Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 8/7/26 Glenn Greenwald on How American Politics is Changing

Episode Date: August 10, 2026

Glenn Greenwald joins the show to discuss the recent victories of several anti-establishment left-wing candidates in Democratic primaries and the shifts in American politics more broadly. Discussed on the show: “Robert Kagan: Sometimes US intervention is worth blowback” (Responsible Statecraft) Glenn Greenwald is an American journalist, author, and former lawyer. Subscribe to his Substack and follow him on X @ggreenwald  Sign up for the Scott Horton Academy of Foreign Policy and Freedom at scotthortonacademy.com For more on Scott's work: Check out The Libertarian Institute: https://www.libertarianinstitute.org Check out Scott's other show, Provoked, with Darryl Cooper https://youtube.com/@Provoked_Show Read Scott's books: Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine https://amzn.to/43D82oY (The audiobook of Provoked is being published in sections at https://scotthortonshow.com) Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism: https://amzn.to/4eMQblu Fool’s Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan https://amzn.to/4a5fKvx Follow Scott on X @scotthortonshow And check out Scott’s full interview archives: https://scotthorton.org/all-interviews This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Tax Attorney Matt Sercely https://agoristtaxadvice.com; Moon Does Artisan Coffee https://scotthorton.org/coffee; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom https://www.libertyclassroom.com/dap/a/?a=1616 and Dissident Media https://dissidentmedia.com; Expat Money https://expatmoney.com/scott; and Crowdhealth https://www.joincrowdhealth.com/ (use promocode Horton) You can also support Scott’s work by making a one-time or recurring donation at https://scotthorton.org/donate/ or https://patreon.com/scotthortonshow Audio cleaned up with the Podsworth app: https://podsworth.com Use code HORTON50 for 50% off your first order at Podsworth.com to clean up your voice recordings, sound like a pro, and also support the Scott Horton Show! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, you guys, me here for expat money at expatmoney.com slash Scott. Learn what it takes to get residency, even citizenship, to buy property and protect your neck by building yourself at Plan B. Get this free booklet all about how to do it if you just sign up at expatmoney.com slash Scott. Ladies and gentlemen of the press have been less than honest. Reporting to the American people, what's going on in this country. We're dealing with Kim. Revisited.

This is the Scott Horton show. Libertarian foreign policy, mostly. When the president visit, that means that it is not only... We're going to take out seven countries in five years. They don't know what the fuck they're doing. Negotiate now. End this war. And now, here's your host, Scott Horton.

All right, you guys. Introducing Glenn Greenwald. Pete of System Update is his show. And of course, he has a substack as well. And I forgot to hit the share screen button so I can share the screen of it. And here it is. His substack is greenwall.substack.com. He does his Q&A shows and stuff.

And yeah, good to see you. Glenn. Welcome back to the show. Always great to see you, Scott. Thank you for having me. Yeah. Hey, and congratulations. on finally aging a little bit there. You still look about 10 years younger than me,

which isn't fair because I think you're about 8 or 10 years old. I think it's more like 15 years younger, but I have to object to the premise. I really don't think I have aged at all. I was going to pray a little bit. I was going to ask, maybe you got married to a woman recently or something like that? I think that is something that would actually rapidly age me.

You're right about that, but that's for one of the many reasons why I have not done that. But I'll take up the compliment. Yes. Congratulations on your hairline for sure, you know. Yeah, that's one of the most important accomplishments. I agree. Of the things I've done in life, that is one of the things of which I'm proudest. This is what old men talk about at the start of their podcast.

Weight and medication and hairline. Yes, yes. You know what I'm interested in the Reds winning these primaries against the liberal centrist Democrat types lately. And I'm interested in your take. on it all, it seems like maybe possibly, Glenn,

possibly, that the centrist's liberal types that it's Zionism and war, that that's their Achilles heel. That's what they just can't give up. That, and that's what's really sinking them among all of

their own constituents. They just can't make a break with Israel. That clearly is a big part of it. I mean, I understand why call them red. Some of them, you know, I do identify as socialist. I don't think would, would accept the communist label. Others do. And at the end of the day, maybe there's not a huge difference. But I really don't think that's what's driving any of this. It's not like these are Marxist revolutionaries really believing that there's some kind of imminent, you know,

Vanguard of the Proletariat and they're planning it and parting, uh, preparing for it. I've known Hassan Piker for a long time. And my main criticism of him has always been. been a little bit similar to AOC that he's kind of a Democratic partisan who masquerades as a radical, but really isn't all that radical. I mean, I think Assad probably is more than AOC, and I think that's true for a lot of these candidates. If you actually don't go what their economic policies are, it's, there are policies that you certainly hear in the mainstream quite a bit that have substantial support for the American people, you know, just things like Medicare for all and reducing the kind of brutal income and wealth inequality,

not things that a libertarian would like, that's to be sure, but things that I think find residents increasingly even among a lot of traditional Republicans. And of course, the foreign policy as well. But I think, you know, if I had to put my finger on it, I really don't think Americans these days are motivated very much by ideology, except maybe on social issues, which I don't think, people are voting much on.

That's really where you still find a kind of reliable left-right framework that's predictive of people's views. To me, like the two defining political events of this century, say, in the United States, both demonstrate what I think is the crucial point for understanding our current political situation now, which was one in 2008,

when a previously obscure senator, Barack Obama, who hailed from the most liberal district in the United States, or one of them, Hyde Park. His name was Barack Hussein Obama, had a father who was Kenyan, who grew up and lived in Kenya, and would have been the first black president

and Democrats all kind of were petrified. He's never going to be able to win an election, especially in swing states in the middle of the country. No one is going to vote for somebody like that. It was considered very liberal as well. And yet he won, you know, up and down the industrial belt, the Rust Belt, including places like Indiana, and Ohio, which Democrats, you know, have no chance of money now.

And that should have shattered our understanding of what, what political assets really are important and which ones aren't. And if that wasn't enough, in 2016, Trump did something very similar, where it was just assumed from the time that he wrote down that escalator that he was never really going to be president. He had no chance for a zillion reasons. And yet, like Obama, he's now won the president. twice. And that should lead us to try and analyze that as much as possible, like what went wrong

in our assumptions about who isn't, isn't electable. And my view is that they had two very relevant aspects in common. One is that they both had great personal charisma, which have the effect of drawing into the political process, huge numbers of people who typically just don't vote. We never talk about non-voters. Like, they're irrelevant. But if you can bring them into the political process, that's like political gold. And if you're charismatic and you can convince people that you're different, you can do that and win elections that otherwise you couldn't. And both of them did that. Charism is crucial. But the other part of it is they both, you know, to whatever extent you think it's credible, you know, relentlessly positioned themselves as enemies of a political

establishment that most people hate. And it kind of seems like we're stuck in the 1990s or the 2000s, you know, where we have this view that, oh, and in swing state. or middle of the country states. Only moderates can win. You can't have an extremist on the right or an extremist on the left. I just don't think that's how our voting patterns

and our elections suggest that we try and understand the current moment. And so I get the conventional wisdom of all these DSA candidates, these left-wing candidates. They have way too many left-wing views that are way too anathema

to the ordinary voter. What views are they really running on that are so anathema? I think they're going to have a lot more success and are having a lot more success because those premises that so many of our pundits and media class use are just no longer really applicable. Although, you know, their kind of legacy ties to Israel has really been in Achilles' heel in the elections, too, where, you know, this lady that lost Haley Stevens that lost this primary, she was just known as such a shill for APEC

and had that big red badge on how much money she'd taken and those clips of her, you know, coutowing before them and all that kind of thing. She had that speech where she said, Israel comes to me in my dreams. I will always devote myself. Aside from $60 million in APEC, not just her, obviously, you know, Democratic incumbents lost because of their closeness to Israel,

Dan Goldman and the head of the Progressive House caucus. There was an incumbent in Colorado, Diana did jet that loss to an insurgent, very left wing. No, but that I think is absolutely true. but even there, I'm not so convinced that people care so much about Israel per se. A lot of people do.

I think they see it more as a kind of symbol or vehicle for why they hate our political class and why it doesn't work. Like people are sitting here saying our communities are falling apart. We have no economic opportunity. We're suffering in so many ways. We spend all these times on thinking about things

that have nothing to do with us. And this idea of constantly focusing in Israel, visiting Israel, sending billions to Israel, going to war for Israel. It's kind of like a practice. for trying to figure out if a politician is one of those people that doesn't really care about Americans and the needs of their lives.

And I think that's why it has such salience. Yeah, that's a good point. And, you know, the guy that beat her, L's, was it? How do you say? El Sai. Yeah. I can't read my own handwriting anymore. My handwriting is perfect, but my eyeballs don't work.

But I saw where they cornered him and they go, Oh, you hate the Jews, huh? And he goes, no, so see, my thing is, I think that the money from the people of Michigan should be spent by or at least on the people of Michigan instead of helping other countries kill kids. I was like, yeah, that is the core. And any paleo-libertarian or paleo-conservative could have made the same argument. All this time we call that ideology America first, right?

Yeah. I don't think we should. And he's quick to ask. I also don't think we should be sending billions to prop up the regime in Egypt even though my family is from Egypt. Yeah, which is just foreign aid to Israel anyway. Right, right?

Like the Jordan. Like the Jordan. Exactly. That should be tallied. But, you know, there was a moment in the New York City election where I think a lot of people on the American right, like the actual populace, the actual America first people, not just the Magid people, started to kind of have this weird respect for Zoran Mandani. You probably remember it,

but there was a debate. And at the time, there were like seven or eight mayoral candidates, including Andrew Cuomo and a few others. And the question was, and it was obviously designed for Mandani, but the others answered it first,

if you're elected, where will your first foreign trip be? And every single one of those Democrats raised our hand and said, I would immediately go to Israel. At this time where Israel needs our help, I would go to Israel, I'd go to the Holy Land.

One of them said, I'd go to First Israel and Ukraine. And it was Zoran and him only, who said, I'm not going to be thinking about foreign trips. I'm going to be focused on the needs of the people of the city that I'm trying to become the mayor of and to represent, and to the extent that American Jews need protection, I'm going to be thinking about the American Jews

who are living within the five boroughs of New York, not Israel. And I don't even think it's manipulative. I mean, that's how I understood the America First movement. And it is an America First ideology. When you say things like El-Sai, you're just saying, like, look, I don't hate Israel. I'm not against Israel per se. I just don't understand why we're spending,

why we have to give them our money to pay for their military. It should be spends on American schools, on American communities. And I think that's a very appealing bipartisan, cross-ideological message. And one thing, it's not as extremist. Yeah. Health insurance.

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and the tension between the rulers of the party and the voters of the party is, you know, more profound or more pronounced there. But, you know, I was just getting interviewed right before talking to you. I was on my friend Ed DeMarch's show on the Trends Journal there. And he was asking me, I don't have this specific quote, but he was asking me about a quote from J.D. Vance, where J.D. Vance seemed to be demoting Israel from the special relationship to just the plain old kind or something like that, even though, of course, within the last couple of days, Donald Trump denounced this guy, Said, as, you know, a horrible rabid Jew hater, you know,

in the most Al-Darsha-Witsian way. So I can't imagine there's too much distance between Vance and Trump on this. In fact, I wouldn't even take Vance as being sincere on this. I guess my question is more along the lines of what do his statements signaled, do you think, if anything? Well, it was it. I think this all began. I don't know if you recall this, but maybe late 2024 or early 2025, Trump was asked in the Oval Office, is Israel going to annex the West Bank? And Trump very angrily said, and he kind of pounded his fist on the table, listen to me, Israel will not annex the West Bank. Do you hear me? They are not going to annexed the West Bank. And I think the only reason Trump said that was because he cares even more

than he cares about Israel, Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, the Gattaris, the Duranians, he wants the Abraham Accords. And they're all telling him, like, we can't do anything until Israel loosens up on the West Bank and makes a two-state solution that they keep expanding, which is what the U.S. has been hearing for decades, which is why the U.S. always opposed West Bank settlements, not that the Israeli cared. We can't get anything done in the Middle East. And I think Trump actually meant that. And yet about three weeks later, J.D. Vance went to Israel. And while he was there, the Kness had purposely scheduled a vote and approved a kind of resolution that essentially endorse all but annexation and all but name only while J.D. Vance was on American soil. And he gave this interview at the airport clearly offended and

resentful that the Israeli would do this, you know, symbolic action just to humiliate him. and show that they can. And, you know, there's been this attempt by neocons. I'm sure you've seen it, especially with this like MOU that the U.S. signed with Iran that most neocons thought was unduly favorable to Iran. But then also that week of J.D. Vance going around saying things about the U.S. Israeli relationship, but about Israel that I don't think anyone at the top level of the

U.S. government has said for decades. And there was this kind of attempt to suggest that he was off on his own, you know, kind of saying things that Trump doesn't believe. leave. And I mean, if you know the first thing about Donald Trump is that he does not tolerate disloyalty or an attempt to draw attention to yourself by disagreeing with him. And Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan in their book that they're giving interviews for were asked about this many times and they said everything Vance did was with Trump's authorization. I think Trump is sensitive to the accusation that he's kind of Netanyahu's bitch, that he does what they tell him to.

He's so often saying nobody tells us what to do. We tell them what to do. So there might be, you know, something there politically and psychologically, if not fundamentally. But I think, you know, a bigger part of it is is that they're, they're reflecting the very real political transformation within the conservative movement and the, and the Republican Party, especially among younger people, who J.V. Vance in particular, is going to need when he runs for president in 2028, you need that youth enthusiasm that will not be there if you're perceived as an Israel lackey. And even if it's just cynical and political,

it's still significant and encouraging because it reflects the reality that even within American conservatism, even in the Republican Party, there's a very non-trivial change in public opinion to Israel that politicians have to kind of placate or pander to, if you will,

if they want to have a political future. And I do think that's significant. Yeah. Well, and also, you know, Gaza, the horribleness of that whole thing. And for two plus years straight there and the sieges and all the rest of it's just, I hate to use this term, but I mean it in like a reasonable sense, just offensive to people's eyes and spirits and stuff.

It's just gross, watching what they did to those people. And then they drag us into war in a way where like you and I know that Ned Yahoo and his men played a big role in line us into a rock war too. but most Americans don't know that, and it was not so upfront at the time of what was going on, whereas this is clearly the Israelis dragging us in and to such an overt disaster. And then stealing southern Lebanon while we're fighting Iran for them

and all of this kind of stuff, it's such insult to injury. I wonder, you know, it's the kind of thing too where the more they try to fix it, the worst they look too. You know what I mean? The more text messages I get or the more, you know, their last few deadenders tell us that we shouldn't be complaining about price inflation and this kind of thing. It just because Israel's got to pay for this more somehow. You know what I mean?

Seems like they're really near a bad spot where the only people who are going to continue supporting them are in Washington and the rest of America just completely turns their back. I think it's such a crucial point that you alluded to about what's driving a lot of this change in Israel, which is in past wars, only corporate media or journalists from large American newspapers could go to war, had the resources to go to war, and then the resources to reach a lot of people. And, you know, the history of the American media has been one that's been very cooperative with the U.S. National Security State throughout the 20th. century. So our wars were so sanitized. You know, you had obviously good reporting like Sy Hirsch in the Vietnam War. And the Vietnam War was one of the first that were Americans were really horrified. But that's because so many Americans were coming back in body bags. But our recent wars have been, you know, so kind of sanitized. You don't see our victims.

You don't see the horrors. You see what the U.S. military embedded with these journalists wants you to see. And this is a case where I do think the proliferation of social media and the availability of of cameras in everybody's hands has made not just a significant difference, but a radical one. Because I do believe that if you are a minimally decent human being watching day after day, you know, children being blown up and incinerated in their tents

and hearing stories from Western doctors about, you know, getting sniped in the head and being operated with no anesthesia, you're going to be horrified by that. And, you know, probably we should have been as horrified by other words, but we just haven't had to confront the realities of it because we didn't have the technology. We didn't have the access. We didn't have the dispersed media voices or even just the people in Gaza who were able to

tell their own stories. This is why they were so eager to ban TikTok was because TikTok was one of the places where young American people in particular were seeing the realities of not just what Israel was doing, but remember the knowledge that Joe Biden, this nice, kind, decent, a vuncular man was the one paying for it, arming it, protecting it, justifying it. And I just think it made a lot of people really sick to be associated with something like that. It should have made people that, that. And I think it really did. And then that just opened up a whole vista to things that had always been purposely kind of kept

on the fringes of discourse where you and I often were residing when we were talking about this, which is, what is the nature of the U.S. Israel relationship? Why do we seem so inservitude to them? Why does it occupy such a central place in our politics? And once all of that started being understood in question, it kind of led to the snowball effect, where to me, things are happening that even if you asked me, you know, five or ten years ago,

I would have said we're unthinkable. And I'm not really a very jaded or blackfilled person, but I just didn't think this kind of change, would this support for Israel would unravel so quickly, so passionately, so intensely. and I think the reason that you cited, along with the fact that Trump built his movement on this America first ethos, right? We don't use our resources to fund other countries' wars that are in our business. Those two very strong political currents combined to raise Israel in terms of its importance to voters,

not just on the left or people like you who have been focused on wars from the right, but the ordinary person now looks at Israel with a lot of things. negative views, which, which again, for the last six, seven decades would have been something that was almost impossible to imagine. Yeah. Man, you guys need one of these bug assault shotguns for shooting salt at flies and killing them when they're in your house. Threatening to defecate and vomit on your food, you can't have that. So what you do is you get one of these and you kill them. And the best way to get one of these is you stop by Scott Horton.org and you click the Amazon link in the right hand margin there at the top of the right hand margin.

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And you can get yourself a bug assault and don't worry about the mess. Your wife will clean it up. Hey, you guys, me here for expat money at expatmoney.com slash Scott. Learn what it takes to get residency, even citizenship to buy property and protect your neck by building yourself at Plan B.

Get this free booklet all about how to do it if you just sign up at expatmoney.com slash Scott. Hey, I was going to send you this article, but I ran out of time. But then I looked at your Twitter feed and it turned out I didn't need to because you noticed it. I'm always not ahead of you.

You know that. Man, you're killing it out there. You and a lot of other people. And but what it was. What was the article? I interrupted you with praise. Yeah, no, it's okay. I was trying to remember the name of the guy who wrote it or did the interview, but I can't.

But it was a young guy at the responsible statecraft there interviewed Robert Kagan. And it was a most revealing interview. And I actually have a quote a lot like this at the end of my book provoked from something that Kagan wrote a couple of years back where he talks about blowback. And in the cases of Pearl Harbor, September 11th and Russia's invasion. of Ukraine. I think he only cited two of the three in this one. But as I put it in the book, oh, in other words, your author's exactly right about everything. FDR deliberately provoked Pearl Harbor. I don't know if they deliberately provoke September 11th. They certainly, it was

blowback from American foreign policy there. And then obviously we see what happened with the war in Ukraine. And that's a lot for Victoria Newland's husband and Bill Crowst's writing partner to concede, I think. Glenn, and I saw that you were pretty impressed by that. too. What do you make of it? Even though I'm somebody, and I know in the work that you do, you have to be somebody who constantly confronts and tries to combat propaganda, foreign policy propaganda, political propaganda, but especially war propaganda. Sometimes it does shock me how effective propaganda is as a science that you can convince people of things that right in front of their

eyes they should be able to see are so blatantly untrue. You know, like the idea that America fights wars to bring freedom and democracy or deliver. the oppressed peoples of the world, whereas right this moment, our closest allies that we prop up are some of the most savage dictators on the planet in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, et cetera, et cetera,

and all the democratically elected governments we've overthrown and replaced with vicious dictatorships and if they could turn around and say, we're going to war to free the people. You know, so that level of propaganda to abast even the most obvious truth sometimes really does amaze me. And the fact that they made such

an obvious concept that, of course, the CIA and many papers talked about, which is blowback, the idea that if you go and bomb other countries, kill a lot of their innocent people, interfere in the domestic politics, they're going to get angry at you, and they're going to want to do things back to you, and eventually they will. The idea that this, it's not even a fundamental foreign policy doctor, it's just one of basic human nature has been rendered so off limits. Like you probably recall in the aftermath of 2000, the September 11th attacks, there were a few people who bravely stood up and said, look, it's not like we were just here

innocently minding her in business and got attacked one day out of the blue because al-Qaeda picked our name from a paper bag where all the countries were in. It's because we've been interfering in their region and this is kind of the chickens coming home to ruse. Fox News turned like that guy Ward Churchill who was some obscure left-ling politician

who said nothing more than that into, you know, one of the world's great villains. He ended up getting fired. This has been the great taboo to talk about this. And I, you know, Scott, one of the things that happened over the last couple of years that I think has gotten infinitely less attention and concern than it deserved was when young people kind of by accident

on TikTok discovered the letter that Osama bin Laden wrote to the American people in 2002 trying to explain why there was so much anti-American hatred in the region. And he laid out, you know, so many of the obvious, reasons why people in that region would hate us. You know, we imposed sanctions on Iraq that killed hundreds and thousands of people and then said it was justified, put military bases on their most religiously sacred soil. But also that, you know, we have been arming and funding and financing and protecting the Israelis and they're massacring and oppression of the Palestinian people.

Obviously, that's going to create hate for us in that world. But that letter was something we were urged never to read. Young people found it because the Guardian is one of the few newspapers that actually had it on their site, and they started passing it around on TikTok saying, oh my God, I never knew this history. I thought Osama bin Laden attacked us because he hated women walking around in bikinis on beaches, hated us for our freedom. And they found this letter. And they're like, I can't believe it was because in part they're angry that we fund Israel in the middle of their region. And within two days, the government and all kinds of other institutions bullied the

guardian, a supposed newspaper, into removing that letter from their site. Obviously, of historic importance so that the links on TikTok no longer work to it and then TikTok banned a discussion of it.

This is how kind of taboo the enforcement on suppressing this discussion has been. And so for Robert Kagan of all people,

and of course he knows that. He's a smart guy, whatever else you want to say about him in the middle of foreign policy discourse, but this is

something none of them ever say. In fact, they attack you for saying it to come out and say, look, it's timely face facts

that we're We're not an innocent country. We don't get attacked because, you know, people hate us for our freedom. It's for good reason that we're constantly, you know, the aggressive country, bombing, interfering in a region, supporting Israel. For someone like that to make that kind of an admission, I don't know, maybe he has guilt over all the things he supported, maybe his hatred for Trump, which these neocons have, cause him first to turn against the Iran war and then need to make arguments to explain why the Iran war is bad

without indicting himself for the Iraq war. whatever his motives are, it's a remarkable set of admissions and he was very unflinching about what he said. And again, it should be basic, the most basic and obvious truth that everybody understands. But because it's so suppressed, the fact that someone like him comes out and just said it so explicitly is why it caught my attention and yours as well.

Yeah, it didn't seem like it was based in guilt at all, right? It was based in like, why lie? Like, yeah, in fact, because he elaborates, right, that I'm not saying that we shouldn't have done anything that FDR did or that Bush and Clinton did or that... He barely acknowledged that the Iraq War was a mistake. He wasn't even saying like, I'm sorry for the Iraq War that he was kind of still justifying it.

You're right. And you know, it was funny too that, uh, and I'm glad he clarified this. And I think it's fair. He said, don't call me a neo-conservative because actually I'm not a neo-conservative. I'm just a liberal and I always was. And I never did move that far to the right just because I wrote for Irving Crystal and hung around with all of those guys. guys, I always considered myself a Democrat.

And so that's true even for Richard Pearl. You know, the Prince of Darkness and major ringleader of the war, they said was always a card-carrying Democrat. Some of those guys never quite moved so far as the Republican Party, even when they were working for W. Bush and serving that whole crowd. And then as we've seen Bill Crystal and some of the others, Max Boot, have gone back to the Democratic Party where they came from and where they feel at home. As Kagan put it, he goes, I am a liberal.

And then the way I didn't hear the audio, but they spelled it out, liberal. Like he wanted to really emphasize what, like, Bill Clintonite he is, basically, right? A center left guy. Right. And, you know, I don't know exactly why this is, but, you know, at some point there became this kind of iconography. The Democratic Party is weak and soft on wars. The Republican Party are the tough guys. Maybe it came after the Iraq War on 11.

but in Vietnam, it was the left largely protesting the Vietnam War, but they were protesting the policies of two Democratic politicians, John F. Kennedy, and then especially Lyndon Johnson, and then it ultimately became a Nixon one. So, you know, and some of these Democratic presidents, like Harry Truman, were some of the hardest core cold warriors. Truman dropped the only nuclear bombs that have ever been dropped in history. So, yeah, it's never been the fact that the Democratic Party

was the place for, you know, peace-knit, isolationism, anti-war sentiment. It just got that perception from like the Fox News point of view. And you're right. But I still do think that neoconservatism has an important ideological meaning as an indicator for a person's kind of politics.

And probably what it did use to mean, as he said in that interview, people who were once on the left like Irving Crystal and Padorj, those kind of people who then became Cold Warriors for interesting reasons we're getting to Israel and then became attached themselves to the conservative movement,

whereas he's saying, look, I never did that. But I think neo-conservative is really more of an ideology that doesn't care much about domestic politics might even be liberal in its domestic politics,

but its primary obsession is with wars in general, specifically wars in the Middle East or elsewhere, that have a big effect or a big connection to Israel, and a lot of those people do care mostly about Israel.

So I still think it's a meaningful term, even though it doesn't have quite the same fixed meaning as it once had. Yeah. Okay. So just a couple more things here real quick for I let you go, Glenn. I'm interested in what you think about what's going on with Tucker Carlson lately and whether he's really building an independent party or not, what you think about that.

But there does seem to be a coalition of people that got fired for standing on principle and sort of building around him there. And I might as well ask this part of it too because it's a remark that he made that I was going to ask you about, which is, where all the left-wing protesters against the Iran were? And they did come out for Gaza, which is, you know, very much against the interests of the Israelis there. So that wasn't holding them back. But they don't seem to be out now. And I guess the obvious answer is, well, because all the clampdowns on campus speech in the aftermath of the Gaza war is what's preventing it now. Or, you know, the,

Abject slaughter in Tehran is not quite the equivalent humanitarian catastrophe as bad as it has been. So maybe it's part of that, but he seems to think that like, nah, it's because the NGOs are turning them on and off like a light switch and they haven't turned them on right now. And that kind of rings a little bit true too. So two-part question for you, but go ahead. Yeah, let's assume the premise is entirely true. I mean, on some level, you would have to give those largely left-wing college protesters credit for the fact that what they were protesting was not Trump administration policy, but the policy of the Democratic Party.

They were out there protesting Joe Biden and Kamala Harris' support for that genocide. And I think we see far too little of that, but it's commendable what we do. When people identified with one side or another really vigorously protested and announce their own side for behavior they find reprehensible. I do think part of it is what you said before, you know, it was a two and a half year

protracted college campus protest that was in many ways crushed by a lot of the speech codes and police action that the Trump administration principally ushered in. It's a lot harder to protest

in college campuses now. But I also do think that as discussing as I find the Iran war, it hasn't risen to the level of the kind of crimes against humanity and human atrocities that we've seen and still see in Gaza on an ongoing basis.

It is almost more sanitized what we're doing in Iran. So I kind of understand why it hasn't provoked that level of visceral anger and visceral disgust. But I also, you know, I do think that the, what Tucker and this kind of

of related movement that has long been affiliated with the American right is being motivated by, is not all that dissimilar to the insurgency that's taking place within the Democratic Party as well, like the people you called the Reds before. And this isn't actually that new. If you go back and look at what happened after the 2008 Financial Christouse

and specifically the bailout of the banks, you have the occupied Wall Street movement that emerged on the left. and you go to any of those encampments as I did, and they were particularly driven by anger about the bank bailouts. But there was also the Tea Party before it kind of got commandeered into an arm of the Republican Party that was also driven by largely by the same principle issue,

which was rage over Wall Street and the Federal Reserve and the financial crisis and the bailout of the banks. And that's not a foreign policy issue. That's kind of this idea that our politics or economic future is being driven by these huge globalized, institutions of monetary power and people who dominate our politics at the expense of everybody else. You've seen this kind of convergence going, you know, kind of evolving and growing for quite a while. And I think we're now at the pinnacle, you know, you go, I mean, you go and listen to

Marjorie Taylor Green, who, you know, one of the things I've always liked about her is she's just, she was always kind of like a real model of a citizen legislature. She didn't get groomed in like, you know, county party meetings, didn't run for the state, you know, senator of the state howells, she just, you know, got inspired by Donald Trump and what he was saying about America first and believed it and went and ran for Congress and went to Washington and was his loyalist because she believed in his ideology until she realized how Washington works and that none of what he was saying was true. And her critiques are sound a lot like the critiques that you hear from the American left, not just on foreign policy, but economic.

as well. And I do think there's a sense that is being tapped into by Tucker and the people with whom he's trying to work. And there are a lot of people on the left, whom he's very close as well. You know, I've been on his show probably more than anybody, but a lot of other people. And I think there is a very common and significant thread of people who believe that what they hate about the political process and their government's treatment of them is neither Republican nor Democratic. It's just this bipartisan political class that they hate and who they believe correctly hate them. And if you get somebody who can come along and say, I really am outside of the two-party system. I'm not just like totally Republican who agrees with them on 90%, but in

running because of my opposition to like NAFTA, like one issue or two issues. Someone who really says, no, fundamentally I think both parties are harmful for America and they're able to convince and attract enough of a coalition around them that it doesn't appear to be partisan, you obviously need in our system that is designed to crush anything other than the two parties, someone very famous, well known, charismatic, well spoken, who can get a lot of money behind them. Tucker Carlson is one of a few examples of someone you could imagine being credible in that way. I don't know if he's planning to run for president. I can tell you not just publicly, but privately, he's sworn up and down for.

for as long as I can remember, even when I've been haranguing him that he just can and won't. Maybe he's out of change of heart, but clearly they're trying to build something like that, whoever ends up being the candidate or who leads it. And I think there's more space than there has been in at least my memory or my lifetime

for a legitimate third party. I mean, not like Ross Perot enabled one through his billions of dollars, but like a real popular movement that is finally equally disgusting. by both political parties. Yeah. You know who's the greatest American ever?

I know, Ron Paul. Exactly. We're all agreed about that. You can see I've got this great bust of him behind me. It's the same one on Tom Woods counter if you watch the Tom Woods show. And you can get one of your own from Rick Casale at Rick Casale.com. And just follow the link from the right hand side of the page at Scott Horton.org. Use the promo code Horton and you'll save some money, get some free shipping and stuff like that.

this great bust of the great Dr. Paul. Mmm, Scott Horton flavored coffee. I drink this stuff first thing in the morning, every morning, and then right around 2 o'clock when the potential siesta starts to kick in. No siesta, more coffee. Moondos artisan coffees. Get it, they hate Starbucks,

because Starbucks supports the war party. Well, Moondos supports peace. Just go to Scotthorton.org slash coffee. Scotthorton.org slash coffee. You know, that picture of them all sitting at the table there, You could see like a pretty good president in him or Massey, and then the rest taking the different jobs of Secretary of State, defense, and chief of staff and whatever kind of thing.

There's your little crew right there to put America first. Good nucleus. Very good nucleus. You just, but they're all traditionally, you know, associated with the American right. And I think for this to work, it's going to have to be less identifiable as a left-right movement. You know, I was,

Ron Paul had a bit that he put out. out about, well, instead of a third party, let's work on creating a second one. And that reminded me about how back, I should post this on Twitter. In 2012, after they were screwing him out of the nomination, I gave a speech where I said,

Ron, you should keep running, and you should run with Dennis Kucinich. And you should insist that Obama force Biden off the ticket and run with Romney instead, and then we'll find him. finally have a two-party system. And it'll be the Democratic Republicans for life, liberty, and peace and property, you know, and freedom.

And then on the other side, we'll have the war party of taxes and tyranny and death and endless war for Israel and all that. And then the lines will be clear. And because Dr. Paul always got along great with Dennis Kucinich. And they worked together on opposing bad things, not proposing grandiose scheme. And they got in the Fed. They both were worked together on a whole bunch of things, according that. And as I remember, they took, I mean, I remember.

Ron Paul actually saying after your article that he would strongly consider Dennis Kucinich as his running mate if he won the nomination. Kucinich also said he would be happy to run with Ron Paul as well. Man, that would have been so great. Bygones. You know, the Republican Party, and I don't just mean the party, but I mean the voters too.

They chose John McCain and Mitt Romney, right? It'd be nice to just blame, like, somehow the Freemasons made them do it or something, but they lined up to vote for John McCain, man. They did, Scott, but then in 2016, when they were told to vote for Jeff Bush, they didn't. And then when the assumption was he was just too bad of a candidate, they were told to vote for Marker Rubio,

and they didn't either. And then down the line, they refused everybody and opted for Trump. And that should have been a red light for the political establishment, not just that he got the nomination, although that too, but that he won, in a way that just people decided to write off of some weird anomaly that they weren't going to grapple with, And to me, I've been, this is like my big political passion was seeing these obvious glaring similarities

between people who call themselves left and right and think they're on the opposite ends of the political spectrum and with some issues, of course, immigration or abortion or whatever they are. But on the issues that really are most consequential to people's lives, they have so much in common. And trying to get people to see that and build that bridge, you know, has been a long time passion of mine. and to see it kind of coming to fruition,

you know, is so encouraging. Yeah, we used to talk about that realignment back 20 years ago. And, of course, the real problem is left-wingers and right-wingers just hate each other. And I'm a libertarian. I get along with everybody. And I always kind of thought that really the frame needs to be somehow changed to make it easier for us to work together,

where it's not called working together, where we're just kind of opposing the same things at the same time. You know what I mean? But like, you know, we did a big, you might be familiar, we did this big anti-war protest, rage against the war machine protest

at the Lincoln Memorial in 23, opposing the war in Ukraine, mostly. And it was libertarians and liberals and leftists and progressives. And the thing is, if we brought any real right-wingers, like we brought Dr. Paul, but if we brought any real right-wangers,

the whole thing would have fallen apart. And if we did one of those with the libertarians and the right-wingers, which we could do, we couldn't really bring any real left wangers or the whole thing. They just hate each other too much. But it seems like, as you're saying, though, there's so much agreement about what we're against in terms of that monetary policy

and the wars and the corruption and all the things. It's like I think we really need people. And you're not libertarian, but you do a real good job of bridging divides and talking with people on all sides too. It seems like we've got to be able to be able to find a way to coordinate our activities without the sides feeling like they're getting the other side's cooties on them and stuff. You know, in fact, one more thing is that interview I did with Ed Demartre right before the show, he played me a clip of Mike Pompeo supporting the war.

And the first thing Pompeo did was say, yeah, if you oppose the war, then you're just like AOC and Bernie Sanders and all them liberals, right? It's just a kiss of death to a right winger to be associated with something that a left winger thinks to. And they just, you know, it works. That's why they do it. It has always worked, but I think even that's eroding. Because if you see the Democrats, you know, support and enable and fund something that you really believe is a genocide, which is the worst crime that human beings can commit. That's why that concept was created.

Then how can you tell anyone else I'm willing to work with somebody who financed and supported a genocide? But the other, this person's views on the right are bridged too far. but genocide isn't. And I do think, you know, there are people who frequently go on with Tucker Carlson who are on the left or who are Democrats who spent many years. I can show you a lot of segments

calling me a MAGA supporter or a fascist for my going on Tucker Carlson show so frequently. And they now find themselves going on because I don't think these tactics are, they work on some people. You know, the first fight, I'll just tell you this quickly, the first fight I ever really had

with the political left shortly after I began writing and I was perceived as a leftist because I was criticizing Bush Cheney foreign policy and civil liberties erosions. I wrote an article in 2008 saying, wait a minute, why is it that Ron Paul

is completely off limits to anyone remotely on the left? Yes, of course, you disagree with him on some issues like economic policy and the social safety net or whatever, but you disagree with democratic politicians as well and you say, no, those are still acceptable.

But Ron Paul is the only person doing things that are supposedly important on the left. Like he's talking about the racist drug war and why it should end. And he wants all these wars to end and domestic surveillance to be stopped and the deep state to be over. These are all supposed to be cherished concepts of the left. Why do the differences with Ron Paul make him completely radioactive but off limits? But the sometimes bigger differences you have with Democratic Party establishment candidates still mean it's such tribalistic propaganda. it's our two-state, it's our two-party system, constantly bombarding people with the idea that you have to pick one or the other,

and then whichever one you pick, the other side is the enemy. But I think as the political establishment has become so widely hated on a bipartisan basis, people are now more open to the kinds of alternatives that they've been trained for so long to think are almost immoral to consider. And that's what makes this kind of opening, I think, more viable than a lot of people assume it is. Yeah. All right, the show is system update, and the substack is, I think, glen greenmall dot substack.com.

Thanks, Glenn. Great to be. You're talking to us. And they talk to you soon. This Scott Horton show is brought to you by the Scott Horton Academy of Foreign Policy and Freedom, Roberts & Roberts, Brokerage, Inc., Moondos, Artisan Coffee, Tom Woods Liberty Classroom, and APS Radio News. Subscribe in all the usual places and check out my books,

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