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Scott Horton
You ladies and gentlemen of the press have been less than honest according 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 does it, that means that it is not a liberty. We're gonna take out seven countries.
Charles Goyet
They don't know what the they're doing. Negotiate now. End this war.
Scott Horton
And now, here's your host, Scott Horton.
Charles Goyet
All right, y', all. Introducing the great Charles Goyet. You know, he used to be my partner on anti war radio back in the day, and he's the author of the Dollar Meltdown and Red Blue and Broke All Over. But most importantly, he's the author of this book which I published, which we at the institute published, I should say. Empire of Lies. Boy, look at all that glare. Empire of Lies and its many subtitles read fragments from the memory hole. And also the shameful story of the Deep States, Warlords, War Lies and failed foreign interventions. Welcome back to the show, old friend. How are you, Scott?
Scott Horton
It's great to, great to see you. And what your listeners won't know is that the only person I ever wanted to fill in for me when I went on vacation or was away from my own talk show was you. And even my producer loved the time. I think he came on at least once and maybe more, and he loved it. And when I came back the next day or from vacation, he says, and you know, Scott, some regular caller came in, you know, tried to ruffle your feathers and stuff and said, this is what Scott said. And they were chortling and laughing his hands. And so I knew my show was in good hands with him. That's, it's, it's great that, it's great that I'm gonna be on your show now.
Charles Goyet
I remember one time I was supposed to sub for you. I did sub for you. And I went to a friend's house because he had that Comrex gadget. So I was supposed to be like high quality audio back then because you needed a gadget for that kind of thing. And for whatever reason, they did the test and it was fine, but for whatever reason, his gadget just could not talk to your gadget. So I ended up hosting your show on a cordless bone with my audio quality at 8K and it was a disaster.
Scott Horton
Yeah.
Charles Goyet
Yeah.
Scott Horton
Well, stuff's better now, but it's not all, it's not all kink free. Like, you know, I've got an outboard. I've got an outboard cam A Logicam. But no matter what I do, my computer always wants to default to the inboard cam and I have to fight with it, struggle it, beat it with a hammer. You know, it's just like. But anyway, I guess it's better than it was.
Charles Goyet
We all need to learn Linux.
Scott Horton
Yeah.
Charles Goyet
All right, man. Here's the thing about this book. I love this book. It's really great, but it's also kind of a neat little experiment. So as I was saying, we were host together of Anti war radio on antiwar.com back when. And that meant that basically we just ran all our foreign policy interviews, which was all of mine, and most of yours would run there at the top of the page where the. Still the little Scott Horton show section at the top now. And. And you're a Ron Paul guy and a libertarian and hard money guy, Austrian economist and successful, you know, radio host in. In 1990s era. Libertarian, you know, good on all these things and perfect counterpart to me in the W. Bush years there@antiwar.com and all that. And then, man, I thought that you retired. I didn't realize. It turns out that you were like writing for these kind of private investment newsletters all this time and that kind of thing, which I guess I could have expected you were writing for somebody I'd see@lewrockwell.com every once in a while. But I didn't know that you were really working all this time. But then the point that I'm trying to get to is that we're almost like twins separated at Obama era instead of at birth. Right? But we, we kind of. We're not really talking for, you know, quite a while. Right? Like the whole teens almost. Right. And then into the. Into the twenties here. And then what's so cool is I read your book Empire of Lies and it's exactly like my last two books. Enough already. And Provoked. And yet it's obvious. No offense taken, dude, because I. Believe me, I got a pile here. It's so clear that you have not read enough already. Provoked. And yet wrote the exact same book. Only instead of what would be then 1200 pages of my two books combined, you did it all in like 250. And what's great about that is one, it's perfect by my standard. It's exactly right. And you make all the same points, only just so much better. And the writing is so much better. And where I can only come up with these sort of chronological timelines of horrible things that happen. I always daydreamed that I was Smart enough to somehow write all of that in a way that it's all kind of all mixed together. And I could tell the story in a much more concise way, but I just can't do that. So instead you just get a list of things that happened that bothered me or whatever. But you did what I wanted to do, which was to mix these. You know, tell this story by subject matter instead of just chronology and. But. And have a really smart way to weave it all together and. And tell the story. So you have so much here about Eastern Europe and about the Middle east and all the wars and all the lies and all these things. And it's just exactly what I would have written if I was, like you, 10 IQ points smarter.
Scott Horton
And so don't say that.
Charles Goyet
Brilliant and perfect.
Scott Horton
Love it.
Charles Goyet
I hope everybody reads it.
Scott Horton
That's very nice. And I loaded it up with a lot of juicy anecdotes that have slipped down the memory hole. And that's why the subtitle is Fragments from the Memory Hole. Because everybody knows from high school, 1984, you know, the Ministry of. The Ministry of Love is where they took people to torture up. And the Ministry of Truth is where they went to rewrite history. And so they rewrite history. You know, Oceania has always been at war with East Asia. And the old version of history would go down the incinerator called the Memory Hall. But I want to remind you of this. It's probably slipped your mind. The last time we talked before we connected here more recently was several years ago. And I was working on a book, and I got stuck on something and I couldn't figure out. I couldn't think of a good example or two to illustrate the point. And I knew there were things historically that would be right on it. And I couldn't come up with a struggle. And I got three or four, but I wanted five or six and stuff. And I emailed you late one night and shazam, you sent me back the perfect material that I was able to incorporate into the. Into the narrative. I was writing that. I think that was the last time. That was 10 years ago. Something like that. Do you even remember that?
Charles Goyet
No. I mean, Bailey rings a bell, maybe. Yeah. It's happened.
Scott Horton
Anyways, very helpful. So you're. You're the source. You're the encyclopedic knowledge. When anybody needs to know anything, I say turn to Scott Horton.
Charles Goyet
Hey, guys, Scott here. You know, you've probably noticed when I'm interviewing somebody or somebody's interviewing me, I've got this great bust of Dr. Ron Paul in the background on my bookshelf here. Well, you can get one like that too. They're available again from the great artist Rick Casale. Just go to my website, Scott Horton.org and look in the right hand margin. Click the link through there and use promo code Horton. You'll save 25 bucks and get free shipping at least in the lower 48 states. And he does custom work as well. Well, anyways, point being how good this book is. And you know, one thing that I thought was fun was so we both have the exact same narrative about, well in many ways overlapping narrative about the rise of the bin ladenites in the 90s and you know, Bill Clinton backing them still in Bosnia and things and, and in Kosovo and in Chechnya not doing anything to protect us. And we kind of go through and do like the hit list of the big bin Ladenite attacks against the United states in the 1990s leading up to September 11th. And you hit on one that I always leave out and you do a real great job on it. And of course I can tell because you really covered it at the time. My first radio show didn't really start until the end of 98, but you were covering this on the radio at the time. So you knew all the whole full story of Flight 800 and the shoot down. And so there was a limited hangout there, sort of distraction red herring argument that it was a Navy missile on a training exercise that shot it down and that was why there was a cover up. But then that was shot down and so then went back. Know what it was almost certainly, as you demonstrate in the book here was it was bin Laden nights with a stinger that shot that plane down and they wanted to cover that up. And it was in the summer of 96 and it was just after Kobar. So Khobar was the bin Laden nights and they blame that on Iran. And then here just like a month later they shoot down Flight 800 and they blame that on a spark in the fuel tank. Unbelievable.
Scott Horton
A million 747 flights and never had there been a phantom spark in the center wing fuel tank. I mean they just made this up
Charles Goyet
and everybody and, and, and I still remember and you'll find this on YouTube. You know YouTube just the algorithm has fetched this up for me recently about die laughing when they show with a straight face to this day. The and I remember watching this on CNN when they debuted it, the CIA animation of what it must have looked like when this center fuel tank blow up blew up and the whole front half of the, of the jet broke off and fell straight down. And then what you thought was a missile was actually the rest of the fuselage shooting straight up in the air because of the losses made of the front.
Scott Horton
Yeah, 3,000ft up. It said that's what the eyewitnesses, the eyewitnesses there were, there were 230 souls killed in that event. There were more eyewitnesses than the amount of people killed. And the eyewitnesses said, well, we saw the streak arise from the horizon, arise from the ocean. We saw the streak go up there. No, no, no, said the CIA video. The witnesses did. It was cartoonish, Scott. Anybody could see it. They use some like 1950s, you know. ANNOUNCER VOICE what the witnesses saw was not a streak of light and was certainly sure as hell not a missile. You know, and they red lettered it, capitalized it and stuff. And when does the CIA put out videos to support the FBI's fraudulent story? So I mean, it was just, the whole thing was, was just absurd. But you know, you've done that, you've used the same technique. I, I liken this to actually the assassination of Kennedy, which was in my time, but before your time. But the assassination of Kennedy in November, in November of 1963 was, was kind of a pivotal event for a lot of people, including myself, although I was just a kid at the time. But everybody will remember that 10 months or so later, in August of 1964, there was a non event in the Tonkin Gulf. Something that didn't really happen. The commanders on the scene said, well, it didn't happen to ignore it. Radar man sending false information, got a little panicky, so on and so forth. So there wasn't an attack that was used as the pretext for the war in Vietnam. It was called the Tonkin Gulf incident. LBJ, within months of running for re election, his election was coming up in November. He used this as the pretext for the war in Vietnam that killed 58,000Americans, at least 2 million Vietnamese. It was an event that had never happened. So the, the point of that is that if the American people had been suspicious, had been allowed to know the truth about what happened to Kennedy eight months earlier, a year earlier, they certainly would have been skeptical about the lies they were being told by LBJ trying to get reelected in August of 1964. And it's the same thing with TWA Flight 800. If the American people had gotten the truth about, about that event and that we were subject to terrorist Attack, everything would have changed. There were new procedures, there would have been new clampdowns, there had been new watching to make the American people safer. And one incident after another that, that that came to pass would, would almost certainly have not happened. And you use the same sort of a theme in your book. You're talking about COBAR talent.
Charles Goyet
Yeah, sure. Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, I mean, that was. The thing is, I make the same point off of COBAR that you make off of 800, that if they had been honest with us then, right, we would have had a whole kind of different understanding of, of and the government agencies would have had a different understanding of what they were dealing with and how to react to it and all that. But your example is better because you're talking about aviation and you're talking about. There would have been a whole new series of questions about, well, what are we doing about hijacking. These are not commies who want to go to Cuba if we get hijacked by an Al Qaeda guy. These are the suicide bomber types, right? So we might expect them to kamikaze the thing. And maybe we need to revamp our procedures based on that kind of threat. People who are willing to die in an attack against us, we're going to have to take that seriously in a different way. Maybe put locks on cockpit doors and these kinds of things years before. They'd had plenty of time before September 11th to be better prepared.
Scott Horton
You know, the important distinction to make about it too is that we wouldn't have had to depend on the government's reaction. You know, the airlines lost a fortune after 911 with collapsed air travel and so on. It was costly event. So had they seen the threat to their air travel, they would have on their own begun to take affirmative measures to protect themselves. You wouldn't have had to rely on a bunch of bureaucrats that, you know, were, were turf building in their own agencies for one purpose or another, rather than trying to protect, you know, the passengers on commercial flights. So it would have been, you know, when, when they had a mad cow disease outbreak, you know, McDonald's and other beef companies started moving heaven and earth to protect themselves. It wasn't the government. Matter of fact, the Department of Agriculture didn't want those companies trying to protect their products because it would scare the consumer that there was something wrong, which of course there was a threat, but it's always the same thing. When there was E. Coli outbreak in spinach farming in Northern California, the farmers, the co ops and stuff, they took their own affirmative measures without having to wait for the government to tell them what to do and things got done. Same thing could happen with, with air travel. Yep,
Charles Goyet
yep. And look, and you know, I know that it's by far the majority view now and the default view is that the whole thing was a scam and the government did it and whatever. But if that is true, then the way that they did it was by having the Saudis help Al Qaeda do it. It was still the bin Ladenites who did that attack. Clearly. And even if the CIA and the Vice President's office were all in bed with Prince Turkey and Prince Bandar to make it happen, then still plain old federal cops could have still kept those guys out of the country. Right. And, and plain old, you know, police work at airports and security measures taken by airlines and those kinds of things could all have still been in effect and served to, you know, mitigate the consequences even of that kind of operation at a higher level. So still stands, and it was still the bin Ladenites who did the thing.
Scott Horton
It was, it was a time so thick with lies it reminds us of today. It was just a non stop barrage of lies out of Washington like today. But one of the ones that always caught my attention was the one about the aluminum tubes. And so Cheney and Scooter Libby, you know, started propagating the story about these. Oh, they use aluminum tubes, part of refining process. They've got smoking gun in the form of mushroom cloud, you know, the refining uranium, blah, blah, blah. And even our own Department of Energy guy says, sorry, can't use those tubes. Don't configure, don't work. No, that's not what they're for. You're wrong. But they, they packaged the story up anyway and they fed the story to the lap dog press, they fed it to the New York Times aluminum tube. So it shows up on a Sunday morning from Judith Miller on the front page of the New York Times. Oh, aluminum tube, see, smoking gun, mushroom cloud. Oh, we're doomed. We got to go to war. And that same Sunday morning, Cheney shows up on Meet the Press and this is how they run these plays on us. He goes, he goes, aluminum tubes, refining. See I've been telling you about this uranium refining. They're this close. They're five minutes away, 30 seconds away from nuclear weapon, mushroom cloud, smoking gun. And, and then he says, Scott, he goes, but don't take it from me, here it is in the New York Times this morning. You know, it's just, you know, it's like that tinkered Evans to chance. You know, it's like a triple play or a double play stuff, you know from, from the, from the deep state to the lap dogs and lap dogs back to the deep state. From back to deep state to another lap dog. From that lap dog back to the deep state back to the. It just goes on and on and on. Much like today.
Charles Goyet
Yeah. Hey guys, Scott here for Mundo's Artisan Coffees. It's the Scott Horton show flavored flavor coffee breakfast blend. It's part Ethiopian, part Sumatra. It's really good. All you do is go to Scott Horton.org coffee and it'll forge you on there to mo Artisan coffees. Get it? They hate Starbucks because they represent the war party of course. And so they're moon do and they support peace. And guess what? Scott Horton show coffee is the number one best selling coffee at Moondo Artisan Coffees right now. Just go again to Scott Horton.org coffee. So you know when you talk about all the special interests in Washington behind the empire and its wars, I mean obviously the biggest dog of them all, bigger than the arms manufacturers or maybe even bigger than the Pentagon. It's a God damned Israelis. They have so much influence in Washington D.C. and it looks like they're about to drag us into another war. Supreme Allied Commander Netanyahu came to Washington and ordered a second carrier to the Persian Gulf or well to Eastern Med at least to back up this war. What is, how is that even possible? That, that, that our priorities are so out of balance that Israel can have that much influence in Washington especially comparatively to the American people who apparently are, well, is near meaningless.
Scott Horton
You know, I think the American people have become like Stockholm syndrome. You know we, we started talking about Kennedy a little bit back in that day. You know, nine out of 10 people believed the government when the government said, you know, lone gunner le did this. Don't look over there and don't look over here because it was. We got the case all wrapped up and they believed it. And now we've been through, you know, we've been through Kennedy's assassination, the Vietnam War, the war lies about Vietnam. We've been through the missing weapons of mass destruction Covid one lie after another. All these regime change operations all over the world that never turned out the way we were promised. And so the American people now, at least in my experience, don't believe a word the government says. For the most part the majority don't believe it, but they roll their eyes and they kind of think, well you know, it's business as usual, they're like. They're like Stockholm syndrome captors. They bought in with their captors. You know, we know they're lying to us, but, you know, we've made our peace with it. We live with it. And so, you know, they. They don't dare look too close. You know, be an ugly confrontation with reality. Down the memory hole has gone the account of Netanyahu. When he said. He said, well, if you. If you invade Iraq, you know, if you stop the weapons of mass destroyed. If you invade Iraq, I promise you it will be entirely transformational of the Middle East. You won't believe the beneficial effects that it will have. I mean, those. Those incidents are. Are forgotten. And the lapdog press, the corporate press doesn't remind people. So when he comes out spouting these same things that he makes himself at home in the Oval Office and stuff, people don't re. People don't remember. And you can't. You can't correct your trajectory as a nation unless you remember where you've been, the lies you've been told and the mistakes you've made. And so it's imperative for people to learn this stuff.
Charles Goyet
Yeah, man. All right, so check this out, guys. Just as Charles and I were going on today, I got this in my email. It's from. Oh, I'm gonna say your name wrong. Let me see if I can say Veronica Kirilenko. And she is from the new American magazine, John Birch Society's magazine. And here they have a great review of Charles book Empire of Lies. What becomes of a nation that learns to live on fiction? Oh, well, I haven't even had a chance to read it yet because I got this right when we were going off.
Scott Horton
Hey, but.
Charles Goyet
So this. Give her credit for this. Great. And. And thanks for this great review and recommend that to everyone so that you can all be even more motivated to go out and get Charles's great book. It's really so good. And I really am jealous of your talent, but I mean, not to a destructive degree only, you know, in a nice way. But can we talk about the new Red Scare, the deep state in action? Your chapter three here, remind me, is this Russia Gate?
Scott Horton
Not. Not so much Russia.
Charles Goyet
No, it's part of it. I just passed it. I know. Russia gate's one of the things in there.
Scott Horton
Yeah. But it's. It's basically about how close, you know, they bring us to the edge of nuclear war. And the American people, I believe, had a pretty good idea in 62 about the Cuban Missile crisis. You know, even the anchors on TV were kind of worried that beads of sweat on their temples and stuff when they reported on it, because it was really, you know, it was. Well, it was on the brink. But this time it's pretty much been hidden from the American people. And the New York Times, when they do report something, it's always, you know, too late after, it doesn't matter anymore. But last March, this time last year, they did a long story called the Partnership, and they went into detail, they interviewed 300 people over a course of months. And they actually told for the first time in the mainstream press anyway, just how close we came. And they concluded the Americans run operating the, the, the Ukraine war on behalf of Kiev. And Zelensky were running it from an operations center in Germany. And they had. It got to the point that as the nuclear doctrines of this, of the Russians were being escalated and the bravado of NATO and the White House and stuff were growing day by day by day. The thing, the thing came so close. Finally, even the New York Times said we got to the point where we had Americans directing the killing of Russian soldiers on Russian territory. And you have no idea how imperiled the world became with that event. And it is true. So that's, you know, I call that, I call that the second Cold War. Not saying that it's over yet, because you probably got a better idea than I do, but that it continues today. I'm trying to understand, you know, what the Trump initiative really consists of and doesn't seem to be any there there. So. But anyway, that's the second Cold War. But I want to, I want to say about the, the deep state and marching us to the edge of peril like this, it's easy to think that the deep state is lodged in people like Allen Dulles who, you know, overthrew. Well, Iran was a good one, you know, in 1953, but in Central America, too, this guy was toppling governments all over the world. Tried to take down de Gaulle in France and while Kennedy was president. But, you know, when they finally got Kennedy, it all of a sudden was like, it opened the gate, you know, the deep state. The CIA wasn't just relegated to foreign interventions now they had a foot in the door in the United States and they could run the way they wanted. But people that are beginning to get sensitive about this, they think, well, it's Allen Dulles, it's guys like Brennan and Clapper that have lied to us, lied to Congress. These are the deep state guys. And there's Victoria Nuland that fomented the war in Ukraine and toppled the government there with $5 billion of your tax money. But it even goes beyond that. There are these petty minor bureaucrats all throughout the government that are looking to advance their careers and serve the interests of the deep state. The deep state. I call the deep state the functional, the organizing center, the executive arm of the empire. Only if you get rid of the empire will you get rid of most of these attributes of the deep state. But all these people seek to ingratiate themselves to get their careers ahead by serving the interests of the deep state. And it's all unstated. They had the guy, Lt. Col. Vindman in the first term in Trump's White House and a staffer in the National Security Council. And then the guy that really is effectively the initiator of the first Trump impeachment. And what was his complaint? He told Congress that it was outrageous that President Trump was ignoring the advice of the consensus of the interagency. The interagency consensus. And I may or may not like any of Trump's decisions, but there is no such institution in the United States Constitution called the interagency. Who in the hell do the people think that they are? What is the interagency? Who created it? How do you appeal its decisions? How do they get rewarded? Do they vote? Can I join? What is an interagency? It's the deep state at work through mid level bureaucrats and the effect that they have on American national policy. And what gets reported in the national media is simply beyond measure. It's the interagency and we have no interagency and we need no inter agency. And yet they're the petty minor bureaucrats that along with the guys at the top, you know, the Brennan's and the clappers and stuff. Move, move. The policy of the deep state and the global American military empire forward.
Charles Goyet
Yep. Hey guys, you know I have another podcast now, right? Yeah, me and the great American historian Daryl Cooper. That is Martyr Maid. He's my co host and we host a show every Friday night. We might be switching to two days a week here sometime soon, but for right now we're doing Friday nights live at 8 o' clock Eastern Time on the YouTubes. Checked out our Twitter handle, Provoked show. Absolutely right. See everybody, it's just like provoked, only a lot thinner. So if you didn't want to read Provoke because it's too dang long, then you should just get th the Empire of Lies by Charles Goyet because, yeah, I have a part just like that about Vinmin and the inner agency and all that stuff. The outrage that the President, United States, who does he think he is trying to change American foreign policy? The lieutenant colonels have spoken.
Scott Horton
What world.
Charles Goyet
The foreign born lieutenant has spoken.
Scott Horton
Yeah.
Charles Goyet
So this is Chuck's new piece here in the Blaze Media. Where in the Constitution is the inter agency anyway, another great one. I think we're, we have that on antiwar.com either today or we're going to run it tomorrow or something.
Scott Horton
Oh, it's really, it's really a story that it wasn't just, you know, the Kennedy assassination and stuff. They there's a new account just released, grand jury stuff that had been hidden for many, many years about the way that the, the Joint Chiefs, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Admiral Moore was spying on the Nixon White House. And what didn't they like about what Nixon was doing? Well, they didn't like the prospect of a reduced military budget. One they didn't like Vietnamization. They didn't want anything to do with the tante that would slow down the Cold War and Cold War spending. And so they had that. The their primary guy was an enlisted man, a naval guy and then yeoman or whatever they called him. And he was, he was dispatched to, you know, to steal papers from the briefcases of the officials, you know, like Kissinger and Alexander Haig from burn bags. He was retrieving material from burn bags and rifling through wastebaskets and stuff and delivering this all to the Joint Chiefs, to Thomas Moore and other guys at the Joint Chief Staff. And Nixon was aware of this. He learned about all of this. And so I guess the point of the story, this also appeared in the New York Times last week. The point of the story and what I write about is the same sort of thing that the American people kind of had concealed from them. The fact that all the sort of surveillance and espionage that went on in the next administration and all the Watergate stuff was the spawn really of the deep State spying on him and his reaction to it and so on. And it snowballed from there.
Charles Goyet
Yeah, well and it people always wondered about this, but now we know that Admiral Moore's role in this was what it was. It kind of raises new or raises the same question again only with a little better context about what was Bob Woodward's real role in this since he had just left the Naval Criminal Investigative Service before going to the Washington Post. Was this all just an.
Scott Horton
Yeah.
Charles Goyet
Let me ask you about now on Kennedy. When I was a kid, I was a new World Order, Kook. But I didn't really want to solve the Kennedy assassination because I just thought there's 20, 50 books about it and I don't want to read them all. And I don't care that much because he was nothing but the Bill Clinton of his day anyway. And so as Angela Keaton said, who, who gives a rat's ass who killed John F. Kennedy anyway? These things happen in third world military dictatorships, you know. But one thing that's really interesting, of course, is the question of foreign involvement. And more and more people are beginning to believe, or continuing I guess, to believe, that actually it was the Israelis. They certainly had motive because Kennedy was doing everything he could to demand inspections of Demona and to try to shut down their nuclear program, force them to join the NPT as a non nuclear weapon state. And then somebody blew his head off. But then the thing is when people say, oh well, Alan Dulles this and right wing Cuban's that, well, what about actually that James Jesus Angleton was completely pwned by the Israelis and apparently him and his guys were the ones that shot the President in the head. So I don't know if it's conclusive yet. And I've known about their motive to do it for a long time, but now I'm like, man, I don't know, it looks like maybe there is some cause and effect here through Angleton. What do you think?
Scott Horton
They're in the lineup. They need to be in the lineup along with the mafia guys, along with the CIA. They all need to be in the lineup. And sometimes you get these strange coalitions of different interests working together. We saw that in the Iraq war. I mean, we saw, I remember guys, I think Larry Kudlow was one who said, well, if we go to war in Iraq, it'll be good for the stock market. And there were guys like Karl Rove that said, you know, Bush pulls 10 points higher if he's wearing a, you know, a bomber jacket or a flight suit. So we've got midterm elections because we got to get, you know, we need a war there. There were guys that said with the people in the Pentagon knew it would be good for promotions. You know, you got to have some dynamism and movement in the Pentagon so people can get promotions. Obviously, obviously there were merchants of death war manufacturers that were thumping for it and they were underwriting position papers from the think tanks about why we got to go to war there. And so there was this whole coalition. Oh, the Greater Israel was part of it too. There was this whole coalition of interests that came together like some weird, you know, astrological conjunction, a harmony of the spheres or something that all came together. And I think. I think the way to really understand the Kennedy assassination, and I'm not an expert on it, is you've got to take into account a variety of interests, a spectrum of them that found common cause and worked in concert with one another. But absolutely, Israeli intelligence belongs right there in the lineup, along with the mafia, along with the CIA and. And along with LBJ and others.
Charles Goyet
Yeah, well, and they've proven that there's absolutely no bottom to their depravity. So is there anything that Israel would not do, even including torture a child to death or whatever for the fun of it? There is nothing that they would not do.
Scott Horton
Well, one thing, one thing, one thing they wouldn't do.
Charles Goyet
Why not?
Scott Horton
When there's food. When there's food and provisions for. For the starving people of Gaza, they wouldn't open fire on them when they came to. To take rations and stuff. They wouldn't do that. Oh, I'm sorry. Sorry, I'm mistaken there.
Charles Goyet
Anytime. So, yeah, anyway, I like picking on them. I don't know that they did it, but, you know, even like that theory that Lyndon Johnson did it, that might not be any different than saying that Israel did it, because what was he, other than an Israeli sock puppet anyway? You know what I mean?
Scott Horton
Yeah, he was. Certainly was.
Charles Goyet
It's funny because I even read one time, I think in Haret Said, the Israeli theory was that Lyndon Johnson did it. And I was like, you guys are so ungrateful and throw your own guy under the bus that way, you know.
Scott Horton
Well, you know, they have a monument to the. The memory, I'm pretty sure, of James Jesus Angleton, you know, for having been a great. A great servant of the. Great servant of Israel.
Charles Goyet
How.
Scott Horton
How could he been a great servant of Israel? He was the deputy head of the CIA. He was the head of the. I don't know what it was, surveillance and sabotage or something. You know, how could it be a servant of a foreign government? Why are they lauding him? Well, the answers become kind of obvious.
Charles Goyet
Yep, absolutely. All right, so here's the book on the Amazon there. Empire of Lies by the great Charles Goyet. And of course, he's got other books on Austrian economics there. The Dollar Meltdown and Red Blue and Broke all over and. But this is the new one and published by the Libertarian and available now there on your Amazon. And thank you so much for coming back on the show, Charles it's been great to talk to you again, man.
Scott Horton
Scott, it's great to be on. And thanks for publishing my new book.
Charles Goyet
Yeah, absolutely. And thanks for being part of the institute with us, man. We're happy to have you.
Scott Horton
I'm proud to be there.
Charles Goyet
The Scott Horton show is brought to you by the Scott Horton Academy of Foreign Policy and Freedom, Robertson Roberts Brokerage, Inc. Mundo's Artisan Coffee, Tom Woods, Liberty Classroom and APS Radio News. Subscribe in all the usual places and check out my books, Fool's 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 and Scott Horton.org and I'm serializing the audiobook of Provoked at Scott HortonShow.com and Patreon.com Scott HortonShow Bumpers by Josh Langford Music, intro and outro videos by Dissident Media. Audio mastering by Podsworth Media. See y' all next time.
Podcast: Scott Horton Show – Just the Interviews
Episode: 2/20/26 Charles Goyette on the Lies that Built the American Empire
Date: February 24, 2026
Host: Scott Horton
Guest: Charles Goyette
In this episode, Scott Horton welcomes Charles Goyette, former co-host of Antiwar Radio and author of Empire of Lies, to discuss the persistent fabrications underpinning American foreign policy and the rise and reach of the so-called “deep state.” The conversation traverses decades: from the foundational deceptions of the Vietnam War era, through the bin Laden years, to modern manipulations steering America toward perpetual conflict. The two reflect on the erasure of inconvenient historical truths (the “memory hole”), government-media collusion, the influence of lobbies like Israel’s, and the dangers of the new Cold War with Russia.
“It’s just exactly what I would have written if I was, like you, 10 IQ points smarter.” (Scott, 05:38)
“Everybody knows from high school, 1984... the Ministry of Truth is where they went to rewrite history... the old version of history would go down the incinerator called the Memory Hole.” (Goyette, 05:50)
TWA Flight 800 & Khobar Towers ([08:28–13:24])
“It was cartoonish, Scott. Anybody could see it... when does the CIA put out videos to support the FBI's fraudulent story?” (Goyette, 10:06)
“The Tonkin Gulf incident... was an event that had never happened.” (Scott, 11:22)
Structural Incentives for Cover-Ups
“It wasn’t the government... it was the co-ops and stuff, they took their own affirmative measures without having to wait for the government to tell them what to do...” (Scott, 13:13)
Iraq War & Aluminum Tubes ([15:30–17:08])
“Cheney shows up on Meet the Press... ‘But don’t take it from me, here it is in the New York Times’... from the deep state to the lap dogs and lap dogs back to the deep state.” (Scott, 16:12)
Role of Special Interests, Especially Israel
“Obviously, the biggest dog of them all—bigger than the arms manufacturers or maybe even the Pentagon—it's the God damned Israelis. They have so much influence in Washington D.C. and it looks like they're about to drag us into another war.” (Goyette, 17:21)
“We know they’re lying to us, but, you know, we’ve made our peace with it…” (Scott, 18:41)
“You can’t correct your trajectory as a nation unless you remember where you’ve been, the lies you’ve been told and the mistakes you’ve made.” (Goyette, 19:50)
“There is no such institution in the United States Constitution called the interagency. Who in the hell do the people think that they are? ... It's the deep state at work through mid level bureaucrats and the effect that they have on American national policy.” (Goyette, 24:51)
Scott raises the theory that Israeli intelligence, alongside CIA and organized crime, had motive and possible involvement in JFK’s assassination, referencing Kennedy’s push against Israel’s nuclear ambitions.
Goyette responds with a broad view:
“I think the way to really understand the Kennedy assassination… is you’ve got to take into account a variety of interests, a spectrum of them that found common cause and worked in concert with one another. But absolutely, Israeli intelligence belongs right there in the lineup, along with the mafia, along with the CIA and along with LBJ and others.” (Goyette, 31:29)
Scott closes the section with pointed sarcasm regarding Israel’s depravity and US complicity:
“There is nothing that they would not do.” (Goyette, 32:23)
“When there’s food and provisions for the starving people of Gaza, they wouldn’t open fire on them... Oh, I’m sorry. Sorry, I’m mistaken there.” (Scott, 32:31)
On parallel approaches and shared conclusions:
“It’s just exactly what I would have written if I was, like you, 10 IQ points smarter.” – Scott Horton (05:38)
On the memory hole:
“I loaded it up with a lot of juicy anecdotes that have slipped down the memory hole.” – Charles Goyette (05:47)
On government/media collusion:
“Cheney shows up on Meet the Press... ‘But don’t take it from me, here it is in the New York Times’... It just goes on and on and on. Much like today.” – Scott Horton (16:12)
On public resignation to lies:
“We know they’re lying to us, but, you know, we’ve made our peace with it. We live with it... They don’t dare look too close.” – Scott Horton (18:41)
On the deep state’s structure:
“It's the deep state at work through mid level bureaucrats and the effect that they have on American national policy.” – Charles Goyette (24:51)
On the coalition behind war:
“There was this whole coalition... like some weird, you know, astrological conjunction, a harmony of the spheres or something that all came together.” – Charles Goyette (31:47)
On Israel’s impunity:
“There is nothing that they would not do.” – Charles Goyette (32:23)
The conversation is candid, humorous, and conspiratorial, but carefully sourced and historically rooted. Both hosts are deeply skeptical of official narratives and assertive in attributing culpability to entrenched interests, from media to the military-industrial complex and foreign lobbies.
Empire of Lies, as discussed by Goyette and Horton, provides a condensed, accessible account of the patterns of deceit structuring US foreign policy, the manipulations of the deep state, and the grave implications of national amnesia. The discussion underscores the urgency of remembering history’s true course to prevent further catastrophic interventions.
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