True Anon Truth Feed - Seth Harp & The Fort Bragg Cartel [LIVE]
Aired: 2025-08-15
Duration: 01:43:08


=== First Live Recording Revealed (02:29) ===

[00:00:00]  Hello, hello, hello.
[00:00:02]  Hi, greetings.
[00:00:04]  Good afternoon.
[00:00:05]  Greeting.
[00:00:06]  Greeting.
[00:00:07]  Just single greeting.
[00:00:08]  Greeting.
[00:00:09]  Well, hopefully, you are listening to this by yourself because it is going to be a wild ride.
[00:00:14]  And I think you should take your shirt off right now.
[00:00:16]  We have something special for you today.
[00:00:20]  Yes.
[00:00:21]  We actually, for the first time, have a recording of a live event we did.
[00:00:25]  We never do this.
[00:00:26]  We don't do this.
[00:00:27]  We are breaking true and on protocol.
[00:00:30]  I think it's a technicality because it technically was not our live event.
[00:00:37]  It was set up by the publishers.
[00:00:40]  So we can get away with that.
[00:00:41]  Also, we didn't record it.
[00:00:43]  That's true.
[00:00:44]  And we didn't record it.
[00:00:45]  The house recorded it.
[00:00:46]  That's true.
[00:00:47]  Yeah.
[00:00:48]  So our rule of we don't record our live shows still stands because not only was this not a true and on live show, we didn't record it.
[00:00:57]  We didn't record it.
[00:00:58]  We didn't record it.
[00:00:59]  Well, we do have a tape of it.
[00:01:02]  Let me get to your tape of it.
[00:01:05]  It's us with our good friend.
[00:01:08]  And how many returning now?
[00:01:11]  Returning to the show, how many times has he been on?
[00:01:14]  Three, four?
[00:01:15]  Something like that.
[00:01:16]  Five times?
[00:01:17]  Bob, a lot of times.
[00:01:20]  Seth Harp, who is the author of a new book called The Fort Bragg Cartel, which is fantastic.
[00:01:30]  And you and me, because since Frays forgot, you and me, what we did is we sat on stage with him and we talked about the book for quite some time.
[00:01:39]  Yeah, I feel like an hour and a half.
[00:01:41]  And listen, I just got to put this out there because I haven't really heard the recording yet.
[00:01:46]  If there are pauses and gaps where you're like, why aren't these guys speaking?
[00:01:52]  It's likely due to some reaction, either of mirth or of shock and horror from the audience.
[00:01:59]  Now, the reason that generally we don't release live shows is because, well, there's many reasons for that.
[00:02:07]  But it's because it always sounds weird because you can't hear, it's like, there's no, there's like spaces missing there.
[00:02:12]  There's like dead air.
[00:02:13]  Yeah, you can't hear the audience when they're like, or like, wow, you guys are so smart.
[00:02:19]  So if there are spaces, if there are spaces like that in this room, you fill them.
[00:02:26]  You laugh.
[00:02:27]  Exactly.
[00:02:28]  You do something about it.

=== Met Seth in Syria 2016 (06:27) ===

[00:02:29]  Yeah.
[00:02:30]  You know what that's called?
[00:02:31]  Participation.
[00:02:32]  Exactly.
[00:02:33]  So it's like you're there.
[00:02:35]  And it's like we're here.
[00:02:36]  And that's it.
[00:02:37]  All right.
[00:02:38]  Without further ado, we will start the show.
[00:03:09]  I don't like this sitting thing already, but we're going to do that.
[00:03:13]  Look at that.
[00:03:14]  Is this thing on?
[00:03:16]  How are you guys doing tonight?
[00:03:19]  Hi.
[00:03:20]  Quick question: Who did the fire alarm?
[00:03:24]  Did anyone see who did it?
[00:03:26]  I love that.
[00:03:28]  I think you should do that.
[00:03:28]  No snitches.
[00:03:29]  That was really good.
[00:03:30]  I really hope that it continues to go off and, in fact, goes off during this event tonight further while we're on stage.
[00:03:39]  Yeah, that would be great.
[00:03:40]  Hello.
[00:03:41]  Hello.
[00:03:43]  Thank you guys all for coming.
[00:03:45]  We don't usually do this kind of thing.
[00:03:48]  No.
[00:03:48]  It's a little like professional of us, I feel.
[00:03:50]  I know.
[00:03:51]  The sitting is really fucking.
[00:03:52]  It's so nuts that we are even asked to do this, but we're so excited.
[00:03:57]  We're going to be talking with Seth Harp tonight, the author of the Fort Bragg Cartel, Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces.
[00:04:05]  I think everyone here got a copy of the book, which is so exciting.
[00:04:09]  I'm going to say this real quick before Seth gets out here.
[00:04:12]  Well, we're going to wrap for a little bit first.
[00:04:15]  This book is so fucking good.
[00:04:17]  It's really good.
[00:04:18]  It's shocking.
[00:04:19]  What is this book?
[00:04:20]  We have to read a lot of books for the show.
[00:04:22]  Most of them are pretty good because I kind of figured that out before we decide to read them.
[00:04:26]  This book is like, I'm like, this is going to be a hit.
[00:04:28]  Yeah, there's some crazy, crazy shit in here that I'm really excited to talk about.
[00:04:35]  One thing I'll say is that, Brace, you have known Seth for a little bit, actually.
[00:04:42]  Can you talk about that?
[00:04:43]  Yeah, I met Seth.
[00:04:44]  I think I probably mentioned this in the show before, but I met Seth in Syria in 2016, I think in November of 2016.
[00:04:53]  So I think we're actually right after the election.
[00:04:57]  What were you doing there?
[00:04:58]  Nothing.
[00:05:01]  It's covered in the book.
[00:05:02]  Yeah.
[00:05:04]  But I. There's a bit of Syria in this book.
[00:05:07]  There's a little bit there.
[00:05:08]  There's a little bit about the town that we met in there, Inissa.
[00:05:11]  But we met in this town called Inisa, which at that time had very few people in it.
[00:05:17]  It had just been sort of the site of a mild battle.
[00:05:22]  But I was, the unit I was in of the People's Protection Forces, the YPG, was stationed out of this building there.
[00:05:31]  And a white boy showed up at the sort of command center near there.
[00:05:36]  And I went over to talk to him because I hadn't spoken English to anyone in a while.
[00:05:40]  And we had talked on the phone prior, I think, because he had been writing an article for Rolling Stone.
[00:05:45]  And it was cool.
[00:05:47]  We hung out for a while.
[00:05:48]  He gave me a compass, which I still have today.
[00:05:51]  Actually, I never used it.
[00:05:53]  I can't believe you didn't miss it.
[00:05:54]  To be honest, I do have it.
[00:05:55]  It's in my backpack.
[00:05:57]  You didn't even bring it out here.
[00:05:58]  I'm not going to do that.
[00:06:00]  I'd lose it if I did.
[00:06:03]  But I've kept in touch with Seth since then.
[00:06:07]  And I think we first had him on the show four years ago in 2021 about the article, which I think basically gave rise to this book.
[00:06:17]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:06:17]  That's actually a really crazy thing about four years ago.
[00:06:22]  Yeah, we had him on.
[00:06:23]  We've had him on before.
[00:06:25]  But I think it's kind of beautiful that we had him on to talk about that article.
[00:06:29]  And now, look at this.
[00:06:31]  Look at this thing.
[00:06:32]  And it seems that, I mean, we're going to talk about it when we bring him out.
[00:06:35]  I keep saying that.
[00:06:37]  But kind of a little bit of an Alice in Wonderland thing.
[00:06:40]  You know, it starts with this crazy, you know, this just what?
[00:06:46]  I don't know if I know the story well enough to go where you're going with that.
[00:06:49]  No, I just, I mean, it's like this, you know, it's like you start with this one little thing, and then suddenly you're on this like winding, crazy, I don't know, path that goes so many places in this book, just from this one like murder story that we talked about however many years ago.
[00:07:04]  I will say there's an extraordinary amount of crackheads in this book.
[00:07:08]  So it's mostly about crackheads.
[00:07:10]  We're going to talk about that.
[00:07:11]  Well, actually, one thing I do want to say is this book, in addition to the crackhead thing, I think there's a, because I guess no one here has read this yet, or probably a couple of you have, but like, this is a book about side hustles, I think, almost entirely, which I do want to talk about because there's a lot of that going on in the special forces community.
[00:07:30]  Yeah.
[00:07:31]  Should we bring him out?
[00:07:32]  Let's bring him out.
[00:07:33]  Seth Harp, come to the stage.
[00:07:50]  What's that?
[00:07:52]  Get your mic up there close so they can hear your beautiful voice.
[00:07:56]  Hello.
[00:07:57]  There it is.
[00:07:57]  How are you all doing?
[00:07:59]  Good.
[00:08:01]  Yeah, it's interesting you talk about Ayn Issa in Syria because, you know, that was not a safe place to be at that time.
[00:08:09]  And, you know, Brace obviously was carrying a gun.
[00:08:13]  What?
[00:08:17]  And so was everyone else, not me.
[00:08:20]  And, you know, there were like airstrikes in the distance, and there was a pretty real possibility at any time that an ISIS infiltrator could come and blow themselves up, which I believe happened a few days after I left that place.
[00:08:34]  But all of that is to say that at that time, the amount of fear that I felt was nothing compared to what I feel right now looking out into these bright lights, being in front of like 400 and 500 people, because this is literally the first time in my life I've ever done something like this.
[00:08:50]  Oh, my God.

=== Special Forces Impunity (15:00) ===

[00:08:57]  Well, Seth, I think we'll try to put you at ease by asking you some of the same questions you've probably been asked in every single interview you've done so far about this book.
[00:09:07]  And I want to start with a very stupid question, but I think that will situate us kind of in the world that we're going to be talking about.
[00:09:14]  What are the special forces?
[00:09:17]  What makes them so special?
[00:09:21]  The special forces were created actually a little bit before Vietnam.
[00:09:26]  And the basic idea is that they are, their job is to go to foreign countries where the U.S. is at war, often proxy wars or undeclared wars, and to liaise with local forces, train them up to fight as a proxy force, proxy army.
[00:09:44]  And that's kind of what's different about the SEALs versus the Green Berets, because the Green Berets kind of fancy themselves as, I think the phrase I've heard before is armed anthropologists.
[00:09:57]  And it's a bit self-flattering, but that was their original purpose.
[00:10:01]  And they do emphasize language acquisition and stuff in their training.
[00:10:05]  I mean, that's famously in the Vietnam War.
[00:10:07]  That was the people who sort of liaised with the Hmong and various indigenous populations in Vietnam to try to get them to fight the North Vietnamese.
[00:10:17]  Right.
[00:10:17]  And talking about Laos, obviously, there's a long pedigree of drug trafficking that's been taking place with U.S. proxy forces side by side with Green Berets, CIA paramilitaries.
[00:10:31]  And yeah, I talk a lot about that in the book.
[00:10:34]  So Vietnam, Green Berets, that's kind of when the Green Beres and SEALs first start doing missions, I guess.
[00:10:42]  But that's mostly seen, I feel like, as the CIA's war in large part, I think because of some of the more spectacular operations, some of the more horrible ones, like the Phoenix program.
[00:10:52]  And it's not until the 80s that I feel like that the, which you talk about in the book, that special operations becomes not only sort of more a household name, Green Berets obviously were already because it's like the John Wayne movie and shit like that.
[00:11:06]  But it's like you see sort of the decline of the CIA as this kinetic force, we'll say, and the rise of the special operations community sort of in the wake of that.
[00:11:18]  Yeah, so one thing I discuss in the book is the church committee and the reforms that took place that really clipped the CIA's wings around the late 1970s to 1980.
[00:11:31]  And the timing is very interesting because right after the Intelligence Oversight Act of 1980 went into effect, literally a few months later is when Delta Force was created.
[00:11:41]  Delta Force being a subset of the Green Berets that is significantly more selective and elite, and which also has capabilities that in many ways overlap with the CIAs.
[00:11:53]  I didn't realize before I started researching the book and reporting on it the extent to which they have capabilities for doing espionage missions and covert operations of all kinds, black operations.
[00:12:05]  That's what Delta Force is about.
[00:12:06]  That's what JSOC does.
[00:12:08]  It's crazy reading the book because I think for most people, especially because of what's in like what's portrayed in popular culture, movies, whatever, we were just talking about how you could call like the JSOC guys seem like crackhead Jason Bourne or something.
[00:12:25]  But it does feel like everything you're reading about that they do and they carry out is actually what you think the CIA does.
[00:12:31]  Like what you're saying, all these kind of covert operations, even like, you know, guys going undercover, like stuff that you really feel like is intelligence gathering is actually now under the aegis of the special forces.
[00:12:45]  Yes, and I really wasn't aware that there was even a such thing as active duty U.S. military troops in foreign countries, you know, undercover identities, not wearing uniforms, not carrying IDs, but fully covert.
[00:12:58]  I really didn't know that that was a thing.
[00:13:01]  I don't think anybody does.
[00:13:02]  Well, you know, one big difference between JSOC and the CIA is that JSOC almost never leaks.
[00:13:08]  So we know hardly anything about it.
[00:13:11]  There's been much less reporting.
[00:13:14]  You know, Delta Force is the most elite unit in the military and has been at the forefront of U.S. military operations since 2001.
[00:13:22]  And yet I was surprised to find out there really aren't any books about Delta Force.
[00:13:26]  Like, it was just kind of oversight considering its significance and centrality to the U.S. government.
[00:13:33]  Yeah, I mean, a lot of this book, as the title might show people, is about Fort Bragg, because that's where JSOC and like that's where basically all of the action, not only in the book, considering like, or concerning the characters that you talk about, but the larger forces at play are all situated out of Fort Bragg.
[00:13:51]  So what does that look like there?
[00:13:53]  Like how many different, I mean, you talk about the Delta Force compound there, but like the Green Berets are out of there, like you have Airborne out of there.
[00:14:00]  Like who's out of Fort Bragg?
[00:14:02]  The largest unit there is the 82nd Airborne Division, which is really, you know, it's like the main military force, I think they call it the main contingency force of the United States.
[00:14:13]  So anytime something happens where they have to deploy a division rapidly, it's the 82nd Airborne.
[00:14:18]  And it serves as kind of like a farm team for the Green Berets, which are also headquartered at Fort Bragg.
[00:14:23]  So there's Green Beret groups all over the country, but the headquarters are there, and also the 5th Special Forces group is there, third group.
[00:14:29]  Sorry.
[00:14:31]  And then on top of this pyramid is Delta Force.
[00:14:34]  Would you say they're like the first tier on the top of the pyramid?
[00:14:38]  Sure, yeah.
[00:14:38]  And that tier, you know, tier one operator.
[00:14:40]  Tier one, right at the top.
[00:14:42]  Tier one.
[00:14:43]  And then it kind of follows.
[00:14:44]  Just provide sort of the base for everything else to be on.
[00:14:48]  Yeah, you want to be tier one.
[00:14:50]  So this is a big thing actually that I see.
[00:14:52]  We were talking backstage about this, but I watch occasionally the special forces a podcast or two by some of these people.
[00:15:00]  You're aware of the special forces content construction.
[00:15:03]  What is genuinely like who is in the different tiers of operators?
[00:15:06]  Because I'm assuming the lowest tier three operator would be Green Beret.
[00:15:11]  Because there's just more of them?
[00:15:13]  No, so Tier 3 is to the extent you buy into this sort of hierarchy.
[00:15:18]  The conventional.
[00:15:20]  She and I have long-standing arguments about these sort of things.
[00:15:23]  It's really, it's not really annoying.
[00:15:26]  I don't think anyone uses the term tier three, but that would be the conventional army.
[00:15:30]  Sure, like the lowest one.
[00:15:31]  Yeah, and the broadest one.
[00:15:33]  Right, yeah.
[00:15:34]  That's what I was in.
[00:15:35]  I was a tier three operator.
[00:15:38]  And then they have, you know, they do say tier two for green berets, regular green berets and regular Navy SEALs.
[00:15:43]  And the book really emphasizes most of the focus is on tier one, JSOC, black operations.
[00:15:50]  You also mentioned some other, like, even more rarefied units, which I had never even heard of.
[00:15:56]  Yeah.
[00:15:58]  One of them is called like, what, the activity?
[00:16:01]  The activity.
[00:16:01]  Which is a psycho name.
[00:16:03]  It's a good name.
[00:16:04]  I mean, we have to give it up.
[00:16:05]  It's a good name.
[00:16:06]  But like an absolute psycho came up with that.
[00:16:08]  It's so, it goes so hard.
[00:16:10]  You're like, shit, what is the activity?
[00:16:13]  Yeah, the activity.
[00:16:15]  It's an Army Special Mission Unit that's possibly more secretive than Delta Force, considerably smaller.
[00:16:21]  They actually have a sort of, I guess, Air Force, or they have air assets, and they call that the Confederate Air Force.
[00:16:30]  Oh, great.
[00:16:30]  Interesting.
[00:16:31]  All right.
[00:16:32]  Probably just Confederate in the general, like, you know.
[00:16:35]  A general sense?
[00:16:36]  No, no, not like.
[00:16:38]  Why?
[00:16:39]  It's because they're based.
[00:16:41]  It's because they're based in Virginia.
[00:16:44]  Sure.
[00:16:46]  Yeah.
[00:16:46]  And what's the connection there?
[00:16:48]  Well, it's their Confederates.
[00:16:49]  They're based there.
[00:16:50]  But yeah, also, they're also sometimes called the Army of Northern Virginia.
[00:16:53]  There you go.
[00:16:54]  There you go.
[00:16:54]  Thank you.
[00:16:55]  I was missing that.
[00:16:56]  It's not a joke.
[00:16:56]  They called it.
[00:16:57]  Right, that's true.
[00:16:58]  It has a lot of names.
[00:16:59]  It's not just called the activity.
[00:17:02]  So it's the Army of Northern Virginia.
[00:17:04]  They call it that because it's in Northern Virginia.
[00:17:07]  But there really was an Army of Northern Virginia in the Civil War.
[00:17:10]  And so that's where Confederate Air Force.
[00:17:12]  Very funny.
[00:17:13]  Less funny if you're in the crosshairs, one of those drones about to be struck.
[00:17:17]  Well luckily, something that you learned from the book is that the special forces compared to the rest of the army is almost entirely white.
[00:17:27]  It's something like 90% white.
[00:17:29]  Maybe 99%.
[00:17:30]  It's kind of crazy.
[00:17:31]  I didn't realize that before I got into researching it.
[00:17:34]  But yeah, that's what I've been told.
[00:17:37]  I interviewed one guy in the book who he felt, you know, so the Army as a whole is tremendously diverse.
[00:17:44]  Yeah.
[00:17:45]  But the Special Forces is considerably less.
[00:17:48]  In fact, I was just at Trump's military parade.
[00:17:50]  I had, yeah.
[00:17:53]  Shout out.
[00:17:54]  Yeah.
[00:17:55]  Marching in a...
[00:17:56]  He was in it?
[00:17:57]  I was in it, yeah.
[00:17:59]  And it was kind of funny when, you know, the Green Berets marched past because all the preceding formations, you know, they're as diverse as the rest of America.
[00:18:08]  But then when the Green Berets march past, it's like they choose those soldiers that just stand on the North Korean border.
[00:18:13]  And it's all like the tall, square jawed guys.
[00:18:15]  I mean, that's really what the Green Berets look like.
[00:18:17]  It's kind of a joke.
[00:18:18]  But Delta Force, even more so, yeah.
[00:18:21]  And so with Delta Force, there's about, I mean, how many Green Berets are there, like 30,000?
[00:18:25]  There's quite a few, yeah.
[00:18:26]  Thousands of them.
[00:18:26]  Not 30,000, but quite a few, maybe 15, 20.
[00:18:29]  Delta Force is considerably smaller.
[00:18:31]  No, much smaller.
[00:18:32]  Maybe 300 operators, 400.
[00:18:34]  Yeah, and it's, it's, I think, to, I guess, transition a little bit to some of the narrative of the book, because we don't want to just be like, here's what happened in the book.
[00:18:43]  You guys haven't read the book yet.
[00:18:44]  But to give you a little hint, the book is in large part about a murder that occurs when a Delta Force operator shoots his best friend five times and kills him, who is a Green Beret.
[00:18:59]  During a drug binge.
[00:19:01]  Yeah, during a Disney World drug binge, I guess.
[00:19:06]  Around kids.
[00:19:08]  Yeah.
[00:19:09]  Yeah.
[00:19:11]  Well, so actually just, so it's because this is like what this is, I mean, this is really the genesis of the story.
[00:19:18]  It's how you start looking into this.
[00:19:20]  Can you tell us, I mean, just briefly, we don't have to go through the whole entire thing, but what happened between Levine and Leschaker?
[00:19:28]  Well, the reason I chose that incident to open the book and to dedicate the first two chapters to telling that story is because I wanted to demonstrate the degree of impunity that special operators, that Delta Force operators have.
[00:19:44]  And so they went to Disneyland, or the one in Florida, Disney World.
[00:19:49]  Disney World, yeah.
[00:19:50]  Okay.
[00:19:51]  Shout out Disneyland.
[00:19:53]  I've never been that way.
[00:19:54]  If I had to go, I would probably want to do a bunch of drugs as well.
[00:19:57]  But I mean, it's kind of crazy.
[00:19:59]  They were on basically all the drugs, including bath salts, because I had access to Mark Leschiker's toxicology report because he did not survive this day.
[00:20:12]  But one of the drugs that he was on, he was on two bath salts.
[00:20:16]  I forget the full name of it.
[00:20:17]  He was on two different ones.
[00:20:18]  Two different types of.
[00:20:19]  I don't even know there were two different ones.
[00:20:24]  I didn't either.
[00:20:26]  But bas salts can cause hallucinations.
[00:20:28]  It's possible that he may have had poorly cut MDMA or something like that that had basalts in it.
[00:20:34]  I'm not sure he went to a smoke shop and asked for the bas salts.
[00:20:39]  But those can cause hallucinations, really crazy.
[00:20:43]  you know, delusions.
[00:20:44]  And that's exactly what happened to Mark Leschaker, as you mentioned, a Green Beret, tier two Green Beret.
[00:20:51]  And he became convinced that the car was being followed because they were driving back to Fort Bragg.
[00:20:57]  And the driver of the car was the main character of the book, to the extent there's a main character, a guy named Billy Levine, who was a Delta Force operator who had been in the Army for many years and had served many tours in the assassination programs in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan, as well as in parts of Northern Africa.
[00:21:16]  So this is a guy who had been trained in evasive driving.
[00:21:20]  I've seen his enlisted record, and he actually went to a course called evasive driving, as well as counter-surveillance.
[00:21:26]  And so he tells his buddy, you know, you're tripping, man, there's nobody following us.
[00:21:30]  But the other guy couldn't be dissuaded, and the situation really deteriorated from there.
[00:21:36]  And when he got back to their place in Fayetteville, he tried to start taking the engine of the car apart with a screwdriver because he thought that there was like listening devices in there.
[00:21:46]  Billy tried to take the screwdriver home.
[00:21:48]  It led to a physical fight.
[00:21:49]  Billy subdued Mark and then took the two little girls.
[00:21:52]  As you mentioned, both of them had young daughters.
[00:21:54]  It's a very sad aspect of the story.
[00:21:57]  The girls were, I think, five and six years old.
[00:22:00]  So Billy grabs the two girls and takes them inside.
[00:22:03]  And he tried to get help to defuse the situation.
[00:22:08]  In fact, he called his commander on Delta Force, a guy named Jens Merritt.
[00:22:14]  But while he was doing that, while he was locking the back door, locking the windows, Mark was banging on the front door and asking to be let in.
[00:22:20]  And his daughter, being six years old, just came downstairs and let her father in, naturally enough.
[00:22:26]  And then when Levine came around the corner, he was so startled and angered that he pulled out his personal firearm and just shot his best friend multiple times.
[00:22:35]  I think it was five times.
[00:22:38]  All of which is to say, you know, that the case, it was a pretty clear-cut case of murder.
[00:22:43]  I mean, had there been the prosecutorial will to charge Levine for that, the evidence certainly would have supported a charge of first-degree murder.
[00:22:50]  But that's not what happened at all.
[00:22:52]  And that's really the part that I wanted to focus on.
[00:22:54]  Rather than this sad, crazy shooting, these guys on tons of drugs, killing each other, it was really what happened afterwards that was so interesting.
[00:23:02]  Because the first person to arrive at the scene was Jens Merritt, that Delta Force commander of, or Billy Levine's superior.
[00:23:09]  And among the things that he did when he got there was to take Mark Leschiker's phone and keep it and make sure that as a result of that, the police didn't have access to the phone.
[00:23:22]  What was the reasoning he gives there?
[00:23:24]  What was for being there?
[00:23:26]  For taking the phone.
[00:23:27]  Well, I called him and asked him that, and he declined to comment.
[00:23:32]  Smart.
[00:23:36]  Well, I mean, I just figured because so much of this is like, there's like this sort of patina of like national security concerns that like is draped on a lot of these cases to I guess fiddle with the results or with the evidence and that's just immediately where my mind went with that.
[00:23:54]  Well consider it from the perspective of the Delta Force Command.

=== Delta Force's Impunity Problem (06:37) ===

[00:23:57]  A guy like Billy Levine cannot go to prison.
[00:24:01]  If you are someone who has done who has participated in covert operations many times, it's just an unacceptable national security outcome for you to be in a courtroom for any reason, and even more so to go to prison.
[00:24:14]  So this case just has to go away.
[00:24:16]  And I document step by step how they made it go away.
[00:24:20]  He was taken to the police station in handcuffs and there's an arrest report that says first degree murder on it with his name on it.
[00:24:26]  But he wasn't placed formally under arrest.
[00:24:28]  He was never photographed.
[00:24:31]  He wasn't read his rights.
[00:24:32]  He wasn't given a drug test, which is really crucial, even though he just killed a guy.
[00:24:38]  And then he was just released, just let go.
[00:24:42]  They pretended to believe his claim of self-defense, is what he said.
[00:24:45]  I mean, he gave three different accounts of the shooting.
[00:24:47]  He first told a 911 dispatcher that he had shot a stranger, someone that broke into his house.
[00:24:53]  He told Jens Merritt that Mark Leschiker had committed suicide right in front of him.
[00:24:57]  And then finally, he settled on the self-defense story.
[00:25:00]  Even though the medical examiner who first arrived at the scene wrote in her report that there were no weapons around Mark Leschiker's body, and that screwdriver was still where he had dropped it in the driveway.
[00:25:13]  Nevertheless, they just let him go and closed the case that same night.
[00:25:18]  What's the relationship between Special Forces higher-up command and the local cops?
[00:25:27]  I mean, you can imagine the power dynamic there because JSOC is the most elite tier of the U.S. military.
[00:25:35]  It has basically unlimited funding.
[00:25:37]  They're at the forefront of all kinds of military operations.
[00:25:39]  They're a more powerful institution than the CIA and more secretive too.
[00:25:45]  Contrast that with the district attorney of Cumberland County, who's just a small town kind of lawyer.
[00:25:53]  So it's not hard to imagine the sort of power dynamics and the influence that they exert over that office.
[00:25:59]  And in the book, I document case after case of special forces soldiers being taken to the police station in handcuffs, accused of serious crimes, and that DA, Billy West, just dropping the charges every time.
[00:26:12]  Yeah, there's a really sort of arresting scene.
[00:26:15]  I genuinely wasn't trying to make a point there.
[00:26:18]  There is a striking scene after Billy Levine is let go that night of just like a bunch of Delta Force guys showing up in these big souped up trucks to kind of like welcome him back.
[00:26:31]  And there's hints of a sort of maybe rivalry in the same way that you might see with like in like gangland between the Green Berets or between Leshikar's team and between Billy Levine's after that as well.
[00:26:45]  I mean you talk about the funeral where there's some harsh words there.
[00:26:49]  But I think it's really in the aftermath of the shooting, at least in terms of the book, that like there starts to be a lot more details or you start to include a lot more details that really do make it seem like more in line with a gang that's being run out of that's being run out of Fort Bragg than anything else.
[00:27:08]  Because you can pretty much immediately see one of the problems, right?
[00:27:12]  Like you have this giant, it's the biggest military base in the U.S.
[00:27:15]  But you also have more people on that base who, I mean, the further you are in special operations, sort of the further you get to be off the range or whatever, off the ranch.
[00:27:24]  I don't know what that phrase is, but like, you know, you can grow the beard long or like you can work under a cover identity, but you do these things that like aren't regular soldiering, you might say.
[00:27:33]  Oftentimes, maybe even dealing with like drugs or, you know, drug lords or whatever.
[00:27:39]  And to have a, seemingly a fairly captured judiciary in that town that is where all these people live seems like sort of a bad recipe for some problems.
[00:27:51]  Yes, certainly.
[00:27:52]  And, you know, I talked to a police officer in this little town called Vass.
[00:27:57]  Her name was Diane Ballard, and she told me about seeing case after case get dropped against special forces soldiers who turned up accused of crimes.
[00:28:07]  It's definitely a thing, and that's why I really emphasize the point of impunity, which extends to, you know, because after that, you know, the shooting of Mark Leschaker was really just a prelude to the things that happened later.
[00:28:18]  And importantly, Billy Levine himself ended up murdered just 18 months later.
[00:28:24]  And among the many suspects in his death were Mark's teammates because they were clearly unhappy.
[00:28:29]  I mean, you know, you don't get charged with murder, but that doesn't mean you don't have problems in the community.
[00:28:34]  You just killed a guy.
[00:28:36]  So his teammates were among the people who were looked at as possibly responsible.
[00:28:41]  The total culture of impunity or necessary impunity because of the nature of the work goes back to this sort of Omerta code that these guys operate with to the point that you were saying earlier, unlike the CIA, we were talking about this backstage, they're not calling, when they're pissed off, they're not calling up their buddy at the New York Times to leak a bunch of shit to make trouble.
[00:29:05]  There is a real like gang code or you know like mafia code among these guys and they all handle it in-house Whether that means like taking care of the guy who shot your boy when he was fucking high on his mind or whatever or Whether it's never talking I mean it's always never talking about whatever happens overseas,
[00:29:26]  which I want to talk about And it it just sort of reinforces and strengthens the whole thing when we talk about just like accountability in a larger sense right not just for these individual acts but like for anybody in the other branches of the government outside of the executive to actually know what the fuck is going on with these guys who are basically running all of the major ops in every theater the U.S. is in.
[00:29:53]  yeah it's um like it's all it's all related you know what I mean mhm And actually it's funny.
[00:30:00]  I got a weird signal message last night from a staffer for a senator who's known as an advocate for, who's a civil libertarian.
[00:30:10]  And the staffer was asking me, hey, he wanted more information about certain aspects of Delta's operations.
[00:30:17]  In particular, their use of what's called commercial cover, which is when operators go overseas disguised as American businessmen.
[00:30:26]  And, you know, that exchange, among other things, you know, emphasized to me or brought home how much Congress has cut out of this loop.

=== Surge in Special Forces (15:02) ===

[00:30:35]  I mean, that's really the important thing.
[00:30:37]  It's top-down over the executive.
[00:30:39]  Right, unlike the CIA as well, which is its own institution, this is all rolled up into the executive.
[00:30:45]  And it's sort of like part of, or a necessary part of even the strengthening of the executive that we've seen since basically Raygame.
[00:30:53]  Oh, yeah, it's a big part of that.
[00:30:54]  And it does go back.
[00:30:55]  I'm glad you mentioned Reagan because, you know, this stuff, it really came into fruition and developed in the modern era, but the roots of it are certainly in the Reagan administration.
[00:31:04]  And in particular, I focus on the role of George H.W. Bush in the transfer of authority over covert action from the CIA to the military right after the CIA was put for the first time under congressional oversight.
[00:31:19]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:31:20]  You said something earlier, too, about how these guys were, you know, they kind of emerged as a proxy force, basically.
[00:31:27]  And so much of the book is, you know, spans the GWAT.
[00:31:36]  Do you call it GWAT or GWAT?
[00:31:40]  I guess I say GWAT.
[00:31:42]  The global war on terror, but it's not in the community.
[00:31:45]  You guys not in the community like us.
[00:31:48]  It's a cringe term, but there's really not a suitable substitute.
[00:31:52]  You can say post-9-11 wars.
[00:31:53]  How do you describe the era after 9-11?
[00:31:56]  Yeah, I don't know.
[00:31:57]  Just too many wars.
[00:32:00]  And all of them almost basically proxy wars, right?
[00:32:04]  All different theaters all across the world, in all different countries, with basically no oversight.
[00:32:10]  I mean, outside of the big, you know, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria.
[00:32:15]  I mean, there's so many, these guys are in so many other places.
[00:32:19]  And, you know, I think that as you kind of detail in the book, their sort of, their rise as a proxy force and the way that we fight across the world in these different proxy battles that require or are sort of designed for their use, like these, these two kind of reinforce each other and have completely changed the way the United States operates around the world.
[00:32:45]  I mean, it's just, it isn't anything like what people think it is.
[00:32:50]  Yeah, and that transformation, I think, really accelerated under President Obama.
[00:32:55]  And we're now at the point where, although the U.S. is sponsoring and prolonging and engaging in wars all over the world, there really are no conventional troops deployed.
[00:33:04]  There are none.
[00:33:05]  Because, you know, I think there's a limit on the war-making powers of the government, which is that American citizens, by and large, are pretty tuned out of foreign policy and don't really care that much.
[00:33:17]  But they do care when soldiers come home in body bags.
[00:33:20]  That's something that actually will generate widespread grassroots opposition to wars.
[00:33:25]  And we saw that most obviously in the Iraq War.
[00:33:28]  It wasn't the fact that the U.S. military had killed, I don't know how many hundreds of thousands or a million people.
[00:33:34]  It was the fact that 5,000, 7,000 soldiers had died.
[00:33:38]  And so, you know, the new war paradigm that was created under President Obama was to do everything through special forces, with drone strikes, with assassinations, with covert action.
[00:33:49]  Because most of these guys, by and large, I mean, they're good at what they do, they're good at fighting, and they mostly don't get killed.
[00:33:56]  Yeah.
[00:33:56]  And it keeps the American public in the dark because they say, oh, I'm seeing all this on the news, but as long as we're not sending American troops, it's like, babe, those troops are everywhere.
[00:34:06]  They're everywhere and they've been everywhere.
[00:34:07]  Like, we are sending troops.
[00:34:09]  We are there.
[00:34:10]  And yet there is this, we get to kind of operate at home and manage expectations as if none of that's going on.
[00:34:18]  Yeah, it allows people to tune it out.
[00:34:20]  Yeah, I mean, one of the things that you describe in here, and that's just, I think people generally know about, especially higher-level operators in the special forces, is that these guys are basically assassins.
[00:34:33]  And not only are they assassins, but they're assassins who have this sort of rolling mission.
[00:34:37]  You describe it, I can't remember the acronym.
[00:34:41]  It's like one of the most unwieldy ones I've seen.
[00:34:44]  Yeah, F3EAD.
[00:34:46]  Oh, yeah, that was awful.
[00:34:47]  It's a tough one.
[00:34:48]  It's like a Florida rapper.
[00:34:50]  But it really is.
[00:34:54]  But the process that's described there is like, you know, they'll go and kill some people at a house on who knows what spurious intelligence, take all those people's electronic devices, take as many names from that as possible, get as much information from that as possible, and then within a vanishingly short timeframe, go and kill, most likely kill, maybe capture, but most likely kill the contacts that they got from that house.
[00:35:18]  And they're doing this like, I mean, some of these raids you're talking about are like basically people operating this level for like 72 hours straight.
[00:35:26]  You know, like mission after mission after mission after mission.
[00:35:29]  And you get the sense that like these guys are less like a soldier that someone might imagine, even like a special forces soldier that someone might imagine, like, you know, sneaking into somewhere and whatever, doing this like complex mission,
[00:35:41]  but like really almost on the same level as like a Sicario or like a or just a hitman, but like somebody who has just almost this infinite list of targets and absolutely nobody sort of keeping watch and checking them because all the missions are secret and oftentimes ordered by the executive.
[00:36:01]  Right.
[00:36:01]  That really became the model during the Iraq War and what's called the surge.
[00:36:06]  Yes.
[00:36:07]  Surge.
[00:36:07]  2007 or 2008.
[00:36:10]  What happened?
[00:36:11]  I mean at that point the war in Iraq was going very poorly for the Bush administration and they were open to new ideas of how to prosecute it.
[00:36:18]  And that's really when you had certain officials in the special operations community in JSOC, notably Stanley McChrystal, the JSOC commander at that time.
[00:36:26]  And, you know, the surge on its face, on the surface, was a buildup of conventional troops in Baghdad to sort of hold down the fort and maintain security.
[00:36:36]  But really all the action was behind the scenes.
[00:36:39]  That's when you had Delta Force really become the death squad that it evolved into was at that time.
[00:36:46]  And, you know, the model became, because before that, Delta Force had been doing relatively niche missions, like looking for weapons of mass destruction that didn't exist, or hunting down former regime officials was the main thing they were doing.
[00:36:58]  They killed Uday and Kuse, they captured Saddam.
[00:37:02]  But Stanley McChrystal convinced the administration that he could use the same force to decimate the ranks of the insurgency.
[00:37:09]  And they did this work always at night, always wearing civilian clothes or just something other than a uniform.
[00:37:16]  And they always did it by taking their target or taking their targets by surprise.
[00:37:22]  Rather than, you know, conventional infantry will mount patrols and go on patrols and wait to be shot at and then close with that formation of those enemies and kill them.
[00:37:34]  Whereas Delta Force uses intelligence to identify targets in advance and go sneak up on them, you know, kick the door down, and then, yeah, I mean, you might get lucky and be able to surrender, but for the most part, everyone on that target's going to die.
[00:37:48]  Yeah, and just to be clear, the level of intelligence that the U.S. was working with in Iraq and Afghanistan at this time was, I think, spurious at best in many cases.
[00:37:59]  I mean, you mentioned it before, like the lack of accountability.
[00:38:02]  There's no oversight, so there's no way to know.
[00:38:04]  But sort of the best accounts suggest that the error rate's probably around 50%, or, you know, just 50% of the time, it's just people who have no, because, you know, the language capabilities are very lacking, especially in Iraq and Syria.
[00:38:19]  Yeah, I mean, so a guy like Billy Levine, who, again, like, I feel like is the through line to the book, if there is one.
[00:38:26]  I mean, there is one.
[00:38:27]  That sounded like a, you guys know what I mean.
[00:38:29]  But he's like, he's somebody who appears throughout the entirety of the book.
[00:38:34]  Like, this is the kind of stuff that he was doing.
[00:38:36]  I mean, he was basically deployed as a hitman overseas by the government.
[00:38:40]  And at the same time, you know, again, these are, I'm not going to say they're super difficult missions because oftentimes, I mean, I'm sure they are.
[00:38:49]  I couldn't do them.
[00:38:50]  But like, a lot of the times it seems like these guys are kicking down people's doors and just like shooting six or seven people, taking everyone's phone, and then doing it again.
[00:38:57]  But it seems like there's this almost like this amphetamine kind of, like, there is this drug-fueled nature to it.
[00:39:03]  And you talk about this quite a bit.
[00:39:05]  I mean, these guys were being given, and this is very common in war, I mean, since probably before World War II, but very famously starting in World War II, or a lot of it very prominently in World War II, but being given amphetamines and kind of going for this like super extended period of time doing this kind of high-intensity physical stuff and not sleeping for days at a time, sort of tweaked out of their minds.
[00:39:30]  And also having like no oversight, having this lawless way of operating.
[00:39:35]  That is, you know, obviously the U.S. Army does a lot of things in like big army that are lawless, or at least don't follow the law as it's written.
[00:39:42]  But like the rules of engagement being totally different, accountability being nil, even though it's very low in the actual regular Army already.
[00:39:50]  But basically acting like cowboys and then being sent home.
[00:39:54]  And like, what was Levine's career like?
[00:39:57]  Was he doing this kind of stuff?
[00:39:59]  Yeah, he made the cut for Delta Force in 2009, which was a pivotal time because, you know, when President Obama was elected in 08, he set about withdrawing from Iraq.
[00:40:10]  But because the surge had been perceived as a success, he, when confronted with the problem of the ongoing war in Afghanistan, decided to elevate Stanley McChrystal to command the entire war and made, you know, there was a surge in Afghanistan.
[00:40:27]  And I call it an assassination program.
[00:40:29]  A lot of people are more familiar with the term night raids, which was the euphemism that was consistently used for assassinations, but it was drone strikes and night raids.
[00:40:39]  That was the main method of waging war.
[00:40:41]  Levine came up right around that time, and his first rotations were in Afghanistan at a time of really peak violence there.
[00:40:48]  And then, with regards to the amphetamine thing, you know, in his separation board, at the time of his death, he was being discharged from the army because he'd been arrested.
[00:40:56]  He had been arrested six times on felony charges, including first-degree murder, including aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, manufacturing drugs, etc.
[00:41:06]  So he was really messing up, and he was called upon to explain his drug, his out-of-control substance abuse.
[00:41:14]  And I spoke on background to a person who had been on that separation board and told me that Levine said that it was them prescribing him dextroamphetamine that originally engendered the taste that he had for crack cocaine because that was his main thing.
[00:41:30]  He was smoking crack every day.
[00:41:32]  So I mean, what other because you describe it in here, but like what kind of drugs are they being prescribed officially by the Army?
[00:41:39]  I mean, it's a pretty extraordinary list.
[00:41:43]  Dextroamphetamine or Adderall for sleep deprivation and then ambien in order to sleep.
[00:41:51]  It's a good combo.
[00:41:52]  Yeah.
[00:41:55]  As well as tramadol to deal with chronic pain because a lot of these guys, it's very hard on your body this work.
[00:42:02]  And so all those three things, and plus many of them, I'm not going to say all, but you know, there's just raging alcoholism in the army and especially in the special forces.
[00:42:11]  And steroids.
[00:42:12]  Steroids.
[00:42:14]  It's crazy reading this because these guys are housing like insane amounts of drugs and alcohol where it's sort of like they do feel like they have this superhuman quality.
[00:42:25]  Like I don't want to like feed into the like special forces narrative about them being these like hulking, but they kind of like are these like massive like drug killing machines.
[00:42:35]  Like that's what it feels like.
[00:42:38]  I think that's a fair description.
[00:42:42]  And we made him that.
[00:42:44]  Indeed, yes.
[00:42:46]  I mean many in this audience will drink two IPAs at this and then go home later and be to your girlfriend like oh man, I feel heavy.
[00:42:55]  But these guys were drinking like 24 packs and then like and smoking crack and like mass murdering people.
[00:43:04]  Yeah.
[00:43:04]  I mean Levine was, you know, I didn't even know what boofing was before I started recently.
[00:43:09]  You do mention that in here, yeah.
[00:43:11]  I mean that's crazy when you can't, when smoking crack doesn't do it for you, you have to insert a speedball in your rectum.
[00:43:17]  Yeah.
[00:43:19]  I mean, I think that's the thing.
[00:43:21]  While he's an active duty operator on Delta Force, I can't emphasize enough.
[00:43:26]  Like, doing that while he's still on active duty in the Army.
[00:43:29]  Yeah.
[00:43:30]  I mean, and so that's, I mean, you talk about like various problem cases within Delta Force, including one guy who people are afraid is going to do a mass shooting.
[00:43:40]  And they're like, well, we'll just like move him to an administrative position.
[00:43:45]  But like that, there is this, there is this culture of impunity that is prevalent in Delta Force, where like you have to be like fucking Levine.
[00:43:56]  You have to like have killed the guy, been arrested for making fucking crack or meth, and also harboring a fugitive.
[00:44:02]  And like, you know, you have to arrest it for six felonies in order to eventually be separated from the army.
[00:44:07]  But a lot of people who are only maybe on rape charges or something like that will just get moved to a different position within Delta Force or within special operations.
[00:44:16]  And there is this sense that like you, if you're in this, you're in this no matter how much you fuck up.
[00:44:23]  And like, that doesn't mean they won't bully, they'll fuck with these guys or whatnot, bully.
[00:44:28]  Maybe that's the wrong phrase.
[00:44:29]  But like they won't sort of move these guys to like less glamorous positions or move them out of positions they might want to be in, but they're still kind of kept in the family and it's all sort of kept in-house.
[00:44:39]  Yeah, just like a gang.
[00:44:41]  And you know, it's an unspoken spoken rule that once you're at that level, once you know where the bodies are buried, basically, not only are you not going to get arrested or not prosecuted, but they're going to allow you to serve out your 20 years because all these guys serve 20 years and once you've served 20 years, you get a pension for life.
[00:45:00]  It's a pretty good deal, actually, because Levine was set to retire at age 37 with a pension for life and also lifelong medical benefits.
[00:45:09]  Yeah, I was about to say also probably 100% disability.
[00:45:12]  100% disability as well for PTSD and hearing loss and those things.
[00:45:16]  So you get a nice retirement package, so to speak.
[00:45:19]  It's not going to make you wealthy, but when you're talking about people that have an associate's degree or no college education, it's a pretty good deal.
[00:45:25]  And are like extremely fucked up and can't do anything but like kill people on drugs.
[00:45:28]  And do podcasts.
[00:45:29]  Yeah.
[00:45:33]  He's not talking about me.
[00:45:33]  He's talking about Sean Ryan.

=== Convicted And Ruined (12:43) ===

[00:45:38]  But yeah, I talk about one operator named Christo Balballejo who he raped a woman and they did this charade of a court-martial.
[00:45:48]  Actually, that was a big problem, as much of a problem as the shooting of Mark Leschiker.
[00:45:52]  In fact, they happened almost simultaneously.
[00:45:54]  So I talked at the beginning of this about the murder of Mark Leshiker.
[00:45:58]  Right at that same time, one of Levine's buddies, an operator named Cristobal Vallejo, who is a white guy, although he has an Hispanic name, he, is that funny?
[00:46:08]  I don't understand it either.
[00:46:09]  Sometimes people laugh nervously like they do in movies.
[00:46:11]  Okay, sorry.
[00:46:17]  He raped a woman after a party at this warehouse that they maintained for these sort of illegal after-hours parties and drug storage depot.
[00:46:29]  But she was an Army officer, and she followed the book 100% in reporting this murder.
[00:46:33]  I mean, excuse me, this rape.
[00:46:35]  She told the first people that she talked to that she had just been raped.
[00:46:38]  She didn't change clothes.
[00:46:39]  She went first thing in the morning to the hospital and got a rape kit.
[00:46:42]  I'm sorry to talk about such brutal realities.
[00:46:46]  Just kind of launching into it without any trigger warning.
[00:46:49]  But it's a brutal world.
[00:46:51]  In any case, she had that rape kit, which was positive for his DNA, et cetera, et cetera.
[00:46:57]  They just had him completely dead to rights.
[00:46:59]  And in fact, he was arrested and charged with rape.
[00:47:04]  But then that's when the sort of wheels start turning, phone calls start getting made.
[00:47:09]  And they managed to move that rape trial onto Fort Bragg and conduct it, because it had happened off base, so it was a civilian thing.
[00:47:16]  But they moved it on base and did it as a military trial in which he was exonerated in this complete kangaroo court, which I pretty exhaustively document step by step just to show that there's not.
[00:47:26]  That's really upsetting.
[00:47:28]  It was to me as well.
[00:47:30]  And after that, you know, after he had been exonerated, this is all a long-winded way of saying that he remained in the Army for five more years after that, just doing nothing, just sitting at a desk job until he reached his 20-year mark and was able to retire to Colorado.
[00:47:46]  So I want to talk a little bit more about drugs, because it's not just that they're doing them, but they're also moving them, selling them, bringing them over, bringing them back, doing all sorts of things.
[00:47:58]  They're moving weight.
[00:48:00]  Yeah.
[00:48:01]  Another thing that people really associate with the CIA, obviously, with Vietnam, and that also then just got kind of moved over into the special forces, it seems like.
[00:48:13]  Can we talk a little bit about this?
[00:48:14]  Because you put drug trafficking right front and center right in the book title.
[00:48:20]  And it's a big part of the culture there.
[00:48:23]  Yeah.
[00:48:24]  To my surprise, I really wasn't tracking, as a, you know, previously working as a war reporter and other things, you know, I wasn't really tracking the extent to which that had become a thing.
[00:48:34]  Where Green Berets, you know, I heard you say side hustle earlier.
[00:48:38]  That's an accurate way of talking about it.
[00:48:41]  Yeah.
[00:48:42]  And I think this is not the central point, but it's on my mind because of what we were talking about earlier.
[00:48:48]  You know, it's not just to make money.
[00:48:50]  A lot of these guys are complete adrenaline drunkies.
[00:48:54]  Like they need challenge.
[00:48:55]  They need stimulation.
[00:48:57]  They're almost childlike in that way.
[00:48:59]  They can't be bored, and they want danger.
[00:49:02]  They live for danger.
[00:49:04]  And once you've done that for a long time, you kind of get addicted to it.
[00:49:06]  And so I've talked to several either Navy SEALs or Green Berets who have been convicted.
[00:49:13]  Again, that's Green Berets, so it's different from JSOC.
[00:49:16]  I have seen cases of Green Berets get convicted of trafficking drugs.
[00:49:21]  They have comparatively less impunity.
[00:49:23]  Anyway, who have told me that they did it for the excitement?
[00:49:27]  I interviewed a guy named Dan Gould and his partner Henry Royer, who had two Green Berets in Fayetteville, who were trafficking million-dollar quantities of Coke on U.S. military aircraft from Bogosa, Columbia to Duke Airfield in Florida.
[00:49:43]  and were busted for this and prosecuted and convicted.
[00:49:46]  And that's what Dan Gould told me.
[00:49:48]  He was like, you know, the money was nice, but I really, I just wanted something to do.
[00:49:52]  I was so bored being stationed in Columbia by myself.
[00:49:55]  You know, this almost sounds funny, but like, not to bring up Sean Ryan again, but there's an episode of his podcast where he describes, and he was like, I think a Green Beret or something like that, but he describes like after he got out, he got really bored and decided to start trafficking drugs.
[00:50:13]  And I was like, this is just like another classic Army liar.
[00:50:17]  But now I'm like, maybe he was telling the truth there.
[00:50:20]  I don't think so, not Sean Ryan.
[00:50:24]  But it's, it's, I mean, there's a scene in this book where a former, I guess, disgraced deputy or sheriff and DEA agent is, like, has a bunch of money in all these like literal washing machines that are being tended by a former ISIS trainee in Syria.
[00:50:50]  And he's working alongside a Green Beret, I think a Green Beret logistics guy, and Billy Levine, a Delta Force operator.
[00:50:58]  And first of all, you got to go only in America, right?
[00:51:01]  But it takes all kinds.
[00:51:02]  It takes all kinds.
[00:51:03]  And he's running this, and the money in those washing machines is from drug money that he's getting from moving all these dope for the cartels.
[00:51:12]  And it's just sort of an extraordinary scene that's like this crossroads of all this global war on terror stuff.
[00:51:18]  And I'm including the cartels in that, coming together to have like 50K in a washing machine in North Carolina.
[00:51:25]  50K, he was making a lot more money than that.
[00:51:28]  I think he told me $700,000 he had at some point in one of his washing machines.
[00:51:33]  But yeah, Freddie Huff, Roland Stone just published an excerpt of that chapter.
[00:51:37]  He was a very interesting character who, you know, he wasn't a military guy.
[00:51:42]  He was a police officer.
[00:51:44]  But he was nevertheless one of the most fascinating characters.
[00:51:47]  He had kind of a similar trajectory to these other guys because he was like a really hard-charging young canine officer, an expert in asset forfeiture.
[00:51:58]  He was just really good at his job and he was very dedicated to it.
[00:52:02]  But he got fired from the state highway patrol for giving a DWI ticket to a donor to the governor of North Carolina.
[00:52:11]  And he was very bitter about that.
[00:52:13]  And he decided that he was going to use everything that he had learned as a counter-narcotics officer to actually traffic drugs.
[00:52:23]  And so he linked up with one of the brothers of Miguel Ángel Trevino Morales, one of the most infamous drug lords in Mexican history, and started moving wholesale cocaine from the Mexican border up to North Carolina.
[00:52:44]  He had a massive operation.
[00:52:46]  And at a certain point, yeah, the would-be ISIS fighter plays a bit role.
[00:52:51]  He's just a guy who was, you know, who had converted to Islam and moved to Syria, but he became disillusioned with the path of jihad, kind of like you, Brace.
[00:53:03]  It's like, yeah, we should have linked.
[00:53:07]  And escaped from a training camp, came back.
[00:53:09]  Anyway, he was the link that introduced Huff, who was the police officer, to Timothy Dumas, who is someone we haven't talked about yet, but he was found dead next to Billy Levine in 2020.
[00:53:19]  Both of their bodies were found on base.
[00:53:22]  And it was really investigating that murder, which led to this book.
[00:53:26]  But in any case, he turned out to be the link between Huff and Fort Bragg.
[00:53:31]  Because once Huff realized that, because to Huff, Fort Bragg was a massive market.
[00:53:36]  I mean, they were consuming so much cocaine.
[00:53:38]  I try to make an estimate of exactly how much Coke Huff sold off to Fort Bragg soldiers.
[00:53:47]  And it was conceivably three tons of cocaine in like a three-year period.
[00:53:51]  Now, the estimates vary.
[00:53:52]  It depends upon.
[00:53:53]  I mean, it could be lower.
[00:53:54]  It might have been a few hundred kilos, but it was somewhere in the hundreds of kilos to multiple tons of cocaine.
[00:54:00]  That's a lot.
[00:54:01]  It's a lot, yeah.
[00:54:02]  Yeah.
[00:54:03]  Yeah.
[00:54:03]  While you're like in the barracks or whatever.
[00:54:08]  I mean, 95.
[00:54:10]  That's what happens when you have 95% male population, you know, 50,000 people.
[00:54:15]  I've been sizzed up with like six other guys and being like, so I guess we'll just be here tonight.
[00:54:22]  I got a really good idea for a new war.
[00:54:26]  You talk about the compounds there and all of the different kind of areas and what these guys are getting into.
[00:54:33]  They're not just all sitting around Kumbaya.
[00:54:35]  No.
[00:54:36]  No, no, they're not.
[00:54:39]  But yeah, so Huff turned out to be the most, one of my best sources because he was convicted eventually of drug trafficking.
[00:54:48]  And he was not the first person to tell me that there was a cartel on Fort Bragg to use those words.
[00:54:55]  He used those words.
[00:54:55]  He wasn't the first, but he was the only one who really knew them individually and could tell me for a fact, like, yeah, I sold weight to all those guys and was able to name several of them.
[00:55:08]  Do you think like this, I mean, I feel like you're fairly careful about this in the book, and obviously you can be careful about this now, too, because I don't know the legality of saying this, but like, do you feel, how much awareness from the top do you feel that there is about some of the stuff that goes down?
[00:55:25]  It's hard to say.
[00:55:26]  I mean, certainly when there's these covered up cases that we're talking about, the command is clearly aware of what's happening.
[00:55:32]  I mean, what I always wonder is how many cases don't come to light at all.
[00:55:35]  Because every case that I investigated, at some point there was an arrest record generator, something that I could get through FOIA or through public records requests.
[00:55:45]  But if there was ever a case where none of that happened, then I would have never known about it, and neither would anybody else.
[00:55:50]  Which is probably the case.
[00:55:52]  I mean, I think it's safe to assume that a lot of this stuff doesn't make it to paper.
[00:55:56]  I think that's a fair inference.
[00:55:58]  Yeah, I mean, it's one of the things that you talk about, and again, like all this is in the book, so I don't want to spend too much time on it because I actually want to ask a little bit about your investigation into this.
[00:56:10]  But I think just for context's sake, Billy Levine, after shooting Leshaker and sort of spiraling, which makes sense.
[00:56:20]  I mean, it's kind of unclear what happened there, but it's very clear that he was not happy that it happened.
[00:56:26]  And he took it really hard.
[00:56:28]  And it ruined his life.
[00:56:30]  Like it very clearly ruined his life.
[00:56:33]  That he begins doing this sort of drug dealing.
[00:56:37]  And more low level, it seems like sort of dealing to his friends and people he knows, but then kind of getting more into it with guys like Huff.
[00:56:47]  I mean, how does that trajectory play itself out with him?
[00:56:53]  You know, I sometimes ask myself if Billy Levine wanted to die, because it's one thing to be exonerated of murder.
[00:57:01]  It's another thing to live with the fact that you just killed your best friend in front of your own kid and in front of his kid.
[00:57:09]  He lost custody of his daughter after that.
[00:57:13]  And his subsequent actions were so reckless that it makes you wonder.
[00:57:18]  And he was not a one-dimensional character by any means.
[00:57:21]  In fact, he was a lot more complicated as a person than I think your average sort of like roided up meathead stereotype.
[00:57:32]  In fact, he had developed the conviction somewhere along the line that really the global war on terrorism and everything that he was doing as a soldier was really morally wrong.
[00:57:43]  He was one of the rare operators who kind of comes around to that perspective.
[00:57:49]  And he was known to tell people that he had lost faith in the wars, that he was depressed, that he didn't think that what they were doing was right, etc.
[00:57:59]  And then that's after that is when he killed his friend.
[00:58:02]  And so with all those things weighing on his conscience is when he really started to spiral and act like a complete maniac.
[00:58:09]  I mean, one detail that really stuck out to me is that both Levine and the guy he killed, his best friend, Mark Leschikar, both their moms work at grocery stores.

=== Rough Military Town (02:05) ===

[00:58:21]  And you don't get the sense that these are sort of very wealthy people.
[00:58:28]  And I mean, throughout it, I mean, this is, I wasn't sort of joking about this.
[00:58:31]  I mean, this is like a lot of these guys have sort of these side hustle businesses, you know, sometimes selling like a little bit of Coke here and there to seemingly, I don't know, get a little bit of extra money.
[00:58:42]  But there is this, especially as Levine's life gets worse, he sort of gets in and you have some colorful examples with a, I don't know, a certain element of society that does not seem very healthy.
[00:58:57]  And it seems like around Fort Bragg, there is just this sort of like, I mean, it seems like it exists as this cancerous like tumor on North Carolina itself.
[00:59:07]  And then around it, these sort of like, I don't know, I don't know if cancer works, but like these kind of other kind of industries that feed all of these pretty fucked up guys who live on this base.
[00:59:20]  Yeah, Fayetteville is a rough town.
[00:59:23]  I mean, I can remember, for years it's been infamous.
[00:59:27]  For decades, it's been infamous as a place where sort of druggy dropout soldiers like hang around if their time and service is up, using drugs, selling drugs.
[00:59:37]  But with the deterioration of material conditions all across the United States, and particularly in the heartland of America, especially after COVID, after the implosion of the war in Afghanistan, it's bad.
[00:59:50]  The situation is bad.
[00:59:51]  I can remember a time when I was like, because I would go around knocking on doors all the time because, you know, just trying to track down sources.
[00:59:58]  And I can remember in one neighborhood, you know, the sun was going down, and I was looking around, and I was realizing this is not a safe place to be.
[01:00:06]  And, you know, I wouldn't have expected to feel that way in a small town in North Carolina, but it was definitely that way.
[01:00:12]  I was like, I need to be indoors after dark around here, just because of the sort of people lurking around and looking at me.
[01:00:18]  You know, there's like dogs barking and stuff, and like there's just crack houses.
[01:00:23]  It's rough.
[01:00:23]  It's a rough military town for sure.

=== Squadron 30s: Military Realities (09:26) ===

[01:00:27]  I want to ask, too, because, I mean, we're talking about these guys, and in the case of Levine and a lot of the Green Beret guys, and even in JSOC, they are these kind of, I mean, you described them as these sort of like meathead, you just said like meathead, Reuted up, crackhead assassins, you know, kind of.
[01:00:47]  But there is like another element of these guys, kind of the like, you know, higher echelon or whatever, that are like, I mean, not to like go, you know, right-wing brain theory on it, but like higher IQ, maybe more educated, kind of more elite, that are working these sort of, you know, more clandestine, covert ops that we kind of talked about.
[01:01:12]  And so there's this sort of like bizarre, like how does that mix together?
[01:01:16]  Like, what does that look like?
[01:01:20]  It's certainly heterogeneous to a degree.
[01:01:24]  You know, the book mostly focuses on enlisted guys.
[01:01:28]  A lot of books about military, about the military, military history, especially if they're written by more like mainstream reporters, they often focus exclusively on the world of officers, focus on the personalities of generals, colonels, and so forth.
[01:01:43]  And I wanted to do something different with this book, which is to focus, you know, on the sort of working class.
[01:01:48]  I mean, for folks who don't know, when you're enlisted in the military, it's like you don't have a college degree.
[01:01:53]  Like the class divide is built into the military.
[01:01:55]  Officers are people who have college degrees and have commissions.
[01:01:59]  And I felt like there's a sort of more real and true narrative to be found among the enlisted guys and the reality of their lives.
[01:02:09]  And so, and there is also a hierarchy among those, you know, talking about, first of all, you have to have a certain intelligence quotient to get into the special forces.
[01:02:18]  And that's because you have to be able to learn a second language, or at least learn the rudiments of a second language to be a Green Beret.
[01:02:25]  And then beyond that, yeah, some of them are, you know, there's intelligent people to be found everywhere in the world.
[01:02:30]  And the smartest ones end up rising the highest.
[01:02:33]  And in the book, I talk about a compartmented element of Delta Force called G Squadron.
[01:02:38]  Yeah.
[01:02:39]  That's a great name, by the way.
[01:02:40]  It is a great name, I gotta admit.
[01:02:43]  And those are like the 40 to 50 most seasoned, most mature operators.
[01:02:48]  Most of them are older.
[01:02:50]  You know, it's more like guys in their 40s.
[01:02:51]  Most guys on Delta Force are in their 30s, early 30s to mid-30s, late 30s.
[01:02:55]  G Squadron's a little bit older than that.
[01:02:58]  It tends to be the guys who have fewer tattoos, who just don't look as much the part.
[01:03:04]  And G Squadron, to my knowledge, the existence of it has only been reported in one other place by Sean Naylor, who wrote the book on JSOC.
[01:03:13]  And G Squadron's missions are truly covert.
[01:03:17]  I mean, they are the ones who do things that the U.S. government will deny having any role in.
[01:03:24]  They do solo missions.
[01:03:26]  You can have a guy, I mean, imagine, because not everything they do is connected to war and assassinations.
[01:03:31]  It very much depends on the time, the place, the country, what they're doing, but they have the capacity to do things like deploy to certain countries in Asia under disguise as business people and then install wiretaps at an embassy or some other place where they want microphones.
[01:03:49]  I mean, that's where you have a guy from G Squadron working by himself, living overseas for maybe for a long period of time undercover, and then carrying out these types of missions.
[01:03:58]  And you have to have a certain level of intelligence to be able to do that.
[01:04:01]  Yeah, this is the kind of stuff we were saying, though, that you think the CIA is doing, and really it's rolled up under the executive.
[01:04:07]  And I just feel like that is so important to hammer home because as everyone is talking so much nowadays about like you know kind of the centralization of power under Trump or however they want to phrase it, like this has been a slow build for a long time and it shows up in places that aren't just you know blockbuster Supreme Court cases or whatever, but as you're saying,
[01:04:32]  like these in this fucking squad that literally only one other person has reported on and nobody's even heard of.
[01:04:41]  Yeah, and you know, it's like I said at the beginning, the lack of information or the paucity of information around JSOC is really extraordinary.
[01:04:51]  By and large, people don't know it exists.
[01:04:53]  And even if they do, they're not really aware of what it does.
[01:04:57]  You know, even I think our own Congress doesn't know, and to some extent doesn't want to know, I feel like.
[01:05:02]  Well, then they'd have to do something.
[01:05:03]  I think they're happy to let the executive have.
[01:05:05]  I mean, Congress has been so complicit.
[01:05:07]  It's just a fake.
[01:05:09]  I think that goes to talking about congressional war powers and so much of this being under the executive.
[01:05:15]  Every time there's something like, you know, we bomb Iran or like Yemen or something, people always like, well, there's no war powers resolution.
[01:05:22]  It's like, they're not doing those anymore.
[01:05:25]  That's like some World War II shit.
[01:05:27]  Like, they're not, genuinely, I think it is some World War II.
[01:05:30]  Congress loves to do it too.
[01:05:31]  They're always like, oh, you can't do it without us.
[01:05:33]  And it's like, babe, what do you think we've been doing?
[01:05:35]  They've been doing it without you.
[01:05:37]  I mean, there's a really, if you'll permit me to read like two sentences from your own book at you.
[01:05:44]  But I mean, the part about G Squadron, I think, was like really, I mean, my mind was blown reading it.
[01:05:50]  But you know, this is an interview you do with a rather young woman who's a signature reduction specialist at G Squadron.
[01:05:57]  Great, awesome title, by the way.
[01:05:59]  And I mean, this is a U.S. Army soldier.
[01:06:02]  She was a former, she served five years and then was a civilian employee of Delta Force.
[01:06:08]  Also, shout out Wokeism.
[01:06:10]  We've got a lady.
[01:06:11]  Well, no, it is very, he makes it very clear that it was not a good environment for her to be in.
[01:06:17]  But we're still working on it.
[01:06:18]  But it says she recalled taking a chartered flight, and this is a woman from G Squadron.
[01:06:22]  She recalled taking a chartered flight to a small town in Maine simply to check the mail at an empty office.
[01:06:28]  The MST would send people on monthly rotations to a city in Florida merely to be seen walking in and out of a vacant building.
[01:06:35]  They once sent Williams to California with $10,000 in cash to buy a bunch of cell phones straight from the factory, no receipt needed.
[01:06:42]  And it's just, I mean, these are, I guess, not the sort of tasks you associate in general with an employee of the U.S. Army.
[01:06:50]  And so, you know, it's, and it's funny, it's so crazy that Michael Flynn played a big role in so much of this as well.
[01:06:59]  But like, you know, it's, you see this sort of like ultra-secretive spy organization that has kind of like taken over the top spot in just the Army.
[01:07:10]  And so like, you know, you've mentioned this in this interview, but also just like in the book as well.
[01:07:17]  Like there are special operations guys deployed all over the world, oftentimes in active and in inactive war zones.
[01:07:27]  I recall everyone got really mad at you when you were like, there's definitely some in Ukraine.
[01:07:31]  And like, lo and behold, it's confirmed.
[01:07:34]  There are.
[01:07:35]  Well, we're in time set it.
[01:07:37]  It was fine.
[01:07:37]  Same with Gaza.
[01:07:39]  Right.
[01:07:40]  Yeah, that's how it works.
[01:07:42]  You know, that passage reminds me of a detail that was cut just for space reasons because that passage deals with Courtney's job.
[01:07:51]  Her name is Courtney Williams.
[01:07:52]  That was her real name.
[01:07:52]  She insisted on it being named.
[01:07:55]  Her job was to maintain these fictitious business entities and also to create cover identities.
[01:08:02]  And it so happens that a long time ago when I was in the Army, two guys from my unit were shot and killed in the city called Alamar, Iraq, in an ambush.
[01:08:17]  And I won't go into the whole story, but years later, I was reading a book called Sniper One by a retired British Army sergeant.
[01:08:28]  And to my complete surprise, I almost fell out of the chair I was sitting in.
[01:08:32]  He actually had witnessed this ambush and described it in his book.
[01:08:37]  And then he said the next day, because it was a total disaster, it was a massive ambush on a convoy from my unit.
[01:08:46]  And that precipitated actually the withdrawal of U.S. forces from that city.
[01:08:50]  And he said, Dan Mills, if I'm not mistaken, his name, he was a sergeant in the British Army.
[01:08:57]  He described the next day, he said, after those two guys were killed, that two aid workers for an organization called the American Heart Foundation were shot in the leg and had to be evacuated.
[01:09:15]  Something to that effect.
[01:09:16]  I may be getting the details slightly wrong.
[01:09:18]  The point was, I read that and I thought, the American Heart Foundation?
[01:09:23]  Why are guys from that, I mean, that makes no sense.
[01:09:27]  Are they organizing marathons for like cardiovascular disease?
[01:09:30]  I don't know.
[01:09:30]  In Amara, Iraq.
[01:09:34]  But I looked it up, because it sounds confusingly like the American Heart Association, right?
[01:09:40]  Yes.
[01:09:40]  Yeah, but it's slightly different.
[01:09:41]  So I looked it up, and it turned out it was a real organization that had a IRS, what is it, employer identification number, and it was headquartered in Silver Springs, Maryland.

=== Double-Checking Everything Thrice (03:24) ===

[01:09:53]  And so, you know, I wrote them a letter asking if they could comment on what happened to their guys, and yeah, they never responded.
[01:10:02]  Speaking of writing people letters and asking them for comment, what was the process of interviews like for this?
[01:10:11]  Because you interview, it seems like a shit ton of people.
[01:10:15]  And a lot of people that frankly would be, I think, maybe a little bit uncomfortable to interview because you're asking them pretty, it seems like pretty direct questions about some oftentimes very shady activities.
[01:10:29]  And, you know, obviously the subtext there is that they can kill people and get away with it.
[01:10:36]  You know, what was it like?
[01:10:39]  I mean, it's a lot of fun.
[01:10:39]  It's a good broad look.
[01:10:41]  I know you probably have some sort of illuminating.
[01:10:46]  I try not to waste too much time thinking about that.
[01:10:49]  Oh, no, no, no problem.
[01:10:50]  Stupid question.
[01:10:53]  I mean, what I will say is that, you know, before this, I was, you know, I was working in places like Syria and in Ukraine.
[01:11:02]  And so when Viking got in touch and proposed that I write the book, I thought, well, this is great because this is a lot safer than what I've been doing.
[01:11:12]  And I can stop, you know, kind of risking my life.
[01:11:14]  And now everyone talks about, aren't you afraid you're going to get killed by these guys?
[01:11:19]  I think they would have done it before the book came out.
[01:11:24]  I mean, just like thinking about it.
[01:11:26]  No, I can't see you in this audience.
[01:11:28]  Why would you wait?
[01:11:29]  It's like, the book's out.
[01:11:31]  You got killed in Gowana, as my brother.
[01:11:32]  Wait a minute.
[01:11:34]  I did ask you, Brace, if there was going to be metal detectors at the door in all seriousness before this event.
[01:11:40]  I can't remember what you said, but I didn't see any.
[01:11:42]  I hope none of you guys are packing.
[01:11:43]  There's metal detectors because there's a lot of nation vacuums.
[01:11:45]  It's near the city.
[01:11:46]  You can't do that.
[01:11:47]  That's great.
[01:11:48]  Okay, well, then there's nothing to worry about.
[01:11:51]  But I do want to talk about the process of writing this because, I mean, you know, this is, you're a proper journalist.
[01:11:57]  This is impeccably sourced.
[01:12:00]  I mean, it's shocking the amount of details.
[01:12:02]  And we know you, you know, you're double-checking everything thrice, if not many more.
[01:12:08]  Double-checking everything thrice.
[01:12:10]  Yeah.
[01:12:11]  That's how good he is.
[01:12:12]  That's how good he is.
[01:12:13]  You didn't think you could do that.
[01:12:14]  How do you support that?
[01:12:15]  You can see there's a lot of notes section.
[01:12:17]  No, but you're not in the book.
[01:12:22]  It's not as if your journey through this investigation, which is cool.
[01:12:26]  You don't need to do that.
[01:12:27]  However, since we have you here, what ha I mean because I would imagine that, and you get the sense from reading the book, it's like you open one door and you see there's like 15 more.
[01:12:40]  And I just want to know about the process of you writing this book.
[01:12:44]  I mean, I know that you got your mind blown many times in the process.
[01:12:50]  Let's talk about that.
[01:12:51]  I mean, what was that like?
[01:12:54]  You know, typically it's just one thing leading to another.
[01:12:58]  Like, if I get an arrest record and I see that someone went to prison for something, I'll send him a letter in prison.
[01:13:06]  And then if I talk to him, I'll look him up in the white page or something, figure out where his mom lives and go knock on her door.
[01:13:13]  Because, you know, moms are the best sources, ex-wives, ex-girlfriends.

=== Biden-Trump Dynamics (14:44) ===

[01:13:17]  And they're in here, sisters.
[01:13:18]  There's a lot of them.
[01:13:19]  Almost all my sources are of that nature.
[01:13:22]  It was kind of a workaround.
[01:13:23]  My girlfriend says, yeah, they're the best sources, you know.
[01:13:28]  They don't need to talk.
[01:13:29]  Yeah, they don't give a fuck.
[01:13:32]  I mean, I can't blame them.
[01:13:34]  The shit they say and went through, it's like, yeah, put that on record.
[01:13:38]  And a lot of them are really rearing to talk because, you know, when I first read about the murder of Billy Levine and Timothy Dumas on Fort Bragg, that's when I found out that the one detail that was disclosed in that article was that Levine had previously killed a guy at his house and it had been ruled a justified homicide.
[01:13:56]  And they named him.
[01:13:57]  So I looked up his name.
[01:13:59]  I found out where, you know, his mom, sister, and talked to all of them.
[01:14:02]  And it turns out they had been, in the interim, in the 18 months since Mark had been killed, they had actually been trying to get a journalist to listen to the rainy body.
[01:14:10]  They've been writing letters to CNN and to Dateline NBC, writing all these generals and stuff.
[01:14:16]  And so they were really ready to talk.
[01:14:19]  So yeah, those tended to be the best sources because the men that are part of this community for the most part don't talk.
[01:14:25]  There's a few exceptions.
[01:14:26]  there's a guy, guys who kind of broke the code and talked to me, but for the most part I was counting on, but you know, the family members often know just as much.
[01:14:34]  Really?
[01:14:35]  Sure, yeah, because they've lived in this world.
[01:14:37]  Yeah.
[01:14:37]  And they've heard they've been flies on the wall and they've seen it.
[01:14:40]  Well, and they see, I mean, you know, you see the change in your partner when they come back.
[01:14:44]  I mean, it's, you know, not to belabor the point, but it's like these guys come back fucked up.
[01:14:51]  Like, they are really fucked up.
[01:14:53]  And we made them that.
[01:14:55]  We needed them to become that in order to get done what we needed to get done.
[01:15:00]  And they come back and they can't function.
[01:15:04]  You know, I mean, it's like, you know, everyone's been talking about that for so long with all American conflict.
[01:15:09]  But because of the nature of their jobs and the nature of what now American theaters require, I don't even think it's like the kind of cliche, you know, vet coming back and, you know, PTSD.
[01:15:25]  PTSD feels like too small of a word to talk about how all of the knots that these guys are now made of when they come back.
[01:15:36]  And I do think the whole PTSD narrative is pretty overwrought or has been.
[01:15:41]  But in the case of these guys, and yeah, I agree with you that maybe PTSD is the wrong word.
[01:15:46]  you don't really need that sort of therapeutic language to talk about it.
[01:15:50]  I mean, in this community, it's typical for these men to have personally killed more than 100 people.
[01:15:55]  It's something they'll brag about, you know?
[01:15:57]  They compare kill counts.
[01:15:59]  Now, Billy Levine wasn't that type of guy.
[01:16:01]  You know, that was one thing that somebody told me about him, I guess Mark's sister, that he was different from the other guys because he didn't brag about how many people he killed.
[01:16:11]  And he wasn't like that.
[01:16:13]  But the others certainly do.
[01:16:15]  So imagine, you know, you've taken the life of 100 people up close and personal.
[01:16:20]  You're not going to be a normal person after that.
[01:16:22]  That's going to really do bad things to your psychology, to your soul.
[01:16:26]  And you can see it in their faces.
[01:16:28]  I mean, you're talking about the Operator podcast.
[01:16:31]  I try not to watch too many of those, but I mean, some of the guests, you look at them and you look at their face and it's like, dude, you are some kind of ghoul.
[01:16:38]  I don't know.
[01:16:39]  Yeah, no one comes back from any of these being like, oh yeah, my husband returned.
[01:16:42]  He's so much better now.
[01:16:44]  Well, no, and they're also like, I mean, we should say a lot of them are violent to their partners and to their family.
[01:16:49]  I mean, that's a massive issue as well.
[01:16:52]  Well, and to themselves, I mean, you mentioned this in the book.
[01:16:56]  There's a lot of suicides on Fort Bragg.
[01:16:59]  In fact, there's some pretty striking numbers between the amount of overseas casualties, which in many years is zero, and then the amount of casualties that occur on Fort Bragg proper, which is like much higher than other military bases.
[01:17:14]  And yeah, and there's tons of domestic violence.
[01:17:18]  Seems like there's tons of just shootings in general.
[01:17:21]  And there's like an incredibly violent atmosphere.
[01:17:23]  You know, one thing that didn't they stop including, because I know that you try to get like the death reports or whatever from everyone who dies there.
[01:17:34]  Didn't you say they stopped including the cause of death on them?
[01:17:37]  Yes, fortunately.
[01:17:38]  While you're writing the book?
[01:17:40]  After I had finished writing the book, that's when they kind of, I guess they noticed the attention it was getting.
[01:17:45]  Because as I was writing, I was often posting this stuff.
[01:17:48]  And I guess they kind of noticed that and sort of slowed the gears down.
[01:17:54]  And at a certain point, starting in 2023, they started redacting all the circumstances of death.
[01:18:02]  And also really slow rolling the requests.
[01:18:04]  So the last batch that I have from 2023, it shows that Fort Bragg once again had a year in which a soldier died on average every week at the base.
[01:18:14]  But all of the circumstances of death are redacted, so you can't see what the causes were, which is very disturbing, I think.
[01:18:21]  Because in the past, casualty reports are 100% public record, even if you're in JSOC.
[01:18:28]  We're not doing reports anymore, though, for anything.
[01:18:31]  I mean, one thing, this is kind of more overarching and more general, more broad, but I sometimes think about the Freedom of Information Act and what a thin tissue that is between our country having a limited amount of understanding and knowledge of what the government does and having none at all because so much of the book relied on freedom of information.
[01:18:50]  In fact, in the course of writing the book, I sued the Army three times.
[01:18:55]  And in every case, the U.S. attorney settled in my favor, and I got the documents.
[01:19:00]  But that's just a law that can be...
[01:19:03]  Thank you.
[01:19:05]  See, law school is worth something.
[01:19:07]  There you go, yeah.
[01:19:09]  We would excited about that backstage.
[01:19:11]  Yeah.
[01:19:14]  But I mean, you can imagine a scenario in which with things going the way that they are, you know, the Freedom of Information Act just becomes less operative or fully overturned or fully overruled or repealed is the word I'm looking for.
[01:19:30]  Yeah, I mean, the book ends with Heg Seth, right?
[01:19:34]  Our boy.
[01:19:35]  Hegseth is such one of these fucking guys, too.
[01:19:39]  But like without being that?
[01:19:40]  He's a wannabe guy.
[01:19:41]  Well, he was a perfect.
[01:19:44]  He's a reservist, too.
[01:19:46]  He was a real soldier.
[01:19:47]  So he was a reservist.
[01:19:49]  But he was like, he's got the fucking stupid ass like cross he saw on the internet on his chest.
[01:19:55]  And like he does the fucking Tulsi Gabber workout videos and shit.
[01:20:00]  But he's like, I mean, not to be a whatever guy about these things, but like.
[01:20:06]  What kind of guy?
[01:20:07]  Like a whatever guy about these things.
[01:20:08]  But like there is this sort of soldier worship that you see from like, I guess, the Trump camp that you might, I mean, obviously the Biden regime would deploy these guys.
[01:20:21]  It's not like some of the deployments are any different or anything like that.
[01:20:25]  But the amount of support that they get, I think, is undeniable from Trump.
[01:20:30]  I mean, the case of Eddie Gallagher, I think, being really front and center there, where like, I mean, obviously there was some malfeasance in the actual prosecution of that or in the court case, but like, you know, Trump pardoned him, right?
[01:20:45]  Or whatever the fuck that was, a clemency, I don't know.
[01:20:49]  You know, after the guy had killed a child or a 16-year-old in, I think, Iraq.
[01:20:55]  You know, there is sort of this feeling that like the boys are back at the DOD and the gloves are off now.
[01:21:03]  And no, it's a little confusing because like, again, we're not at war with anybody, so I don't know why the gloves would have to be.
[01:21:10]  Who were we hitting now that the gloves are off?
[01:21:13]  But I mean, do you suspect anything will change for the worse?
[01:21:18]  Probably.
[01:21:20]  I think there's a good reason to suspect that it will.
[01:21:23]  And, you know, Trump, it's very characteristic of Trump that he goes too far.
[01:21:28]  Like, it's actually bad for the special forces.
[01:21:30]  It's like bad for them.
[01:21:31]  I mean, Eddie Gallagher is a great example because Eddie Gallagher is a guy who, he didn't just kill one person.
[01:21:37]  He killed a lot of people.
[01:21:39]  And his own teammates turned him in because they were so disturbed by what he was doing.
[01:21:47]  So you're not talking about bleeding hearts by any means.
[01:21:51]  You're talking about his fellow Navy SEALs.
[01:21:52]  We're like, this goes too far.
[01:21:54]  And the SEALs themselves, like the SEAL command, they wanted nothing to do with Gallagher.
[01:21:58]  He was a disgrace.
[01:21:59]  Especially the way he would act and camera and stuff and make a big show of himself.
[01:22:03]  I mean, it was just totally, it was horrible for the SEAL brand, the case of Eddie Gallagher.
[01:22:07]  Which is already not doing very well.
[01:22:10]  But so Trump, by elevating these figures, actually is doing stuff.
[01:22:13]  He's going beyond what they themselves would want, those institutions, what they would want.
[01:22:18]  And Hegseth is a great example of that because, you know, he's not a real operator.
[01:22:24]  He was a national, he was, I mean, I don't, give him the credit that is due.
[01:22:28]  He served in the National Guard and did some deployments.
[01:22:31]  He was an infantry officer.
[01:22:34]  But he was not part of this world.
[01:22:36]  He just acts like it with all the tattoos and stuff.
[01:22:38]  So he's a perfect Secretary of Defense because, you know, for Trump, because he's a wannabe operator that has a big mouth.
[01:22:46]  And loves the TV.
[01:22:48]  Yeah.
[01:22:50]  But you talk in the book, I mean, because you mentioned Biden, R.A.P. I mean, probably.
[01:22:58]  He's in Catholic heaven now.
[01:23:02]  Trump has sort of let the special forces loose.
[01:23:04]  I mean, you talk a little bit about the sort of like sequence from Obama, Trump 1, Biden, Trump 2, that he just kind of is like, yeah, whatever you want to do, go for it.
[01:23:18]  And again, we don't have a lot of, you know, there's like zero transparency into any of this.
[01:23:26]  But what has that, what is the, let's talk about Biden to Trump too, because I think that, you know, like we said, we're not engaged anywhere.
[01:23:35]  There's no, we're not in any wars.
[01:23:38]  And yet, obviously, we are everywhere and engaged in many wars.
[01:23:41]  So what has that been like?
[01:23:44]  Well, you know, the rules of engagement applicable to special operations forces are classified.
[01:23:51]  Great.
[01:23:52]  But from, so during Trump's first term, it's known that he loosened the rules of engagement.
[01:24:00]  Exactly how that, you know, the parameters, I'm not sure.
[01:24:03]  And he also delegated authority to commanders in the field to make decisions about who to strike.
[01:24:10]  And in fact, the Takba Dam operation, which I'm sure breaks.
[01:24:13]  You talk about that in the book.
[01:24:15]  The bunker buster on Takba.
[01:24:16]  I mean, that was the big thing in Syria.
[01:24:18]  And this is after my time there, but like in 2018, there was all those reports in the New York Times, I think it was the New York Times, maybe?
[01:24:25]  About these sort of on-the-ground decisions about strikes being made and sort of culminating in this insane order to drop a bunker buster bomb on a fucking, on this giant dam, Takba Dam, Topka Dam.
[01:24:41]  I never went there, but I knew some people that were over there at one point.
[01:24:46]  That could have just completely, it's like by sheer, like the grace of God, it did not destroy.
[01:24:53]  It was like an oops.
[01:24:53]  It was a dud.
[01:24:54]  The bomb was a dud.
[01:24:55]  Yeah.
[01:24:57]  But yeah, there was this delegation to like, you didn't have to clear anything anymore.
[01:25:01]  It's sort of the doggy Doge method of like middlemen there.
[01:25:08]  But like you could just order, like a guy on the ground could order the airstrike.
[01:25:12]  Yeah.
[01:25:12]  I'm pretty sure the whole Topka offensive was done at the initiative of the JSOC commander or the commander of the JSOC task force in Syria.
[01:25:23]  I've read that Trump didn't even order that at all, which is crazy because that was a major offensive.
[01:25:28]  Yeah.
[01:25:28]  You know, you're talking about hundreds of U.S. soldiers participating, thousands of proxy forces with the Kurds, you know, attacking a city and taking it over without the, and the president is just like, you know, that's Trump.
[01:25:39]  He just lets them do his philosophy.
[01:25:40]  But also deploying a weapon that the U.S. has like very little of.
[01:25:46]  I mean, there's not meant, they don't hold many of them.
[01:25:48]  They're very expensive to make.
[01:25:51]  And they say has never been used in the battlefield before.
[01:25:58]  And it's just like some guy there not like just being like, I'm making the call.
[01:26:03]  Yeah.
[01:26:03]  That's the rules under Trump.
[01:26:06]  And the largest non-nuclear bomb in existence was dropped in Afghanistan, also at the initiative of the JSOC task force commander in Afghanistan.
[01:26:19]  That one was crazy, the Moab.
[01:26:21]  It's insane.
[01:26:22]  Because you know they were just like, we have to drop it.
[01:26:24]  Like, it's really how it seems.
[01:26:26]  Yes.
[01:26:26]  Like, there was no tactical necessity or any, like, there was basically no excuse even given.
[01:26:32]  They're just like, we have this fucking bomb.
[01:26:33]  We're leaving here anyways.
[01:26:34]  It's like pretty soon.
[01:26:36]  Let's drop it.
[01:26:37]  Let's see what happens.
[01:26:37]  I mean, genuinely, it's like, it's not, it doesn't seem like there was any more reasoning than that.
[01:26:40]  There's a little bit of mirroring there with what happened with Iran, too, by the way.
[01:26:44]  But also.
[01:26:46]  Because I think that that op was designed so much.
[01:26:50]  I mean, other people have written this.
[01:26:51]  I'm not coming up with this up the dome, but like that that was designed so much as a little bit of a performance rather than actually trying to take out significant installations or whatever, but that it was like, one, we were going to show, you did this, so now we got to do this.
[01:27:14]  You know, the same thing with the attack on the Qatari base.
[01:27:17]  Like it was a big kind of tit for tat of a little bit of showmanship going on.
[01:27:24]  Yeah, and that's also characteristic of Trump.
[01:27:26]  You know, you're talking about the difference between Biden and Trump.
[01:27:28]  The difference that I see it is under a Democratic president like Biden, you have these large-scale grinding operations that are terrible in their own right, that are taking a lot of lives, you know, like funding the genocide in Gaza, for example, or the war in Ukraine that's killed an entire generation of young men there.
[01:27:49]  Whereas Trump tends to do more sporadic, isolated things, but that are just totally crazy and insane.
[01:27:56]  Like assassinating Qasim Soleimani during his first term.
[01:28:00]  Caused COVID.

=== Israeli Commando Operations (09:55) ===

[01:28:02]  Yeah.
[01:28:02]  I think that's like how I work out 2020 Spirit.
[01:28:05]  That's like the domino thing.
[01:28:08]  But which was also done, according to some reporting, alongside Israeli commandos.
[01:28:14]  Is that right?
[01:28:15]  Well, at least some of the targets, I mean, it's obviously very opaque, but like it was like a joint maybe operation between the two.
[01:28:22]  Well, sure, that was obviously something that was done at the behest of Israel.
[01:28:25]  They wanted to kill him.
[01:28:26]  I've also read that Delta Force was set up on that road outside the Baghdad airport to shoot him and kill him if the bomb missed or if the drone missed.
[01:28:35]  Sorry, to kill who?
[01:28:36]  There were Delta operators set up on the road to ambush Qasim Soleimani had the drone missed.
[01:28:42]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:28:43]  I mean, it's just where, where, this is such a stupid question.
[01:28:48]  Like, where are all these guys right now?
[01:28:51]  I mean, obviously.
[01:28:51]  Where are they now?
[01:28:53]  We got them in Ukraine.
[01:28:54]  They're in no doubt in Gaza and various places, you know, sort of around the Middle East.
[01:29:00]  But like, Africa has been heating up for a while.
[01:29:05]  There's been a number of sort of low, I guess, visibility deployments down there.
[01:29:12]  And again, like, the purpose of the Green Berets is ostensibly to integrate with indigenous forces, right?
[01:29:19]  And to do like train and equip and all this kind of stuff.
[01:29:22]  But in particular, you know, Ukraine and Taiwan are kind of the two flashpoints in the Philippines as sort of an addendum to Taiwan.
[01:29:31]  And Billy Levine, you know, for his language that he spoke, his second language they gave him was Tagalog for deployment to the Philippines, where a Marine recently died.
[01:29:43]  You know, it seems like they are kind of the guys that we put first in a lot of these places, mirroring sort of this preference to not deploy like large-scale ground troops or even air assets.
[01:29:57]  Yeah.
[01:29:58]  Yeah, Levine also served a tour in Niger.
[01:30:02]  I would say where they are right now, kind of an illustration to bring home how little is known and how little reporting there is.
[01:30:10]  You know, there's a significant Delta Force troop in Iraq and Syria currently.
[01:30:16]  The Expeditionary Targeting Force, you know, I talk about them in the book.
[01:30:19]  It's not a permanent formation of Delta Force, it's just a deployed troop.
[01:30:23]  And they're currently doing assassination missions in Iraq and Syria basically continuously.
[01:30:30]  Trump boasted in a speech earlier this year that these forces had eliminated, in his words, eliminated 68 terrorists since he had been inaugurated.
[01:30:39]  And only a few months had elapsed at that point.
[01:30:42]  So to me, that told me that the ETF, they call it, is still out there hitting targets on a near-nightly basis.
[01:30:50]  And those are, again, active duty U.S. Army soldiers killing people every day in Syria and in Iraq with zero reporting around it.
[01:31:00]  The only time it gets reported is if they do a mission that they really want to brag about and get on the phone and call their, you know, their favorite reporter at the New York Times and tell them, hey, we just killed this particular guy who is a really bad terrorist.
[01:31:13]  And then they'll write about it.
[01:31:14]  But other than that, there's nothing.
[01:31:16]  I want to talk really quickly about Gaza and Ukraine because obviously the Israelis are on their own shit.
[01:31:25]  But it's hard to not notice how much of how what's happening in Gaza is conducted so similarly to the ways in which U.S. special forces have changed the nature of kind of like not traditional, I mean non-traditional, but like now just warfare, you know, from the global war on terror all the way through.
[01:31:49]  And Ukraine is, you know, somewhat similar in a lot of ways.
[01:31:53]  I mean, depending on who you want to listen to, you know, you've got NATO running ops, you've got CIA running ups, and obviously there's a massive special forces presence there.
[01:32:04]  And we see in Gaza and in Ukraine the use of kind of clandestine operations, the use of assassination programs, targeted assassination programs, or just like, let's see what happens when we turn this fucking, let's turn a bus into a bomb.
[01:32:21]  You know, like this is now, this is now, you know, totally okay, you know, operations, right?
[01:32:30]  I mean, maybe that's something that they've changed for the kind of, you know, the rules of engagement that we don't know about.
[01:32:35]  But it's, for me, I look at what's happening there, and what I see are the, you know, the imprint of U.S. special forces on just how much the nature of war has changed since 9-11.
[01:32:52]  That's a dumbass thing to say.
[01:32:53]  But.
[01:32:54]  9-11 changed everything.
[01:32:57]  But the kind of flip side of that, right, is that when you are running all warfare as a covert operation, it means that everywhere is the battlefield.
[01:33:06]  There is no kind of like demarcated battlefield.
[01:33:09]  There are no demarcated soldiers.
[01:33:11]  Like we saw that with the Israeli operation against Hezbollah.
[01:33:19]  Like it just any target is like how that obviously comes straight out of the U.S. assassination program.
[01:33:27]  I mean, how could it not?
[01:33:30]  I see what you're saying.
[01:33:31]  I also think that the influence runs the other way.
[01:33:33]  Yeah, of course, of course.
[01:33:34]  I mean, I think that there's a strong Israeli influence on the special operations, especially the use of assassinations.
[01:33:41]  Because it's actually the case that there is not a long pedigree of using assassinations as a weapon of war.
[01:33:49]  And in fact, in many times and places in history, assassination of enemy commanders has been seen as something that's totally disreputable and dirty.
[01:33:59]  And that wasn't the purpose at all.
[01:34:00]  It wasn't seen as something that was even beneficial.
[01:34:05]  Whereas now the whole strategy is centered around killing the people from the top down in the command structure.
[01:34:12]  And that's absolutely an Israeli concept, I think, above all.
[01:34:15]  I mean, Israel is the world's most prolific assassins.
[01:34:22]  And I think that that influence has really rubbed off on, especially since they control so much of our intelligence because of their language capabilities that's totally lacking in JSOC.
[01:34:31]  Yeah, I think, I mean, what's sort of extraordinary about what's happening in Gaza is the method of warfare there is there will be these like large-scale massacres and then there will be this sort of warfare by assassination, right?
[01:34:45]  Like you saw when they killed that Al Jazeera crew the other day.
[01:34:51]  You murder a bunch of people at once and be like, well, they're sort of connected to Hamas.
[01:34:54]  And it really, there is this kind of mirror with like the F3EAD thing where it's like you have this intelligence, which is not necessarily, I mean, intelligence doesn't mean it's smart or real.
[01:35:06]  It just means that you say that there's some sort of like logic or backing to it.
[01:35:12]  And it just feeds off of each other and feeds off and feeds off and feeds off.
[01:35:15]  So you can look on Facebook and be like, well, this guy's Facebook friends with a guy whose cousin is an Hamas.
[01:35:20]  That's literally how they do it, I think.
[01:35:22]  That's my sense of how they do it.
[01:35:23]  Well, they talk about doing it with, I mean, even using AI, right?
[01:35:27]  To like to trawl through things.
[01:35:30]  Similar to how they're talking about with DHS going through college students' social media now to see if foreign students have said anything nice about Hamas or probably just Palestine in general.
[01:35:44]  It's this sort of like hoovering up of intelligence.
[01:35:46]  And I think the one thing that is a little bit different now than it maybe was 10 years ago with war on terror stuff is now that there are these sort of automated tools to look through the intelligence, whereas you don't necessarily have to have like individual human analysts doing it all for you.
[01:36:03]  You can feed it into like, you know, a Palantir program and be like, you know, give me 50 fucking names connected to this and use that for the kill list.
[01:36:13]  And so it's the same process, but it's more industrialized and automated.
[01:36:20]  Yeah.
[01:36:21]  And when you think about how bad AI is at the end of the day, I was just thinking that.
[01:36:25]  I was like, damn, this is answering questions.
[01:36:28]  Yeah, so imagine those type of systems being used to target and kill people.
[01:36:35]  Yeah.
[01:36:35]  It's just dystopian doesn't begin to capture what it is.
[01:36:40]  I mean, it's just like this clownish hell world type of impossible.
[01:36:46]  And you can see it builds, right?
[01:36:47]  From like from Vietnam with the Phoenix program, which was a targeted assassination.
[01:36:52]  I mean, it was more than that, but it was, you know, it was U.S. CIA special forces targeting fucking like 25-year-old villagers and murdering them or much older or much younger.
[01:37:05]  And then using that intelligence to leapfrog off to somebody else.
[01:37:08]  It's the same exact thing to the massive Israeli sort of co-occurring operations against the Palestinian commandos in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, up until the war on terror when it just becomes all that stuff, which was done sort of via this old technology.
[01:37:29]  And sometimes they'd be like, oh, we have this, we were using these computers to figure this stuff out.
[01:37:35]  It's this technology builds and builds and builds and builds until we get what we have today, which is this industrialized, naked slaughter that is often buffeted up by just massive propaganda campaigns conducted by not only the Israeli intelligence and military, but probably the U.S. one as well.

=== Psyop Operations: Industrialized Propaganda (02:44) ===

[01:37:57]  I mean, that's one thing we didn't really, we don't really have time because we got to actually wrap up in a second.
[01:38:02]  But one thing you talk about quite a bit in this book is not just the door kickers or the pipe hitters or whatever fucking euphemism they have.
[01:38:09]  What is a pipe hitter?
[01:38:11]  Pipe hitter is someone who's so daring and fearless and addicted to war that compare them to someone who smokes crack cocaine.
[01:38:23]  It's kind of a crazy thing.
[01:38:26]  So you're a pipe hitter.
[01:38:28]  I see.
[01:38:28]  Yeah, that was like hitting some of the stuff.
[01:38:29]  So these guys must be like, well, I do love being a pipe hitter.
[01:38:32]  I wonder if, but you talk, and we mentioned this with the G-Squatch and stuff, but like there is a massive, I mean, one, one component of, and they're not really in this book so much, but one component of special operations is the PSYOP one.
[01:38:45]  Yeah.
[01:38:45]  And, God, I was looking at like PSYOP, like active duty PSYOP soldiers sort of meme accounts for being a soldier, and they're all just like, nobody respects us.
[01:38:55]  Like, it's all just them.
[01:38:57]  Because they had one really badass ad like four years ago, and that's been it for them.
[01:39:03]  Because they're like, I don't know, they're like computer guys.
[01:39:07]  But you know, you talk about like the civil affairs, whatever, whatever they are, whatever fucking unit of measurement of people they are.
[01:39:16]  I mean, there is a massive sort of propaganda and psychological operations winged to all of this that accompanies all of this slaughter.
[01:39:26]  Yeah, and ever more, like continuously getting more of an emphasis on just that.
[01:39:33]  Chris, is it Chris Donahue or was it, well, I don't remember the general's name right now.
[01:39:37]  One of the former Delta Force commanders was exposed in the Wall Street Journal not too long ago for having run a psyop program in the Philippines to discredit the Chinese COVID vaccine.
[01:39:50]  Oh, yeah.
[01:39:50]  Yeah.
[01:39:51]  So that's the kind of thing.
[01:39:53]  I didn't even realize that was Delta Force?
[01:39:55]  The commander, I can't, I'm sorry, I can blanking on his name right now.
[01:39:58]  He had just recently been a commander of, I think it was Jonathan Braga, if I'm not mistaken, pretty sure.
[01:40:04]  And yeah, he was a commander of Delta.
[01:40:05]  Each commander only commands for two years before rotating out.
[01:40:10]  And so I think he was, you know, before rotating up into a position in JSOC.
[01:40:14]  So at that point, he was in some position in JSOC.
[01:40:17]  But that's the kind of thing that our Army is using our tax money to do is to run PSYOP programs to convince Filipinos that the Chinese vaccine has pork in it because they're Muslims.
[01:40:31]  It's bad, yeah.
[01:40:32]  I mean, and they're doing this all over the world, these kind of crude psychological operations.
[01:40:38]  And inevitably, some of that stuff leaks back into the United States, I think.

=== Crude Psychological Operations (02:26) ===

[01:40:42]  I mean, it has to.
[01:40:43]  Yeah, yeah, I think so.
[01:40:45]  Also, I've heard that there has been some loosening of those restrictions, that age-old restriction on the CIA and on the military that they can't do PSYOPs on U.S. soil.
[01:40:55]  I have read some suggestive reports around those rules having been changed not long ago.
[01:41:02]  Great.
[01:41:02]  Yeah.
[01:41:03]  I mean, I'm going to be real.
[01:41:04]  I think they were doing them anyway.
[01:41:06]  Yeah, of course.
[01:41:07]  But now they could do it.
[01:41:08]  I think that's what those companies that lady had to fly to Florida or whatever to be seen logging out of were probably there.
[01:41:17]  I think we have to wrap up before the fire department comes back.
[01:41:21]  Seth, this is a great book.
[01:41:22]  This is a crazy, crazy book.
[01:41:24]  You guys want to read a bunch of shit that will blow your mind about how terrible and insane the United States is.
[01:41:31]  But it's also, I will say, it's a very readable book.
[01:41:35]  Yeah.
[01:41:36]  I'm glad you think so.
[01:41:37]  And although it is depressing, you know, I want people to take away from it that these people should not have the power that they have, and we need to take it from them one way or another.
[01:41:48]  Yeah.
[01:42:03]  Well, Seth, I would say there's a lot of stuff in this book that is shocking, but not surprising, if that makes sense, which is just some of the worst combination in a lot of ways.
[01:42:13]  And I echo your sentiments.
[01:42:14]  And I, you know, I hope that everyone here, you guys are going to get a copy of the book, signed copy.
[01:42:19]  We were backstage.
[01:42:20]  You went through the whole stack of them like a pro.
[01:42:25]  The book is great.
[01:42:27]  I would, even though you guys will get copies, you know, get people to buy the book.
[01:42:31]  Let's get it in front of people because there's some like really, really important and shocking information in here that more people need to read.
[01:42:39]  So, Seth, thank you so much.
[01:42:41]  Thank you guys.
[01:42:42]  Thank you guys.
[01:42:43]  Yeah.
[01:42:44]  Thank you.
[01:42:46]  Thank you guys for coming.
[01:43:07]  Come out.
[01:43:08]  Come out.