Trillbilly Worker's Party - Episode 420: Blart of Darkness (w/ Special Guest: Eamon Whalen)

Episode Date: November 27, 2025

Journalist Eamon Whalen drops by to discuss his latest for Mother Jones "How a Mercenary Became a Minneapolis Mall Cop" (link Below) https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/11/crg-mercenary-mall-cop-nathan-seabrook-minneapolis-george-floyd-protest-paramilitary/

...withal... ...and... And welcome everybody to yet another edition of The Trillillillies. I am your host, Tom Sexton, and join me as always, my right-hand man, from the jungles of East Ash, West Ashfield. Well, I guess I shouldn't say we're just talking about not docks and anybody. I'm just like, yeah, from the hills. From the hills of Western North Carolina.

Mr. Aaron, Port Bear, what's going on today? man how's uh how's that farm later no it's good man it's good man um actually i was uh i was here now actually uh i guess house sitting for the dogs but um when i was just here by myself the other day when my partner was out they stopped at a tractor supply and they said that there was a sister man you know there was a black woman in the tractor supply so right after we talked about that right after we talked about it so out here in the uh you know in the hills of western north Carolina, you know, us black hillbillies are here too, man. Now, I'm carpetbag and I'm not a hillbilly. We'd claim you anyway. It doesn't matter. Hell of it. And joining us today from

Parts Unknown, Mr. Ayman, Waylon, Ayman. What's going on, man? Thanks for having me, guys. Happy to be here. Hell yeah. Nice for coming, brother. Well, before we get into the meat and potatoes of our discussion today, I got to give a little brief update on my ongoing legal woes you know it's been so rare that i have ever had to answer for my crimes and just this past week i had to go before judge in shelby county kentucky to to do exactly that and uh turns out that uh in the state of kentucky they got some pretty draconian methods for dealing with you if you uh forgot to pay a speeding ticket for a couple of year they're gonna draw quarter you some shit well not exactly that i had to go to a a courtroom that could only be

described as bustling it was a hundred and ninety two cases in front of me and i'm thinking to myself well i'm my my last name starts with an s so it's like you know i'm kind of in the back of the queue like towards the back of the queue anyway right you know so i'm going to be not as much as our our guest today but you know so they threw a curveball at me and the way they did the case the way they saw the cases is they do it like exiting an airplane and they start with the front which also is another gripe of mine.

They should definitely exit the airplane from the back. It would be like much more convenient. Do you think they should maybe have a door at the back of the airplane that like a ramp that people couldn't exit off of like car? Why not do two? I mean, what other building would be up to fire code? You know, if you didn't have an airplane.

We just got one, you know? That's, you're cooking there. I mean, you do have emergency exits, but granted, yeah. Well, I've always been a back of the bus guy just because, you know, I'm a cool guy. I want to just be in the back. So I just slid to the back pew there thinking, well, whatever. And it ended up being a bad call because I was a case 191 of 192. And so I had to sit through just my numbing hours of court, you know, and it's usually just real greaseball stuff.

Like, you know, somebody forgot to pay child support one month or something, something. You know, whatever, whatever. So I have to sit there and listen to all these cases. And so I finally get to mine and I go up there. You know how like, I don't know if you guys ever been to court or not, but like you'll have to like kind of confirm like these pretrial people or whatever. And they'll be like, well, do you have like this, this and this showing that this has been satisfied and blah, blah, blah, blah. And this is a long meandering story to get at, you know, basically they threw it out and all that stuff.

but not before the pretrial woman really just gave me down the road about like she was acting like I was lying to her you know like I was like she was like guilty she was like did you get your new driver's license and I was like well I paid my reinstatement fee I thought that's all I had to do she's like no you got to get a new driver's license and she's like do you have your license I showed it to her and all that stuff and she was like you don't listen very well do you And I was like, what? You know one thing, you know what they got a little say, man, one thing that I've, and you know, not to denigrate any civil servants out there, people working in social services.

I think you could denigrate some of them, don't you? Some of them, but I've always just felt like, you know, I've always just felt like I, like, was a child and it was very paternalistic. And I don't know if, I mean, I think that's just due to somebody being exhausted and tired and being underpaid and working long hours and, you know, kind of sort of like maybe dehumanizing people when they really. really need to help. Or maybe they just don't know. But it just makes me feel like the kids in the Peanuts cartoon, you know, where it's just the kid, the adult scene from, I guess,

waist height and they're just talking like, mar, ma, ma, ma. And I'm just sort of like, yeah. Well, I would normally agree with you. Had I not seen her dress down a man named Ramon Cruz that was way earlier in the proceedings, you know. So if your thesis is correct, she grew tired of us about, you know, name number four call. But I think more of the cases, like when you get these people like particularly in kentucky i don't know how it is where you guys are at but like in kentucky i feel like they just get so used to like talking down to people is they they perceive like the the unwashed masses as like kind of beneath them otherwise why would you be going before a judge and then i talked to the judge went for the judge and she was cool as hell she was just like yeah man

so you've really been through a lot for something so stupid so you were contesting a speeding ticket No, you have to go, or they give you a failure to appear, and the vicious cycle continues. So I would catch you up here. I went to jail recently because they put out show cause warrant because I failed to go stand and respond to this traffic ticket that I had. I just totally forgot about it. I just kind of tucked it aside. They orange jumpsuited me and everything.

That's crazy. so um wow holy shit been an ordeal but in any case uh i'm a free man well i was going to say the first time i've been the first and only time i've been in a courtroom was for or is reporting this story in the courtroom scene in the story well let me give you a piece of advice my friend you you should keep it that way it's a very disorienting experience i have to suck that was disoriented for me just as a reporter for sure we're going to get into that and so that's as good as jumping off as any for to get into today's discussion. So Amon wrote a piece called How a Mercenary became a Minneapolis small cop.

After the George Floyd protests, a former military contractor named Nathan Seabrook brought the war home. And I guess just to kick it off, Amen. You write basically that in Mother Jones that this guy who was a former military vet sort of formed this concierge homespun private security service in the wake of the George Floyd protests when Minneapolis sort of became ground zero

for a lot of those demonstrations and I guess just to kick it off could you start by telling us a little bit about this guy? Nathan Seabrook that's at the center of all this yeah he is from Minneapolis I don't think many people outside of

the sort of veteran and private security military contracting networks that he operates in pretty much knew who he was i mean he does as as we'll get to later he did have some amount of notoriety within some of those circles but they're pretty kind of shadowy networks so i first just found out who he was because in the summer after george floyd so the summer of 2021 in minneapolis in june there was a so like around the year anniversary basically, because I remember George Floyd was murdered on May 25th. This was like June 3rd of the next year. City's still very tense.

The trial had just happened. There had been another police killing during the trial, which had sort of like almost kind of lit the match on this powder keg again. So the things were very tense. And then there was a police killing of a black man named Winston Smith, which was in the parking garage of a small shopping mall in a sort of like once she'd commercial district uptown minneapolis it's like it's it's uh a lot of did local discourse around like uptown being dead and there's it's tied up with like kind of crime stuff but it's a lot of

just kind of big box stores moving in so if i can interject real quick when prince sung about uptown this is why he's referring he's not talking generically about just going to downtown i'm so glad you brought that up because the this this mall that winston smith was killed in the top of this of this parking garage next to this mall. This mall had just been renamed seven points, but the name before that was Calhoun Square, and they named it because it was named after John Calhoun, the Confederate.

Oh, man. Because there's a lake next to it that was also named Calhoun, so it was called that. And then the lake's name was changed to its indigenous name about like probably like six or seven years ago. So then they changed the mall too. But it was like a bizarre, it's like Minnesota naming stuff.

out of the Confederates. Yeah, that's just really weird. I mean, that's like people in upstate New York or in New York City itself flying the Confederate flag, you know? Yeah, yeah. So that, that's just to say, but Prince has a song, you can look it up called Calhoun Square. And it's sort of like, if you want to, like back when, yeah, Calhoun Square was maybe a pop in place, it is much less now as seven points or much less at the time the story takes place. But I'm glad you brought that up because he literally not only has a song called Uptown. He has a song called Calhoun Square. I always love.

Dedicated to Prince, we should tell. Places are night checked and songs. And like, you've been singing them for years and you just have no frame of reference for the place or whatever. Yeah. So Winston Smith is killed under very weird circumstances, I mean, just relative to other police killings, I guess. If you want to say that, there is, it's a multi-agency police task force that involves like five or six. six different jurisdictions, including led by, like, U.S. Marshals, and they're there to arrest him for missing a court date for, like, a gun charge. But that also, they kill him on the same day that

the memorial sort of semi-autonomous zone at the site of George Floyd's murder. That was cleared out by the city. Those happen on the same day. So people were just very, like, agitated by that. And there's like some kind of perceived connection. And then with Winston Smith, they also, the local paper reports that he was a murder suspect, which was wrong. And so people are like, you know, kind of you're smearing his name, assassinated the character. Protests start, but they're very, very, I would say, in terms of, like intensity, they're pretty intense. But in terms of numbers, it's like pales in comparison to the summer before. Yeah.

They're nowhere close to be just an amount of people on the street. but essentially a month after the protest developed this guy Nathan Seabrook shows up to clear out what had become a like memorial garden protest encampment in a vacant lot next to this mall's parking garage and it's basically just these guys show up to evict this encampment and they're dressed in tactical gear and they've got long guns and masks and they look like this like paramilitary force and everyone's kind of like what the fuck is going on and then. And then I, that's when I first heard about him. There's a local outlet called Unicorn Riot that people may have been familiar with. They do a lot of like protest live streaming. They wrote, did a little report on him. And I was just intrigued. And then I started digging into him essentially.

And there was quite a lot there more than I expected. So that's, yeah, I guess a little bit of like setting, setting the stage for who he is. Right, right. And could you talk a little bit, Amen? Maybe this is like sort of a fast forwarding a bit, but just to kind of provide the context. In your piece, you talk about the surge in gun sales during COVID, right? And sort of like, I guess you could also say, like, we just lived in this time of like intense paranoia, right? And mistrust, you know, not just in the government, but of one another.

So could you talk about the rise? And I mean, if you want, you could even, you can't even even go back to just after or just during the Iraq war, right? Could you talk about sort of the rise of these, I don't even know how to say it, like either these large private security firms or these sort of boutique security firms that this guy has developed? And could you talk about like in which ways that they work with law enforcement and maybe connect that with Minneapolis PD? Yeah. So I guess a good way to describe that. So I've done a lot of reporting on the aftermath of George Floyd in Minneapolis. And I think it's very good to like position this story as sort of the sort of, yeah, tension and paranoia in this story very much in that context of about that time like 200 police officers had left the department.

And then the other ones had just gone on like a silent strike. and then also business owners were incredibly paranoid, you know, like at the same time that this was happening, it was the exact same time that people were trying to recover from COVID essentially. Like this killing happened at the very same time the first people were getting their shots and it was like the first kind of summer of somewhat of a return to normalcy with vaccines and such. And in that sort of post-George Floyd year, I'd say 2021, 2022. Crime, especially murders, like genuinely, like, skyrocketed in Minneapolis.

They have doubled. In 2021, it was one of, like, the deadliest year. So there was just a general feeling, paranoia and fear of violence. And I would say, like, a conflation of that issue with the protests, with a sort of general feeling of disorder. And so there's a lot of private security guys that were hired. And there is even, I had it in the previous draft of this story. Like, this story is 6,000 words.

And I had one that was a draft that was probably like 10 or 11,000. But there was another guy that was a former Blackwater guy that wrote a whole sort of like diary travel log of post being on a security unit and post George Floyd, Minneapolis and completely exaggerating how. Making it sound like a war like a like a like a like a like a like a like a war zone in the Middle East. Like where these guys have actually trained for. Well, that was my next question here, is that, like, you know, we've heard that ad nauseum about every, like, city in America for the last two or three years, you know, that's kind of propelled by, like, right-wing media specifically. But, like, you know, I've heard everything from, every place from San Francisco to Detroit to

Kalamazoo to Memphis described as, you know, a foreign war zone or whatever. And I'm just curious, too, like, but you say that, like, this was an instance where things were kind of probably a little bit crazy, but like, not necessarily approaching war zone, but like things were like tense enough and crazy enough, like with the murder rate rising and stuff like that, that like people were concerned about this in a way that like maybe they weren't, you know, five, ten years ago. But I'm curious like how that those sort of media talking points about the rise of crime

and everything, like sort of set the stage for CRG to come together. that being Nathan C. Brooks, you know, concierge security firm and how that like the rise of those kinds of talking points sort of provided the fertile soil for somebody like him to start this. Yeah. So I should say to get back to a little bit about who he is. He then, he is a military veteran. He served in the Gulf War. And then he was in Army Reserve for quite a while. And then he came home. And then he left the armed forces and then became a military contractor in the Iraq war. After that, he was a foreign service officer for the United Nations, like, protecting kind of dignitaries doing like what they call like executive protection, basically being like a highly trained bodyguard across Africa and the Middle East. And so he comes back to Minneapolis in 2018.

And I'm not quite sure what he's doing between 2018 and 2020. But in 2020, he then works security crews during the actual uprising. When things were legitimately like the civil unrest was, this is, you know, Minneapolis saw the most amount of property destruction since the L.A. riots in 92, like pretty historic levels of civil unrest in Minneapolis. He is on, ironically, a security crew that protects members of the city council that are like, you know, left-wing, that left-wing council members that feared for their safety based on their positions around policing. And then, very crucially, which is something I discovered

my reporting that was really interesting is that his first job when he, okay, sorry, let me take one step back. During that time in 2020, in the unrest, he starts to hatch a plan for, like I said, a sort of boutique security firm. A lot of private security in the U.S. is dominated by very large conglomerates like Allied Universal and Guarda World. You probably seen like a parking garage or even a grocery store or whatever. The armored trucks with Guarda World on the side. Yeah, yeah. You see that everywhere.

And it's like Allied Universal is one of the biggest employers in the U.S. I think it's like top five. So that the private security industry has been booming, definitely boomed post-COVID. I cite some like white papers from industry consultants saying that this is like a boom time for the industry. And a lot of it is, you know, relates to levels of inequality. His countries are going to see a lot of private security sprout up. But he is basically, concox a business plan for a boutique firm that is uniquely suited for what he sees as a sort of new landscape of American uncertainty, what he calls it. There's this deleted promotional video that he has that sort of

It's called Introducing CRG. And he's essentially saying that we're in a new age of uncertainty. No place is truly safe. The pandemic. The George Floyd protests. He throws in January 6th. Like on his first website, there's this, there was just immediately a video that played on the browser.

And it looked like a protest that was like in Ukraine or something. Like it wasn't even a protest in the United States, but he's very much trying to conjure this feeling of like instability that is reminiscent of a place of a country. that he served overseas that the United States invaded or destabilized in some way. So he's saying Minneapolis now needs guys like me who know how to operate in these hot zones. And part of the story is that like there are now a generation of these kinds of highly trained veterans and military contractors that have as the sort of wars in the Middle East are winding, down are coming back looking for new opportunities and part of his private securities company's

business plan is to essentially inflate the threats available because it like when there's a market for force if you inflate the threat then you will you know have more job security and so what he did was take a fairly like you know there there was some busted windows and some graffiti and like, I hadn't really gotten the mall. They wouldn't comment and tell me, like, what was the, you know, most egregious things that were happening that were caused, that would cause them to hire a security unit like that. But essentially, he's saying that I've got, that there are these, what he described to the MPD and emails. He was sending them these, like, intelligence reports and threat assessments and daily briefings, like, very breathless, paranoid reports on what he called, like, I have, I've located an antique. Keef a cell in this encampra. You know what it was. I'm going to go neutralize them, essentially, like, and make sure they don't come back. And he wrote up his business plan to the mall, modeled, it was called Operation Peaceful Garden.

It was, and he says in a deposition for a lawsuit that he was involved in that it was based on a operation that he had led in Libya, where he had commandeered at an abandoned royal facility. And so it's just, like I said, in the story, it's like more blackwater than Paul Blart in terms of mall cops. It's just like totally outsized reaction for the, for the actual threat left. And it's like, sorry, yeah, go on. No, no, you know what it, oh, just while you talk before I forget, you know what it reminds me of, it reminds me of in Bring the War Home by Kathleen Bilyu.

She talks about the rise of the white nationalist movement since the 70s, post-Vietnam. And it reminds me of a lot of these, you know, men, you know, that went to fight in Vietnam and they were fighting communism. And they came back and they used those same tactics undergirded by the same anti-communist sentiment to actually patrol the United States border, right? You know, from actually like Vietnamese people who were coming to the United States, right? Or other people who were coming to United States from other countries, right, that we had basically destroyed, you know, during our, during our exploits during the Cold War. And it's just really interesting to see that there's that same mentality of bringing the war home here, you know, as the United States is something we've talked about on the show. As the United States retreats from the world, maybe, what I'm going to say is retreats and its engagements, but at least in the Middle East, we can see that winding down. Where do these guys go now, right? They turn to the streets where the same instability, the same kind of system that created instability abroad that creates it here, right, that leads to something. like this, you know, obviously there are issues of racist, racial tension as well and straight up

racism as well. But you see guys like this, they find that this is where they can make their money, right? And also just to be straight up, what it sounds like reading this, if I could say, it just sounds like this guy just wants to live out his violent fantasies, right? You know? Yeah, and that he did repeatedly, and I was a little bit shocked that he continued to do that. Like, I was, like, he continued to refer to the protesters, like, liken them to, like, uh, the Taliban, answer al-Sharia, Al-Shabaab. And it's just really like a level, a level of overstating the threat that is, um, some minor vandalism. Kind of jaw-dropping. And so like what, so basically like the, the way the story goes is he shows him and his, his crew, kid up. show up to this protest encampment in the early morning hours causes an uproar because

everyone's like what's going on the you know people in Minneapolis are like I said these protests are small but there is enough of a sort of contingent activist contingent that people are like we're not standing for this and it causes an uproar people then sort of come at him he He said that he was doxed. He was harassed online. But a lot of times when he's describing, when he likens these, you know, Antifa activists to insurgents abroad, he's mostly talking about what they would say online. Like he's like in an interview with this like right wing outlet, it's the only interview that he's done. He goes like, you know, I never thought I would see that here, you know, I would see what they did in Afghanistan here. And he's just talking about like mean tweets. essentially. I mean, that's like, that's like that's famous Mujah Hadin tactic, you know, the mean tweet. Yeah.

And so I should I should just like to go on the timeline a little bit. So Winston Smith gets killed on June 3rd, 10 days later. And so the protesters are blocking this street, which is this like very bustling thoroughfare right next to the mall. Late one night, a drunk driver going 80 miles an hour, barrels through. the protest barricades and kills a woman who is protesting. And so then it's just like this small contingent of protesters are even more traumatized. And they sort of give up the street and say, we're going to just do this protesting campment in a memorial garden. And so it was sort of like a memorial

garden for these two for Winston Smith and Deanna Marie. And then that goes on for a month. And so basically like or less than a month into the protest encampment that's when CRG shows up and um yeah and then I end up sort of following the story they operate in that mall off and on for about the next year and then he also has other jobs around the city he's surveyed definitely surveilling certain activists on their social media and just using kind of creepy intimidation tactics all while like operating as this like heavily armed force treating this mall almost like a garrison essentially yeah well we'll talk we'll talk more about that some of those creepy interactions and second including one you mentioned happened in a home depot which is like weird that home depot has

become like ground zero for how these guys and ice operate it's like i don't even think about that yeah but but like you know we're kind of touching on here like basically you know their early pitch to clients was that, you know, this new American landscape of uncertainty and nothing's ever going to be the same again. There's no true safe places left. And that's why you need outfits like us. And then, of course, he goes on like you're talking about amen to, you know, seven points mall is one of the earlier clients. And they just totally create this militarized presence. And one of the protesters gets killed in an unrelated sort of accident. They move it into the grounds of the mall and then like you know we kind of touched on you know

some of these like crazy excessive tactics but like some of the stuff like I read about in this is like he wanted to take mutilated animal parts and like kind of like spread them around and do all these weird bizarre things can you talk a little bit more about some of those like excessive methods and and also aiming to if I could add to it and I don't know if you can offer an opinion here but do you think that a lot of that stuff was just to instigate the protesters because a lot of it seems like they're going and harassing people who are being not just even nonviolent, but people who are mourning. And they're trying to instigate and harass them into doing something that

justifies right, them being there and that level of force. Yeah, the first one. So the rotting animal parts is something I got from records requests from the communications within the Minneapolis Police Department. And that was when he was, when he was. was hired by this like bible college that's in downtown minneapolis that they were trying to well i mean it is a biblical tactic i mean i was thinking i was just about to say it's not even like modern warfare that's like some berserker shit or like you know some biblical tribe belodian yeah yeah so he got hired by this by this bible college that's in downtown minneapolis and that was dealing with drug dealers essentially, and he was trying to, and he suggested laying a rotting

animal carcass in the alley where these drug dealers. Nothing scares a drug dealer than a rotting corpse. I'll tell you. And that also comes in an email that is like one of the, and this was, this particular email was reported first by a journalist named Sam Richards, and which was like one of the previous, only other reporters to kind of cover this. And this has a police officer, Sam, you know, emailing another, this is a police lieutenant, emailing another police lieutenant being like, hey guys, we're going to have to talk about this guy, Nathan Seabrook. He's the one who wanted to lay rotting animal parts in this alley.

He is, quote, diabolically manipulative. And that is sort of like a kind of, you know, a thing that sort of rings through the story is that, or just sort of something that I always kept in mind, is that a officer, a ranking officer in a notoriously corrupt, violent and racist police department as was made, you know, world famous is saying that this guy is a little weirded out by this cat. Yeah. And as far as the instigation, I really can't call it. It's hard to know it's hard to know how much, how genuinely he believed that to be a threat is sort of like

these guys who have this war zone mindset, if they are truly paranoid of the violence, or if they are potentially trying to inflame or instigate it certainly seemed like some of the tactics were meant to inflame like at at a memorial for Winston Smith they were like playing loud Martin Luther King speeches on like a loud speaker while people were trying to give speeches about things um yeah and so I mean there's definitely intimidation and taunting But I don't know. Yeah, it's hard to say about whether that was any kind of like intentional instigation or anything like that. But I should say like it worked.

Like he did like sufficiently scare enough people to not want to participate in the protests anymore. Can we talk just like pause for certain talk about like the legality of running like this type of outfit for a second. Like it like if Aiman Aaron and Tom just wanted to start, you know, armed counterterrorism operatives for hire you know LLC like for America's shopping malls and Bible colleges like

can we like how do you get bonded to do something like that can we just walk in as like three geeks off the street and just incorporate or like it's a state by state thing and there is a there is a board it's the it's the same way you get licensed as like a private detective

in Minnesota. It's called the State Board of Private Protective agents and Private Detectives, and I think he was a protective, you know, like armed security. And I interviewed the head of that board. And, you know, it's, they do background checks and there's an extensive application process. And you have to, but it's, it's fairly minimal requirements to be like less than you would think to be an armed officer. And there's not really any, as far as I know, there's, there's, there's no regulations around how militarized you can be. I mean, he essentially just said like the best it's as far as it's as much as like the sort of client see fit. I did have, I did interview a, the head of like one of the national kind of security trade groups. And he was, you know, he had

some incentive to say this, but he also was like, I was describing CRG to him, describing the story and he was like that isn't that's a that's a that's an outlier as far as as security goes a lot most secure arms you know most security is unarmed and he also made a good point where he's like if you're a business like does it really attract customers if they're seeing like a tactical unit right razor wire fence above the shops I guess that's what I really that's what baffled me about this is that this is a very this is like a floundering shopping mall that has been like like, we're going to put an arcade bar in it. We're going to put it this in it.

We're going to like, they've tried all these things and like no one. There's there's like something. They're really like struggling commercially. And so just it seems like it's in like such a miscalculation from their own economic interests to like, even though that was like what was one of the reason that they hired this is that they're like, you know, protecting the property and trying to get back into business as like, you know, Minneapolis was coming out of this COVID George Floyd moment. But it seemed like totally counterproductive and very bad PR to the point that they didn't even, you know,

I talked, they had a PR representative and he essentially just stopped responding and he wouldn't give a comment. It just seems like, it seems like you want to foment that kind of like exaggerated fear so that you could attract like-minded people, the only people that would pay for a service like this, you know, in a floundering neighborhood. You know what I mean? Yeah. To switch gears a little bit. I mean like, you write, is Donald Trump deployed? his eyes to major cities, you know, to terrorize people based on these sort of, sometimes media,

mediated fears of unrest and disorder and so forth. And, you know, you cited his executive order declaring Antifa, domestic terrorist group, you know, which, again, a number you won't find in the yellow pages. I don't even know if that makes any sense anymore. Do they even have yellow pages? I don't know. That people like, you know, like Seabrook, almost provided some proof of concept in a way for Trump's expansion of ice and then and then the militarization of ice and the use of war zone tactics and you know like even down to the the sort of subterfuge of like being in plain clothes and mask wearing and and that kind of thing could you talk a little bit more about like your thoughts on on that like is that is that fair to say do you think like seabrook

is really provided and people like him have provided some precedent for the way that ice operates now in the way that they're just sort of taking anybody. And it's less like a Homeland Security thing and more just like Trump's personal brown shirts in a way. And if ICE will use, if the government will actually employ like contract firms like his as well. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I would say probably now, it's just like the guys that he might have hired and I might try to work for that. I just have it much. They just like could work for ICE and probably get paid more and have better government benefits and stuff. I think I think that he was working with, you know, doing independent contractors.

I don't think he was giving, you know, these guys were employees that he had working with them. But yeah, I describe it as like a like an ominous precursor. Like I'm not, you know, I don't know if anyone in the Trump administration knows what happened here. But it's essentially this microcosm that was very hard for me to not draw a lot. line in terms of, like you said, bringing in a military war zone mindset into these cities that are demonized as hotbeds of disorder and crime and radical leftism that needs to be, you need the stability of an armed force like that.

And I just couldn't help but notice the like the, from the plainclothes tactical gear, masks sort of like who's bought like these guys seem like they don't have a boss like they're kind of operating under their own like under their own authority there's no chain of command it was it was very like I just couldn't help but like see it as a precursor to that and then also like to draw it back one more generation the ice uniform is the up like the special operator military contractor Iraq uniform and that's why the story kind of even goes back into this long tail of the war on terror and this chickens coming home to roost of the privatization of the war on terror and the this sort of culture of impunity that

defined the Iraq war, the privatization of the Iraq war and how many of these guys like the army is one thing, but having this generation of guys who worked for private firms that didn't really operate with any rules of engagement. That is, I would say, a different, possibly even more alarming development. Yeah, I mean, like, when you hear, like, horror stories that come out of Iraq, and I'm not saying this to let the, the, just regular armed forces off the hook. I mean, there's plenty of enlisted men that, you know, did atrocities over there, too. But a lot of these, like, sadistic sort of weirdly creepy stuff, like, I remember on blowback them talking about some military contractors like just killing, rounding up and killing all these

people's cats in this place that they had went in there and that that type of thing. And like this guy, Seabrook, had been an enlisted man, I guess during Desert Storm in the early 90s and then decided to go back for round two as a private contractor in the early 2000s when we went back into Iraq. Yeah, it's like, it's a weird culture that's like, yeah, it's like you say, it's like a little cowboy. There's not like really strict chains of command. Like even ice. I mean, you know, it's like under the charge of Greg Bovino, but these guys seem to just kind of just act on their own impulses in a lot of ways. Yeah. And so like kind of the second dimension of this story is

that beyond Minneapolis, I sort of zoom back and I discovered that Seabrook worked for this notorious firm in Iraq called Crescent Security Group, which was, which was profiled in this book called Big Boy Rules, which was written by this former Washington Post war correspondent, who was one of the first reporters to kind of, going to quote, discover the private armies of Iraq. He's named Steve Feinero. He won a Pulitzer for it.

But I happened to discover this through his book that Seabrook worked for Crescent. And Crescent was like, you know, there are places, you know, firms like Blackwater and Dine Corp that became very notorious for like graft and violence, like Blackwater, the people can look up like the Nisor Square Massacre, like truly, truly like grievous acts of violence. But Blackwater was like big and, I don't know if you say professionalized, but it's, Crescent security was much like, Faneiro describes them as like the Kmart of private security. Yeah.

I didn't figure out what the minimal hiring standards were. A really good illustration of like the lawlessness of private security firms in Iraq is that Crescent employed, I didn't, this detail got caught from the story, but Crescent employed a, their director of security. So the director of security for this firm was this guy named Scott Schneider. And Scott Schneider was not allowed, he couldn't have been in the army because of his military, because of his criminal record in the states. he wasn't even allowed to own a gun in the United States because of a domestic violence charge and he is the director of security like the guy who's in charge of the guns

you know how bad your track record has to be for you not to be able to own a gun in the United States I mean I mean also I guess given given the kind of sort of wanton violence and sort of just you know acts of just atrocities committed by these security firms I guess someone like that is the perfect person, right? Two had one of these security firms, right? Yeah, and so Crescent is, like a lot of these security firms,

they were doing what they called like convoy mitigation. So Crescent was in Kuwait and they would basically guard along convoys of supplies as they drove from Kuwait over the border into Iraq. Crescent, I believe, didn't even have their contracts through the United States. It was through the Italian military. that was like assisting in the United States. And how Crescent became, like, and also like no one really knew who they were.

Like there was hundreds of firms in Iraq at that time. There were so many contracts. There was so much money because, you know, they said Donald Rumsfeld said the war was going to be over in like three or four months and it ended up being, you know, everyone knows decades. And so they had a, they needed this release valve in the form of these security firms. Crescent on because as Fainererer writes, they were very reckless in just unprofessional and shady and just he felt kind of like

this is an unsafe environment like and this is a bound this is bound to like end badly and it did and seven or sorry I think six of their contractors were kidnapped by sort of an unknown group it was never really identified but they were kidnapped at a checkpoint which they thought was like a rocky police. And so those, these contractors are kidnapped. It becomes a national news story. And one of the contractors is this guy named Paul Rubin, who's from Minneapolis. And it becomes like something that's covered in the local press in Minneapolis.

Seabrook was a manager at Crescent. And he had recruited Paul Rubin who was his, who was his childhood friend, essentially. Paul Rubin has a twin brother who's a Minneapolis police officer, who is the one 20 years later that tells Seabrook about the job at the mall and says, you should go offer your services to this mall. But in the midst of this kidnapping in like 2007, 2006, this guy named Mark Koshelski, who is the owner of what was the last gun store in Minneapolis. he was like a very he's like a local politics gadfly and like a like conservative anti-tax advocate and like a gun nut and like a character i mean i've interviewed him a couple times he's actually the one who coined or i don't know if he coined it but he he definitely capitalized on it in the mid-90s minneapolis briefly had one of the highest murderates in the country and it was

called Murderapolis and he sold a shirt he sold it so Minneapolis is called Minneapolis the city of lakes and he sold a shirt that was called Murder Apolis City of Wakes and I had like a Grim Reaper over the skyline and so this guy this guy Mark Keschelsky has this gun store on his trips home Nate Seabrook is a regular there the Ruben brothers these twin brothers are also regulars there Mark Kishelsky is unsatisfied with the government's search for these contractors. This part was also comfortable the story because it was a little far field narrative wise, but it's just genuinely crazy. Mark Kishelski then takes it upon himself to go look for the contractors. He goes to Iraq and Kuwait twice to look for them. Jesus. Yeah, you can like, look,

there's like, there's stories about it in the local press back in the day. But Kishelski then is, is Seabrook by the time the kidnapping has happened. Seabrook is no longer at Crescent security. on a trip home, he has, he's getting a gun customized by Mark Kishelski. And Kishelsky goes like, that's, that's an illegal mod. I can't do that. And by Kishelski's allegation, Seabrook then pulls out a military ID card that he says, I can take this card and I can get kind of any weapon I want on any base that I want. And that opens up like a, the kind of biggest like scoop and like,

like discovery that I made in the story is that this, that Seabrook was investigated by the Armini Criminal Investigated Division for stealing one, almost $1.7 million worth of government weapons and equipment from military bases using a fraudulently obtained military ID. This is all alleged, all allegations, but it's all in an Army CID report. And so that's sort of like what you're talking about of like the military is one thing, but they have an army CID. There is something there at least. I'm sure investigations can be buried. Seabrook was never prosecuted or charged with anything, and I've never found out why. But that's a good sort of difference is that there is like there's at least some institutional regulation accountability there. That storyline is when this

this story became a much bigger thing for me and like this like pretty crazy yarn that connects these two brothers you know multiple decades Minneapolis to Iraq and yeah it's just and let me let me ask you a question because I mean I know you don't know why he hasn't been prosecuted despite an investigation but I mean like like you know I'm thinking about in the piece you talk about him writing these reports, right, for the Minneapolis Police Department. He was writing them and then sending them to them. And then sending them, right? Tips, yeah.

So there's obviously this. Discovering Antifa sales stuff. Discovered an Antifa cell. There was one that was basically like a, just like a single. I didn't share the person's name, really, but it was like a single, like, profile of an individual activist. And it was like, so and so gave his. like ats is like an admirer of Fidel Castro and Joseph Stalin is like at this this had like

pictures of him from his social media and was very much like a I don't even know really what you would call it but it was like a it appeared to be a part of a series it was the only thing that came back in a records request but it appeared to be like a part of a series of like a dossier of of these you know Antifa radicals in his view sorry go on here so no I just I guess I I just want to ask, then what do you think? So it seems like, obviously, there is some, I know that they're all police officers you'd mentioned, like the police officer in the email who'd mentioned that we need to talk about this guy.

But it seems like there's at least some tolerance of these groups, right? And actually a necessity, maybe perhaps in some people's minds, like, what sort of role do you think that they play? And I don't even know what we want to call, like the coming hellscape of what's already here now. But as we see this rise in civil unrest and, you know, in racial tensions and, you know, wider income and wealth inequality, what role do these, do these firms serve? That's a very interesting question.

And I was trying to figure out the kind of like, the relationship between the police and them and the sort of like question of like how much of a vacuum they were filling. Because you could easily, you could easily make this into a sort of a argument against to defund. You know, you could say like you remove police, you're just going to get a worse kind of private security, which is true in some respects. But an interesting thing about the time that the story takes place is that this is in the summer of 2021. And this is several months before Minneapolis is set to vote on this referendum that is more complicated, but essentially a referendum on defund. And it is a referendum on the police department. And it is a referendum on the police

department and i guess a theory i had and others have had that i talked about is that at like they didn't that the department could be more tolerant of something like this based on them not wanting to be the ones that are spending another summer looking like they're roughing up protesters if that makes sense as as they're sort of going in it's sort of they're trying to like regain their legitimacy you know and so that it's sort of like tolerating at an arm's length distance. But there was, I don't know, there was more people that are more, you know, police officers, I think were probably split.

There are some evidence in these emails that they were not liked and they didn't think that they were a good presence for public safety. But then there was also like at this trial, I go to a police officer was subpoenaed and testified on essentially testified to Nathan Seabrook and CRG's like professionalism and was a very good witness towards them and was like I mean spoke very highly of them at this trial under oath and so I would say I would say that it's mixed and yeah I would generally would describe their relationship as more collaborative than anything else but there it is interesting that there was some people within the department that like recognize that that actually wasn't a good

look right right i mean i could just think like if i you know god forbid if i was a cop right you know i would just be like well you know if you associate with this guy whether or not you associate with this guy i think that generally people are wary of folks walking around with fucking guns harassing people you know and maybe you would not want people to make that connection with you as a police department, you know what I mean, instead of collaborating with these people. But, I mean, I just think it's interesting because I can just, I remember hearing about all these cops in, so this was before Zoranam Dani got elected as mayor of New York. But I just remember all these cops talking about that they were going to leave New York City, right?

And in the piece, you talk about this sort of exodus, right, of police offers from MPD. So it's just, you know, in this kind of dystopian sort of image. I can see, I can see these private firms are the ones that are coming in, right? You know? Yeah, I wanted to ask him because you said that you'd spoken, actually spoken to him once, not for this story. He declined to comment on this story. But when you had talked to him, I guess that was during, was it during the Derek Chauvin trial or around?

No, no, no. So this is at a, this is at, I mean, it was for this story. Like, I just approached him. Oh, okay. So he, he, on the first night that they were there, a woman alleged that Seabrook assaulted her, punched her in the head, and then exacerbated her kind of preexisting head injuries and really dramatically affected her cognitive ability and to the point where it was debilitating to her and she filed suit against him. he filed a counter lawsuit for defamation against her and for battery saying that she maced me and then she defamed me on social media so it was that it was the defamation trial that i went to report out which was like the courtroom i was talking about and so while we were

waiting for the verdict i approached him and you know asked for an interview asked for him to tell his side of the story and he spoke for a bit and then said you don't want to talk to me anymore and I was the most I had got out of him, basically. And what was like your personal impression of it? Like, or is it just not? I mean, at that point, he was very, it was tense. He definitely was trying to repair his image. He was on the stand telling a much different kind of, or, you know,

he was trying to sort of present a counter narrative to what he just, you know, what he would see as a defamatory, uh, malicious narrative spread by, people online against him. And his, you know, his basically thing is that I'm just trying to keep my hometown safe. He also said, was basically like, I'm a good soldier that's come home and I'm simply trying to use the skills that I've gained defending this country abroad and defending the streets here and restoring public safety to this great city that I grew up in. And furthermore, it is incredibly insulting that anyone would call me. Because some people were like, are, Are they proud boys?

Like, who are they? Are the extremists? You know, people were just saying shit online. And he goes, like, it's so insulting that someone would call me a proud boy because my grandfather was murdered by the Ku Klux Klan. And then he starts crying on the state. Okay, okay. Can I just interject here?

All right. I'm also looking at the towards the end of your piece. You mentioned that, but you also mentioned that he's talking to Winston Smith's younger brother, Cadell Smith. Yeah. And you say that they have a meeting at a Thai restaurant in the mall. And I think Cadele says the point he was trying to get across is that CRG was a black-owned organization. He's for black people. And, you know, with the clan comment about his great-grandfather, I just have to think that, like, I don't think outfitting yourself, you know, with long guns and tactical

gear and harassing people who are protesting for a better world and over the murder of a black man by the police. I just don't think that you want to call yourself a black-owned organization that does, you know, I'm saying? That will, that will, uh, you know, vibe well with people. It's not like opening a record store, you know? Yeah, brother, you're not open up, you know, you're not open up a fucking, like a jambalaya shop, you know what I mean? You know, you're not doing any of that. So that's a, which, which I have to say, too, which I think is sort of interesting, and this is just a personal kind of comment. I don't know if you'll have anything to say about this, but I just do think it's interesting that, like, you sort of have, like, an individual

like him who, and I'm thinking of even Eddington, man, sorry to bring this movie up again, but this Michael character, the black cop character, right? You have these characters who really, it really just reminds me of this idea of, like, a rainbow coalition in the United States military, you know, that you can be American, not because of your skin color, but that you can achieve and exceed, I guess, to these higher ideals and demands that the country needs of you, right? even if that means being a black fucking former vet being a veteran and you know harassing the shit out of black and white people who are protesting against police brutality just that fine kind of

circle and just that kind of logical loophole that he uses that is very insidious you know dishonest is just sort of a I mean it's just what do you say about it man yeah yeah well it's I mean it's really interesting that he was the his first client was the special prosecutor prosecuting Derek Chauvin, who's this guy named Jerry Blackwell, who is a black private practice. He was like a private practice attorney that was sort of the, this like special pro bono prosecutor that Keith Ellison brought in that gave the opening and closing statements and was like kind of the star of the trial. And he was, he was his bodyguard, essentially. But then, so then, you know, ostensibly he believes that Derek Chauvin was served justice.

I'm not sure. I can't comment on that. But what he did do was the only public comments he's made responding to the allegations was an interview on this outlet called Alpha News, which is basically like the Minnesota Breitbart or something like that. And he gave the interview to this woman named Liz Collin, this reporter whose husband is the former Minneapolis Police Union chief, notorious alleged racist. And she is the producer.

of the documentary, the fall of Minneapolis, which is the thing that became this big, like, it created a firestorm and it is like... It was like birth of a nation for a bunch of white, white racists in Minneapolis. Yeah, like, retcon, the murder of George Floyd and has, like, they've been very influential

in convincing people that, like, what Derek Chauvin's lawyer was saying was true, you know? And so it's just like, okay, so you're, you know, providing, giving legitimacy to this, outlet that their biggest claim to fame is disputing the narrative of George Floyd, yet you've also been the one who was defending the prosecutor of the murderer of George Floyd. Like, it is very kind of head spinning. I mean, as Michael, as Michael Jordan said when he was asked, you know, just kind of like

just sort of the ID, I guess, or sort of the, I guess, where C. Brooks' head is. as Michael Jordan was asked why he didn't support like a black man running for Senator in North Carolina, which would have been the first black center of North Carolina. And he said, Republicans buy sneakers too, you know, which essentially, I guess you just need to make your money. You know what I mean? You need to make your money.

It doesn't really matter what side of the aisle is and what personal convictions that you have. I mean, I think his personal convictions lie in the defense of the homeland, right? Well, yeah, and I can't imagine that his 2014 tome infidels in the Garden of Mesopotamia sold on it. Wasn't exactly a world beater on the, on the best set of it. That is an amazing, that is not a, it is not a, I, I, uh, I own it. It's not a very, it's not a, there's not much literary flair.

What's, what's that, you know, what's that racist-ass French novel man that I'm looking up, dude, the camp of the same. That, that sounds like a title of a book that a good, that guy would write, you know what I'm saying. Yeah. Uh, that, well, so that's what's. The interesting thing that you said is like getting his money, that's where the sort of this question of the military contract or mercenary thing comes in, you know, is that he's seemingly willing to take the contracts depending on relative to what side they are on. The other ironic thing is that I mentioned before when he said the, when he had been on a crew

that had been assigned as a protective unit on the Minneapolis City Council, the ostensible reason those city council members were under threat is because they had just said that they were going to dismantle the police department like in this you know headline grabbing thing so it's another kind of like odd where he's protecting these like leftist city council members that are are had become kind of overnight abolitionists that are then getting this like all these threats incurred at them and so it's really yeah yeah strange bench fellows yeah and a lot of crossed signals that is, yeah, doesn't exactly map on to what we might expect, I guess. Well, to close us out, I mean, the last question I have is like, what's the future of Cbrook and

CRG and all this stuff? I saw you'd mentioned he was hawking briefly some AI tools for his operation, that kind of thing. What's he up to these days? So the most recent thing was I found in 2023 he had done a ad with a liquor store owner based on these, basically, like, mobile surveillance systems. And then he had sort of said in the YouTube ad that he was going to, like, outfit them with AI technology to what he said,

start mapping individuals. I'm not sure what that means. And the other thing I should say the, so the Home Depot story you should say that I should say is that. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, we just jumped right over that. Yeah, yeah, no worries, no worries. There's a lot. I mean, there's a lot of shit in the story.

This guy named John. nobles who I don't even know if you were at any of the seven points protests he may have been but he is he helps he has a a small collective that help the unhoused community in Minneapolis and the Twin Cities delivers supplies and so and he had also been talk some shit on the internet about Seabrook you know said said something and one day he's at Home Depot and this is in 2023. He's at Home Depot and some guy, like, he's in a sort of corner of the story as he describes it. And some guy kind of like grabs him on the shoulder and turns him around. And he goes, like, my name's Nathan Seabrook from Conflict Resolution Group. Like, you've been defaming me online.

This ends now. Like, we're going to end this now. And he just goes like, what the fuck? And he like leaves. But I have no idea how he knew he was there. If he just like, like, it's that, that part was very creepy is that because that was like no longer he's like at the site of the of the shooting guarding this parking garage and and just sort of like intimidating the activists around there and now he's actually elsewhere in the city seemingly following people and what now wanting to use AI to facilitate that so I did like he had kept his his public statements and profile to a minimum, but then recently he did hop on X the Everything app, and he does have a pretty active LinkedIn that he did say, this was cut from the story, but he did say, like, we need

to prepare for the summer of rage, which he called last summer. I think it just kind of like once he saw the stuff happening in L.A., but he's sort of like, he really, in several interviews, like the interview he did that I draw on, um, call on this podcast called fearless mindset that was done like right he talks about the job at seven points like he had just taken it he really like he talks about his like and this is what he does to the in the police emails too like really hipes up his ability to kind of like project violence and sort of like yeah my people like we've got intel and we're really seeing some like violence that's going to happen and it's like okay I mean he just keeps predicting it like it's not

he's predicting that there isn't going to be violence. Most of the times he's just been like, yeah, there's violence. Like summer of rage, there's going to be violence. And it's like, like I said, that's going to be good if you run a security company. If you keep saying that you're an expert in intelligence and you're projecting a violent summer ahead. Whereas like a huge thing, like at the Winston Smith protests, I can't really overstate how much a lot of the people there were talking about. like the kind of biggest thing people were saying was like, where is everybody? Like, where is everybody from last summer?

Like, there's not enough of us. We need more of us on the street. It's like what the protesters were saying. So, like, it just became even more farcical where it was like, this was like a relatively small. Like, I understand because the city was so tense, like you could see why a business owner would get scared of that. Yeah. But the, the, it was just orders of magnitude more serious and large in 2020. And it was almost like you're trying to like, yeah, just increase and inflate the possibility of a threat.

And then it just, you know, it could become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Right. And so, yeah, go on. No, which I have to say, I think that what did he say that his goal was to make sure that these, the protesters never came. came back to the garage, but actually, like, one, that would be bad for your business model. But, two, that also just shows you, like, even in the name conflict resolution group, is that I guess, like, it's not really about conflict resolution. It will be resolved, right?

But through violent means or intimidation, right? Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's, it's hard to say what's next. I mean, things seem to be, like, like, you don't, as we get further away from 2020, you don't have as much, like, there's definitely still. fear of crime and disorder in Minneapolis and he probably can get some amount of work. I'm not sure I haven't heard any of their recent jobs or anything, but one's got to think that, I mean, it could be a growth market if we see more like civil unrest, but I just don't,

I don't know if we're going to have another 2020 unless there is some something, some COVID-like event combined with political upheaval, you know? you need you need some kind of catalyst sort of perfect storm like a like a destabilization of like kind of everyday life you know like you need you need that to be ratcheted up to have that level of civil unrest where it does legitimately feel like like someone like I need some like army guys in here right otherwise Nathan Cbrook will be taking up a job a more dignified job at Home Depot you know but when that's your little woolly he's late in the cut doing the birdman hand rough.

I mean, the other thing, the other thing, like, beyond, well, I think that the private security industry will continue to grow in the United States, for sure, just because, like, we're on that sort of privatization timeline things will continue to privatize, like, people, I think, I mean, we kind of saw that in the post-Louigi thing, like, they were really trying to, like, juice up to, like, executive protection. Like, that was going to be very good, like, corporate executives are now, like, invest. that much more um and then the other thing is that war globally will continue to be privatized and is i think more than anyone actually really knows besides kind of like industry experts

and people who really monitor it the cat's out of the bag like that that's it's pretty hard to like sorry mixing metaphors here but like to put the toothpaste back in the tube with that like the The Rock War really set that off, like, turbocharged, which was like, it was an industry kind of after the Cold War, a lot of private, like, military firms started in like Cold War Africa. But I think that the future of warfare will continue. There will be national militaries, but they will be robustly supplemented by mercenary units from certain countries. Like, we've seen that a lot. We see that in Ukraine. And, I mean, we're seeing it with these, like, creepy firms that we're doing the, you know, Gaza

humanitarian foundation. Right. Yeah. Privatization of war will absolutely continue. And the privatization of public safety services in the U.S. will continue. And I think that the workforce that supplies those, I think it's fair to say that there will be increasing overlap and interplay between those. but I do I should say it does you know right now this story is an outlier like the only other thing that I could think of that is like similar is somebody like I don't know if you guys remember during the no dapple protest there was that group called tiger swan which was a which was like an ex-navy seal or an ex-special operator guy that were infiltrating the activist groups and they had those like there's a famous clip with Amy Goodman and those those dogs that are attacking protesters those yeah that was like tiger swan

And they were also describing the water protectors as jihadi militants. It was a very similar playbook. Like this expert Michael Picard that I interviewed for the story was like, I was describing it to him. He's like, that sounds pretty similar to Tiger Swan. He had done a report on that. So like right now, it's an outlier. And that should provide some comfort. But it was more that this is a possibility of what can happen.

Right. I just want to say, too, to close out, man, it's kind of like, as Noah Colan says, the war in terror is sort of like cast this long shadow, right, over the 21st century. And it's like these, you know, ghosts, right, of these past wars, these haunted soldiers, right? They're going to be fighting the wars of the future. You know what I mean? That's increasingly what it seems like, whether those wars are, you know, in another country, in Middle East Africa, Latin America, Asia, or whether it's in your, fucking downtown you know black cock helicopter over a apartment building yeah we're coming like we saw in fucking exactly like we saw yeah

ice too exactly Jesus God well amen uh thanks for being with us man thank you so much man the piece is when a mercenary became a mall cop it's in mother Jones right now and you got some other stuff out even if you want to plug any of that and tell people where they can find you yeah um you can follow me on X the Everything app. Amon Waylon is my app, just my full name. I have a substack. I don't really write on it, but I use it as like a way to promote my writing.

So whenever I have something new, it usually goes through the substack. So that's the best way to kind of keep track of what I'm working on. It's aim and Wayland.substack.com. I have this out. I just did a short piece on like the Nick Flentes, Tucker Carlson, Heritage Foundation, the grapification of the right and then I have another piece kind of on that subject coming soon in another publication I won't jinx it but I'll keep that under wraps but yeah please and I've like I said I've done a lot of reporting on the like post George Floyd moment in

Minneapolis which I think is it's pretty important and I've got some of those links and like the substack post about this online if people want to read further but thank you guys so much yeah thank you so much man yeah we'll link all that in the show notes and uh you know if you're feeling in the giving mood this holiday season again for five dollars a month you get an extra episode with us every week and of course uh your reward will be laid up in heaven for doing so So patreon.com slash trillbilly workers party if you want to cash in on that eternal reward. Amen, thanks again, man, Aaron, thanks. And thanks, and thanks everybody for tuning in.

You know, I'm going to be the