Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 9/1/26 Nolan Denaro on JD Vance, Pete Hegseth and the Failures of MAGA War Hawks

Episode Date: September 6, 2026

Scott interviews writer and podcast host Nolan Denaro about several columns he’s written recently for Antiwar.com. They dig into the shortcomings, failures and overall depravity of the war hawks in the current MAGA movement. Discussed on the show: “JD Vance’s Iran War Dilemma” (Antiwar.com) “How Trump Took the U.S. to War With Iran” (New York Times) “Pete Hegseth: Militarism’s Ideologue” (Antiwar.com) “The War Hawks’ Predictions Have Aged Like Milk” (Antiwar.com) Nolan Denaro is a political analyst, writer, and host of “The Quest For Clarity” podcast, available on YouTube and Spotify. He is a columnist at Antiwar.com, and his work has been published by Responsible Statecraft, the Libertarian Institute, The Daily Caller, and the Ludwig von Mises Institute. He writes on U.S. foreign policy, economics, and current events, with a particular focus on war and imperialism. He writes opinion pieces on his Substack, and you can follow him on X @nolandenaro. 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; 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

Yes, sir, it's the Scott Horton show brought to you by expat money. That's 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 Hitler 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 Nolan De Niro, and he is a great new libertarian podcaster and writer. And evidently, he's a new regular featured columnist at anti-war.com. Some editorial director I am, I'm like, oh, you made him a call?

And then Eric was like, yeah. And I said, great job. That's my job as editorial director. Eric does things. And then I go, man, that was a really good idea. I'm glad you did that. So here's our guy, Pete Hegseth, militarism's ideologue is his latest. And then look, we've been polishing him over at the Institute as well.

Mark Levin, capitalism's worst advocate. And Nolan, you first came to my attention. What, just a couple of few weeks ago from our good friend. And I forgot, I guess he must be our Will Grigg fellow, Thomas Edlam at the Libertarian Institute. He said, check out this young libertarian. I don't think he's old enough to drink yet. He's good on stuff. And so, yeah, it's been great to have you around.

And you've been writing a lot of very interesting articles. So everybody check them out and tell us, what's the name your show? And how can people find it on YouTube and wherever else? The name of the podcast is the Quest for Clarity, and that's on YouTube and Spotify. If you just look up Nolan DeNaro, it should come up on both of those platforms. Okay, great.

Yeah, that's the tab I should have had open here, but I didn't. The Quest for Clarity, if I could type, right? All right. Okay, so yeah, let's talk about a couple of your latest pieces here. I guess I was interested to see your take on J.D. Vance just because I'm interested in the subject of J.D. Vance and where he fits in all these things. But then again, I'm also very interested in, well, broadly speaking, a young person's perspective, but more particularly your perspective on the vice president and what he stands for in the midst of all this mess, meaning, obviously, the war in Iran and the rest.

So why don't she take us through here a little bit? Yeah, so J.D. Vance has been a chameleon this entire time, and people can clearly see through that. I wrote about it in Anti-War.com, actually, a couple weeks ago, J.D. Vance's Iran war dilemma was the name of the piece. And he is just constantly on this flip-cloth, because if we look back to his rise to the Senate in 2022 and then eventually to the vice presidency in 2024

with the help of some of these new right figures, kind of the Don Juniors and these types of figures, and Charlie Kirk, the late Charlie Kirk, there was this kind of theme around J.D. Vance of being this non-interventionist, or at least an intervention skeptical figure, kind of a Buchananite type of figure, a populist right-winger.

And over the course of the last four years in his shift from Senator to Vice President, to Vice President to the Vice President, he's also shifted his views on foreign policy to now just adapt to whatever the administration is doing. We saw this, and we've seen behind the scenes, it's all been very transparent. This is something the administration can't really get around

is that the leaks have been constant. And the leaks are really contradicting every public statement from all these figures. But really, J.D. Vance, this whole time, has been a victim of this. He's been saying one thing in public while the leaks show that he's been advocating for restraint behind the scenes. So it makes him look weak, as I said in the piece

a couple weeks ago. It makes him look kind of ineffectual in the administration. And it sets him up for an awkward situation in 2020A where he'll be possibly pinned against figures like Marker Rubio, who kind of it's more believable, I would say, that they are hawks, because they've been hawks. Someone like Marco Rubio has been a hawk his entire career in politics. But J.D. Vance has to really pick aside here in his rhetoric

and decide whether or not he's going to stick with the supposed principles he has behind the scenes, which I'm not sure that he necessarily has, or he's going to go the path of trying to get Trump's endorsement and do that by endorsing everything Trump has done foreign policy-wise throughout this administration. So that's the dilemma he's in. Yeah, well, and you can see the neo-conservatives absolutely. hate his guts or all the hawks absolutely hate his guts because he used the end word

negotiation which they absolutely despise and so you know it's like that uh sworeshnager and apollo creed uh shaking hands meme thing about you know with the the doves and the hawks teaming up to despise this guy because he's crossed us all basically um and to have a little bit of sympathy for the devil here it's got to be tough to be the vice president of the united States, typically a vice president is not going to resign unless he's under indictment, man, and has no choice, right? Spiro Agnew, although who knows what was really behind that? Suspicious now.

But anyway, especially, you know, you got to figure when the president is as old as the president is. I like, that's a hell of a thing to resign in protest over war. But then again, I guess according to all the reporting, however credible you might find it, but it doesn't seem to be contradicted, really, right? It seems he told the president, look, this could be a bad idea for some severe reasons here,

but did not say, damn it, man, I beseech you, please don't do this, you know, kind of thing, did not, like, really try to stop him. So I'll stand behind you no matter what and whatever. And I don't know, I guess from what I can tell, Trump's mind was made up, But anyway, yeah, and then as you say,

Vance is, he has to lie to try to justify this stuff. So how can us who care about the truth, you know, ever forgive that? You know, the I-TOL is going to send nuclear suicide bombers around and whatever stuff, you know? It's, I like what you said at the beginning there. He's really just pissed everybody off from every direction. The back starting last year in June for the 12-day war, he didn't say anything really that.

that signal that he was on our side and opposing that operation. He quickly sided with the neocons and the Warhawks and the administration, supporting that, and adopted really quickly their language of this is a limited tactical strike and just ignoring the context that this exists within the whole timeline of events here that led us to that point and that's transpired sense. And even now, even in his seeming pursuit for diplomacy, he has to still adopt the kind of broad narrative that they've established,

that is that there was this imminent threat that Trump acted decisively and bravely like only he could to take it out and now we've accomplished everything that we have sought to achieve and it makes him look like an idiot all throughout at every turn because he says we've achieved everything

we wanted to achieve and now we're negotiating to basically give a gift to the Iranians while simultaneously a couple weeks later he then asked to justify why strikes are continuing and says oh well we have a couple things that we still have to handle and we're doing this on our own terms

well if this was on our own terms then you'd think the negotiations would have been successful the multiple times they've been attempted throughout this war. So every turn, he's made the Warhawks Matt and I know Ben Shapiro has had very strong words against J.D. Vance throughout this entire thing. He's basically compared it to Bernie Sanders

after his Joe Rogan appearance. And then the more doveish figures, the non-interventionists also don't like him because he claims to be non-interventionist and a much more restrained figure while adopting their sort of rhetoric. So it's really every way you look. look at it. He has no clear path here

for building a coalition for 2028. Yeah. Mm, Moondos artisan coffees. Explicitly, Scott Horton's show flavored coffee from Moondos artisan coffees. Get it, they hate Starbucks because Starbucks supports

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Scott Horton.org slash coffee. Get you some. Hey guys, if you sign up for my substack at Scott Horton Show.com, then you get all the shows a day early and without ads. Pretty good, right? Scott Horton Show.com. And I said Apollo Creed, but that's not right. That's the character.

The actor is Action Jackson. Yeah, exactly. And then, but you know, it's funny because on the Rogan show, I'm like, man, he sounds really reasonable in a hot house full of crackheads up there, you know, in Washington. But he's saying, Rogan, listen to me, man. Our only hope is to negotiate. We can not solve this thing with force. We tried that.

Didn't work. I'm not sure if he quite said that, but he said, listen, you and your five buddies could close the straight with just a couple of RPGs, meaning that the only way to solve this is to have Tehran decide that they want a safe, secure a golf. And the only way to do that is to get them to agree to the same thing that we agreed to with them. There's just no other way to do it. And the Hawks don't want to hear that.

And they all, as you say, they all condemned him for it. But, you know, there were a little. lot of people, not just at anti-war.com, but even in Washington, there were a lot of people who would say that same kind of thing about Afghanistan, even way back in the W. Bush years. And then they just kept pursuing military solutions anyway that ended up proving, of course, to, you know, not be effective at achieving their goals. And so, you know, it's a shame to think that he's so discredited.

He's got no support from us because he's just completely undermined it. And whatever, weird associations with Peter Thiel, the, you know, technological arms merchant and all of the rest of this stuff too is all very suspicious. But like, you know, in a bad bunch, he might have been the best, but it's just hard to even consider him that way.

He's made so many damned compromises at this point, you know? It's the same thing with what we saw the other day with the reporting that Tulsi Gabbard before the war, like days before the war, told Trump exactly how this would go. It's like comical how precise she was that they will close the trade of her moves. The hardliners will be put into power

after we kill the top level of leadership. It's just they knew exactly. And J.D. Vance was echoing similar sentiments and there was risks being told to Trump from Dan Cain. There was people in his ear telling him the risks of this. And it's all, they knew what they were talking about.

They've known this for years. Tulsi Gabbin and J.D. Vance for years in the Trump campaign, when they were part of it, when they were surrogates and vice presidential candidates. And even before that, when they were congresswoman and a senator, they knew the precise risks of a war with Iran. And now they forced themselves into this incredibly tough situation

where they are, well, in J.D. Vance's case, where he's trying to build a coalition and nobody likes him because he's just lying at every turn. So it's a really tough spot for him. Yeah. It's funny too, man, the more stuff comes out about this and the more I review it, it really is something.

You know, if you compare it to, example, you know, when Obama did his escalation in Afghanistan, there was this huge consensus inside the foreign policy community to push him to appoint Petraeus and McChrystal to do their early new counterinsurgency doctrine and all of this stuff. They were pushing him to the front of the parade, you know? Before that, the other bigger one would have been W. Bush, where he's clearly leaning the parade, but he's cracking a whip and he's demanding that everything tank that ain't Pinnack also get on board too, damn it. And every single one of them did, except the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Even Cato perched their best guys, Ivan Eland and Chuck Pena, during that time. And, but, you know, the Council on Foreign Relations, the centrist's foreign policy establishment, Iraq War II, that was not their war. But they all knew what was good for them. And Richard Haas and Ken Pollock and Michael O'Hanlon and all of those goons. they all got on board for the damn thing. George Bush is leading the parade. Come on, everybody.

We've got to get in this parade. Here, Donald Trump. There's no parade. It's the weekend guy on Fox News. And the hated Cook former leader of some fashion of the conservative movement from years ago in Shapiro. And then just the prime minister himself. Oh, Lindsay Graham, of course,

but especially the prime minister himself coming. and then, you know, I don't want to put too much stock in a Haberman piece again, but there's a few of them, Mizetti, whatever, these New York Times people, but there's enough from other, you know, similar type reporting that essentially, as I was saying, Vance and nobody else either, said, damn it, man, stop, don't. But at the same time, none of them voted for confidence in the thing.

Marco Rubio even, and Tucker verified this too, He said he did not get the idea that Marco Rubio even was pushing for this thing. The whole work hadn't it going at best, okay? We don't want to give them too much credit. But they were essentially saying, geez, I don't know, boss. And he said, you know what? I'm going. I'm flipping a coin.

I'm pressing my luck. My friend Benjamin says it's going to be killer, man. He says it's going to be easy. Wow, look how easy it was for the Delta Force to kidnap Maduro, leaving in place someone who obviously the CIA had already made a deal with, which we do not have here. But I'm just, it's such a, it's an amazing thing.

It really is an amazing thing. They acted like it was this crazy when he held up an armed shipment to Ukraine for three days and the Ukrainians never noticed. But it is this crazy when a president, there's not even a parade. It's him and four friends, including a foreign prime minister,

have decided to do this. with the entire rest of the government at best saying, geez boss, I mean, we'll try our best if you make us, but otherwise we would rather not. That's what I think this is going to be looked back on as the perfect kind of encapsulation of the Israel lobby's influence over this administration in particular.

I mean, it's egregious how much influence they have in this White House. I looked out the FDD when I said his four friends. There's this fifth friend, do believe. Yes, yes. Yeah. But yeah, you got, I mean, it's really every character from the, like every cast member from the, the last 20 years of all these wars,

but the kind of the ones that are left, I guess, the ones that still have some, quote, unquote, credibility, which just means they're just gifted establishment media spots, Mark Tiesin, Mark Deibowitz, all these people, that they've crafted a perfect circle around Donald Trump before this war, is starting off with the, well, ever since the 12-day war, there was the propaganda to build up to this moment,

but there was really starting in January with those protests, which were heavily infiltrated by the Mossad, by the CIA, and by Kurdish forces being armed by the Mossad and CIA, most likely, to create chaos in Iran and make it look as though there was this groundswell of support from like the majority of the population ready for a regime change in just in the case that the United States got involved on their behalf and set the flame off to create this huge uprising. And I think Trump genuinely believed that.

And we saw the other day, the I don't know if he, this is, I don't know if he believes this or not, but the 100,000 protester count now, 100,000 dead protests, that the Iranians killed this year. I mean, there's no evidence to back that up, obviously. But I don't know how much he believes it at this point. But I feel like, based on the reporting, based on what we saw in that moment earlier this year,

it seems like Trump genuinely believed that there was, but from these people that he trusts for some reason, from the Israel lobbying the Hawks in his administration, that there was this groundswell of support. And we saw it in his opening speech for the war, declaring the war, or rhetorically declaring it. They never actually declared war, obviously. but outlining the objectives that the idea was that there was going to be a people power and uprising here

and that obviously was never going to come to fruition. Anyone who knew anything about this, dude, that was a crazy idea. And it was even crazier that some democracy was going to be put in place there. What a joke. But that seemed to be what his weird motivation was personally. Obviously, that's not any of these people's motivations, but they created this perfect narrative to feed him. And he was just totally susceptible to it, as seems. Yeah.

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Well, you know, I have a friend who was like, listen, I speak Trump. When he says it was the biggest thing ever, he just means it was big. That's all. That's cool. When he says 100,000 people, he just means like a lot of people. Yeah. He's not even lying. This is how he talks.

You know what I mean? He's like, oh, I ate seven pizzas. Well, look, he had like quite a few slices. You know what I mean? Maybe seven slices of pizza. Yeah, yeah, exactly right. He had seven slices. He had seven pieces.

Whatever. He ate a lot of pizza, okay? It was a lot of pizza. Eastern Queens. That's just how he talks. You know what I mean? You're not supposed to take it literally. The problem is he believes his own kind of crankery a lot of the times.

He gets so carried away. And then he's like, boy, it's a good thing I intervened. They'd kill 100,000 in their own people in the streets or whatever it is. Jeez, that's worse than Israel did in Gaza over two years, a merciless slaughter in front of all of our eyes. My goodness, that Ayatollah is efficient at killing his own people, huh? The worst atrocity in all of human history was committed, and we have no evidence to back this up besides the president.

words. I mean, it's just, it's crazy. Yeah, yeah. All right. Well, so let's pick on Hegseth now. I'm picking on Hegseth. Here's the latest at anti-war.com. Pete Hegseth.

Militarism's ideologue. Another one of these, No Nothing, No-It-All's. Younger Donald Rumsfeld in his way, he kind of reminds me of, but I don't know. What do you think? Yeah, he is somebody who, I put it in the piece there as well,

that he is somebody who's clearly playing to the older generations of Republicans. There is this kind of urban support for everything the military ever does, to even question the military is this, like, mortal sin. And it's really a Fox News, and he comes from Fox News, so it totally makes sense. It's this Fox News language that every,

like the military must be totally supported in all the objectives and all of their endeavors. And it's this lecturing, it's this screaming at the press, it's just been the whole tone of this, war from the administration has taken on this Pete Hegsett identity, just deny, deny, deny, deny at every point, deny before the war started, that there was any chance that this wouldn't be successful, deny that there was any chance that there couldn't be regime change here.

And now it's deny that we failed. It's deny that Pete Hegsett's decisions all throughout this have caused a lot of chaos in this situation. And we've seen this whole ridiculous mentality boil over in the last couple days. We've seen crazy amount of leaks from the Pentagon into the Wall Street, or excuse me, the Washington Post that all the top guys of the Army and the Navy and the Air Force and all these guys are all telling heck, except it's been too much for too long. We can't keep doing this. And these strikes are something that we cannot handle at this point. These continued prolonged

operations against Iran. And now we just saw the top guy at the Army stepped down yesterday in a big move. So there's just the last six months at the Pentagon have been utter turmoil. And a lot of this has to do with the, and I hate to say this, but it's the lack of adults in the room. That's the worst, Obviously, this is what they usually say, just to say anyone who doesn't go along with the establishment narrative on something. They're not an adult in the room. We need the adults in the room, meaning Hillary Clinton or something. But in this situation, there is a real lack of rational thought that is obviously missing. There's a huge hole in the place of where critical thinking used to be maybe in some instances, very rare instances. But there's obviously something missing here.

And it's the brain of the Pentagon is obviously missing. So that's the big problem with Pete Exa. Yeah, it's funny, you know, when he gathered all those military officers together and, like, he ordered all the generals and admirals from the services to all gather in one thing, and he gave them that big dressing down about how they were fat and whatever. And then people got all upset about that. Like, hey, these are America's Praetorian royalty and how dare you insult their grave honor and their valor and their whatever by telling them what to do at all? And I'm like, actually, I kind of like the fact that he was a lower. ranking guy when he was in and that now he's a civilian and he's telling these big fat Fs that haven't won a war since 1945 that like what am I paying you guys for? And you look at

the auditorium, this massive auditorium, all of these guys, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them. It reminds me of I'm going to get you sucker where he's like, he's got all his medals. He's like, well, this one's for shorthand and this one's for surfing. And like, you know, none of these guys won any wars. None of these guys earned any, you know, badges of actual honor, or very few of them anyway. Maybe some of them bought in Afghanistan and saved their buddy in a firefighter or whatever in very rare circumstances. So I didn't mind that. It was just that he also is scum. So it's not like he was a really competent CEO from an important company who said like, listen, guys, we got to ship this thing into shape here. It was just that he didn't want any more resistant.

from him and his idiot boss's hairbrain schemes. And, you know, come on, guys. We don't want to do the civilian protection, double-check the target list office anymore. That's a waste of time and close that down. That wasn't the reform we were looking for, Pete, you know? Yeah, he is another one of these cases where the rhetoric does not match, like the rhetoric pre-election or maybe in between the election and the inauguration does not match what we see today.

I remember he went on Sean Ryan's show and he was saying how he's a reform. Neocon, this is what he's calling himself, and he says he learned from the mistakes of the quagmires of Iraq and Afghanistan. And he did a job was that interview. Yeah. So he's like giving this, he's playing to the kind of sentiment that brought Trump to power,

which was this non-interventionist. Let's end the war in Russia. Let's end the war. Let's end the wars kind of more broadly calm things down the Middle East. And he played to that to try and get the support from the base to power him through those confirmation here. in the earlier days. But as we've gone on here,

he's even reiterated that recently and that I quoted in the piece that he went at that congressional hearing from earlier this year in April, I believe it was, where he's saying, we learn the lessons of the quagmires in Afghanistan and Iraq,

and we're not doing that again, and shame on you for saying we are. He still cites this sentiment in modern times, but it's been increasingly less or decreasing in how often he does it. And he's shifted into this total, like, monster figure. He's just every press conference is this like insane

tirade against the media. He's reciting these crazy lines like one-liners like the only people need to be scared are all the Iranis that want to live or whatever or think they're going to live. It's these like insane statements, these bloodthirsty statements coming out of the Pentagon coming out of the, uh, the secretary of defense that are unsettling and it kind assess this tone of this in this ignoring of reality that we saw pre-war and we see now it's this like let's just say let's keep wishcasting let's just like throw things out there rhetorically and try and make it into reality and it's just not working yeah all right you guys me here for expatmoney dot com slash scott and what it is is it's this great guy mckell thorup and he's a world

traveler and a real expert in what you can do to buy property and invest in property overseas, protect your assets, and look into even living overseas if that is your interest. And if you just go to expatmoney.com slash Scott, you can get this free handy booklet, plan B, residences, and instant citizenships. That's expatmoney.com slash Scott. Hey, guys, me here for crowdhealth at join crowdhealth.com. slash Horton. And what it is is it's a replacement for insurance. It's not insurance. It's crowdsourcing instead. And who could possibly afford insurance at these prices in this day and age? It makes no sense.

But what this is is it's crowdsourcing. You help pay for other people's medical bills and they help pay for yours. And it really works. You pay the first 500 of whatever you're doing up front in cash. And anything over that, you bill it to the group and they help you pay. And then when it's somebody else's turn, you chip in a fair amount to pay for them. And it's all for a low monthly subscription fee. And it's totally a great deal. And I highly encourage you to check it out at join crowdhealth.com slash Horton. No, it's not. In fact, so here's another piece by you along those lines. The Warhawks predictions have aged like milk. And you go through here and accuse Ben Shapiro and some of the other usual suspects. Decent, of course. For those paying close attention, you might have

noticed at the end of Provoked, which came out after the election, but still in November of 24, I said, you know, Mark Dyson says that Donald Trump's going to be a holy terror in his second term. And I think we might want to trust him. Unfortunately, you know, here he is assuring us that all this hype about Donald Trump caring about America first, don't worry, everyone. He's going to be horrible. It is worth wondering what happened over the course of the, like looking back at this point, it's worth wondering what happened in these meetings at Marilago with. like Mary Madelson and all these big donors were there. And we've heard from people, not like any official reporting that's like necessarily

credible or whatever, but we've heard from people who are like in the inner circles, the White House or the vice president's office that there was some agreement maybe broadly or something made between the Israel lobby and Trump. There's no specifics at this point, obviously. But it's worth asking these questions, given how drastic the shift from the campaign to now is. Now I want to talk with Tucker Carlson about this aspect where he's, says, you know, he had every opportunity to remind Trump what he must have already known about the potential consequences of the war and how bad this not just could go, but is very

likely to go. And he said he thought Trump agreed with that and knew that and was resigned to doing it. Like he had to do it or something, which I don't want to read too, too much into that, but, you know, it's pretty crazy circumstance for starting a war. Be better to just you know, admit that he raped somebody when she was 16 one time and like, but let bygones be bygones. It's better than killing a bunch more people, which that's probably not even it.

It's probably like you're saying, it's just, look, we promise to finance the Republican Party for the next 16 years or whatever kind of crap, you know. Continue the legacy or with the net, with the air. There's a library down there in South. Read him the airport.

I don't know. Yes, they can all go read his writings there, you know. His illuminary thoughts. Now, look, I let you go. Well, let me tell you, I've really been enjoying your show. I wonder if you can tell us a little bit about your background, where you're from,

where you went to school, or if you're still in school. And then also, well, I want to ask you other things. But first of all, just tell us a little bit more about yourself since you're brand new, doing this free market anti-war stuff. Yeah, well, I've been into politics for a long time. I got into politics when I was like nine years old in 2015, 2016, during that whole campaign. I was a big Trump guy.

I mean, my father, my father got me into politics through Donald Trump and like showing me the Republican primary debates and all this stuff and watching the campaign as it went and all the Trump rallies and that whole excitement of that era of this insurgent campaign.

I got into it and I've been into it since. I've just, as you can see behind me, I'm just like a nerd about all this stuff. I read all this stuff. And over the past two years roughly is my kind of shift from this kind of conservative to libertarian pipeline through watching people like you and Dave Smith and these libertarian

commentators. I've just kind of been convinced of all this. And then I've read Rothbard and Nis and all these people. And I've been firmly convinced of all that type of stuff, the free market, non-interventionist ideologies. So I've just over the course of the last decade, I've had this whole, like young person, child to teenager to now a young adult like kind of evolution on my political stances. And it's been really picking up in the last couple of years when I started the podcast. I started it in my senior year of high school and it was, yeah, spring of last year, I started doing it for a year and a half now and it's starting to pick up a little bit.

And then the writing I started just a couple months ago and it's really been doing well. So, and yeah, it's, I've just been having a great time with all this. I just love this stuff. You're in college now? I'm in college. Yes. I'm going into my sophomore year. So that's good, man. Well, listen, so I'm interested in what you think other people, your age, think about all this stuff. How hyped up, you know, they were or weren't on Trump in the first place, how disappointed they are or aren't already after two years and that kind of thing. So it's been interesting.

There's like two camps, obviously, of like young people there is either, and there's no, there's very few. It's becoming less and less people who are like the moderates or the, like, kind of the Fox News Republicans or the CNN Democrats or anything. There's very few of those. there's the DSA leftists and then there's maybe people like, I would probably be considered a moderate

in this new landscape of young people like the libertarians maybe and then there's the farther right like Fuentes type people. But in this new landscape, everyone for different reasons of young people for varying different purposes is against what the administration is doing,

whether it be the wars kind of just brought this broad young anti-war sentiment because of the economic effects of it. or what people perceive as all the economic effects of it, the housing costs and the grocery costs, and people blaming all that on the wars, which is largely true, obviously. And there is this broad sentiment against the administration.

And the young people on the left, they've picked up steam in the last couple of years, the DSA people, really since Mom Dani got elected in New York, there's been this big upsurge in young people picking up democratic socialism as an ideology and being very outspoken about it. So whereas in 2020, before there was this big young people showing their,

big amount of young people showing their support for the Trump, for Trump in the election, and there was a lot of outspoken support for him. It's shifted in the last couple years. People are kind of less and less inclined to be supportive of these policies like the wars, like the Epstein cover-up. And now the people who are motivated

and out in the streets, so to speak, are the DSA people who see their moment in the midterms this year with Abdul El-Sai in Michigan and Mamdani in New York. So there's been a different big shift in the last couple years since the election. Yeah. Well, good.

So I don't know what's going to come with that, but it's good to know that people are paying attention and that they're best right things, you know, the worst things first. So, very good stuff. All right, well, listen, thanks for writing for the institute and for anti-war.com, we're happy to have you. Whoops, I hit the wrong damn button.

Here is Nolan's YouTube page, everybody. You can sign up for his podcast there. Nolan De Niro, and it is at Nolan De Niro, Simple is that. They're on the YouTube and also, of course, on Spotify and all your pod catchers and things like that. And yeah, great to have you. And thanks a lot. Thanks for having me, Scott. The 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, fools errand enough already and my latest provoked how washington started the new cold war with russia and the catastrophe in ukraine find all of the above at scott horton dot org and i'm serializing the audio book of provoked at scot hortonshow dot com and patreon dot com slash scot hortons show bumpers by josh length of music intro intro videos by dissident media audio mastering by podsworth media see all next time