Scott Horton

Mark:Free Talk Live, it's Mark Edge, and I have with me a longtime friend of the show, Scott Horton. Now, you used to be the host of Anti-War Radio, but I think you're just still affiliated with them, but it's called the Scott Horton Show, right?

Scott Horton:Yeah, I kept the name Anti-War Radio for my show on KPFK in Los Angeles, which I quit sometime last year. So I'm not really on the radio anymore, so no point in pretending and calling it that. It's just the Scott Horton Show, which is the name of what my podcast has been, because my radio show is basically the best interview of the week from the Scott Horton Show that I was doing all along anyway. So I've got 6,000 interviews at scotthorton.org if people want to go and listen to them all.

Mark:I'm with you on this one. I don't want to be cruel to my radio stations out there, but I really feel like COVID kicked radio right in the teeth. It may not be dead, but it isn't doing well.

Scott Horton:Yeah, it's a lot of factors. It's very rare that I would ever listen to the radio in my truck, for example. I did have my old favorite morning show on the FM rock station, but they fired the guy who was actually interesting and kept some losers. So shout out to Dale Dudley out there, but Bob Fonseca, screw you, man.

Mark:And speaking of your truck, I don't think you're... I don't want people to get a... I don't even know how to describe you, because you're very difficult to describe. You're a libertarian, like me, but I mean, you're wearing a Bass Pro Shop hat. You drive a truck.

Scott Horton:No, this is a Bug Assault hat. This is a salt shotgun for murdering flies with. It's awesome.

Mark:I have one.

Scott Horton:Yeah. Go to scotthorton.org and click the Amazon link in the right-hand margin there, and it'll lead you right to the Bug Assault 3.0. You got to get the 3.0 because it has the bar safety. With the 2.0, you got to flip the safety every time you shoot, and it's a real pain.

Mark:I had the early version, and it just didn't propel the salt quite quickly enough to make sure that...

Scott Horton:Oh, yeah. No, with the 3.0, you got it made, man.

Mark:That's good news. I'm glad.

Scott Horton:The best thing is when you get them out of the air and then they slam against the far wall. And I taught my dog to eat them so that the last thing that they know is a gigantic monster coming to eat them. Like there's some hero in an old gladiator movie taking on a giant beast. Which is always fun because I hate flies. I hate them so much. They're foul, disgusting creatures.

Mark:That's right. So it's to shoot them and feed salty flies to your dog. I understand they're necessary for the circle of life, but the circle of life goes on outside of my house. Any of them come inside of my house, they are dead to the world.

Scott Horton:That's right.

Mark:So, listen, I'm just a guy with a skateboard and a salt shotgun. That's all. But you are, in my opinion, the single best person to talk to about U.S. foreign policy. And I haven't moved on that opinion for about 15 years. Now, I'm not saying I offload my foreign policy opinion to Scott Horton. But if you used that sentence as a guidepost, then you'd be close enough to the truth. The fact is that you do way more of this investigation than I do on foreign policy stuff. So I listen to your show. I come to you just sort of mentally to find out. And right now, it looks like the United States is once again sharpening the bayonet, looking to plunge it into yet another non-nuclear state in order to keep us free? Distract from the Epstein files? I'm not sure what's going on.

Scott Horton:Well, look, I won't go back too many steps. Let's just say that since October the 7th, and the Israelis launching what they call their seven-front war here, that Iran is the big one. And if you go back to the early 2000s, Ariel Sharon insisted that W. Bush attack Tehran. And then Ehud Olmert did as well after Sharon was in his coma, if not dead. And his protege, Ehud Olmert, took over. He insisted that Bush attack Iran, and Bush told him no. And then Netanyahu came in, and he browbeat the hell out of Obama and threatened to start the war and drag America in, kicking and screaming. And you might remember Zbigniew Brzezinski, he of Rockefeller fame, basically the Democratic Henry Kissinger, told Obama, if the Israelis try to attack Iran, you should shoot their jets down over Iraq, which caused a huge controversy. But people were really worried that Netanyahu was going to do it. Now, I believe, and I'm pretty sure I was good on this all along, that he was bluffing there.

Mark:Who was bluffing? Netanyahu?

Scott Horton:Yes. That he knew he couldn't really do the war without America on board, and he couldn't really blackmail the president in by forcing the Ayatollah to attack American targets. So the pressure on Obama was enough that what he decided to do was enter into the nuclear deal, which all it did was scale back Iran's program significantly, although not completely. And it expanded inspections to double extra happy lucky wish verify that they are definitely not enriching uranium to weapons grade and trying to make bombs out of it. And that was the deal. And that was the deal that Trump tore up in 2018. And he did so at Netanyahu's behest. And the reason why was because that's the pretext for war. And Netanyahu wanted the pretext for war.

Scott Horton:So now skip a few, and it's October the 7th, and now the excuse for Israel to do everything they can to finish wiping out the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip and also escalate all the ethnic cleansing in the West Bank as well. And at the same time, launch a massive war against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. They helped Al-Qaeda along with the Turks and the Americans helped Al-Qaeda take over Syria and sack Damascus in November and December of 2024. And the Houthis in Yemen, yeah, they're friends with Iran, but they're not really sock puppets and they have power to fire missiles and drones, but they don't have the ability to really project power outside of Yemen in any way. So they're a nuisance, but they're less of a threat than Hezbollah, for example.

Scott Horton:And Hezbollah is completely reeling. I don't know how well you and your audience follow this stuff, but over the last couple of years of Israel's war in Gaza, they also really, I don't know the percentage number and I don't know how much they've recovered, but they killed Hezbollah's charismatic leader, a guy named Hassan Nasrallah. They killed him and they did this brilliant, horrible, sneaky terrorist attack, pager attack, where they set off bombs in the pagers of a lot of mid-level managers and fighters throughout Hezbollah and really crippled their force to a significant degree. And the alleged Hezbollah missile threat to northern Israel was really nullified. I mean, they just, I don't know if they just had great intel and bombed those missiles in their stores or if they were always exaggerated in their numbers anyway, but the threatened rain of missiles from Hezbollah never did come. They were severely set back.

Scott Horton:As I said, the entire Assad regime in Damascus was overthrown. Now, you can't undo Iraq War II, which was at Netanyahu's behest and his men's behest. You can't undo the results of that where America put the Shiites in power there, but you can help ameliorate those consequences. They imagine if you just go ahead and take out the Ayatollah's regime in Iran. Although that relies on a completely false premise that somehow the Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani in Iraq is any more of a progressive and pro-Zionist figure than the Ayatollah Ali al-Khamenei in Iran, which is not true. And so he's the one who, after George Bush won the war for him, Sistani kicked his ass right out of there.

Scott Horton:Anyway, from Netanyahu's point of view, everything is coming up Likud.

Mark:That's his political party.

Scott Horton:Yes, yes. Likud is the right-wing nationalist party in Israel. So he's really severely crippled Hamas, right? And haven't heard so much of a rocket fired out of there in a very long time. Not that they've been completely defeated, but they've been severely set back. Same for Hezbollah. Completely got rid of the Baathists in Syria. Now, if they can get regime change in Iran, that's the royal flush or whatever. I don't play cards, but that's the big deal. That was, again, this is what Sharon and Olmert and Netanyahu have demanded and threatened all this time. And so now the question is, so what does that mean about the nuclear program? The nuclear program is a pretext for war.

Mark:Pretext. The U.S.'s or Iran's?

Scott Horton:No, America's and Israel's pretext for war against Iran.

Mark:Yeah. So why do they keep doing it? Just out of curiosity, if your enemy has one particular thing that they really hate about you, and I'm not saying they're enriching uranium to weapons grade. I'm not saying that. I'm just asking if this is the problem, why do they keep on trying to build a nuclear program?

Scott Horton:Yeah. Well, good question. And there are a few different answers to that, including developments right up to the last minute here as we're talking.

Scott Horton:So, first of all, under the Non-Proliferation Treaty, non-nuclear weapon states promise never to get nuclear weapons. But they also are guaranteed the right, the quote in the treaty, inalienable right to a civilian nuclear program. And you could look at that, as you might do, national security hawk as you are, Mark, as a pretty big loophole in that treaty, that you could have completely mastered the nuclear fuel cycle and be able to enrich uranium hexafluoride gas to whatever percent you wish. And all of this is completely legal right up until the point where you decide to kick the inspectors out and flip a switch and start enriching to weapons grade and trying to make a nuke out of it. You could be a nuclear weapons threshold state. You could have a nuclear reactor where you produce plutonium that you could refine and have weapons-grade plutonium as well.

Scott Horton:And so these are, from a cynical point of view, massive loopholes in the Non-Proliferation Treaty and the overall civilian nuclear program regime around the planet, the nuclear suppliers group and all these things. So if you're Israel or you're just an American hawk, let's pretend for the sake of argument that they're honest. They're just worried that they're going to use the civilian program as cover to build a de facto weapons program to get it to as late a stage as possible and then break out, as they call it, and make a nuke.

Scott Horton:But the thing about that is there's a lot of reason to believe that that's really not true, especially considering that the original conclusion by the CIA that while they were really looking into it before 2003, but then they stopped when America got rid of Saddam Hussein for them. I mean, at least that is consistent and makes sense that since George W. Bush was doing their bidding in part by getting rid of Saddam and that security threat to their border. But the thing is, as we know from Gareth Porter's book and his great work in it, the book is called Manufactured Crisis. And he shows that their conclusion that Iran was ever looking at nukes before 2003 was wrong.

Scott Horton:It's based on two things. One of them was a group of intercepts by the Defense Intelligence Agency for so-called dual-use items like magnets and refined metals and things that could potentially be used in a nuclear program. But they thought, aha, these are illicit underground-type purchases on the international black market, but we know about them. Well, those were later resolved. And it turns out those were good faith estimates by DIA, but they were just wrong. And it turns out that the civilian innocent use was the IAEA showed that, in fact, here are those magnets and here are these different machines that are being used at the university for the stated civilian purpose and have not been diverted to military uses. So the DIA was not lying, but they were in good faith just wrong about that. And that was all later disproven by the IAEA inspections.

Scott Horton:And the other half of the CIA's conclusion that they were ever looking at making nukes was based on the Israeli-forged so-called smoking laptop or laptop of death that the Israelis made up and funneled through the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, communist terrorist cult, and had them turn it over to the IAEA. As Ali Heinonen from the IAEA admitted, that was where they got it from. And it was full of a bunch of nonsense. And this was even debunked by David Albright of the so-called Good ISIS and David Sanger in the New York Times, that they were developing a nuclear warhead to fit in a delivery vehicle that would not fit in the new design of Iranian missiles. And they had changed from, I guess, a bottlenose to a more cone-shaped thing. Or maybe it was the other way around. But whatever. It was the new missile wouldn't fit this warhead anyway. So it proved that the Israelis were making a good educated guess when they were forging the documents. But they didn't know that the Iranians were changing the nose cone of their missile. And if they had known, they would have updated their forgery, right?

Scott Horton:And then there were other things that totally disproved that laptop as fake. And then the CIA said in 2007 that they stopped even trying to look into how to make a nuke or even studying it or pursuing it in any way in '03. And the CIA and all the rest of the American Intelligence Council have reaffirmed that conclusion over and over again, up to and including Tulsi Gabbard one year ago in the February threat assessment. Which actually, I don't know if they released a threat assessment this month or not. They usually do in February release an unclassified national security assessment from the Defense Intelligence Agency. I'll try to remember to look that up later, but one year ago affirmed that and she, in fact, affirmed that again in Senate testimony just a couple of weeks before the war broke out last June.

Scott Horton:And so, on top of that, the Ayatollah, the mean old Ayatollah from the revolution in the '80s and the newer Ayatollah, who in fact has been in power since 1989, al-Khamenei, they have repeatedly issued these fatwas, which say it is not just the law, but is supreme, written, high, holy law from God that weapons of mass destruction are haram. Now, I'm not a Shiite and I don't trust in any theocrat who's a politician and a clergyman of some religion I don't believe in. So I got no reason to take that literally in any way personally as meaningful other than the fact that clearly the government has obeyed this supreme leader. That has literally been their order and they have not made chemical weapons. They have not made biological weapons. They have not made nuclear weapons. Even when Saddam was attacking them with chemical weapons with American help in the 1980s, they still didn't make chemical weapons in response. There's just no reason to believe that they changed their mind about that.

Scott Horton:Now, don't get me wrong. According to the Ayatollah, God could change his mind about that tomorrow. But so far, there's no indication that they have, at least up until last June when Israel and America started this war and then the inspectors were kicked out. And so if anyone ever lost sight of the ability to measure and keep track of every last bit of nuclear material in that country, it would have been America and Israel who caused that break in the chain of evidence.

Scott Horton:On the other hand, it is true, as Donald Trump said, it was barely hyperbole. It really was barely hyperbole when Trump said that he obliterated their program. He completely kicked their nuclear program's ass. So they have these two massive facilities, especially at Natanz was the bigger one, and then Fordow as well. And they are closed for business. There is no uranium enrichment going on there whatsoever. They are demolished and their entrances have been sealed.

Scott Horton:And on top of that, their bluff has been called. Trump has already announced and proven, I will bomb you. So don't reopen them, right? What are they going to do about that? Nothing, but get bombed. They can't do anything about that. And then the third facility is called Isfahan. And that was a crucial facility where you take the uranium metal and you convert it to uranium hexafluoride gas, which that's what you use to enrich in your aluminum tube centrifuge cascades to enrich the uranium to higher percentages of U-235. Then you got to convert it back to metal again to use it for a fuel rod or a bomb or anything else. Well, without that conversion facility, you got nothing. Whatever uranium you have in whatever form, you can't change it. And that facility has been already completely obliterated as of last June and not rebuilt.

Scott Horton:And Trump said, and I don't know that this is true, but it sounded like he was telling the truth. When he said this, I'm almost certain I saw the audio or maybe it was a video of him talking to a reporter. Forgive me for my footnote, but anyone could probably look this up. It was just within the last couple of weeks. Trump said the Iranians started digging. They tried to start digging a new facility. And I forgot if he said I called them or just I had somebody call, maybe Rubio call or whatever, and let them know. Don't do that or we'll just bomb you. So just don't.

Scott Horton:So in other words, quite truly, the old Mexican standoff where we said, if you make a nuke, we'll bomb you before you do. And they said, look, we won't make a nuke if you don't bomb us. So don't bomb us. That standoff was broken. And instead, Israel and America just started this aggressive war. At that point, hey, the fact is America is the superpower. And in fact, the thermonuclear weapon superpower. And Iran has no atom bombs and no ability truly really to defend themselves.

Scott Horton:They do have a missile force that could potentially threaten American supplies in the Gulf. But they have a real deterrent there, which is that Donald Trump is loco. And so if America starts bombing the crap out of Iran and they hit back very hard. And let's say they overwhelm our defenses and they swamp our bases in Bahrain and Qatar and Kuwait and Iraq with missiles and kill thousands and thousands of guys. Let's say they sink our ships in the Gulf or in the Indian Ocean. Mark, what do you think Donald Trump might do in a situation like that?

Mark:I think he would get emotional. He would either, what, curl up in a ball and say, oops, I shouldn't have done that. Or he's going to probably get very, very upset and do something rash.

Scott Horton:And the Ayatollah is not a dummy, dude. So look at what happened last June. Trump called his bluff and the Ayatollah just took it on the chin because what was he going to do? So I don't know what's going to happen. I'm not predicting the best result here. But I also, I guess my gut is not feeling like the worst-case scenario. But then again, if the war is truly meant to completely destroy the regime and replace the regime, then what would any regime do in that situation? They probably shoot everything they got. Use them or lose them. If we're going to die, at least we're going to destroy Donald Trump's political career on the way out the door. Something like that. I don't know whether that would do it. I mean, if they sunk a few American ships or something like that. I think Americans would react very poorly and probably want to go whole hog.

Mark:They're not dead.

Scott Horton:Oh, by the way, so I'm sorry, in direct answer to your question too, that I never did get to, which is, so why insist on their right to enrich uranium? They have said it's just a matter of national sovereignty and independence. You can't tell me what to do. We signed a treaty. We promised not to get nuclear weapons, but they have a domestic supply of uranium. And they say, we want to burn that to run our electricity and sell our oil on the world market. And that's it. And you can't tell me that I can't do it.

Scott Horton:And imagine, quite honestly, America in a weaker position where whatever's left of the United States and the world dictates to us, you're not allowed to have enriched uranium anymore. Oh, yeah? Like, nuh-uh. The average man will grab his rifle to fight over that, even if we don't even know what that means. We just know that no blue helmet's going to tell us what to do. And so it's the same kind of thing here, where it's just a matter of national sovereignty. And it's a matter of economics too. There's not that much demand in the world for uranium. There's a lot of demand for oil. And so it's just a matter of opportunity costs on a basic level as well. So that's why they keep insisting on it.

Scott Horton:But then that brings me to the latest thing, which is, according to reliable sources, the latest offer from the Iranians, this is a huge climb-down from Iran, Mark, is they're saying they will take a moratorium on any enrichment for five years. Or maybe it was three to five years.

Mark:Scott, can you hold just one second? I got to take a break and we'll be right back.

Mark:We're back with Scott Horton. Scott, I want to jump right back in. I've got so many questions with what we went over in the first segment there. The IAEA, what's that stand for?

Scott Horton:That's the International Atomic Energy Agency. And I'm sorry, just to wrap up that last point real quick, their offer was to go on a moratorium from any enrichment for three to five years and then to enrich only up to 1.5%, which I don't even know if that's useful for their electricity program. But this is a huge climb-down from their insistence all through the past leading up to this. So it's a real test, honestly, of whether America is dealing honestly here or whether it's just quite literally they mean to use this as a pretext to launch a war of regime change.

Mark:So enrichment is necessary for nuclear power as well as nuclear weapons. Now, as I understand it, nuclear weapons only work with a certain level of enrichment. Nuclear power can be had with a lower level of enrichment. But enrichment itself is not an indication, ladies and gentlemen, Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea. Enrichment is not an indication that Iran is necessarily creating, is weeks away from creating a nuclear weapon, which they have been my whole life.

Scott Horton:Exactly. And I mean, quite honestly, I remember just because I have a very visual memory about these kinds of things. I remember driving my truck for work and sitting at the red light at 290 and I-35 and the top-of-the-hour radio news telling me about Iran breaking out towards a nuclear weapon. And they'll have one by the end of the week or the end of the month or whatever it was. And this is in the year 2004. And because I know where I was and who I was working for and everything. And if you drive for a living, if you're an air conditioner repairman out there working on a construction crew or any kind of contractor out there where you're out in your truck driving around and you're listening to talk radio, you probably have heard 50 million times about Iran's nuclear weapon. Just for generations in a row.

Scott Horton:But the thing about it and what they won't tell you is that they've had this inspections regime guaranteeing that they are not using their nuclear material for a military purpose. So it's sort of like if you had a gun shop and people were always accusing you of selling illegal laser rifles to the Mexican cartels and you said, I'll tell you what I'm going to do. I'm going to let an ATF agent sit on a bar stool at my counter and watch me not sell laser rifles to Mexican cartels. I'm doing legitimate business here, everyone. And then they still came and said, see, he's a criminal. He's a bad guy. He's making and selling laser guns. But you've got a cop sitting right there verifying daily that you're not breaking the law and that everything is above board here.

Scott Horton:That's the IAEA. They're the international ATF, basically making sure, if that's a very poor analogy, but making sure that, yeah, you have nuclear material. You're introducing it into these machines. It's this much material. It spits out that much at this percent enrichment, et cetera.

Mark:Last night, Sean Hannity, I had the pleasure of briefly passing through the living room as the senior mama was watching Fox News, her favorite news channel. And Sean Hannity said that Iran would not let American inspectors in to inspect their nuclear program or whatever's left of it, whatever smoking rubble pile. Now, I think this is probably true insofar as why would they let American inspectors in? Are there American inspectors?

Scott Horton:There were. But after last June, they kicked them out and said that they were spies and then they were helping with the targeting, which is highly probable. I don't know. Why wouldn't it be? And honestly, man, I got a lot of jobs and I did not keep up. And I admit I did not look into that any deeper and I'm not taking their word for it. But I'm just saying if they believe that... And it doesn't matter because America has allies all over the world and their scientists are not compromised in certainly not in any way that their national governments wouldn't know about or the CIA wouldn't know about. And under no circumstances are whichever scientists from whatever country allowed in there without American approval in the first place of who those people are and are going to be speaking for the results of their inspections and whatnot.

Scott Horton:Anyway, the point is, man, that the real point is that this isn't about nuclear weapons, that even though America broke the stalemate and called their bluff, it looks to me. I mean, there's just no indication at all that they went ahead and broke out toward a nuke in some secret tunnel since then. You can just make up stories all day about, well, they might have could have. But there's no indication that that's true. Instead, it looks like actually Trump called their bluff and kicked their ass. He blew their nuclear program up real good. And they actually don't have much of a leg to stand on as far as continuing it at this point. They're totally in a position of weakness here.

Scott Horton:And so there's no need to panic and think that there's any need to defend. And there's no need, Mark, in the world to think that anyone in our government thinks there is. They know there's not. I mean, Trump gets on there in the State of the Union. He goes, they just won't say those sweet little secret words. I don't know why they're secret. They don't say those sweet little words, those secret words. No nuclear weapon. But that's just total nonsense. They disavow nuclear weapons openly, publicly a million times over and over again. And no one who knows the first thing about that thinks otherwise. You could call them liars, but don't sit here and tell me they've never even said that they disavow nukes because that's just not true.

Scott Horton:And it's on the level of, quite honestly, like they said about Iraq. Why won't he come clean about his weapons? Well, let's see. Saddam Hussein, he turned over a 12,000-page dossier on all of their WMD, which was totally legit. And they said, well, there's no new information here. Yeah, exactly. Because all of it was destroyed. The very last bit of it was destroyed by the end of 1991. And the inspectors knew all about that by 1995.

Scott Horton:And if people say they heard the exception of that, the exception of that is munitions that were buried by the IAEA or the United Nations weapons inspectors out in the desert and were left there to decay on shelf-life grounds because it'd be safer to just do that than to try to move them. But none of that was a secret arsenal. All of that was capital-D Declared to the international inspectors, and they were the ones who chose to leave it there, including the same thing with a locker of yellowcake uranium in Iraq, which they just left there and which totally proved what a lie it was that he went to Niger to try to get some secret yellowcake uranium when he had a giant storelocker full of it. All he would have had to do is take some clippers and break the lock on there and go right in if that had been his intent or even within his capability.

Scott Horton:Just like in 2002, Mark, we got to debunk the technical aspects of the aluminum tubes and what they're used for here. But also we got to debunk the idea that that's what this is about. This is about the Likud killing the Ayatollah so that they can break the chain of power that supports Hezbollah, their neighbor that hassles them on their northern border, so that they will have regional hegemony and be the unquestioned power with no one to balance against them. And have all their enemies pwned, as they put it. Peace through strength instead of peace through being decent human beings and dealing with their neighbors in good faith.

Mark:So the press, I think as a generality, hates Trump. They really don't like this guy and I see why they might look at him as a threat. Why doesn't the press make clear what appears to be just a run-up to war with no factual backing, from what your claim is?

Scott Horton:I mean, for the obvious reason that they're completely pwned by Israel, too. I mean, look at the State of the Union. The only thing that the Democrats, or maybe there are a couple of things, but one of the only things the Democrats stood up and clapped for, and they despise Trump. A lot of them walked out in protest. They sit there with their arms folded, their bottom lips pouting. They hate him. But then he says, yeah, we're going to get that Ayatollah, no nuclear weapons for him. And all the Democrats stand up and applaud.

Scott Horton:And what's interesting about this, I really like it in a George Carlinian, appreciate-the-excitement-of-the-chaos kind of way, that right now you have almost completely on the left half, I don't mean leftists, but the entire left half of the American political spectrum, the liberals, the progressives and the leftists of all different descriptions. It's just completely the Democrat voters versus the owners of the Democratic Party on the issue of Israel-Palestine. And for that matter, you could extrapolate out really easily to another war for Israel against Iran. They were against it during W. Bush. I'm pretty sure they're all still good on it now or they default to good on it.

Mark:Right. I remember an odd situation in I think it was 2012. So I watched the national conventions, both Republicans and Democrats in 2012. I was really interested in it because of Ron Paul, as you can imagine, whose bust you have behind you. And I remember this weird vote at the Democratic National Convention. They took a vote that said that we support, I think it was Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. And then they took a vote on it and it was a voice vote. And it appeared to be very, very even on both sides. And then the lady that was up there, pardon me if I don't know her name, slipped down into the annals of history. She said, because it's a voice vote and because I'm the speaker, I get to decide. So she decided that it was true that Jerusalem was the capital of Israel. And I'm like, I don't even know what's going on. I go and look this up. And apparently it's a big deal because, well, turns out Jerusalem is not the capital of Israel and it can't be the capital of Israel because of political reasons. And to say so is controversial in some way. And so half of their party's like yes and half of their party's like no. And this is 2012. This is long before the whole Palestinian thing and all that. So I think you're absolutely right that there is a segment of the Democratic Party that's pro-Israel. That segment is in power and getting enriched in some manner or another. And then the largest segment, the voting segment, is anti-Israel.

Scott Horton:Yep. And I remember that same anecdote, but I'll do you better. It was Mayor Villaraigosa, I believe was his name. If I remember right, it was a man, the mayor. And the vote was overwhelmingly boos and in the negative. And he was startled by that and you could see him looking offstage for instructions. And then he says, the ayes have it. And the place was in an uproar because it was an indoor stadium. It was like a basketball stadium or something. And the place was like, what? No, boo, more double extra boo after they had... it was bad. And people can look that up.

Scott Horton:And look, after the last two years of what happened in the Gaza Strip, for people, maybe I do know. It's a very balkanized media landscape out there. But for people who are not familiar, I know there are people who are not familiar. I would urge you to go to X. If you don't have a Twitter account, X account, create one and just go type in Gaza and look under media. If you're on TikTok or Instagram or whatever, there must be... I don't know how bad the censorship is. I know it's bad everywhere. But certainly on X, if you just look at Gaza on there, you will see that they deliberately kill civilians every single day over there.

Scott Horton:And this is during the ceasefire, man. And for the two years before the ceasefire that started in October, they were killing about a Waco massacre worth of people every day. It was somewhere between like 80 and 120. Waco was actually playing it down. It was somewhere between 80 and 120 people. Someone had advised them somewhere in the focus group results or something. This is what you can get away with. If it's 150 a day, that's too much. But don't bother skimping and only killing 25 because you can get away with at least about 125 or so. And they would kill 100, 125 people every single day for two years. After the first few months, it was more. I mean, pardon me. For the first few months, it was more. But after the first few months, it was about right around a Waco massacre every single day in the Gaza Strip.

Scott Horton:And you have to understand, man, if you don't, and your audience, that Gaza is an Indian reservation, right? It's not... Palestine isn't the country next door. It was already conquered. These people are living in a giant, essentially, concentration camp. It would be like if black crime got out of control so bad in South Chicago that they walled off South Chicago and then they just started bombing Chicago. Like these people are, quote unquote, your people. This government is... it's not exactly their government. It's an occupation, foreign military government. But the people of Palestine, Israel is on top of Palestine, and in Gaza and in the West Bank, even when they have the so-called Palestinian Authority on the West Bank, they're like trustees in an Israeli open-air prison. They work at the pleasure of the Israelis. They are an occupation force, a Palestinian local native subcontractor under Israeli rule.

Scott Horton:And they deal with these people with ultimate violence. It'd be like if we had Indian reservations that were... Indians still do exist in the United States. But if we just never left them alone, if the Anglos were still just bombing the Navajo forever, daring to act out or commit a crime or do a thing, we get to just bomb them and bomb them and bomb them and bomb them. And kill a Waco massacre worth of Indians every day. You understand what I'm saying about the difference between Indians versus if we were at war with Mexico. Not that it would be OK to kill civilians in a war with Mexico. But I'm saying Mexico is a sovereign thing. The Indian reservation is under the control of Uncle Sam in the first place. So you don't get to just go in there and bomb it like that. Does that make sense?

Mark:It does to me. So it sounds like a genocide.

Scott Horton:And it is. I've often felt that this is the case.

Mark:Now, I don't pay enough attention, but my sort of real concern is, why do they stay? And isn't it cheaper and easier just to let the Palestinians go somewhere? Isn't there any country that will take them? I mean, do we have to perpetuate a genocide?

Scott Horton:I mean, I understand. That's the goal, right, is to get the people of the world and including the Palestinians to just say, geez, you'd be better off to just admit defeat and go. But they just won't. They're not going to give up their land any more than we would. And on top of that, other countries don't want to do it because their name would be absolutely mud in their relations with all other Muslim countries forever if they were to take them. And no non-Muslim country is going to take them. So the Muslim countries don't want the Gazans to escape.

Mark:Well, they don't want to abet the Israelis' mass murder and theft of their property by helping Israel to dispose of the people.

Scott Horton:That's what they don't want to do. And of course, by getting rid of all the Palestinians, then that means also giving up the last of Muslim control of any of those holy sites. And so that ultimately is the plan of the Israeli right, is to blow up the Al-Aqsa Mosque and to build the third temple and start sacrificing animals and force the Messiah to come and this kind of crazy stuff.

Mark:Well, why isn't this mosque blown up at this point? I mean, how hard is that?

Scott Horton:Because the Israeli government so far has prevented it. In fact, at one point, some radical orthodox sect had planted bombs throughout the Al-Aqsa Mosque. And the Shin Bet National Police, basically their FBI, had caught them at the very last minute. The bombs had been set. The explosives had been set inside the Al-Aqsa Mosque. And they've done this thing. South Park made a parody of it or whatever. But this is a real thing. There's a prophecy about either you got to wait around for the Messiah to come, or you can cheat in a way. And if you have a pure red heifer and you sacrifice this pure red heifer and use the right sacrament and the right ceremony with the ashes of this heifer, then you can take the shortcut and rebuild the third temple and go ahead and blow up the mosque and do it now.

Scott Horton:And so they've done this. They've had evangelical Christian ranches. There's this one evangelical Christian rancher from West Texas, I believe, is the guy that got it done, who just poured a ton of money into genetic engineering. And they worked for generations on this. I mean, I remember Justin Raimondo wrote an article called "Beware the Red Heifer" back in 2002. And they finally achieved that in this decade. Because it always had like one little white tuft of hair or something. And then a rabbi would object. But they finally bred in Israel a pure red heifer. And then they sacrificed it and did the ceremony and the thing.

Scott Horton:So, I mean, honestly, man, this kind of thinking is driving American foreign policy right now. America's at the beck and call of serving not just the interest of a foreign state, but the interest of a foreign state that's on a mission from God to kill anyone who stands in their way of confiscating all of this prophecy and bringing on the end of the world. It's complete madness.

Mark:It does seem like complete madness. And you've given me some things that I didn't know previously as far as facts on this one. And I do appreciate that. Can we jump real quick to Venezuela?

Scott Horton:Sure.

Mark:Tell me about Venezuela. It all just seemed like a surprise to a lot of people, although there had been a huge military buildup and a lot of fishermen's boats got blown up. I mean, what happened with Venezuela?

Scott Horton:Venezuela. Well, look, I mean, the thing with the boats, I guess I always took that as mostly a pretext, kind of warming us up for the attack, although they've done it since then, too. So I don't know if they've just defined these orders down. None of these so-called fast boats from northern South America can get to the United States without stopping for gas 25 times or whatever. These drugs are not coming here. They're going to Trinidad and Tobago, and then from there they're changing to a transatlantic submarine and selling coke to Africa. And it changes every three months. These places, there's all kinds of different places, and they're constantly moving around. Of course. So there's a pretext for intervention mostly. If it's in any way a good-faith effort to stop the spread of illegal drugs, then it's ridiculous and foolish. As everyone has been.

Mark:Yeah, more likely it would be siding with one cartel over another.

Scott Horton:This group is favored by the CIA, and that group has fallen out of favor or whatever. That's really typically the way these things go there. Just like, remember, everyone, the gun-walking scandal from the Obama years where in Arizona that gun shop was made by the government to sell guns to the Mexican cartels? Which Mexican cartels? The Sinaloa cartel. Why? Because they were fighting the Zetas. This is America's government in Mexico, right? It's just nuts.

Scott Horton:Anyway, as far as Venezuela itself, the fact of the matter is that Hugo Chavez was a commie dog, and his economic policies are completely crazy. And Maduro was worse than him. And he did refuse to recognize the results of a fair election that he lost. And he's a commie scumbag, and his commie scumbag government was full of a bunch of gangsters and kooks, just like you would assume about them. If I told you, Mark, they're a bunch of commies, you'd be like, man, they must be a bunch of terrible people.

Mark:Yeah, and bad at their job, of course.

Scott Horton:Right? But on top of that was a massive economic war by the United States against them, where we essentially make it virtually impossible for foreign governments to come in and run their oil program for them. So only Chevron had it in there, and they were able to exclude a lot of competition. Exxon, everybody else was out. And so their economy was, one, weakened by Marxism in all the ways you'd expect. But two, you can't underestimate the power of the U.S. Treasury Department as an international star destroyer pulling into orbit over your planet to dictate to you how things are going to be or else. And they have the power of the 800-megaton gorilla at their disposal.

Scott Horton:This is why the creation of the BRICS movement and all of that is for people to try to escape the dominance of America's control of the global economic system through sanctions and all of these things.

Scott Horton:So anyways, they saw their opening. And who could deny, I'm sure they're making a Hollywood movie about it right now, who could deny how amazing it is that the Delta Force was able to go in there and get the head of state and his wife in a way that is comparable to a night raid in Kandahar province in Afghanistan, where they're just going after some schmuck. Here they were able, and I'm sure that there were bribes and high-tech means as well of suppressing whatever enemy fire. I think his people were basically presented with a fait accompli. You want to die, too, or you want to sit tight and see the sunrise? And then they did it like that.

Scott Horton:But here's the thing though. Everyone in my mentions on Twitter was saying, shut up, stupid Horton. You don't understand. These commies were commies. And so we have to do this. And then I said, they are commies, but you don't have to do this. And then that day, the next day, Donald Trump says, well, look, we're not putting the right wing in power there. They may have even won the election outright last time and had it stolen from them. But still, the entire regime is this commie regime. And we're not doing like Bush and Paul Wolfowitz in Iraq, where we de-Baathify the whole government and kick every commie out of power there and dissolve the army and then do a big nation-building project and take over Venezuela. That is suicide. There's no way we're doing that. So what do we do? We keep the commies. We kidnapped the top commie, and we kept his vice president. And so now all of Venezuela's communism belongs to us and is the Americans' responsibility now.

Mark:Scott, what's the website so people can follow you and find out more of your content?

Scott Horton:The best thing to do is just go to my Twitter feed, x.com/scotthortonshow, and I got all my links there. The Academy, the Institute, antiwar.com, my show, and all my books.

Mark:Scott Horton, that's scotthortonshow on X.