Jack V Lloyd@jackvlloyd
I agree.
And here's a story contextualizing why.
I was at Tom Woods’ house for a meetup and Scott Horton was giving a short talk.
During the talk, Horton claimed that the Pulse Nightclub shooting in Orland where 49 people were murdered by Omar Mateen was a consequence of "blowback."
As I heard him say this, my face turned to a scowl.
I knew this story.
I knew that "blowback" made absolutely no sense.
You see, Omar Mateen mentioned in his 911 call that this was made about the attacks in Syria and he was pledging his life to ISIS.
Here's the thing: Omar Mateen wasn't Syrian.
In fact, Omar Mateen's family moved from Afghanistan in the 1980s and Omar was birthed in a JEWISH HOSPITAL in NEW YORK!
So how is it that an American man, who's family is not from Syria, who was born in New York in a Jewish hospital, is a product of "blowback?"
The CIA did not run him any weapons.
He was not personally affected by the attacks where maybe a family member could have died.
His attack was on random gay people at a gay night club.
It was at this moment that I realized Scott Horton had no sense of cause-and-effect relationships.
Instead of being accurate that Omar Mateen was radicalized by teachings from joining a Mosque, he tried to turn Omar's mass murder of random gay people into an "underdog" cry of resistance.
There was nothing about "resistance" with this act.
It was depraved mass murder against people completely unrelated to anything going on in Syria.
I started to deep-dive Scott Horton's history and I saw this pattern I just witnessed up-close.
Gross generalizations about people and events where the actors and actions did not align with the cause and effects.
He would use the anecdotal fallacy to draw deep demonization of anyone or anything he stood against, which was especially anything to do with Israel, Zionism, or Western state hegemony.
It was a turning point for me as I finally came to understand who Scott Horton really is.
He never really drifted from his core history of being a leftist punk skateboarder who simply took his leftist class theories and applied them lop-sided through the veneer of "libertarianism."
There was never any nuance about the actors and actions when it came to what he critiqued.
And how could he possible have it?
The man has spent a career podcasting and writing on global affairs yet has never himself been to these places and done the hard work of actually observing up-close the conflicts and interviewing people on both sides to get an understanding.
As his ideas are donated because they're not coming from primary sourcing, you can see the pattern of how he gets his ideas.
He cites to Al Jazeera, The Gaza Health Ministry, Russia Today, The Grayzone, and a host of leftist media whose socialist and communist media heads share his "antiwar" mentality - just from an even stronger leftist bent.
I want you to actually fact check me on this. Go look at his sourcing on all his 30+ years of articles with Antiwar dot com.
It's out there in the open to see.
So Scott Horton does not help libertarians become better thinkers for liberty by giving them a more robust and nuanced approach to foreign conflicts that properly weighs the totality of real foreign threats and terror groups.
In his worldview, the world is largely just captured by Israeli Zionists and nobody has any material blame, agency, or threat to pose as compared to the Zionist class.
Just like communists blame capitalists and the bourgeois, so does Horton blame "Zionists/Zionism" as his boogeyman for every ill in the world.
He will downplay mass murder in Iran and Chinese state takeovers of industry so long as it maintains a focus on Israel and "Western Zionism" as the ultimate threats.
And this is why I completely distanced and dissociated from Horton and his lot of comrades whose worldview is actually just the leftist/third-worldist view that hates America and Israel under the premises that they are "Zionist colonialist occupiers."
This type of warped thinking is what gets you the results like in South Africa where the "anti-colonialists" take over in the name of "social justice" for "blowback," and it's just a ruse to institute state central planning for socialist ends.
This messaging does not help libertarianism.
It doesn't ground people in truth and reality.
It just causes them to become allied with communists, socialists, and other third-world leftists in the name of being "Anti-US hegemony" and "anti-Zionism," while, in reality, aiding and promoting those who want to both end Western capitalism and bring about a radical Marxist order.
I want nothing to do with these people and I want nothing to do with those who are trying to upend the Western enlightenment because they think they are being, "anti-war."
NONE of it is "anti-war," because they pooh-pooh the violence of third worldist governments when they mass murder and kidnap people over free speech and free market issues.
They downplay anything they believe will give the CIA and neocons a boner.
That's not dealing in reality.
That's dismissing REAL state violence just because it doesn't go along with the narrative you want to pose.
That's dishonest and shameful.
If you want to have true liberty, you need to reject this all-or-nothing third-worldist mentality that has you rationalizing the violent takeover by socialists, communists, and Islamic-aligned anti-capitalist third worldists who wear the skinsuit of "America first" to get you to support vile socialists like Mamdani under the pretense that they're at least "anti-Zionism" and "for going after the Epstein class."
This rhetoric is being weaponized against you to TRICK YOU into support those who want to actually enslave you and end capitalism.
And I will, for one, will not stand for it.
I can only hope you also agree and do the same.
"¡Viva la libertad, carajo!
