A Libertarian’s Reckoning with “Blowback” and Selective Outrage
When “anti-war” rhetoric leads to rationalizing violence by movements that would build something worse than a liberal democratic republic, it has stopped serving liberty and started undermining it.
Written by: Jack V Lloyd
In libertarian and anti-war circles, Scott Horton is widely regarded as one of the most knowledgeable voices on foreign policy.
For years, his podcast, his writing for Antiwar.com, and his appearances alongside figures like Tom Woods and Dave Smith have shaped how many libertarians understand US intervention abroad. Central to his analysis is the concept of “blowback,” the idea that American actions abroad, from drone strikes to regime-change wars to support for particular allies, generate resentment that eventually returns as terrorism on Western soil.
That framework has been applied to a long list of attacks, including the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, where Omar Mateen murdered 49 people. Horton has described the massacre as a textbook case of blowback.
Hearing him make that claim in person marked a turning point for me, not because I had suddenly discovered neoconservatism, but because the facts of the case do not fit the theory.
I was at Tom Woods’ house for a private meetup when Horton gave a short talk. As he asserted that the Pulse attack was blowback from US operations in Syria, I found myself scowling, because I knew the details.
During his 911 call, Mateen pledged allegiance to ISIS and cited American airstrikes in Syria and Iraq as his motive. But here is what the blowback narrative rarely emphasizes: Omar Mateen was not Syrian. His family had emigrated from Afghanistan in the 1980s, and he was born at Long Island Jewish Medical Center, a secular hospital in Queens, New York City, an American citizen who had never lived in Syria and had no personal connection to the airstrikes he invoked. The CIA had not armed him. No relative of his had been killed by US forces. His victims were random civilians in a gay nightclub, people with no role whatsoever in any Middle Eastern conflict.
At that moment, the cause-and-effect chain Horton was describing fell apart.
What I saw instead was a man radicalized by Islamist ideology, shaped by influences traceable to his mosque and to online propaganda, who reached for US foreign policy as a justification rather than a cause. Calling that “blowback” recasts depraved mass murder as a form of underdog resistance.
A defender of the theory might respond that the idea of “blowback” was never meant so literally, that resentment of US policy can radicalize people who were never harmed by it directly. But that answer over-predicts to the point of collapse. Millions of people oppose America’s wars. Scott Horton himself has built a career on fury at exactly the airstrikes Mateen invoked, and he has never so much as raised a hand to anyone. If anger at foreign policy were enough to produce mass murder, there would be millions of killers, not one. The honest question is not why Mateen resented US policy, but why he, alone among the millions who share that grievance, walked into a nightclub and opened fire.
“Blowback” has no answer, because the answer is ideology, the one variable the theory is built to ignore. Stretched to cover anyone who cites an American grievance while committing an atrocity, the word “blowback” explains nothing and excuses everything. A theory that absorbs every fact predicts none of them.
That encounter pushed me to examine Horton’s broader body of work more closely, and the pattern was consistent.
There is a steady pull toward sweeping generalizations that serve a single narrative, usually centered on Israel, Zionism, or “Western hegemony,” while the agency, ideology, and independent culpability of other actors are downplayed or ignored. The sources tend to cluster: Al Jazeera, the Gaza Health Ministry, Russia Today, The Grayzone, and similar outlets with a pronounced anti-Western or leftist slant. First-hand reporting from conflict zones, the kind that complicates a tidy thesis, is thin on the ground.
This is not rigorous anti-war thinking. It is a selective lens that grants certain states and movements a strange exemption from agency.
Mass murder or repression in Iran, China, or elsewhere is minimized whenever acknowledging it would dilute the focus on Israel or Washington DC. What emerges is less a principled commitment to peace and liberty than a recycled third-worldist framework in libertarian dress: capitalists, “Zionists,” and Western powers are the root of every evil, and their opponents are cast as reactive victims no matter what they do.
I have since distanced myself from Horton and the circle that shares this outlook. Real libertarianism demands intellectual honesty about threats from every direction, including radical Islamist terror, socialist central planning marketed as “anti-colonialism,” and authoritarian regimes that crush both markets and speech. It requires weighing the whole body of evidence instead of collecting anecdotes that flatter a preferred story.
When “anti-war” rhetoric leads people to rationalize or soft-pedal violence by movements that would build something far worse than a liberal democratic republic, it has stopped serving liberty and started undermining it.
The liberty movement does not need more voices that reflexively blame the West while excusing the worst conduct of its adversaries. It needs thinkers anchored in cause and effect, willing to face uncomfortable truths about ideology, culture, and human agency wherever those truths lead.
My evening at Tom Woods’ house was the moment I understood that Scott Horton’s approach does not provide that clarity. For the sake of a more honest and more durable libertarianism, I want no part of it, and I hope others will examine these patterns for themselves.
References
“Investigative Update Regarding Pulse Nightclub Shooting.” Federal Bureau of Investigation, 20 June 2016, fbi.gov/contact-us/field-offices/tampa/news/press-releases/investigative-update-regarding-pulse-nightclub-shooting.
“FBI Releases Full Transcript of 911 Calls From Orlando Massacre.” NBC News, 20 June 2016, nbcnews.com/storyline/orlando-nightclub-massacre/fbi-releases-transcripts-911-calls-orlando-massacre-n595626.
“Orlando Shooting: In 911 Transcripts, Gunman Said US Must Stop Syria Bombing.” Global News, 24 June 2016, globalnews.ca/news/2959797/orlando-shooting-in-911-transcripts-gunman-said-us-must-stop-syria-bombing.
Jack V Lloyd is a lawyer, author, and multimedia producer known for his Voluntaryist comic. Follow him on X @jackvlloyd.