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Chapo Trap House

961 - The Dogs of War feat. Seth Harp (8/18/25)

Chapo Trap House

Chapo Trap House

News

4.69.1K Ratings

🗓️ 19 August 2025

⏱️ 93 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Journalist and author Seth Harp returns to the pod to talk about his horrifying and expansive new book The Fort Bragg Cartel. We talk with Seth about America’s forever-war machine and the global drug empire it empowers, with a special focus on the case of Delta Force officer William Lavigne, who killed his best friend before turning up dead near Fort Bragg in a still-unsolved murder. We also discuss the rise of JSOC, the third Iraq War and its ongoing ramifications, the US military’s ties with the brutal Los Zetas cartel, and the eternal shadow war waged in the name of empire. Buy Seth’s book here (and give it 5 stars on Amazon!): https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/730414/the-fort-bragg-cartel-by-seth-harp/ And follow him on X at @sethharpesq

Transcript

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0:00.0

All right

0:02.0

All I'm going to be is a chopin' Hello, everybody, August 18th, and this is your chopo. Just going to jump right into it today.

0:40.2

We're very excited to have back on the show author Seth Harp to talk about his newly released book, The Fort Bragg Cartel.

0:49.1

Seth, I mean, this is, no shape to any of the other authors or books we've discussed on the show,

0:54.4

but this is an astounding piece of work, Seth.

0:57.2

And I guess like the highest compliment I can pay it is that this is nonfiction that

1:01.9

reads like a novel to me.

1:03.3

And just like to contextualize this book for our listeners, I was just thinking of two

1:07.7

fiction authors throughout this book that I think will like sort of

1:11.7

situate the material. And the first of course was James Elroy. I was thinking of Elroy reading

1:17.4

this book just because of the sheer scope of just squalor and psychopathic depravity carried out

1:23.6

under the guise of law enforcement, or I guess in this case, national security, and

1:28.6

like the personalities and people that populate this book are truly terrifying. And the other one

1:34.7

was Stephen King, because like a lot of this book sort of read like a horror story to me.

1:40.1

It's like you sort of invoke a demon into your life and society that then steals your soul and turns you into a monster.

1:47.9

But there's no supernatural explanation required because like the mechanism here is like just drug addiction and war and killing people.

1:55.8

But like think about a book like it where like there's a physical location that is like the locus of evil.

2:02.5

Is there like at the heart of this book, like, what is the thing, the it to you that like,

2:07.6

from which spins out this like, you know, kaleidoscope of murder, torture, corruption,

2:13.7

and death?

2:14.8

I mean, if you wanted to reify it, you could say that Delta Force's base, you know, hidden in

2:20.0

the woods on Fort Bragg is kind of that, you know, that monster lurking in the forest.

...

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