
... s- to this day, they don't officially have nuclear weapons.
- SHScott Horton
Correct, and the reason for that is because it's illegal for America to give aid to a nuclear weapons state that refuses to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty. And so... And they don't wanna do that. In fact, they did proliferate nuclear weapons to South Africa, who gave them up before the change after apartheid. Um, but if, if they're, if they openly possess nuclear weapons, then, I mean, hell, it should already be illegal 'cause everybody already knows. But the Glenn Symington law says that you can't give aid, military aid, to a nuclear weapons state that won't sign the NPT. That's America's treaty that we forced the whole world to accept, and which, by the way, is in terrible jeopardy now. Right? Because, you know, um, Saddam Hussein goes, "Look, my hands are up. I got nothing." They invaded him anyway. The North Koreans armed up with nukes. The Libyans said, "Well, look, we have some centrifuge material, but we have no operational program, but you can have our junk." They killed him. And then the Iranians said, "Look, we can make nukes, but we're not making nukes, so leave us alone already," and then we kill them. So America is the great destroyer of America's Non-Proliferation Treaty that we foisted on the world, by which the non-nuclear weapons state promised, the non-nuclear weapons states promised never to get them, and the nuclear weapons states promised never to share them.
- JRJoe Rogan
So-
- SHScott Horton
And that's all in jeopardy now. That may not even exist anymore. The Poles are talking about getting their own nukes now because of Trump's pivot away from Europe in the middle of a war that America helped cause over there.
- JRJoe Rogan
Jesus. So Israel officially doesn't have nukes?
- SHScott Horton
Officially they don't, but everybody knows that they have at least 200. And in fact, I have that personally from Mordechai Vanunu, who is the Israeli whistleblower who went to prison. They kidnapped him in a honey trap plot, I think in, in England or in Italy.
- JRJoe Rogan
With chicks? Was it a honey trap?
- SHScott Horton
With chicks, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
It's always chicks. [laughs]
- SHScott Horton
They, they went to get him laid, and they kidnapped him-
- JRJoe Rogan
[laughs]
- SHScott Horton
... and they held him in solitary confinement for like 25 years or something.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- SHScott Horton
But he gave the whole story to The Sunday Times, The London Times, and they published it back in, I'm gonna say '86. And then, um, what happened was he was on Twitter. He may still be on Twitter. Um, but, um, I had an anecdote from Daniel Ellsberg, the great, uh, whistleblower of the Pentagon Papers, and who was a friend of mine for a long time. He died a couple years ago now. But, um, he had an anecdote about Vanunu that turned out was incorrect, but I asked Vanunu, "Is this correct?" And then he said, "No, it's just like I told The Sunday Times back then," and that was that they had 200 atom bombs by the time that he squealed on them. And we know from Grant F. Smith's research, he got this through some FOIA documents. Um, he's from the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy. Really great researcher on this. And he showed that they had at least been researching hydrogen bombs, the big ones, although there's no proof that they ever actually made H-bombs. And I don't think it's been reported that they've made them, but they at least were looking into how to.
- JRJoe Rogan
Jeez. And this was part of the conflict that JFK had with Israel, right?
- SHScott Horton
Yes, in trying to register what was then, I think, the American Jewish Council, I believe is what it was called, the, the predecessor to AIPAC, as a foreign, as foreign agents, and then they dissolved it and created AIPAC instead, I guess, is the long and the short of that, how they got around that.
- JRJoe Rogan
And they got whacked.
- SHScott Horton
And there are people... You know, and it was... You know, I don't know, man. Honestly, like I told you, I was more of a conspiracy theorist in the '90s, but I never did all read into JFK because there's just 100 books about it and 100 different theories, and I'm just not sure if LBJ hired French hitmen to do it, or if the Israelis got James Jesus Angleton to do it, or if Allen Dulles got some Cubans to do it, or what the hell, right? Like, I don't know. And so it's, um, I really get-You know, I'm, uh... I don't, I don't think I ever really could figure it out, so-
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, no one really has
- SHScott Horton
... I just kinda-
- JRJoe Rogan
There's a bunch of speculation
- SHScott Horton
... leave that one alone.
- JRJoe Rogan
But Oliver Stone is the-
- SHScott Horton
There are a lot of people-
- JRJoe Rogan
... best guy to talk to
- SHScott Horton
... with motive. Yeah. You know what's funny about that? And I think he even admitted this at one point, man. You watch the whole movie JFK. Oh, God. You watch the whole movie JFK, and... I'm sorry, man.
- 2:13:09 – 2:32:14
What comes next for Iran: deterrence, proliferation risk, and the 'just come home' argument
- JRJoe Rogan
So let me ask you this. How... What do you think happens with Iran now? Like, how does this-
- SHScott Horton
Oh, man
- JRJoe Rogan
... play out, if you had to speculate?
- SHScott Horton
Well, I'll tell you that, first of all, they're more likely to go ahead and try to break out and make an atom bomb now than ever before, although I'm not necessarily predicting that. I think, you know, Trump has proven by calling their bluff on their latent deterrent, he has proven he's willing to bomb them, and if they really break out and try to make a nuclear weapon, it's almost impossible that they could do that without us knowing. And then this president, and I think the next one, too, would be willing to go back to war over it, as Barack Obama promised he would absolutely launch a war against Iran if they broke out and tried to make an atom bomb. And, you know, he did an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic called As President, I Don't Bluff, where he's essentially begging Jeffrey Goldberg to tell Netanyahu and them, "I really, really mean it. If they try to make a nuke, I will bomb them, but just let me try to solve this another way." So I think that promise stands. This is the same as W. Bush, same as Obama, same as Biden, and I think that will continue to last into the next presidency. And if the Iranians are smart, what they'll do is they'll hold the same posture they've had, which is, "We're not giving up enrichment, and we're not giving up our capability to make a bomb one day, but we're never gonna call it that, and just don't do this to us anymore," and try to bet on the fact that Trump's only got three years left, and the next presidents won't be so belligerent, and they won't call the bluff or, and, and go ahead and launch another war unless they break out and try to make a nuke. And as Darryl was sayingThey're so much more powerful than all their neighbors conventionally, they really have no need to make a nuclear bomb. And they can, I think, successfully deter Israel even with their conventional missile force, and we saw them just- Yeah ... absolutely blast the crap out of Tel Aviv. Yeah. So I- Very un- underreported, right? Yeah. And, and I think, you know, they should not have killed the conservative old ayatollah, right? And they kill him, and apparently, like, the, the new ayatollah, his son, they killed his mother and sister and... or mother and wife and baby. I mean, that's the new ayatollah over there, is, you know, he's got to be more radical than his father. He's got to be angrier at us than his father ever was. And- So what is the pathway- So- ... to resolution? Well, this is... It's so unfortunate because honestly, um, you know, whatever, maybe some genius at some think tank has a better idea, but I really think that the thing to do is just quit. The thing to do is for America to just come home, for Trump to say, "Look- Cut their losses ... I won." Yeah. But we don't really need these bases over there. The American people don't need to dominate the Middle East. We're not worried about the Soviet Union invading Iran and dominating the Gulf anymore, so forget the Carter Doctrine. Let's just come home. And I think if we do that, we s- we bring all of our ships home, all of our planes, all of our bases, just close them all up and come home, then that shifts the entire burden onto Iran, that they still have to deal with the rest of Eurasia. We're not the one dependent on their hydrocarbon exports. Everybody else is. So are they going to now levy a tax to get through the Strait of Hormuz? Absolutely, but too bad. Shouldn't have started this war then. Nothing we can do about that now, Willie Nelson said, you know? So, like, the way going forward is... And by the way, like, in, in Panama, they tax, um, ships going through the isthmus there, through the Panama Canal. The Indonesians, I believe it is, uh, tax people going through some of the bottlenecks in the Indies. And so it's not entirely unheard of that, you know, the, the dominant power there is going to, uh, levy a fee on people coming in and out of there. But again, too late. Too bad. I mean, America already, we had the... Exactly what Marco Rubio says he wants now, we had on February the 27th, and then they launched this war on the 28th, which by the way, was the anniversary of the Waco raid. This is a pretty ugly time to start an aggressive war. And in fact, as long as I'm on that, and I know you know this, but it's really worth dwelling on, that they killed not just one but two girls' schools in their initial assault. They killed, in one building, they killed 100 and, I think, 73 or 74, uh, almost all little girls. And then in the other one was 20 more. And with, and with that was an experimental new Lockheed missile that fires tungsten pellets out the front before it detonates, uh, or as it detonates, uh, in a creative new way to cut people to shreds. And the thing is about that is as, um, there's this great media critic, um, named Adam Johnson who pointed out this is equivalent to the Oklahoma City bombing, which, you know, for young people, uh, Oklahoma was 9/11 before 9/11, right? It was massive. And never mind, it was a bunch of FBI informants who did it and got away with it. That's another interview, Joe. But, but it was 100- That is another interview, and that's a deep one. Yeah, it is, and- Just the- I'm here for you, buddy. Yeah. But yeah. But, but they killed 167 people, were killed in that thing, and it was just the ugliest damn thing, and it included, like, 20 kids in the daycare there, right? That was the cover of Newsweek, was a firefighter hol- holding a dead baby. It's the worst thing. This is the most traumatic thing for this country, and in the heartland of Oklahoma City and all that. Well, that's what America did to Iran, only the entire building full of kids, all 167 of them, a, a few teachers, but virtually all of them little girls. And another school down the street, too, or relatively nearby, where they... at the volleyball game, where they killed even more. So now think about the Pearl Harbor attack, which Donald Trump himself compared it to Pearl Harbor, out of context, but still, it was a sneak surprise attack in the middle of negotiations on behalf of a foreign country over a lie, and then they killed a bunch of kids. It's like imagine if at Pearl Harbor, if our story of Pearl Harbor was that they sank all our heroes and drowned them down in their ships, in the hulls, stuck in their hulls down there, but also they wiped out schools full of 180 little girls, the children of those sailors who drown at Pearl Harbor. Oh, and also they killed FDR that same day, too. Oh, and also it was a Catholic country, and he's also the pope. Imagine how we would react to that. Imagine what our story of Pearl Harbor to this day would be. I'll tell you what our story of, of World War II would be. It would be that we kept nuking them till they were all dead, is what our story of World War II would be if that's how they had done us at Pearl Harbor. It's just somehow we just don't really think of it in that context, but we should. If that had happened to us, again, just like we, you know, uh, we did a little on Ukraine there and the way America just absolutely pushes their luck. If Russia overthrew the government of Canada twice in 10 years 'cause they kept voting wrong, we would invade Canada and nuke Moscow. And in fact, when you bring up the analogy, it's completely absurd, right? How ridiculous is it that the Russians would dare try to overthrow the regime in Ottawa, that they would dare threaten to try to kick us out of our bases in Alaska or any of these kinds of things, that they would go to war with the people of Vancouver who refuse to accept the new coup junta. It's comic book crazy. They wouldn't dare. But we do that to them, you know? And we act like, as, as Dr. Paul said, if we go around the world killing people like this, bombing people like this, and we think that we can just get away with it and not have to suffer the blowback, then we do that at our own peril. And he was speaking for the government as a member of Congress at the time, that we're putting the American people in danger.By acting this way. It's completely crazy. You know, the... Remember the, the f- um, the Shiite fatwa that the old ayatollah, the ayatollah before last, last, uh, Khomeini put on Salman Rushdie, the author of the book The Satanic Verses, where people in s- people have tried to kill him numerous times, including got his eyeball in, in one case. Um, we've had a real problem with bin Ladenite jihadi terrorism over the time. We have not had the Shiites, we have not had the Ayatollah Sistani in Iraq or the Ayatollah Khamenei declare that all good believers should attack the West now. They could do that. And that's the kind of fire that we're playing with. It's extremely dangerous. I mean, bin Laden didn't even really have a religious rank. He was just a rich guy who, he had earned respect 'cause he was wounded in battle and stuff. He had money and, and influence. But if the Ayatollah Sistani put out a full jihad, which I'm not saying he would do that. I don't, I don't have any real reason to believe that he would go that far. But he's been willing to stand up to the United States numerous times, especially during the war, um, in, you know, the last couple of wars over there. And so, and remember what happened. The night that they started this war, on the February the 28th, the next day, on Saturday the 29th... Or was it, I think it was Friday was the 28th, and it was, like, late in the night they started the war, and then Saturday, I believe, was the 29th, and a, uh, an American, uh, immigrant from Sierra Leone here in Austin took an AR-15, put on a shirt with the ayatollah and an Iranian flag on it. I didn't even know they had Shiites in Sierra Leone, Joe, but I guess they do. And he went down to 6th Street and, and he shot 18 people. He killed three and wounded 15 people in an immediate blowback terrorist attack called backdraft. I, I coined the phrase in my book that, and if blowback means long-term consequences from secret foreign policies that the American people then don't understand and are left up to false explanations or left susceptible to false ex- explanations, well, then backdraft terrorism is when the consequences of your overt foreign policies just blow up right in your face. And, you know, frankly, like, those three people were crucified for Israel, for their sins, for, for... And 15 more wounded, and I don't know how terribly wounded. For all I know, people are still in the hospital over that thing. And that was a immediate blowback terrorist attack from this war, just right away. And, and it's the kind of danger that our government is, continues to put us in through these interventions over there. At some point, you know, all the sort of, um, hypotheticals about, "Yeah, but what if Russia took over the world?" or, "What if China did if it wasn't us?" or whatever, those have got to just kinda fall away, you know, by the wayside. There's no real reason to fear that in the first place, but also, who in the hell are we to stop it at this point, right? Another South Park reference. When Cartman is so scared by the Chinese display at the Olympics ceremony, he gets all paranoid that China's coming for us, so he recruits Butters to come with him to fight and keep all the Chinese away. And then over and over again throughout the episode, Butters keeps, like, closing his eyes and shooting some guy accidentally in the dick, just over and over again. And then by the end of the episode, Cartman says, "You know what? Just forget it, okay? If that's the best you can do, Butters, let's just stop." We're just going around... We're... This is not working, our intervention. It's just not.
- JRJoe Rogan
What do you predict is gonna happen with Iran?
- SHScott Horton
I don't know. I'm really worried. I mean, I try not to take Trump too seriously when he's... You know, or too literally when he's being hyperbolic. But he has threatened to nuke them over and over again, including just the other day. He said, "The country's gonna have a glow around it, you know, when I'm done with them," or whatever, something very close to that.
- JRJoe Rogan
Do you really think he would do that?
- SHScott Horton
I mean, I've... No. No, I don't. I'm not predicting that. But I think it's a s- it's symbolic, right, of his frustration. He absolutely just should not have done this, and now he has no good way out of it, right? He could just declare victory and it would be fine by me. In fact, there was this story in the Jerusalem Post, um, the end of April, I think, I think it was, like, April 28th, about how Trump ordered the intelligence agencies to do an estimate about what would happen if I just walked away, right? And then they're looking into it. Well, just how bad will Iran exploit the new vacuum that we've created and the power and influence that we're handing to them? How bad will it really be? Because he has no options to fix it. He just doesn't. You want a regime change in Tehran, you can drop a hydrogen bomb on the capital city and kill 10 million people and then claim the desolation is peace, or you can just forget it. And, like, man, you know what? W- we're all tough and badass enough to kill all these people. W- we should be tough enough to admit when we screwed up then. Look at Afghanistan. We stayed for 20 years because Washington couldn't admit that we can't win this war. There's only one way to tame the Pashtuns, and that is kill them all, and we're not willing to do that. So what are we doing? W- we're just losing slowly. And then what do they do? They finally admitted it. They finally just said, "Fine, I guess we lost," and left. That's what we gotta do here, but sooner is better.
- JRJoe Rogan
Do you think that it's possible that this war will go on to the end of his regime and then whoever comes into power in 2028 then gets out?
- SHScott Horton
God, I hope not. I, I can't imagine what's gonna happen if this c- thing keeps on for three years, you know? This is a real flaw in our system, quite frankly, is, like, if we had a parliament, we could just vote no confidence in this guy and put a new guy in there whose fault this isn't and try to get him to resolve it. Instead, all we can do is wait three years, wait for him to f- keel over of a heart attack, or wait for his own cabinet to overthrow him in the name of him being, you know, too demented to continue, which is not going to happen. Um, you know, that 25th Amendment, they always invoke that like they could do a coup against him for being a Russian agent or whatever back in his first term. But you can't do that-
- JRJoe Rogan
Look, if they didn't do it with Biden-
- SHScott Horton
Yeah, if they didn't do it with Biden-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah
- SHScott Horton
... he would have to be completely off his rocker and, and to, to a degree where his own cabinet is going to agree to overthrow him, which I just think is virtually impossible. SoThe good news is, right, is that he's, he, he could just flip-flop on anything, right? He can just change his mind about anything. In fact, when he announced the ceasefire, he said, "We're gonna n- we're going to negotiate based on Iran's 11-point proposal." [laughs] Like, okay, man, fine, right? Go from unconditional surrender to surrendering unconditionally. Like, call it whatever you want, and, and he, he is good at that. You could call that a gift if you want to politically-
- JRJoe Rogan
Spinning it
- SHScott Horton
... that he can just pretend like, "Yeah, no, I meant to do that."
- JRJoe Rogan
So what is the hold up? Like, what are, what are they disagreeing on?
- SHScott Horton
Well, he's gotta deal with Netanyahu, right? The Master Blaster thing, you know, from Thunderdome on his back shouting in his ear what he's gotta do and what he's gotta not do. In the 60 Minutes interview, uh, he tells the, the, um, Major Garrett that, you know, uh, "We're not done. The war's not over until we get that uranium." And Garrett says, "Well, how are we gonna get it?" He says, "Trump promised me. He wants to get it. He's going to get it." And, and of course, they have this, it... Ever since they announced the ceasefire, the Israelis immediately escalated their bombing campaign in Lebanon just to destroy the ceasefire. This is what prompted Tucker Carlson to say that Trump has clearly been somehow enslaved by Netanyahu, that he's willing to put up with that. As Bill Clinton said, again, who's the superpower and who's the client state?
Episode duration: 2:35:24
Install uListen for AI-powered chat & search across the full episode — Get Full Transcript
Transcript of episode KBNfvk5Ali0
