Seth Harp Exposes the Murder & Drug Trafficking Taking Place Inside America’s Largest Military Base

Fort Bragg is America’s largest military base. According to reporter Seth Harp, it’s also a hotbed of murder and drug trafficking. (00:00) The Mysterious Deaths at Fort Bragg (07:14) Who Was Billy Lavigne and Mark Leshikar? (12:34) The Government’s Secret Assassination Programs (38:47) The Drug Trafficking Ring Within Government Special Forces (40:33) Who Carried Out These Murders? Seth Harp is a veteran investigative reporter and author of the critically acclaimed new book “The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces”. Before becoming a journalist he practiced law for five years and was an assistant attorney general for the state of Texas. During college and law school he served in the United States Army Reserve and did one tour of duty in Iraq. Find Harp’s book here: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/730414/the-fort-bragg-cartel-by-seth-harp/ Paid partnerships with: Dutch: Get $50 a year for vet care with Tucker50 at https://dutch.com/tucker Pique: Go to https://piquelife.com/tucker to get up to 20% off for life when you start your first month Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:29Tucker Carlson?

  So you got out of the military in 2011. This is the, this is how I understand the genesis of the book that comes out today, The Fort Bragg Cartel. You get out in 2011, you're a reporter. At some point, you start to understand that there are a lot of deaths at Fort Bragg, which is America's biggest army base, home of the special forces. And you start to investigate those deaths.

• 0:57Speaker 02

  That's right. I first read about a double homicide on Fort Bragg that took place at the tail end of 2020. Just an ordinary article in the New York Times that said that these two veteran special operations soldiers, Billy Levine and Timothy Dumas, have been found murdered on a remote training range at Fort Bragg. They've both been shot to death and their bodies have been dumped in the woods.

• 1:41Speaker 02

  I also read that Billy Levine was a Delta Force operator. And in all my time reporting on the military, working as a war reporter, and then before that, serving in the army myself, I had never heard of a Delta Force operator being in the news for any reason, because it's the most secretive and elite unit in the entire military. And the police were saying that this was believed to be a double homicide from a drug deal gone wrong. And so I knew that there had to be more to the story because you can imagine if like, let's say, a CIA agent was found shot to death and dumped in a park in Maryland or something

• 2:23Speaker 02

  like that, and the police were saying it was a drug deal. I mean, that's the level of secrecy, and that's how elite Delta Force is as a military.

• 2:32Tucker Carlson?

  What is Delta Force?

• 2:33Speaker 02

  Delta Force is what's called a special mission unit. It is an army unit. It's part of what's called the Joint Special Operations Command. It was created in the late 1970s to be an elite counterterrorism force for things like hostage rescue. For many years, they were obsessed with the problem or the danger of loose nuclear weapons and drilled constantly for scenarios in which they would be called upon to secure a loose nuclear weapon. This is all pre 9/11. After 2001, after the war started in Iraq and Afghanistan, Delta Force grew quite a bit and came to have a much more prominent role in US military

• 3:17Speaker 02

  operations. And what they primarily specialize in are clandestine operations, covert operations, what we might call black operations. That's Delta Force and it's headquartered at Fort Bragg.

• 3:29Tucker Carlson?

  They get no publicity?

• 3:30Speaker 02

  None. I actually looked into this when I was writing the book to see if they had ever been talked about in the 20 years that the US had been at war since 2001. And I found that in fact, they were talked about in the context of the 2004 Abu Ghraib scandal and had been implicated in the abuse of prisoners in Iraq. Other than that, for 20 years, they kept their name completely out of the news.

• 3:55Tucker Carlson?

  So there are other units famously that have worked with Hollywood filmmakers a lot, whose members retire and go on talk shows, including this one. And you know, you sort of know quite a bit about the SEALs, for example, the various SEAL teams and their training, etc. But has there ever been a Delta operator in public talking about the training or the missions or anything like that?

• 4:22Speaker 02

  There are former Delta Force officers who I've seen occasionally talk on TV. But as far as the regular enlisted guys go, their culture really is, you know, the saying that they have that I've heard repeated is that, you know, SEALs write books, Delta guys write history, something to that effect. It's very much part of their culture not to come on TV shows, not to talk and not to write books.

• 4:53Tucker Carlson?

  Interesting, thereby increasing the mystique. And I think the assumption that we all have is that they're, because they're the most secretive, they are the most impressive.

• 5:04Speaker 02

  They're very impressive in certain ways. You know, the level of physical fitness that you have to, that you have to have to be selected to be an operator is very impressive. Marksmanship, you know, other skills that they have, very tough, tough people for the most part. But as I talk about extensively in the book, the unit has, I think, declined in recent years in terms of its culture.

• 5:32Tucker Carlson?

  Hmm. So let's begin with the story of the Delta operator Billy Levine and the man with whom he was found dead. Who killed them and why?

• 5:42Speaker 02

  That's the question that animates this book from the beginning to the end. I mean, although I talk a lot about military history, I talk a lot about foreign policy, really it's a murder mystery, this book is at its heart. And the question is, who killed those two guys? And the fact is that there are many, many possible suspects, and that kind of is what made it such a rich topic for exploration. It turns out that Billy Levine, 18 months before he himself was found murdered, had killed a guy at his house in Fayetteville. In fact, he had shot and killed his best friend and fellow Green Beret, a guy named Mark Leschaker, right in front of his, Mark Leschaker's daughter, who was about six years old at the time.

• 6:27Speaker 02

  And the police, the local police, the sheriff's department, the district attorney of Cumberland County, North Carolina, and the US Army Criminal Investigations Division completely covered up that murder. And I use that word "covered up" advisedly. I'm actually an attorney myself, so I don't use it lightly. But I devote the first two chapters of the book to showing what the evidence was against Levine and how that case was adjudicated and how he was not even placed under arrest. He was just lightly questioned and let go that same night on the grounds that it had been supposedly a justifiable homicide, when in fact, that theory, that defense, was definitively contradicted by

• 7:12Speaker 02

  the physical evidence. So Levine, having previously killed a guy, then goes on to commit three, or excuse me, I think, four or five felony offenses in Fayetteville over the next 18 months, including aggravated assault with a deadly weapon for shooting at a guy in the streets of Fayetteville, manufacturing controlled substance for cooking crack in his house, lots of weapons charges. He'd even been arrested for harboring an escapee, which is a new one to me. And in every case, the DA had dropped the charges against him. Who was Billy Levine? He was a Delta Force soldier. He had done about, he had done more than 12 deployments, more than a dozen deployments in his career. He wasn't a high-level officer in the Delta

• 7:57Speaker 02

  Force, but he was a veteran operator who had been, who had deep experience in America's classified assassination programs in Iraq, in Syria, and in Afghanistan. So that was the reason why I think he was dealt with such leniency by the authorities. Why did he shoot his best friend to death? It's very mysterious why he did that. Both of them had severe drug problems. You know, this is one thing. Levine was not a, um, he was not a one dimensional character by any means. He's someone whose military career and whose downward trajectory are reconstructed in the book because I think

• 8:41Speaker 02

  it's so illustrative of what's happened to our military over the past 20 years. He was such a great example of, um, of what has happened. He developed very severe PTSD, moral injury. He came to believe that the wars in which he was participating were morally wrong. He had, um, severe substance abuse issues, very severe. Uh, he was smoking crack every day and doing a lot of other drugs as well.

• 9:06Tucker Carlson?

  Wait, while he was a Delta operator who's smoking crack every day?

• 9:10Speaker 02

  Yes. And I learned that that's not that unusual to my surprise.

• 9:14Tucker Carlson?

  But my understanding was in your description suggests that these guys are like basically Olympic athletes whose physical condition is going to be monitored, I assume by, by the unit doctor or somebody?

• 9:26Speaker 02

  Well, you know, operators have a particular type of, um, physical fitness that you really only find in the, in the army, which is the kind of guy who can, you know, run a two mile run in, in 12 minutes, but also smoke a pack a day, uh, you know, and, and get drunk five times a week.

• 9:42Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 9:42Speaker 02

  I mean, they're very, very-

• 9:43Tucker Carlson?

  Just savages.

• 9:44Speaker 02

  This is just savages. Yeah. So-

• 9:46Tucker Carlson?

  That's impressive. So that, but so, but this guy was maintaining his, you know, his training schedule while smoking crack every day?

• 9:58Speaker 02

  Yes. And, um, I was shocked to the degree to which, um, because not only, you know, I served in the conventional part of the military, not in the special forces, and I'd also been out for more than 10 years. Uh, so, um, I was very, very surprised when I started, uh, investigating Fort Bragg and learning the extent to which cocaine use has normalized. And in the Green Berets, not just in Delta Force, but in all of the Army Special Forces, which is a much larger, um, organization than Delta Force is pretty small, um, but the, but the Green Berets is thousands of troops and people just, uh, you know, people that live in this community, live in Fayetteville or live in, uh, Moore County, you know, to them, it's just understood that this is just part of the lifestyle.

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• 14:00Tucker Carlson?

  Who was the man he shot, his best friend?

• 14:02Speaker 02

  Mark Leschiger. He was a Green Beret in 19th Special Forces Group.

• 14:06Tucker Carlson?

  But currently serving, when he died, he was...

• 14:09Speaker 02

  He was... So the 19th Special Forces Group is actually a National Guard unit. So he was a Green Beret. He was still serving in the National Guard. I don't believe he was on active duty the day he died.

• 14:23Tucker Carlson?

  Huh.

• 14:24Speaker 02

  I'm not sure if it makes much of a difference, but to be precise.

• 14:27Tucker Carlson?

  Was Levine ever punished for killing him?

• 14:29Speaker 02

  No, he wasn't.

• 14:30Tucker Carlson?

  In any way?

• 14:31Speaker 02

  Not in any way. He remained an active-duty operator on Delta Force after killing a guy in his house when they were both completely out of their minds on drugs. And Levine was not even given a toxicology test after he shot somebody.

• 14:44Tucker Carlson?

  Completely crazy.

• 14:45Speaker 02

  The reason for that is because, once you have done 10 deployments in service of covert operations, assassination operations...

• 14:57Speaker 02

  It is an unacceptable national security outcome from the perspective of authorities for you to go to prison, for you to be in a courtroom for any reason. Those guys, they are not supposed to exist. And they just can't process them through the criminal justice system in ordinary ways. And to me, that's what made his death so intriguing. Because so many people alleged, the sources that I quote, I want to be responsible about this and not say that it's what I believe, but the sort of conventional wisdom that when I first got into the case, people were saying that the military itself had killed Billy Levine because he had turned into such a problem and was messing up so badly.

• 15:40Tucker Carlson?

  I don't want to derail your story, but you've referred twice to assassination programs. I wasn't aware that the United States admits it assassinates people. When did that start? When did that become a feature of modern war or statecraft or whatever it is? What is that? What are you talking about?

• 16:00Speaker 02

  In 2001, President George W. Bush signed secret orders that essentially, and they're secret, so I haven't read them, but based on the best reporting that I've seen, he signed secret orders that essentially reversed the assassination ban that had been put in place decades earlier. Actually, the groundwork for that legal move had been laid under President Reagan. There were memos in place, there were certain authorities, executive orders in place that did allow for assassination in the case when the target was deemed to be a terrorist. Those authorities actually weren't used, to my understanding, for decades.

• 16:40Speaker 02

  But when, after the September 11th attacks, you know, Bush reversed that. And you know, you're saying that you haven't heard too much about it, but that's because we often hear about it by a certain euphemism, which is night raids. So you may have heard, I'm sure you have heard, that under President Obama, the war making, all of the war effort in Afghanistan became about drone strikes and night raids. Well, night raids is just a euphemism for assassinations. Yes, if somebody... Comes out waving a white flag. Well, he'll probably get shot anyway, but under certain circumstances, they will take people prisoner. But for the most part, you know, when they

• 17:24Speaker 02

  hit a target, every, every military aged man, as they say, on that, on that target dies.

• 17:31Tucker Carlson?

  Whether or not he's guilty of a crime or even suspected of a crime?

• 17:34Speaker 02

  Well, guilty of a crime, I mean, it all, it's, there's no accountability over this because it all depends upon the determinations of intelligence analysts in the Joint Special Operations Command and in the CIA and what have you, the people that generate targets. You know, Delta Force just hits the targets. They may not necessarily generate them, although they do have substantial intelligence assets that develop targets. But there's no way to check their work and say, you know, who these people really were. But, you know, as I talk about extensively in the book and trying to get some clarity around this, you know, the error rate is believed to be very high, you know, at least 50%.

• 18:09Tucker Carlson?

  Is this a longstanding feature of American military policy? Have we been assassinating people for centuries? Is this an American thing to do?

• 18:20Speaker 02

  Absolutely not. And in fact, before the modern era, before the 21st century, assassination was not considered to be, you know, a valid or a, you know, credit worthy tool of war making. It was considered to be something dirty and down low. I mean, and there also wasn't perceived to be a tactical advantage necessarily in assassinating enemy commanders in the, in the enemy chain of command. There was more of a sense in fighting out things out honestly on the battlefield. And it has, that has completely changed. And, you know, I think one big influence on American policy-

• 19:00Tucker Carlson?

  Wait, so up until 9/11, you're saying, so when you say modern era, you don't mean like the advent of electricity, you mean like 25 years ago?

• 19:09Speaker 02

  So I'm not a military historian by any means, but my understanding is that there was extensive assassination operations also in Vietnam. And we call that, that's known as the Phoenix Program, where the CIA was using assassinations to dismantle what was perceived as enemy command and control networks.

• 19:30Tucker Carlson?

  Was it pretty effective? We won that war?

• 19:34Speaker 02

  You know, actually, I think that a lot of people in the sort of national security set did, although it elicited a great deal of repugnance in the public, I think that my sense is that it was perceived as an effective way of waging war. Well, then, why didn't we win? Well, we haven't won any wars since 1945, unless you count the Gulf War. Right. So, you know, I don't think we're doing anything right, basically, including assassinations.

• 20:07Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah, I mean, that is, that is a stat that kind of hard to argue with, that you almost never hear in and around Washington, like, when was the last time you won a war?

• 20:17Speaker 02

  Baffling.

• 20:18Tucker Carlson?

  You spend a trillion dollars a year and you can't win a freaking war, you can't beat the Houthis, like, maybe it's time for some reform or to rethink what we're doing, it's not working.

• 20:27Speaker 02

  It's because...

• 20:28Tucker Carlson?

  Even by their own measurements, right?

• 20:30Speaker 02

  Sure, I completely agree, and I think a lot of people, including people who are anti-war, and who would prefer to see a more isolationist foreign policy, complacently assume that because we spend ungodly amounts of money on our military, a trillion dollars this year on the national defense budget, that whatever else you think of our foreign policy, at least we have the world's most powerful military. That assumption goes largely unexamined, and the reality is, we don't. I was just at Trump's military parade in Washington DC, a magazine sent me to cover that, and a lot of those troops were from Fort Bragg, and you may have seen on TV what

• 21:14Speaker 02

  a joke the parade turned out to be, how disorganized, how unimpressive it was, and the technology that was on display, you know, people expected to be this fascistic spectacle, this authoritarian spectacle, like you might see in North Korea or whatever, but I was looking at the troops going by, not even marching in step, you know, the Bradley Fighting Vehicles, which are 40 years old and perform very poorly, haven't been replaced with anything new, or same goes for the Abrams tank, it's been in service for more than 40 years, the Blackhawk helicopter, just before the parade, a Blackhawk helicopter had crashed into a passenger plane over the Potomac River, lest we forget, killed 68 people, worst aviation disaster since 2001.

• 21:59Speaker 02

  I'm looking at all this and I'm thinking, man, our army is in sorry, sorry shape. And that was the 250th anniversary of the US Army because the Army actually predates the Constitution and predates the creation of our nation. And to me, it is very worrisome to see the state of decline and disrepair in which it in which it's currently languishing. And I think the stuff that's going on at Fort Bragg is highly symptomatic of just that.

• 22:26Tucker Carlson?

  Certainly is. So back to assassinations. So assassinations are, it sounds by your description, like a big part of our foreign policy or our war making efforts.

• 22:38Speaker 02

  A central part of it. Sure.

• 22:40Tucker Carlson?

  And Delta is basically conducting a lot of these, some of these?

• 22:45Speaker 02

  Absolutely. Delta Force and then SEAL Team Six, which is Delta's naval counterpart, also part of the Joint Special Operations Command. And you hear a lot more about them.

• 22:54Tucker Carlson?

  Can I ask a dumb question? Why? So if you're fighting a war where you're in some protracted struggle with violence, I don't know if it's a war, but you're like fighting, why wouldn't, if you could, why wouldn't you capture key players from the other side in order to extract intelligence from the usable intelligence from them? I thought that's what we used to do.

• 23:15Speaker 02

  I don't want to paint them in a cartoonish light. By them, I mean Delta and JSOC.

• 23:19Tucker Carlson?

  Well, they're not making these decisions. I mean, these are made, as you said,

• 23:22Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 23:23Tucker Carlson?

  by, by, by the command structure.

• 23:25Speaker 02

  Often it's direct orders from the White House.

• 23:27Tucker Carlson?

  Right.

• 23:28Speaker 02

  And with also with input from certain congressional leaders are involved in these targeting decisions to a degree that I was not aware.

• 23:34Tucker Carlson?

  Congressional leaders?

• 23:35Speaker 02

  Apparently. I've heard anecdotes about, about operators sitting on target and waiting for the go ahead from Congress. I'm not sure what to make of that because all this is so classified, but that's what I've heard. In any event, there's no doubt.

• 23:47Tucker Carlson?

  Why would it be classified?

• 23:48Speaker 02

  I'm sorry?

• 23:49Tucker Carlson?

  Why would it be classified?

• 23:51Speaker 02

  Well, that's another big component of the evolution of the American way of, of making war, waging war for the past 20 years, is the increasing secrecy around all of this, which I think also has had an extremely deleterious effect.

• 24:03Tucker Carlson?

  You're not able to complete a sentence without me interrupting you. I'm so sorry.

• 24:07Speaker 02

  No, it's great.

• 24:07Tucker Carlson?

  No, you're just saying so many things that are evocative and interesting. I just, I'm trying to track them all down. Okay. I will stop interrupting you. So you said, I don't want to paint a clownish picture of the Delta operators, but.

• 24:19Speaker 02

  They do, they do capture people. They will abduct people. They will take them to like a ship that's in international waters and do God knows what to them to get information. But in most cases, they're just killing the person that they're that they're targeting.

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• 26:31Tucker Carlson?

  What kind of people are these? Like villagers in faraway Middle Eastern countries or others?

• 26:35Speaker 02

  It all depends on the theater. It depends upon the time. I can tell you what they're doing right now because um. Trump made an interesting comment in one of his speeches earlier this year where he talked about, he said something to the effect of, since my inauguration, it had been a few months since he was inaugurated, he said, since my inauguration, we have eliminated 68 terrorists in Iraq, Syria, and Somalia.

• 26:58Tucker Carlson?

  It's all gonna come home. We're gonna have this kind of violence here. You can't commit violence without facing the effects of violence. It's just, it's a principle of the universe. Live by the sword, die by the sword. That never changes. And if we're running around assassinating people, we will have Americans assassinated. Fact.

• 27:15Speaker 02

  Well, some of that blowback, I fully agree. Some of that blowback can be seen in cases like Billy Levine, where he's someone who has, since he was a very young man, has been raised in this system of violence, who comes back and is unable to control it. And, you know, when he perceives small threats, like with his buddy Mark Leschek at his house, barging his front door because they're both out of their head on drugs, you know, he just as a reflexive mechanism pulls out his gun and shoots the other guy. So I think one of the first signs of his, and I'm tracking about 24 murders involving Fort Bragg soldiers.

• 27:51Tucker Carlson?

  24?

• 27:52Speaker 02

  Since 2020, yeah. In which it was either a Fort Bragg soldier who was murdered, accused of murder, or convicted of murder.

• 27:58Tucker Carlson?

  24.

• 27:59Speaker 02

  24. That's my best count. It might be off by one or two on the margins.

• 28:03Tucker Carlson?

  Well, that's wild. A military base?

• 28:07Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 28:08Tucker Carlson?

  I would imagine the murder rate at a military base would be zero.

• 28:11Speaker 02

  I think it should be. If you're an employee of the government, if you're an active duty soldier, you're supposed to-

• 28:19Tucker Carlson?

  The most disciplined people in the world, right?

• 28:21Speaker 02

  Supposed to be. I don't know if you can say that anymore.

• 28:23Tucker Carlson?

  So Billy Levine, by the way, was he from a service family? How did he wind up in all this?

• 28:33Speaker 02

  No, he wasn't. He was a, you know, a middle-class guy, from, working-class guy, from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, who joined the army when he was 17 years old, before 9/11 happened. And 9/11 took place while he was still in training. And he soon got taken up the pipeline of the first special forces group. And then from there, by 2009, he was a relatively young man, 26, I think, when, at the time that he was selected for Delta Force.

• 29:03Tucker Carlson?

  So he was an extraordinary person in that he was clearly suited to the job well.

• 29:08Speaker 02

  Very physically fit, very outdoorsy, very tough, you know, a guy who had the self-confidence that is necessary for this type of work, you know, an adrenaline junkie for sure. A lot of these guys are big time adrenaline junkies, jumping out of planes, you know, parachuting is a big part of what they do. So he was, he was like those guys in all these respects, but at its core, Billy Levine was somebody who also had a sense of ethics and, and right and wrong that his time in the service really degraded to tragic, tragic effect.

• 29:46Tucker Carlson?

  So he murders his best friend in front of the daughter, gets away with it, no penalty whatsoever. That is absolutely wild. And then some months later, he himself is found dead with another man on a remote training range at Bragg.

• 30:00Speaker 02

  Right, about 18 months later.

• 30:02Tucker Carlson?

  18 months later. What, were they shot to death?

• 30:05Speaker 02

  Yes. And it appears that the, that double murder appears to have been the work of people who knew what they were doing. There were no.

• 30:18Tucker Carlson?

  Well, you've got about 50,000 potential suspects on the scene because it's a military base, right?

• 30:23Speaker 02

  And the other guy either was, his name was Timothy Dumas, not to reduce them to their respective races, but to keep it clear, one was a white guy, one was a black guy. Levine's a white guy, Dumas is a black guy. He also was not someone who would have been easy to kill. He wasn't an operator. He was a supply officer who was attached to JSOC. He served in the 95th Civil Affairs Brigade and had done many deployments to Afghanistan in service of the, the JSOC-led task force in Afghanistan. So he's a guy who gets the operators all the stuff that they need in the field, including cash, weapons, ammunition, you know, food, all the basics, gas.

• 31:08Speaker 02

  And he was deeply, he's a whole separate story that we could go into. But to come back to what we were saying about the murder itself, you know, both of them were very, very tough guys who never went anywhere unarmed, who kept their heads on a swivel and who had been to war repeatedly. So the fact that both of them were cleanly taken out and then dumped in this remote area and that the scene was free of any kind of, you know, I interviewed several Army CID agents who worked the scene of the murder. And by all accounts, they found no drugs, no guns, no money, and maybe a couple of shell casings, but you know, there weren't even like footprints on the ground. Were they shot with a rifle?

• 31:53Speaker 02

  No, I was never able to obtain ballistic evidence. I believe that Dumas, the black guy, was shot in the head with a small caliber pistol. And I don't know what a type of weapon caused Levine's injuries, but he was shot multiple times in the torso and in the leg, maybe five times. I'm not quite sure.

• 32:15Speaker 02

  Any idea where they were killed? Dumas was killed on sight, it seems. He was killed execution style on sight. Levine's body had been wrapped up in a sort of tarp or blanket and placed in the back of his own truck. And then he, someone had driven out there and abandoned the truck in the woods with his body in the back. And so the Army, there's lots of theories of this murder, but the CID theory was that somebody, the third man, because there had to have been a third person there. These guys couldn't have shot each other because there were no guns. So someone left with the guns at a minimum.

• 32:53Speaker 02

  And so Army CID presumes that Dumas, who was a really bad, a bad guy, to be honest. He was a drug trafficker and by some accounts, a hitman.

• 33:08Speaker 02

  And

• 33:09Tucker Carlson?

  A hitman?

• 33:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:10Tucker Carlson?

  You said he was an army officer.

• 33:12Speaker 02

  He was a warrant officer.

• 33:14Tucker Carlson?

  Warrant officer, okay.

• 33:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, but yeah, I talked to a woman, a police officer, in fact, who Dumas had offered to kill her husband for money.

• 33:24Speaker 02

  And so CID presumed-

• 33:26Tucker Carlson?

  Was he active duty?

• 33:27Speaker 02

  He was not active duty at the time of his death. He had just been expelled from the military for his criminal behavior. And that is actually a key fact that we can get into because the fact that he had, he had been kicked out when he was a few months shy of his 19th year in service. So, or a few, a few months shy of his 20th, 20th year, in which case he would have been eligible for a lifetime pension. You know, if you served 20 years in the military, you get a pension. So the fact that he had been kicked out and deprived of his pension really is an operative fact in all of this because the story, it goes on from here. But what was I saying about the murder itself that-

• 34:09Tucker Carlson?

  So he was killed, Dumas was killed on sight?

• 34:12Speaker 02

  Right, so, so the theory, I was, I was trying to recapitulate CID's theory of the case very briefly, which is that they think that Dumas was hired to kill Levine and did kill Levine with, with the cooperation of another person or persons. They then put Levine's body in the back of the truck, drive him out in the woods with the intention of throwing his body in a lake that's near there. But the truck got stuck in the, in the woods. It just got stuck in the mud because it wasn't on a road, it was on a fire break trail. And at that point, according to CID's theory of the case, the other guy decided to just abandon the situation and decided to kill Dumas in order to get rid of any witnesses.

• 34:55Tucker Carlson?

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• 35:54Speaker 05

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• 36:24Speaker 06

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• 36:39Tucker Carlson?

  What's the theory as to why Demoss would have been hired to kill Levine?

• 36:43Speaker 02

  Why he would have been hired?

• 36:44Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 36:45Speaker 02

  So there's a lot of competing possibilities. And as I said, I think that's what makes the, this murder mystery, for me at least as a writer, it was, it was a productive narrative vehicle because there's lots of things to explore. One is that Mark Leschek, the Green Beret who, who he killed, you know, his teammates by some accounts wanted revenge. The fact that that murder went completely unpunished, as you might imagine, leads to resentment in the community, leads to a lot of whispers. And you know, you can't just kill somebody, maybe get off legally, but there's going to be repercussions.

• 37:19Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah, a lot of dangerous people around.

• 37:21Speaker 02

  Sure. Yeah. So that's one.

• 37:23Tucker Carlson?

  Okay. So that's a, that's a more human, I'm not saying justifiable. I'm not as bothered by Leschker's buddies getting together and killing the guy who killed him. That seems understandable.

• 37:36Speaker 02

  I will say I found no evidence for that. I also learned that Dumas and Levine were trafficking cocaine together at a high level.

• 37:44Tucker Carlson?

  They were trafficking cocaine?

• 37:47Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm. Not dealing cocaine, you know, in little baggies to their friends. I'm talking about trafficking kilos of cocaine from Mexico up into the United States and distributing it in a large multi-day.

• 37:59Tucker Carlson?

  And Levine is a, just once again, an active duty.

• 38:02Speaker 02

  That's correct.

• 38:03Tucker Carlson?

  Member of Delta Force.

• 38:04Speaker 02

  That's correct. Yes. So they had enemies in the drug world, dangerous enemies, people that will kill you if you don't pay for your product. And finally, Levine, as I said before, was known to be going around telling people that he didn't believe in the mission anymore, that what the United States was doing was wrong, and was in the process of writing a book. And we touched on this in the beginning of our conversation about how much the unit frowns on people writing books. But, you know.

• 38:40Tucker Carlson?

  Possibly really frowns on it.

• 38:44Speaker 02

  Levine's ex-wife told me that he was writing a book. She showed me the text messages where he texted her and said, "I'm writing a book." And he also said that someone already wanted to turn it into a movie. Now, Dumas, so put a pin in that. Dumas, because he had been kicked out of the Army, just shy of his pension eligibility date, he also was writing something, variously described to me as a book or a letter, in which, it wasn't a memoir, it was actually deliberately intended as a blackmail document. He told people that he knew about a drug trafficking ring in the special forces, involving special forces soldiers who had gone over to the dark side in Afghanistan, where there was a great deal of drug trafficking going on, by the way.

• 39:28Tucker Carlson?

  By active duty US military?

• 39:31Speaker 02

  By the Afghan client state that the US supported for 20 years.

• 39:34Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 39:36Speaker 02

  So all these guys, having served many times in Afghanistan, would have been very close and in close proximity to working with warlords, police chiefs, militia commanders, and so on, Afghans, who were some of the biggest drug traffickers in the world, period.

• 39:53Speaker 02

  So that context, I think, is important. But in any event, Dumas had written this letter purporting to name all these individual members of this drug trafficking ring and the special forces, and was going around telling people that because of this leverage that he had over the special forces command, he was going to get them to reinstate his pension. So the fact that both of these guys are writing tell-all documents, and then both turn up murdered on Fort Bragg, is yet another potential, you know, theory for explaining their deaths.

• 40:26Tucker Carlson?

  You must have spoken to people they knew, their friends. What is the prevailing theory among people who were there?

• 40:36Speaker 02

  I can't say that anybody purports to know for sure, but I would say the most common reflexive answer that you get from folks is that they think that they were murdered by elements of Delta Force, either rogue elements of the unit or the command itself. Now, I want to be very careful.

• 40:56Tucker Carlson?

  Come on.

• 40:57Speaker 02

  I want to be very careful and say that I don't have any evidence of that, and I don't pretend to.

• 41:01Tucker Carlson?

  Is that the opinion of any Delta operators, do you know?

• 41:04Speaker 02

  Funnily enough, yeah. One of the guys I talked to, a former Delta operator, seemed to find that, excuse me, a former Delta officer, seemed to find that perfectly plausible, which was disturbing to me, but.

• 41:20Tucker Carlson?

  It's bonkers.

• 41:21Speaker 02

  Again, it's not, if folks who read the book, they will, they will see. The direction in which I lean ultimately, and I don't want to spoil, you know, the ending. But Bottom line, no arrests have been made. That's not true. So in so in a further complication comes in with regard to just that. So in recently, I don't want to spoil the last chapter of the book. But recently, the Department of Justice accused someone of committing these murders. And let me just say that it is not at all who you would think. And virtually all, I can just say all of the sources that I talked to about this.

• 42:06Speaker 02

  Either dismiss it out of hand and say, there's no way, or they just have a really hard time believing it. And the person they've accused has pleaded not guilty. And he is scheduled to go on trial in January 2026. Have you spoken to him? I have not spoken to his father, but not him. Is he a Delta operator? He's not. He's not. Yeah. He's someone who people struggle to understand how he could have. How anyone could imagine that this person would travel from where from where he lived, which was not in the area. Go into Fort Bragg and murder these two guys who are, you know, one of them is like a real life Jason Bourne. And the other one, you know, also a very dangerous man.

• 42:52Speaker 02

  How he could have done that and gotten away with it. And also, the indictment is very strange that, you know, the victims are identified only by their initials. A lot of the cases under seal, the whole thing is very suspicious. I don't want to dance around it. A lot of people that I've talked to say the government is framing this kid.

• 43:14Speaker 02

  Maybe because he was 20 years old at the time, 20. And Levine's 37, Dumas is 44. You know, these are mature men who the idea that a 20 year old stick up kid could have killed them defies credulity in a lot of people's opinion. Now, personally, I have to think that the Department of Justice doesn't indict people for murder lightly. I hope not. I I just, I have trouble getting that far mentally. So it seems like. He must have had some involvement. I want to credit my government for being at least that minimum level of responsibility that they're not simply framing this kid.

• 43:56Speaker 02

  But they haven't made any of their evidence public. And as I said, he's pleaded not guilty. So we'll just have to see how that how that trial goes.

• 44:04Tucker Carlson?

  Have they but they made the indictment public, but none of the evidence?

• 44:07Speaker 02

  The indictment is public, but you know, like I said, it identify I only knew about it because I think someone sent it to me. They it's only identifies the victims by their initials, W L and T D. I've never seen that before. A murder indictment where the where the victims are identified by their initials. I don't even.

• 44:26Tucker Carlson?

  Especially since their murder was public. I mean, it was reported on at the time, right?

• 44:30Speaker 02

  It is a very, very strange case.

• 44:33Tucker Carlson?

  Here's what we know. We know that Levine murdered a guy, got away with it. Obviously, his superior officers knew that command knew that. Was it widely known that he was a drug trafficker?

• 44:45Speaker 02

  It was widely known that he was a drug user. And yes, it was known that he was the guy that dealt drugs to his fellow operators. I mean, I talked to Mark Leschek's family. So Mark and Billy, they were best friends. And so Mark's wife and his mom even they they all knew Billy Levine. They had all spent time at his house. And they and many other witnesses, I interviewed lots of family members and friends of both of these men. They said that, you know, you would go into Billy's house and there was just cocaine everywhere. And all his fellow operators from Dole De Force were at his house, too. There's a bunch of coke on the table. They're doing MDMA. They're even smoking heroin, you

• 45:29Speaker 02

  know, and it's considered to be totally normal in this community. That's what to me was the most shocking to hear again and again, like, not only to be told that all these people, these guys are using drugs, but that people just seem to think that that's kind of what they do, which I didn't know that.

• 45:45Tucker Carlson?

  There's so many threats. I mean, the most obvious is the human effect of 12 combat deployments. So that's, that's too much, obviously. And that will destroy you. It sounds like it destroyed Billy Levine. The second is like, where's the Pentagon in this? This is the premier unit in the United States military. And people are openly using cocaine, smoking crack and shooting their friends and no one's doing anything about it? Like, what is that?

• 46:11Speaker 02

  It's baffling to me. I would have never imagined. I mean, I remember when I was in the Army, one guy, a sergeant in my company, tested positive for cocaine in a piss test. And he was just gone after that. I mean, he was just removed from the unit.

• 46:25Tucker Carlson?

  Well, that's a question that I should have asked you a half an hour ago. What about drug testing?

• 46:29Speaker 02

  So all members of the military are subject to random drug testing. But apparently they considered a joke. I mean, there's a lot of reporting on this around the Navy SEALs. A lot of Navy SEALs have gone on the record to say that, you know, they were using constantly during their time in service and that the drug testing regimen was a complete joke. Because there's ways to defeat it. In particular, you can get a tip off and when you, because it's supposed to be random. It's not something they do regularly. And maybe that's what they need to be doing. But as the randomized testing, you know, you can be told by someone in time, hey, your name is on the list. And that gives you time to like suck down a bunch of water and stop doing drugs and, and pass the test.

• 47:09Tucker Carlson?

  Or by urine, by clean urine.

• 47:11Speaker 02

  But you would imagine maybe that's something that's going on as well. Hadn't heard that in particular, but I know that people can do that.

• 47:17Tucker Carlson?

  They certainly can.

• 47:18Speaker 02

  You got to remember, these guys are intelligent, highly trained. They're spies just as much as they are assassins. Many of them are. There's various levels within Delta Force. There's compartmented elements. There's the line squadrons, et cetera. So it depends on the person. But, you know, these are people who are, their job is to do covert action. So they're very good at getting away with things. When your job is to penetrate a foreign country that's guarded by paranoid counterintelligence officials to go into that country and, I don't know, bug an embassy or kidnap a guy off the street. A drug test isn't going to be something that you're too worried about, I think.

• 48:03Tucker Carlson?

  And you alluded to this earlier. There comes a point where

• 48:09Tucker Carlson?

  You know, the government is afraid of you because you know too much, you've done too much, you're also performing what they think is a valuable service. No one else can provide that service. Like, you're too valuable to, to expel over a failed piss test.

• 48:22Speaker 02

  That's a great point. That's absolutely part of it. Um, which is that, yeah, after they've spent millions of dollars training you, they don't really care. I think they would put it as like, if they were to come out and say it, it's like big boy rules, I think is how they look at it. If you're gonna do drugs, then do it, just don't get caught.

• 48:41Tucker Carlson?

  Right.

• 48:42Speaker 02

  Just don't get caught is the rule.

• 48:45Tucker Carlson?

  Well, it sounds like their work life is that, has the same rule.

• 48:49Speaker 02

  Absolutely. Yeah.

• 48:51Tucker Carlson?

  So you said Billy Levine had decided that the missions he'd been sent on 12 times were, um, not morally justifiable. The, the whole war on terror was a bad idea. Is that a common view, do you think?

• 49:06Speaker 02

  You know,

• 49:08Speaker 02

  it is the fact that combat veterans are one of the most reliable anti-war demographics in the country.

• 49:15Tucker Carlson?

  I've noticed. They don't know that in cable news are always like, oh, combat veterans support whatever mission this is. That's the opposite of what I've noticed.

• 49:24Speaker 02

  The opposite is true. There's, there's data on this, there's polling, super majorities of combat veterans say that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were not worth.

• 49:31Tucker Carlson?

  I've noticed.

• 49:32Speaker 02

  Fighting. And I'm one of them. And so Bill, to, to me, to learn that Billy Levine, you know, held those views is not surprising at all.

• 49:37Tucker Carlson?

  When did that come to you, by the way? What's your, can, tell us, take five minutes and tell us your story, if that's all right.

• 49:44Speaker 02

  Sure. Um, you know, I'm not, my story is really not part of the book, but the relevant background would be that I actually deployed to Iraq at the same time as Levine's first tour in Iraq. And, um, you know, I, uh, before that deployment was over, I had come to the firm point of view that the war was not just a mistake, but a crime to, to carry out this invasion on the grounds that there were supposedly weapons of mass destruction in Iraq when there weren't.

• 50:18Tucker Carlson?

  And what was your role? You were in the army?

• 50:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, I was in, I was in college. I was a college student who joined Army Reserves. I was a student at the University of Texas. In order to pay for college.

• 50:28Tucker Carlson?

  Oh, wow.

• 50:30Speaker 02

  I fell for the recruiter's pitch, which is, you know, one week in a month, two weeks a year.

• 50:38Speaker 02

  I was 19 years old and that was in 2004, 2003, excuse me.

• 50:45Tucker Carlson?

  That used to be real. Well, that was the year we invaded Iraq.

• 50:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:49Tucker Carlson?

  That used to be real. I mean, the reserves served, you know, one weekend a month, two weeks a year for a long, long time. And then the war on terror commenced and those guys were dragged into real war. But I don't think that had happened before, had it? Well, you would know, you did it.

• 51:05Speaker 02

  No, it hadn't happened before. And in fact, you know, I sometimes in retrospect, struggle to explain to folks how it could have been that I opposed the Iraq war and had no interest in fighting in the Iraq war, and yet still joined the Army Reserve at a time when it was clear that the Iraq war was going to happen.

• 51:22Tucker Carlson?

  Well, because the reserves were not used in that way.

• 51:24Speaker 02

  There's that. And also, even people who opposed the war had no idea that it was going to last for years. We forget about this completely. But even people who opposed the war assumed that it would be over pretty quickly. And I can remember even asking my recruiter naively, are you sure I'm not going to get sent to this war in Iraq? That everyone's talking about? Don't worry about that. But yeah, of course, my deployment orders were cut even before I left basic training. They were sent to me while I was standing in formation in basic training. Is set to deploy to Iraq for 528 days.

• 51:59Tucker Carlson?

  And you're a UT student?

• 52:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 52:01Tucker Carlson?

  Sorry to laugh.

• 52:02Speaker 02

  It's okay.

• 52:03Tucker Carlson?

  It's hilarious.

• 52:04Speaker 02

  It was, it was two years before I went back to college after the day I signed that contract.

• 52:10Tucker Carlson?

  What did your girlfriend or parents or buddies say? I'm sorry. I'm sorry to laugh. It's like, do you see the humor kind of the dark?

• 52:18Speaker 02

  I do, of course. Yeah. My parents were pretty resigned to it. Bless their hearts. They had to put up with a lot. But, you know, before I even deployed back to the United States, I was writing editorials for the Daily Texing, because I wrote for my student newspaper.

• 52:34Speaker 02

  You know, talking about the Iraq war and using my perspective as a veteran to try to convince people that this was a mistake and that this whole post 9 11 permanent war paradigm should be examined. So that's kind of like my sort of origin story and how I came to.

• 52:48Tucker Carlson?

  Wait, so how long did you spend in Iraq?

• 52:51Speaker 02

  528 days.

• 52:52Tucker Carlson?

  Oh, you actually did?

• 52:53Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Yeah. Every single one of those days.

• 52:55Tucker Carlson?

  What was that like?

• 52:57Speaker 02

  Um, you know, I think a lot of people had certainly had rougher deployments than I did. I've read books about some of the units that had the toughest, that had the most casualties.

• 53:13Speaker 02

  I don't want to, you know, exaggerate what my experience was like, but at the same time, it was, it was pretty rough. It was pretty rough. I mean, there were guys in my unit who were killed. Uh, we were attacked on a fairly regular basis. Um, nothing crazy, but you know, getting shot at and getting mortared was a continuous thing. We were often outside the wire because we were, although we were non combat troops, we, we built bridges and roads. This was our job. We did a lot of construction work and dirt work, uh, in war zones or in, um, you know, areas where they've been fighting, especially to repair roads that have been damaged by A Ds. Um, so several of our convoys were ambushed. Um, a lot of, I think maybe five

• 53:56Speaker 02

  or six guys were shot and survived. Uh, and then also there were other bad things that went on.

• 54:05Speaker 02

  You know, I, uh, in one circumstance, there was a soldier who, um, shot up a car in front of me and another group of soldiers and killed the occupants of that car who were just a woman and her kid. And, you know, he said that he thought that, uh, you know, they were approaching too fast. I won't get into all the details of it, but the ugliness of it and savagery and how unnecessary it all was, made a deep, deep impression on me at that age. Um, and I have dedicated all my work as a journalist and reporter ever since then to opposing, you know, the continuation of these wars.

• 54:43Tucker Carlson?

  Well, bless you for that. What was it like coming back after 528 days? Did you rejoin your fraternity or what? I mean, it must've been bewildering.

• 54:55Speaker 02

  It was great coming back. It was good. Um, you know, I didn't have like the sort of stereotypical Hurt Locker type of experience where, you know,

• 55:07Speaker 02

  I wasn't like, uh, what's that movie, um, Apocalypse Now, where I'm laying under the ceiling fans, skinning rats. It wasn't like that. I mean, I def- I do remember having, it's been a long time now, but I do remember having nightmares for years. Not necessarily of violence, but I would have this dream where I had lost my weapon and was unarmed. I was in Iraq, uh, on the street or whatever and didn't have a weapon. So, yeah, there was some lingering effects, but you know, I don't complain about my personal experience in this. The US killed a million people in Iraq, maybe, maybe, the estimates vary, but hundreds of thousands, possibly a million people.

• 55:49Speaker 02

  They're the ones who are the victims of this, not US soldiers like me who have hurt feelings when we come back. Uh, you know, I want to be clear about that.

• 55:58Tucker Carlson?

  But it sounds like your experience there affected your view of the broader mission.

• 56:05Speaker 02

  For sure. Yes, profoundly, I would say.

• 56:08Tucker Carlson?

  What about the guys you served with?

• 56:10Speaker 02

  Um, my, my reaction was typical, like I was saying before, um, most, uh, there was a divide in the unit. I can remember debating the 2004 election with the guys who were for Kerry and the guys who were for Bush. You know, the military is very reflective of our society, maybe not the special forces, but the regular army is. Um, and so the same divisions we see in society at large are reflected in the ranks. So it was no different.

• 56:39Tucker Carlson?

  What do you think the prevailing view, let me ask you again, among the special operators is of the mission itself? Like, why are we doing this? Is that a question they discuss?

• 56:51Speaker 02

  I don't hear them talk about that sort of thing very much.

• 56:54Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 56:55Speaker 02

  They just say, bad guys, we kill bad guys, we kill terrorists. Um, I have to assume that in units like Delta Force, the majority of the guys are able to compartmentalize.

• 57:11Speaker 02

  The ethics of it and say, or the wisdom of it and say that that's simply not their job to think about and that they just follow orders.

• 57:19Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 57:21Speaker 02

  But as you can see, in the case of a guy like Bill Levine, that only lasts for so long. Eventually, it starts to dawn on you that this is not okay. And if you listen to operator type podcasts, you'll hear a lot of that. I mean, yeah, it's, they're not the, the most jingoistic and pro-war people, like you said before, are cable news, cable news anchors, not, you know, soldiers. The soldiers, I think, have a more nuanced perspective almost as a rule.

• 57:48Tucker Carlson?

  Did you ever run into any cable news anchors when you were over there?

• 57:54Speaker 02

  No, no.

• 57:56Tucker Carlson?

  So Mark Levin was not in your unit?

• 57:57Speaker 02

  I didn't see him, no. I did see Joe Millionaire once.

• 58:02Tucker Carlson?

  Joe Millionaire, whatever happened to him?

• 58:04Speaker 02

  Uh, I don't know. I saw him in Iraq. I also saw 50 Cent gave a concert in Iraq.

• 58:09Tucker Carlson?

  How was it?

• 58:10Speaker 02

  It was cool. Yeah. It was a high point of the deployment.

• 58:14Tucker Carlson?

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• 58:41Speaker 05

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• 59:12Speaker 06

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• 59:15Speaker 08

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• 59:41Tucker Carlson?

  I want to go back to the connection between Levine and his friends, his colleagues, the Delta operators, but also the other special forces, community members at Fort Bragg, and drug use and drug trafficking. That's shocking, but it doesn't seem to have shocked their superiors. To what extent is drug trafficking tolerated in the military? I can't believe I'm asking this question, but it sounds like it is.

• 1:00:15Speaker 02

  It's hard to imagine that you would have to ask that question. And yet, from what I was able to learn, it's not an isolated case, Levine and DuMoss. In fact, it seems that after 2020, these, like the drug trafficking rings that permeate Fort Bragg only increased. And you even had public statements from Fort Bragg officials acknowledging, you know, for example, that they had 100% increase in drug crime on base from 2020 to 2021.

• 1:00:45Tucker Carlson?

  How could you have drug crime on a military base?

• 1:00:48Speaker 02

  It was very surprising to me as well, but you even have cases of military police officers dealing drugs out of their police cars on Fort Bragg. Folks, if you want to look that up, look up the case of Jacob Dickerson, Dickerson, who was an MP on Fort Bragg, who was busted for drug trafficking. And in fact, I obtained the investigative files in that case and learned that there was actually four or five of these MPs on base that were trafficking drugs. And they dropped charges against all but one of the guys because he had exacerbated the trouble he was in by getting into a drunk driving accident. And even he was just given a slap on the wrist. I think he got, you know, a month or two in the stockade and a dishonorable discharge.

• 1:01:32Speaker 02

  But there is a, I would say pervasive practice of, or there's, there's drug availability on Fort Bragg that's comparable to, to any, you know, dense urban city in the United States.

• 1:01:47Tucker Carlson?

  The military is an authoritarian structure. I don't need to tell you that since you served in it. So it seems like you could prevent that if you really wanted to. You could fix that problem.

• 1:01:58Speaker 02

  You would think so. You would think so. And I'm at a loss to explain why so little has been done. I've talked to people who, you know, CID sources who told me.

• 1:02:12Tucker Carlson?

  CID is what?

• 1:02:14Speaker 02

  The Army's Criminal Investigations Division.

• 1:02:16Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 1:02:17Speaker 02

  It's a quasi-military, quasi-civilian police agency that has jurisdiction to investigate crimes involving American soldiers. So you have MPs, who are the uniformed officers, and then above them you have CID. So they're the ones who investigate, you know, major crimes on bases. And they told me about closed-door meetings in which the Fort Bragg brass mostly seem concerned with, you know, massaging the statistics that they kept, just to make it seem like drug crime was under control, when in fact, it's not.

• 1:02:50Tucker Carlson?

  Who runs Fort Bragg?

• 1:02:52Speaker 02

  Well, Fort Bragg is under the largest umbrella formation there would be the 18th Airborne Corps. So the commander of the 18th Airborne Corps is going to be the highest-ranking Army officer on Fort Bragg. But you also have the Joint Special Operations Command there, which is a very elite formation in the military, the most elite. And so the commander of JSOC is also a very important and powerful person, who's a three-star general, if I'm not mistaken, who's on the base as well. So you have a collection of, you know, what people call the brass. And then, of course, they're subservient to the Pentagon, and the Secretary of the

• 1:03:34Speaker 02

  Army, and the Secretary of Defense.

• 1:03:38Tucker Carlson?

  One connection that I've almost never heard anybody make, but I've thought about. So the war in Vietnam really starts in 1964 with the Gulf of Tonkin incident, and extends all the way, really, to the final end in April of 1975. That coincided almost exactly with the rise of a real drug epidemic in the United States. Vietnam is in a drug, is a poppy-growing region, you know, the Golden Triangle. And for a bunch of different reasons...

• 1:04:11Tucker Carlson?

  That war seemed to have had a material effect on drug use in the United States. Like, and a lot of people died from drugs during the period of the Vietnam War. And I think there must be a connection. You see the exact same phenomenon around the war in Afghanistan. Starts in 2001, ends three years ago, and it coincides precisely with this explosion in opioid drug use and the inevitable death toll from that. Is there a direct connection between those two things?

• 1:04:42Speaker 02

  Yes, there is. And the US media's failure to connect those things is probably the biggest dereliction of duty on part of the press corps that I've seen in my life.

• 1:04:52Tucker Carlson?

  Those are big things.

• 1:04:54Speaker 02

  Big things, yeah.

• 1:04:55Tucker Carlson?

  The death toll from drugs during the Vietnam period, and particularly during the Afghanistan period, dwarfs the death toll in the war itself.

• 1:05:02Speaker 02

  Yeah. The number one cause of death for Americans age 18 to 45 is fentanyl overdose. And where does that, that comes, that comes directly out of the heroin crisis that afflicted this country from, let's say, the mid 2000s up until 2015, 16, 17, 18. And so it's very important to ask, what were the causes of the heroin crisis?

• 1:05:26Tucker Carlson?

  I don't think I've ever heard anyone ask that question.

• 1:05:30Speaker 02

  Well, the conventional explanation, which is not wrong, is that the roots of it lie in the overprescription of opioid painkillers in the 1990s.

• 1:05:39Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 1:05:39Speaker 02

  That's very true. That happened.

• 1:05:40Tucker Carlson?

  The Sackler family in Purdue.

• 1:05:42Speaker 02

  Yeah. That created widespread dependence on opiates among a large number of people. You also saw, at the same time, to feed this demand, increased heroin production in Mexico. However, more than 90% of all the world's heroin was produced in Afghanistan between 2001 and 2021.

• 1:06:04Tucker Carlson?

  More than 90%?

• 1:06:07Speaker 02

  In fact, Afghanistan, under US occupation, produced more heroin than the world, the whole world could absorb. So supply there outstripped global demand. And so for that reason, you, there are now believed to be large stockpiles of Afghan heroin in places like Pakistan and Tashikistan.

• 1:06:23Tucker Carlson?

  How could, should, wait, do you think heroin production went up under US occupation?

• 1:06:27Speaker 02

  I mean, it went up exponentially. So and as a direct result of the US invasion. And we should talk about the Taliban in this context because I'll try to keep it to brief to the essentials because it actually goes back to the 1980s. So in the 1980s, the CIA armed and funded Afghan resistance fighters known as Mujahideen to fight the Russians who had invaded Afghanistan and were occupying Afghanistan to prop up a communist government there. So and they won that war. That's what we call Charlie Wilson's War, the movie, of course. But after the CIA withdrew, those warlords that they had previously set up took over Afghanistan and ruled it in the 1990s. And they were

• 1:07:09Speaker 02

  all major drug traffickers. They're the ones who were responsible for turning Afghanistan into the narco state that it became. You know, Gulbadeen Heckmatyar, if I'm pronouncing that correctly, was the main recipient of CIA cash. And he turned into the big, by far the biggest drug lord in Afghanistan. There's also the clan of Nassim Akhunsada in the Helmand province, who was another major recipient of CIA aid and who turned the Helmand into the world's most prolific opium, poppy, heroin, morphine producing area in the world. The Taliban, we hear so much about the Taliban's oppression of women and making music illegal. And they do those things. The Taliban is an arch conservative

• 1:07:54Speaker 02

  movement whose ethics and morality I absolutely do not share. However,

• 1:08:00Tucker Carlson?

  I never understood why I was supposed to give a shit about that. I mean, I want everyone to be free, just as a matter of principle, but that didn't. But moving, you know, metric tons of heroin into my country, that seems like a real story. Whether people can, you know, girls can get PhDs in feminist studies or whatever is of less concern to me, right?

• 1:08:20Speaker 02

  Right. Well, the Afghan people didn't like it either, all the drug trafficking that was going on in their country. And what made the Taliban popular originally was their suppression of the drug industry in Afghanistan. They eliminated, they took over and eliminated all of the drug production that was taking place there because it's, you can see how it's ideologically consistent with their Sharia law. You know, they don't tolerate drugs. They don't tolerate alcohol either. So they get rid of all of it.

• 1:08:49Tucker Carlson?

  Sharia law is bad, Seth. I don't know if you've heard that. It's bad. It's worse than what's happening in New York and Detroit. It's just bad.

• 1:08:57Tucker Carlson?

  I don't know why, just like years of brainwashing. I just like, I'm not Muslim. I'm not for Sharia law. On the other hand, compared to what? Compared to Baltimore? You know, shut up Sharia law.

• 1:09:10Speaker 02

  Well, in

• 1:09:11Tucker Carlson?

  Sorry Sharia law.

• 1:09:14Speaker 02

  In Afghanistan, the effect of implementing Sharia law was the total suppression of the heroin industry and the decimation of the world's supply of heroin.

• 1:09:22Tucker Carlson?

  And a massive reduction in the rape of boys. They didn't like that.

• 1:09:26Speaker 02

  That's another subject that's absolutely part of this. And I almost hesitate to go there because it's, it's, um, it is a parallel. Everything I'm saying about drugs could also be talked about. I can't believe I'm even saying this, but child sex trafficking was something that took place. There was something that the US-backed client state was deeply implicated in child sex trafficking. Another thing that's falsely laid at the feet of the Taliban and said, this is just part of Afghan culture, when that is not true. Um, but to return to the heroin thing, the, um, it was actually in the summer of 2001.

• 1:09:59Tucker Carlson?

  Do you feel like your mind explodes with like, when you start to understand what the truth is? Just that the layers of propaganda that attach like barnacles to your brain when they come off, you're like, I don't even recognize this world. Do you feel that ever?

• 1:10:13Speaker 02

  In this case, yes, because although I had served in the military and worked as a war reporter, I'd actually never been to Afghanistan. So I had to educate myself on the Afghan war, um, starting from scratch. Um, and what I learned was that, uh, the Taliban eliminated the drug industry just months before the US invaded. The DEA and the UN certified the, the eradication campaign that the Taliban had carried out. And when the US invaded in 2001, they teamed up with the exact same narco warlords, um, that had previously ruled Afghanistan, what we call the Northern Alliance. Um, and those people took over and Hamid Karzai was installed as CIA puppet,

• 1:10:54Speaker 02

  uh, president of Afghanistan and immediately legalized poppy production in Afghanistan. And within, within the span of, let's say, two years, maybe three years, heroin production increased something like seven or 8,000% in Afghanistan. And

• 1:11:11Tucker Carlson?

  And of course, a lot of it winds up in Europe and the United States, correct?

• 1:11:14Speaker 02

  Yes, you know, you have, like I said, more heroin than the world can even absorb.

• 1:11:20Tucker Carlson?

  Why would the US authorities, why would the CIA, why would the White House allow that?

• 1:11:27Speaker 02

  I, my view, there's a paranoid point of view, conspiratorial point of view among people who believe that this is some kind of, this is some kind of societal program, this is some nefarious program that the, that the US government wants the whole world to be inundated with heroin. I personally am more inclined to the view that they just don't care. And that these type of mercenary drug traffickers make natural allies to a foreign power that's invading your country.

• 1:12:02Tucker Carlson?

  Is there a difference between negligence and malice? If I leave my toddler in the car with the windows closed on a hot day to go gamble at a casino and he suffocates, does it matter if I wanted to kill him or if I just didn't care enough?

• 1:12:17Speaker 02

  No, I don't think it matters.

• 1:12:19Tucker Carlson?

  It doesn't matter.

• 1:12:19Speaker 02

  And I'm not making an excuse.

• 1:12:20Tucker Carlson?

  No, no, I know you're not. I'm just like, the bottom line is that US authorities, the Bush administration, and then the Obama administration, and then, you know, up, up until the end, up until the Biden administration, allowed the United States and its citizens to die of drug ODs because the, the country that they were running, Afghanistan, was producing all, all the heroin. Right?

• 1:12:45Speaker 02

  I mean, yes, the, I mean, the amount of heroin that was being produced was very potent, a high quality and large amounts of it. So that obviously supply and demand depressed prices. And you have ample reporting, it's not just Europe and Australia and Asia that's being flooded by heroin. Also, the United States in this time saw a massive increase in supply. Now here's where the cover up comes in, because all of this was well reported up until the late 2000s, let's say 2007 or so. That's when the DEA started putting out statements to the effect that although there was rise in heroin supplies in the United States, they claimed that none of it was coming from Afghanistan. Less than 1% is the official figure.

• 1:13:29Speaker 02

  And so in the process of writing this book, I spent a lot of time in the weeds trying to figure out how exactly the DEA made this determination because it's kind of like saying, no oil from Saudi Arabia ever gets burned in the United States. You ask, how is that possible that the world's largest consumer of drugs is not importing any drugs from the world's largest producer of drugs?

• 1:13:51Tucker Carlson?

  Which, by the way, it controls.

• 1:13:52Speaker 02

  Which it controls. Yeah, that seems to defy reason. Yeah.

• 1:13:55Tucker Carlson?

  Yes, it does. That's why you're a good reporter, Seth.

• 1:13:59Speaker 02

  If you read the book, you will see that I get deep in the nitty gritty of it, down to the actual mathematics of it. But suffice it to say, I find that that statistic was totally bogus and invented as a way to cover up the fact, this incredibly damaging effect of the war in Afghanistan had on US society.

• 1:14:21Tucker Carlson?

  So I guess another way to say that would be, in fact, a lot of heroin from our client state, Afghanistan, was winding up in American cities.

• 1:14:29Speaker 02

  Absolutely. Especially the China, what's called China white heroin. It's called China because of its color, not because it actually comes from China. Now, it's, the picture is slightly confounded because there was also a lot of Mexican heroin coming to the United States during the same time. But Mexican heroin is black in color and low in quality. It's called black tar heroin.

• 1:14:50Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah. It's usually smoked.

• 1:14:52Speaker 02

  Right. And it was, but it was the China white that really flooded the US during this, this time period and caused the most damage, especially in the Northeast and in Appalachia and in the Midwest, because that's where flights from Afghanistan come. It's all traffic through airports on the eastern seaboard, whereas Mexico kind of supplies the west of the United States and the south.

• 1:15:14Tucker Carlson?

  Right. That's why Jerry Garcia was a black tar addict in Marin County, California, and all the junkies in Philadelphia are using China white.

• 1:15:23Speaker 02

  Right, right. And the China white, because it's so much more potent, is what leads to all of the, the huge overdose crisis that we suffered during these years.

• 1:15:30Tucker Carlson?

  Pretty hard to OD from smoking heroin. Possible, but.

• 1:15:32Speaker 02

  That's my understanding, yeah.

• 1:15:36Tucker Carlson?

  So who profited from that?

• 1:15:39Speaker 02

  That's a very good question. Not the people of Afghanistan. The numbers that I've seen suggest that maybe a billion dollars a year was, you know, was the was the profits that went to Afghans of one type or another. The majority of it went to drug supply chains outside of Afghanistan. And that's the most opaque aspect of all of this.

• 1:16:04Speaker 02

  And that's where I have the most unanswered questions. Who exactly was making all of this money?

• 1:16:10Tucker Carlson?

  So the the occupation of Afghanistan was a military occupation, diplomatic as well, intel components. But basically, we had our troops in Afghanistan, therefore, we controlled Afghanistan. So if there's a exponential rise by thousands of percent rise in opium production, heroin manufacturing and export of heroin, it's kind of hard to believe the US military didn't know that.

• 1:16:34Speaker 02

  Well, they certainly knew about it. And there's, um, there's an agency called the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction that had, although it's a US government agency, has done the most important retrospective work on this, including lots of interviews with key people who, and all of them acknowledged that they knew that it was going on. And Cigar is an agency, its acronym, discussed how the US military didn't want anything to do with drug eradication because they saw it as detrimental to their mission because the people they were working with were drug traffickers. And the same story goes for the CIA, except Cigar explicitly says in its 2018 report on counter narcotics

• 1:17:20Speaker 02

  that the CIA, rather than cooperating with anti-drug eradication measures, prioritized its relationship with significant drug traffickers. That's the language of the US government report. And it even names some of the major drug traffickers who worked with the CIA, who were on the CIA's payroll. And let's not forget that the president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, and his brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, were on the payroll of the CIA. And led this drug trafficking organization, which, you know, recently our government accused Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela of being the head of a drug cartel on some very, very flimsy evidence. And they make these organization charts where they purport to show Maduro at the top and other these other guys.

• 1:18:02Speaker 02

  If you had taken that same lens and trained it on Afghanistan, you could have very easily created an organization structure showing the world's biggest drug cartel with Hamid Karzai at the very top. And he's someone who, you know, is sitting down to dine with President Obama and all these other top US officials.

• 1:18:18Tucker Carlson?

  But if I'm a, if I'm a special operator in Afghanistan and I'm working with the local leaders who are also drug traffickers. I mean, it's not a huge step and I'm buying heroin for, you know, a thousand dollars a pound when I can resell it for many, many times that. Can be kind of tempting to bring some home, right?

• 1:18:43Speaker 02

  Timothy Dumas, who was found dead next to Billy Levine on Fort Bragg in 2020, had evidently written a letter in which he outlined exactly what you're talking about. A drug trafficking organization involving special forces soldiers who are trafficking heroin from Afghanistan to the United States on military planes. And he was killed before that letter was ever made public.

• 1:19:08Tucker Carlson?

  Who'd he write it to?

• 1:19:10Speaker 02

  He wrote it. It was addressed to a top ranking. I never read the letter, but I interviewed someone who did read the letter. I interviewed three people who knew about the letter, including Dumas's son and also his partner in crime. A very corrupt former North Carolina state trooper named Freddie Wayne Huff, who was entrusted with a copy of the letter and read it. He said that it was addressed to a high ranking general. As I said before, Dumas intended to use this blackmail letter to exert pressure on the special forces in order to get his pension reinstated. But it doesn't seem to have been a very wise maneuver on his part.

• 1:19:45Tucker Carlson?

  No, no, you can push too hard, then you wind up executed. I'm coming around to your theory, by the way.

• 1:19:54Tucker Carlson?

  That this may have been retaliatory.

• 1:19:57Speaker 02

  That's, that's not my theory, although I get what you're saying, but just to be super clear about it, because these are not light allegations. So I just want to be as responsible as possible as reporter and say that this is what people have alleged, this is what the evidence is, but we don't know for sure. And the reason we don't know is because our ignorance has been procured by the people, by the authorities who are, who have the responsibility to investigate this stuff and are not doing it.

• 1:20:24Tucker Carlson?

  Do you think, nicely put, and thank you for saying that, do you think the US, people in the US military in the special forces committee did participate in drug trafficking?

• 1:20:36Speaker 02

  I find it hard to imagine that, that they weren't. I will say that there's other ways of making money, other types of crime that are discussed in the book. The book's not entirely about drug trafficking. There's also a lot of weapons trafficking, a lot of weapons theft from the military. For Bragg, it would blow your mind if they ever disclosed how much, how many weapons and how much explosives that they lose annually. It's really crazy.

• 1:21:06Tucker Carlson?

  What kind of weapons, what kind of explosives?

• 1:21:08Speaker 02

  Military weapons and plastic explosives. They lose an incredible amount of weapons every year. And Timothy Dumas was a guy who was trafficking weapons, besides trafficking drugs.

• 1:21:17Tucker Carlson?

  He was a quartermaster.

• 1:21:18Speaker 02

  He was a quartermaster, and so he was deeply involved in all of this.

• 1:21:21Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:22Speaker 02

  I mean, I read his separation packet, it's 128 pages, and it makes crystal clear that his entire career was characterized by stuff going missing, documents going missing. He was the, he was the, the, when he was in Afghanistan attached to JSOC, all of the records for two years, 2012 and 2013, if I'm not mistaken, went missing in their entirety. All the paperwork on all of the JSOC supply chain for that battalion was just gone. But...

• 1:21:55Tucker Carlson?

  What do you do with military-grade weapons, even small arms, fully automatic rifles? Like, what do you do with something that you can't sell it in the United States?

• 1:22:03Speaker 02

  No, you sell it to Mexican cartels. And then that's how they end up better armed than the Mexican government in states like Tamaulipas and Nuevo León and Coahuila.

• 1:22:11Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:12Speaker 02

  Los Zetas.

• 1:22:13Tucker Carlson?

  The Ukrainian military has been selling NATO weapons, American-supplied weapons, to the Mexican drug cartels. Fact. They hate it when you say that, but it's true.

• 1:22:20Speaker 02

  Well, I haven't seen that reporting, but I will tell you this about Ukraine. That agency I mentioned earlier, Cigar, there are provisions in the laws providing aid to a Ukrainian that ensure that that type of accountability never takes place again. Because Cigar turned into a real embarrassment for the war in Afghanistan, because apparently they took their job seriously and did it correctly. So the aid to Ukraine can never be audited. That's written in the law.

• 1:22:45Tucker Carlson?

  What?

• 1:22:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:22:49Tucker Carlson?

  Oh, this can't continue for too long. It's too out of control.

• 1:22:54Speaker 02

  Um, you know, the Roman Empire declined for hundreds of years before it finally disintegrated. So.

• 1:23:01Tucker Carlson?

  Well, and then it just moved east.

• 1:23:04Tucker Carlson?

  And it lasts another thousand years. But amazingly, so of course, you're right. You're absolutely right. But it is bewildering that this was even just 20 years ago, if you had done a poll of people I knew, anyway. I lived in DC. I was around the government every day. Is this country corrupt? I would say, not really. I mean, that was my view. I think most people felt that way. When you joined the army, did you think the people who ran the army were corrupt?

• 1:23:35Speaker 02

  No, the simple answer is no. But, you know, corruption takes many forms. In the United States, if you get pulled over by a cop, you can't just bribe that cop to let you go. That's not going to happen. But the higher you go up in the power structures in this country, the more you find legal corruption. I mean, is it corruption for a corporation to give unlimited amounts of money to a politician to get elected? Because that's, our Supreme Court says that's totally legal under Citizens United. But in another context, in another country, in another time, that would just be considered the rankest sort of bribery. So it depends upon how you define corruption.

• 1:24:17Tucker Carlson?

  Well, of course, it is bribery.

• 1:24:19Speaker 02

  I agree, yeah.

• 1:24:20Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah. Well, obviously.

• 1:24:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:24:22Tucker Carlson?

  It's a complex question because like, do you have a right to tell people to what extent they can support a politician? I don't know. I mean, I think it is complicated, but the effect as it stands right now is politicians are bribed by donors.

• 1:24:35Speaker 02

  Mm hmm. Yeah, absolutely.

• 1:24:36Tucker Carlson?

  I mean, that's how we got Ted Cruz. Totally corrupt, uh, human being.

• 1:24:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, he's unfortunately, he's my senator. I hope that he has a primary challenger soon.

• 1:24:47Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah, well, I think he just won, so, uh, probably not for a while, but, um, anyway, sorry, not to get off on a Ted Cruz tangent, but I just want to say again, Ted Cruz is corrupt. His wife, uh, works for Goldman in Texas, and when she pitches clients, I happen to know for a dead certain fact, uh, he goes to dinner with them. So that's, that's corruption.

• 1:25:08Speaker 02

  Well, I'm sure he's looking forward to coming back on your show again after the last time.

• 1:25:12Tucker Carlson?

  Anyway, sorry. No, I'm being mean, but it's true. And there's a lot of it. But when it happens in the Senate, you're like, okay, of course Ted Cruz is corrupt. Look at him. But when it happens among people, most civilians revere, like, you know, the most elite units in the US military, I, that's dispiriting, among other things, right?

• 1:25:31Speaker 02

  I think it is, and, um, I think my inclination is to think that it is a result of waging wars that nobody really believes in for years and years, because think about what that does to your psychology. When you're engaged in a righteous cause that has widespread societal buy-in, um, you're going to be constrained by your own sense of yourself as a virtuous actor. And you're going to know that when you're tempted to do things for money or for other motives, that that's not consistent with your self-image. And so you don't do it. But when you're fighting for years in wars like Afghanistan that the public just doesn't even pay attention to, and you know, all your allies are drug traffickers and they're

• 1:26:16Speaker 02

  raping little boys and that they're trafficking sex slaves, but you're just doing it because you like your work and you like being an elite, uh, soldier, then it's easier to take a mercenary attitude towards this and just think, it's not going to matter if I skim, you know, a hundred thousand dollars off the top of the op fund that we have out here in the field, all this cash that we're given, or it's no big deal for me to grab a couple of bricks of this heroin. And put it in my footlocker and then sell it for 50 grand when I go, when I get back to Fayetteville.

• 1:26:47Tucker Carlson?

  I, I hope what you just said is clipped because that's a perfect summation of what my instincts are. That the more morally corrupt the enterprise is, the more morally corrupt the people participating in the, in the enterprise become.

• 1:27:00Speaker 02

  And that's why I spend so much time in the book, talking about the wars in which all this, the context in which this takes place. Because it doesn't take place in a vacuum. And, you know, the decisions of our leaders in this country trickle down to the lowest levels and have an influence on how people live their lives.

• 1:27:18Tucker Carlson?

  That's right.

• 1:27:21Tucker Carlson?

  Has any, anyone ever been held accountable? I mean, I think you've, I think you've confirmed my instinct, which is that there was a connection between the war in this drug producing country and our occupation of this drug producing country and the drug epidemic in the United States. I mean, there's clearly, I mean, you have to be an idiot not to see the connection. But has anyone ever been indicted, arrested, convicted for participating in that?

• 1:27:47Speaker 02

  No, no, nobody.

• 1:27:49Tucker Carlson?

  Nobody?

• 1:27:50Speaker 02

  Nobody, no. For the drug trafficking that took place in Afghanistan?

• 1:27:54Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:55Speaker 02

  No, that's never happened. And there's been, there was total impunity around the entire enterprise.

• 1:28:05Tucker Carlson?

  Man, I think the United States government, I don't think I know, is doing things right now whose consequences cannot be foreseen, but they'll be profound.

• 1:28:14Speaker 02

  I agree.

• 1:28:15Tucker Carlson?

  And I think the more rotten your behavior, um, you know, the bigger the consequences. And you don't get away with it. No one gets away with it.

• 1:28:24Speaker 02

  I agree. And, um, you know, you wonder what's going on now because Afghanistan is fading rapidly into the past. You know, the war ended in 2021. And, you know, is there massive drug trafficking taking place under the auspices of US military control right now? Not that I know of, but there's other things. You know, Ukraine was the most corrupt country in Europe before the war there, before Russia invaded. And we've dumped so much money and so much equipment into that country with no oversight at all, and transferred it to a political class that we know is corrupt

• 1:29:06Speaker 02

  to the bone. So that would be the place to look now, in my opinion, for contemporary examples of corruption.

• 1:29:13Tucker Carlson?

  You'd get assassinated if you tried to do that. You'd be assassinated by the Ukrainians, perhaps, you know, with the help of US intel agencies. Period.

• 1:29:24Speaker 02

  I feel like it would be very unsafe to look into that subject.

• 1:29:27Tucker Carlson?

  It would be very unsafe. I can tell you firsthand, it would be very unsafe to do that. In fact, you couldn't do it.

• 1:29:32Speaker 02

  Whereas...

• 1:29:33Tucker Carlson?

  Which is pretty crazy, if you think about it.

• 1:29:35Speaker 02

  It is crazy. There's a lot of things that are crazy these days. I think that what made it possible to write what I wrote about Afghanistan was something that happened while I was writing the book, not too long ago, in fact, which was that, you know, the Taliban took over after the US withdrew in 21, and then proceeded to do exactly what they had done in the year 2000, 2001, which was to completely eradicate all drugs from the country. And up until then, we had been told, to the extent that drug production in Afghanistan came up, we were always told that it was the Taliban, and that the insurgency and the drug production were just two sides of the same coin.

• 1:30:17Tucker Carlson?

  Such liars, yes.

• 1:30:18Speaker 02

  But the best lies are the ones that are 180-degree opposite of the truth.

• 1:30:21Tucker Carlson?

  Exactly, exactly.

• 1:30:23Speaker 02

  And what made it, what gave me the, I guess, what gave me the confidence to really, to hit as hard as I could in this narrative, was seeing the Taliban in 2023, they completed another eradication campaign, where they once again totally eliminated heroin production and drug production from Afghanistan. So at that point, you know, I had doubts as a reporter, because I'm not omniscient, and, you know, there's always conflict, this conflicting information. So I kind of doubt my own conclusions. I'm thinking, well, they must have been involved to some degree. We hear that said so often from the most prestigious institutions of media and government. There must be some truth to it. But seeing the Taliban totally

• 1:31:03Speaker 02

  eliminate drugs from their country again made me realize, okay, this was always a one-sided thing. It wasn't that both sides were involved in it. And like I said, that didn't happen until 2023. And so, and that's what I think makes it possible to tell the true story of Afghanistan for the first time.

• 1:31:20Tucker Carlson?

  You want to get really red-pilled? You want to make it almost hard to live here? Look up Taliban drug treatment. You know, you're in your early 40s, I think. So you've lived in this country a long time, and you must know people who've been ensnared in drugs or died from drugs. I know, and you must, you live here. So you know-

• 1:31:37Speaker 02

  Sure, yeah, of course.

• 1:31:38Tucker Carlson?

  -who've become addicted to drugs and can't get off. And a lot of them, most are dead. Ask yourself, super simple question, is the Taliban drug treatment program, you can look this up, there are videos of it online-

• 1:31:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, I've seen it.

• 1:31:52Tucker Carlson?

  Does it have, does it produce a higher or lower relapse rate than the American version in, say, Delray Beach, Florida?

• 1:32:02Tucker Carlson?

  You know- Are the Taliban better at getting people off opioids than we are? And the answer is not just yes, but hell yes. Way better. Because they don't wean them off with methadone. This whole thing is a freaking lie. By the way, a lot of people get rich off that. You know who you are if you're listening. Some of them are big political donors who get rich on drug treatment programs. Disgusting. And it doesn't work. It works for some small percentage, but it doesn't work for most, that's for sure. And a lot of them die, and they never lead productive, joyful lives. And the Taliban have a faith-based, I know, I'm gonna probably get pulled off YouTube for saying this, but it's true. I'm saying this as a Christian, not a Muslim.

• 1:32:41Tucker Carlson?

  They have a faith-based, no-nonsense, zero intoxicant policy in their rehab, and it works, and ours doesn't.

• 1:32:50Speaker 02

  Well, it's a really good point because Afghanistan-

• 1:32:54Tucker Carlson?

  If you think drugs are a serious problem, and I do because I've lived it and seen it, yeah, it's a serious point. It's a serious point that we should think about.

• 1:33:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:33:02Tucker Carlson?

  What is that?

• 1:33:03Speaker 02

  Well, Afghanistan came to have the highest rates of drug use in the world, the highest addiction rate in the world, which is a tragedy and is something that was that was foisted on them, and it's a source of profound misery and blight. And the Taliban's way of dealing with it, once the US left, was to simply round up addicts. If they found them on the street, they would just put them onto buses and it was involuntary, take them to these detox wards where they're not given any kind of methadone-

• 1:33:29Tucker Carlson?

  That's correct.

• 1:33:30Speaker 02

  ... or any kind of medication. They're just given, you know, food, water, and a place to stay, and then they just wait it out. You know, they're basically locked in there, and they suffer through withdrawals, and then, once they're sober, you know, they're allowed to leave at that point. And it was amazing to me to see the hostility in the Western reaction to the drug, to the Taliban's drug detox program. I mean, you can read all of these think tank pieces and all these NGOs where they're talking about how inhumane this is and so on.

• 1:34:04Tucker Carlson?

  And I've been through withdrawal from alcohol, and it was so unpleasant, and I did it alone. I'm not, you know, I didn't, I have not done anything extraordinary, but the one extraordinary thing, I did go through that. Man, I never drank. You go through that? I mean, I know people relapse after going through withdrawals, for sure, but I can just speak for myself and other people I know have done it. That's a pretty powerful incentive not to do it again. It is. And I do think there's a cost to sort of easing people out or something. I mean, some withdrawal is life-threatening. Of course, you don't want to kill people. But opiate withdrawal is not life threatening. It's just you shit yourself a lot and feel terrible. I don't know, there is, I can speak from experience. There's, there's value in that. Like you'll never have another glass of vodka if you've gone through something like that.

• 1:34:49Tucker Carlson?

  That's, that was my feeling.

• 1:34:50Speaker 02

  So let me ask you, would you like to see, you know, um, police officers?

• 1:34:55Tucker Carlson?

  Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow. If you're standing leaning against a trash can in the fentanyl haze, if you're tweaking your brains out and picking open wounds on your face from meth. That is, you are in hell, you're dying, you're a fellow American. I have an obligation to help you. You're beyond helping yourself in the way that a child, a toddler is beyond helping himself in the way that a schizophrenic is beyond helping himself. You don't have reason, you don't have free will. And it's incumbent on me to love you through action. And we can argue about the details of treatment. I personally think that when possible and not physically dangerous, total withdrawal is, is the best way, you know, having done it.

• 1:35:35Tucker Carlson?

  But I also think, um, more, bigger than that is you can't allow this and call yourself a decent society. You cannot allow this, this is hell. And anyone who doesn't think it's hell doesn't know anything about it. What if that was your daughter? Getting pimped out, you know what I mean? Like it's that ugly and you're from a city where it's just totally destroyed your downtown. But most American cities can say that and, um, and no one does anything. So yeah, tomorrow, tomorrow. This is a country where we force people to take the COVID vax. So don't lecture me about civil liberties asshole. Sorry, yeah, I do feel that way strongly. And how many addicts do I know personally who got sober in jail?

• 1:36:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:36:15Tucker Carlson?

  And they're grateful for that. And so when Nancy Pelosi starts talking about compassion, the partial birth abortion lady's talking to me about compassion, fuck you actually. Compassion, look at your city. There's no compassion there, that's hate, hate for your fellow citizens allowing this stuff. Sorry. Drugs are destroying America.

• 1:36:33Speaker 02

  I, uh,

• 1:36:34Tucker Carlson?

  And I say this as a former user of drugs and like was very liberal on drugs, but I was wrong.

• 1:36:39Speaker 02

  You know, I should say, I'm not a drug warrior. I don't believe in the war on drugs. I don't think drugs should be illegal. I think that they should be regulated rather than controlled as rather than being a controlled substance that's totally illegal. But I'm inclined to your point of view about the rehabilitation of large numbers of drug people, of drug users. I think that drugs are one of the most salient features of American society.

• 1:37:09Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 1:37:09Speaker 02

  For the worse.

• 1:37:12Speaker 02

  And that we have a just are as a country, we have a big, big drug problem. And you see that affecting the military, you know, more than ever.

• 1:37:19Tucker Carlson?

  And yeah, I guess I shouldn't be you're, of course, you're absolutely right. It's like the thing about getting older is it's like, it's so hard to readjust your previous perceptions of things. But you're right, of course, you shouldn't be, I should not be shocked that there's a drug problem in the military. There's a drug problem everywhere else. There's a drug problem in suburbia. There's a drug problem in the inner city. There's a drug problem in rural America. We just have drug problems in America, bottom line.

• 1:37:41Speaker 02

  Let me say this in response to what you're saying about rounding people up and putting them into into detox wards. I think that's better than arresting them and putting them in prison for for using drugs.

• 1:37:52Tucker Carlson?

  Well, of course.

• 1:37:53Speaker 02

  And probably cheaper, too.

• 1:37:56Tucker Carlson?

  It's not even like compared to what? How much aid have we sent to Israel to kill people in Gaza? Like, I don't know.

• 1:38:01Speaker 02

  Money's not an issue.

• 1:38:02Tucker Carlson?

  Well, I mean, on some level, it is an issue, but it's also, it's an expression of your priorities. What I spend money on in my family is an expression of what I care about.

• 1:38:12Speaker 02

  Well, what I mean is.

• 1:38:13Tucker Carlson?

  You should care about your own people and the kids who are literally standing there like this. Like, how can you allow that? Or people lying in their own feces on the sidewalk? Like, that's so shameful. It's a mark of shame against all of us. Those are Americans. And I, I don't think we should put them in jail. I completely agree with you. That's not a crime as much as it's a tragedy. It's a crime against them. They're committing a crime against themselves.

• 1:38:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:38:39Tucker Carlson?

  Don't allow that. Would you allow your child? If you, if you had a child who was addicted to fentanyl, like standing like this, you'd be like, I'm gonna chain you to the freaking radiator until you get better. I love you that much. Wouldn't you?

• 1:38:51Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:38:52Tucker Carlson?

  Yes. We should love our fellow citizens that much. But we hate them. And we call it compassion. That's hate. It's not compassion. Sorry. Oh, nothing bothers me more than that.

• 1:39:04Speaker 02

  It is upsetting to see the degree of degradation.

• 1:39:08Tucker Carlson?

  Yes, that's the word.

• 1:39:10Speaker 02

  As a result of, you know, the drug industry.

• 1:39:13Tucker Carlson?

  They're human beings.

• 1:39:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:39:14Tucker Carlson?

  And they've been reduced to something less than human beings.

• 1:39:17Speaker 02

  Yes, and there's a lot of factors that go into that. There's a lot of causes and one of them is something we're really not here to talk about today, but it's the downward mobility that we see in our society and the lack, the lack of economic prospects that people have.

• 1:39:33Tucker Carlson?

  I strongly agree.

• 1:39:34Speaker 02

  Especially if they don't have an elite education.

• 1:39:36Tucker Carlson?

  Yep.

• 1:39:37Speaker 02

  The cost of housing, there's a lot of reasons why.

• 1:39:40Tucker Carlson?

  I totally agree.

• 1:39:41Speaker 02

  End up like zombies.

• 1:39:42Tucker Carlson?

  But you could also, I mean, I, yes, I say that often, I mean it sincerely. And we're a tiny number of the worst people are taking all the money. I totally agree with that. Oh, you're a socialist. No, I'm not. I'm an American who remembers a middle-class country and I would like to have that again. That's it. Even though I'm not middle-class, but anyway, whatever. Leaving that aside, you can say there are a lot of reasons your house is on fire, but the first response is to put it out. You know, we probably should upgrade the electrical after this or put a lightning rod on the roof or whatever. We can take steps to prevent it happening again, but right now you need hoses and water. And if you see Americans dying of drugs on the street, I'm, you know,

• 1:40:26Tucker Carlson?

  you have to stop that immediately. Those are human beings with souls. They're your countrymen.

• 1:40:30Speaker 02

  Mm hmm. And I think that, you know, the government now, under Trump, what they're trying to do is declare war on Mexican drug cartels or on the Venezuelan government. And this, I think, is totally misguided and will be ineffectual if they actually go through with it. Because.

• 1:40:49Tucker Carlson?

  Well, certainly the Venezuela thing is a product of, yeah.

• 1:40:54Speaker 02

  The thing is, we're, we're talking about the complicity of the US government and the international drug trade.

• 1:41:00Tucker Carlson?

  And you think that's real?

• 1:41:02Speaker 02

  I definitely think that's real. And it's, again, it's not what I was saying before. It's not, you know, a top-down conspiracy where it's actually the purpose. It's a side effect of our imperialism and the permanent war paradigm. And in Mexico, I spent a lot of time in Mexico before I was working on this book as a reporter, reporting on the drug wars there, the cartel wars there. And it's one thing, you know, Trump can tell people, he can tell his voters, we're going to declare war on Mexican drug cartels. And people will buy into that because they see them, you know, they as vicious criminals and murderers who are pumping drugs into this country. So it's easy to see why they would be for that. Well, I feel that way. I see them that way.

• 1:41:45Speaker 02

  Well, the reality is that Mexican drug cartels don't really exist in the same way that we've been taught to believe in them by Netflix and Hollywood. In fact, there's a recent book, it's an academic book. It's not the easiest to read, but I think it has an important thesis. It's by a Mexican academic named Oswaldo Zavala. And it's called Drug Cartels Do Not Exist. What he means by that provocative thesis is that there are not this type of organizations that we see represented in shows like Narcos. Take El Chapo Guzman, for example, the famous drug lord who was captured, I guess, 2015, 16.

• 1:42:26Speaker 02

  The US government to date has seized no assets belonging to him, none. Why is that? I thought he was one of the world's richest men. He's on Forbes list, was one of the world's richest men. No assets? None, zero. We reserve that only for Russian oligarchs. Well, I don't think they can find any. They can't find any because the drug industry in Mexico is incredibly complex. The first thing to understand is that it's not a collection of organizations. It's a market and the demand component of that market is in the United States. So people in this country wanting drugs is the battery that's running this whole thing.

• 1:43:08Speaker 02

  Because once there's that demand, supply and suppliers inevitably arise to feed it. And in Mexico, those suppliers, yes, there are low level traffickers. There are the people, the disposable people who are bringing the drugs across the border, the disposable hitmen who are 14 years old and carrying out hits. But the real power behind the drug industry in Mexico is the military and the police, politicians, lawyers, deep pocketed investors.

• 1:43:38Speaker 02

  They're the ones that are going in on drug trafficking ventures essentially as joint ventures, as investments. It's much more organic and spontaneous than we're led to believe. The, the organization, to the extent that it exists, can be found in high level, you know, army generals or high level police officers who are taking a cut from all the little fish who are swimming through certain drug trafficking routes. So the sort of idea that we have of a cartel where it's just bad guys hiding out in their lair, having meetings with the bosses, that just simply doesn't exist in Mexico.

• 1:44:17Tucker Carlson?

  So El Chapo, just to get back to the original example, was described as a billionaire. We got a pretty, what seemed like a pretty detailed accounting of the revenue. Well, no, we didn't.

• 1:44:29Speaker 02

  I mean, you're talking about the DEA and the, and the DOJ. I mean, they, they are capable of manufacturing narratives. They're lawyers, they are prosecutors, you know, they can put this stuff together and, and make this case. Look, I'm not saying that El Chapo wasn't a drug trafficker. He was, he was. But he consistently acclaimed that he was a small fry. And he had like four guys with him at the time that he was arrested.

• 1:44:56Tucker Carlson?

  I thought he had like a private zoo with white lions and...

• 1:44:59Speaker 02

  Where is that? I haven't seen that. I've seen his pictures of his mom's house in Sinaloa. But there was that time that Sean Penn went to go visit him.

• 1:45:07Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:07Speaker 02

  Did that look like the lair of a drug trafficker? He looked like an ignorant campesino up there. He had like chickens in cages and stuff. And, and he was clearly a very naive person when, when Sean Penn interviewed him. Like he wanted, he was entrapped into this by desire to give flowers to Kate Del Castillo, the, the Mexican actress who was with Sean Penn.

• 1:45:29Speaker 02

  I digress to some degree. The point is-

• 1:45:31Tucker Carlson?

  But the bottom line is they've, I just want you to say it again, they've, the US government, nor the Mexican government's never confiscated any of this wealth-

• 1:45:39Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 1:45:40Tucker Carlson?

  That we were told he had.

• 1:45:41Speaker 02

  That's right. Because the real power behind the drug industry in Mexico is the political class that's like this with the United States security state. That is fun, that gets all of their, you know, the Mexican army, the, things have changed in Mexico, by the way. This is a moving target to discuss because Mexico is starting in 2018, has gone through profound political changes.

• 1:45:59Tucker Carlson?

  For sure. That would be the beginning of-

• 1:46:02Speaker 02

  AMLO, sure.

• 1:46:03Tucker Carlson?

  Of the AMLO period.

• 1:46:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, AMLO and then his successor Claudia Scheinbaum. But at the bottom, especially in the northern states of Mexico, along the Texas border-

• 1:46:11Tucker Carlson?

  Yep.

• 1:46:12Speaker 02

  I don't think so much has changed there. And if you, just take a state like Tamaulipas, which is just south of Texas, which has probably the highest intensity of drug trafficking anywhere in the world, bringing it to the United States. Who are the real powers there? I mean, you could say it's the Gulf Cartel, or you could say it's Los Setas. These are the organizations that we've been trained by the media to believe are the sort of puppet masters that are making all this happen.

• 1:46:38Tucker Carlson?

  By the way, I bought that storyline totally.

• 1:46:41Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:46:41Tucker Carlson?

  I mean, I have no other information. I don't speak Spanish. I don't, I don't know. But I mean, I've just sort of assumed that was true.

• 1:46:46Speaker 02

  The real drug traffickers there, the real power. The idea that, that we often also hear that the Mexican state is outgunned by drug traffickers.

• 1:46:54Tucker Carlson?

  Yes, I've bought that too.

• 1:46:56Speaker 02

  I made a comment about that earlier, about how, the high-power weapons that they have. There's some element of truth to that, but the reality is that the cartels are not a threat to the Mexican state. In fact, they're an appendage of the Mexican state in a certain way. And the, the elite class in Mexico, the kind of a shadow paramilitary structure of let's say a state government, like the state government of Tamaulipas, and the police forces there, and the military divisions that are stationed there. And we're not going to go to war with those people because there are allies. I mean, people may not realize this, but there's close security cooperation between the US and Mexico.

• 1:47:30Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 1:47:31Speaker 02

  I mean, they're armed, the Mexican army, we arm them, we give them their Blackhawk helicopters and their armored vehicles, and also the state- Police forces in the north of Mexico, we arm all of them and they get training from the state department and from American police officers and so on. And they're the the real cartel, to the extent a cartel exists. And you can see that in other places in the world, notably in Colombia, where, you know, it again, it's changing there because they also have a new president. Latin America is changing rapidly in recent years. But for Pat in the past for many years in Colombia, the Colombian federal government and the and the Colombian military have been the biggest drug, most responsible for moving the most weight in drugs, I would say.

• 1:48:14Speaker 02

  And once again, they're closely backed by the US government. So to bring it home and wrap up this point, you can say we're going to target drug cartels in Mexico. But the fact is, one, they have no idea who these people are, the people that they're setting up as as drug traffickers. They may have developed some targets. To fight a war, you need not only political will, you need targets. That was a problem, incidentally, parenthetically, in Afghanistan. It was hard for them to develop targets there because it's such a big, remote country. Anyway, in Mexico, they're not going to be able to find those targets. And to the extent that they are, they're going to be people that are protected by the State Department and the CIA.

• 1:48:53Speaker 02

  And so it's just not going to happen. This is this drug war, this war on Mexican drug cartels, I don't see it happening. And if it does, it'll be in the nature of very isolated strikes.

• 1:49:04Tucker Carlson?

  So what is the answer?

• 1:49:07Speaker 02

  The you have to address the demand. The demand is what's causing all this. So long as

• 1:49:11Tucker Carlson?

  Why can't anyone just why? Here's what I don't understand. Sobriety is good. Okay, sobriety is the key to joy and productivity and like having a useful life, making it worth being here.

• 1:49:23Speaker 02

  I agree.

• 1:49:24Tucker Carlson?

  Short period that we are. I believe that through much experience. I've never heard any leader in our country say that.

• 1:49:33Speaker 02

  What I'm saying about Mexico?

• 1:49:34Tucker Carlson?

  No, about sobriety.

• 1:49:35Speaker 02

  About sobriety.

• 1:49:36Tucker Carlson?

  The goal ought to be clear thinking, you know, whatever, within the bounds of human nature, but like virtuous life. I don't know. Try to be clear eyed, hardworking, decent and sober. Like, I don't, I don't, no one, like, there's no kind of goal set by our leaders. Like, maybe you shouldn't be wasted all the time. Maybe you should off your freaking SSRIs, which make you impotent, by the way, you know, or your benzodiazepines, or your beer, or your weed. Like, no one even says that.

• 1:50:06Speaker 02

  I mean, I think they're all on drugs.

• 1:50:08Tucker Carlson?

  Everyone's on drugs.

• 1:50:09Speaker 02

  I think the whole US government's on drugs.

• 1:50:11Tucker Carlson?

  I totally agree.

• 1:50:12Speaker 02

  I mean, look at the people at the highest level. I mean, don't want to cast just reckless aspersions, but here's something that's concrete. Rolling Stone, a magazine I've written for for many years, reported on drug use in Trump's first White House. And in fact, Trump's personal doctor, Ronnie "The Candyman" Jackson, they called him, he was an admiral, if I'm not mistaken, in the Navy, a physician, who was demoted by the Navy for running an unlicensed pharmacy in the White House because he was giving Trump's people prescription drugs without a prescription and for free. And even if you're the president's personal physician, that's illegal. So there's evidence that all of those people were, and you see it in their

• 1:50:55Speaker 02

  behavior as well. And I'm not just picking on the Republicans here because look at, look at Kamala Harris, for example. I don't know her personally, and I can't say for sure, but did she seem like someone who was, you know, taking a lot of prescription pills?

• 1:51:10Tucker Carlson?

  Well, I worked for someone like that in television. It was the head of a network who, I mean, we used to joke, this person's on benzos, like, just dead eyed. I mean, you see that so much.

• 1:51:22Speaker 02

  Talking nonsensically, like weird, you know, laughing, weird reactions, people who just are not quite there in a certain way, and they seem kind of zonked out in a certain way.

• 1:51:31Tucker Carlson?

  Yes, that's the whole country.

• 1:51:33Speaker 02

  That seems like a lot of our top leaders.

• 1:51:36Tucker Carlson?

  So my question is, why does no one ever mention that? And, and just say, like, here's what the, you know, we all fall short of the goal. It's not even judging, I'm not judging anybody. I'm not qualified to judge anybody, but like, I do think it's important to articulate the goal. And why shouldn't someone say the goal is sobriety?

• 1:51:58Speaker 02

  You know, again, I'm not here to be a drug warrior or paternalistic or to lecture people who struggle with substance abuse, but I certainly agree with you that that we should, that that should be a value of our society.

• 1:52:12Tucker Carlson?

  You should know Seth, that the real danger is Sharia law. Sharia law, and you can tell when you go to a place like Abu Dhabi or Riyadh, like, oh, man, I hope we don't ever wind up with a society like this, with a rape rate of zero, where you leave your keys in your Lamborghini and don't ever worry about it being stolen. And, you know, if people want to get wasted, they do it at home. You know what I mean?

• 1:52:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:52:34Tucker Carlson?

  Oh, boy, I hope we don't wind up with that.

• 1:52:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think, I mean Sharia law is obviously just a punchline. I don't know that too many people actually believe in the reality of that. And, I mean, sure, like I said, you know, I'm a lawyer. I actually studied legal philosophy. Sharia is not that different from other legal codes. A lot of our own legal code, the Anglo-Saxon common law, Anglo-American common law derives ultimately from religious authorities.

• 1:53:06Tucker Carlson?

  Hope so.

• 1:53:07Speaker 02

  There's a lot of universal, there's a lot of universal values in.

• 1:53:11Tucker Carlson?

  Hammurabi's code is recognizable. I wouldn't want to live under it. It's kind of punitive, but it's not like from another planet. The oldest legal code that we have, Hammurabi's code, it's like, it's not, like, you sort of know what he's talking about, right?

• 1:53:26Speaker 02

  Look, they, I agree, yeah. And look, they put up the Ten Commandments in front of the, I live in Austin, Texas, and they put up the Ten Commandments in front of the state capitol. And that's controversial among, you know, religious libertarians. But I'm of the view that they, I'm happy to see them put the Ten Commandments up there if they would just follow them, you know?

• 1:53:43Tucker Carlson?

  I agree.

• 1:53:45Speaker 02

  Starting with thou shall not kill.

• 1:53:47Tucker Carlson?

  I couldn't agree more. So let me just put a bow on this really super interesting conversation. Thank you. With the question like, how?

• 1:53:59Tucker Carlson?

  Were your interactions during the two and a half years you were writing this, or more, with like DoD, for example, with the Pentagon? Like, you must have called over there to the PIOs and said, "I have the list of following questions." How did they respond to you?

• 1:54:16Speaker 02

  In general, they just didn't respond. And I was in touch with them just yesterday because Politico was publishing an excerpt of the book, and so we had to go back to them again for comment. And the fact that it involves Delta Force, the fact that it involves a special mission unit, you know, they said that explicitly in the response that I got from USASOC yesterday. They said, "Because your question implicates a special mission unit, you know, our policy is to not comment." So, for the most part, they didn't give me anything. I was on my own, but...

• 1:54:46Tucker Carlson?

  So, here you have a documented case of one of their guys murdering someone in his house. Obviously, there was drug trafficking. There was indisputably drug use, narcotic use by federal employees, and they don't have to answer any of your questions because the missions are shrouded in secrecy?

• 1:55:05Speaker 02

  Yes, that's right. In general, that's right. I will say, you know, I try not to be, I try to be fair when possible, or to give credit where credit is due. There was a case where the Senate Armed Services Committee questioned the Commander SOCOM, which is an umbrella formation above JSOC and above all these units, questioned him in a committee, a Senate committee, about my reporting for Rolling Stone, and asked him to address, you know, the cases of drug trafficking and unsolved murders. And General Brian Fenton, who at the time was the Commander SOCOM, said that he was concerned about it, said that it was unacceptable, said that they were laser-focused on eradicating it.

• 1:55:50Speaker 02

  But whether those sentiments that they expressed to members of Congress was actually backed up with real action, I don't know. I don't know.

• 1:56:00Tucker Carlson?

  Do you see the possibility of reform?

• 1:56:03Speaker 02

  You know, I don't think that I'm very critical in this book of every single presidential presidential administration since 2001, Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden. None of them, I give a pass any of them, but I do see Trump's influence here to be uniquely negative because of the way that he surrounds himself with some of the craziest people in the special operations community, elevates these people who are who among their own colleagues are considered loose cannons, not credible. You know, there's the case of Eddie Gallagher, where Trump made it such a big part of his brand to defend this disgrace to the Navy SEALs, who was turned in by his own teammates for killing a bunch of people for no reason.

• 1:56:47Speaker 02

  I mean, you're talking about guys who are not bleeding heart liberals by any stretch of the imagination. They're there with Chief Gallagher, next to him, seeing what he's doing, and they're not okay with it. They turn him in, the command wants nothing to do with Gallagher, they also think that he's an embarrassment and a disgrace and a murderer. But Trump intervenes to prevent him from from losing his trident. And Trump touts him and he becomes this big influencer and so forth. So that type of incredible irresponsibility and malignancy on Trump's part, his uniquely malignant influence as commander in chief, I think augurs very poorly for the possibility of reform, and at least in the next three years.

• 1:57:30Tucker Carlson?

  Well, you want honest, competent, decent military because, you know, it's the purest expression of power that a government has, the power to kill people. And you have to think that they're operating on a different and elevated moral plane. They can't just be like an outlaw state. You know what I mean?

• 1:57:51Speaker 02

  Yes, that's what I was saying before about the founding of the US Army 250 years ago. It is a core institution in for our country, for our nation. So to see the degree of decline, it's everywhere, you know, possible to observe. It's very concerning and I really don't think people are aware of the degree to which the military is incapable of fulfilling its functions. I don't know that you can say that the US has the most powerful military in the world anymore. I think that you a strong case could be made that China has a more competent military, even though they have never been in combat, they have totally untested.

• 1:58:34Speaker 02

  So there's a big caveat there, but just looking on the surface, like, I don't think Chinese soldiers are trafficking drugs and killing each other. I don't think Chinese soldiers are dropping dead from fentanyl overdoses right and left. And also China has a much bigger army than us, while our army is shrinking to a degree that's really shocking. I mean, they're really running out of people. This year recruiting was a little bit better, but you're still talking about, you know, a long, long deficit in recruiting. The army's never been smaller than it is right now. They can't get qualified helicopter pilots, let's say, as we saw so tragically demonstrated over the Potomac River in January.

• 1:59:15Speaker 02

  So I think that, you know, beyond just the drugs, there's a lot of reasons to be concerned, you know, about the the health and viability of the US military in general.

• 1:59:27Tucker Carlson?

  Boy, that's a sad story. Seth Harp, thank you very much for that.

• 1:59:30Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me.

• 1:59:31Tucker Carlson?

  Appreciate it.

• 1:59:36Tucker Carlson?

  We want to thank you for watching us on Spotify, a company that we use every day. We know the people who run it, good people. While you're here, do us a favor, hit, follow and tap the bell so you never miss an episode. We have real conversations, news, things that actually matter, telling the truth always. You will not miss it if you follow us on Spotify and hit the bell. We appreciate it. Thanks for watching.