#109 Jeremiah Wilber - War Party Movement
Jeremiah Wilber - (Ret) Army Green Beret, Mountain Man, Founder of War Party Movement, Cofounder War Party Ranch, Getto Vaquero, and Your Mom's Favorite Cowboy. Jeremiah was born in Ennis, Montana and grew up on Fort Belknep Indian Reservation. From an early age, Jeremiah was an avid outdoor enthusiast, spending much time hunting, fishing, and cowboying. Following high school, he enlisted in the US Army, attending the Military Police School (MP) at Fort Leonard Wood. As an MP, Jeremiah served two combat tours and completed the Sapper Leader Course and Army Ranger School.
After graduating Ranger School, Jeremiah attended Special Forces Assessment and Selection (SFAS) and was selected for the elite Green Berets. As a Green Beret, Jeremiah Served in 3rd Special Forces Group as a Special Forces Communications Sergeant and in 10th Special Forces Group as Special Forces Operations (Team) Sergeant and a Master Trainer at the Special Operations Mountaineering and Arctic Warfare Course.
Following retirement from the US Army, Jeremiah has decided to channel his time and energy into raising money for veteran and human trafficking nonprofits. In 2016, he completed his first ultra-marathon, running from Denver to Breckenridge to support the Green Beret Foundation and in 2021 Jeremiah took on the most arduous ski race in North America, the Grand Traverse Backcountry Ski Race on behalf of the Heroes and Horses Foundation.
Tune in as Jeremiah Wilber joins Bobby Marshall in studio to discuss the human trafficking epidemic, Native American culture, kidnapping, perdition, domestic violence, hunting, veteran life, conservation, Colorado, outdoor life, and much more.
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Jeremiah Wilber - War Party Movement
You are tuning in to the show. Our returning guest for this episode is my friend, Jeremiah Wilber. He's a former Army Special Forces operator, outdoorsman, and much more. He's the Founder of the War Party Movement, helping to raise awareness and combat the human trafficking epidemic plaguing the US. Jeremiah and the War Party organization are doing some amazing things, but above all that, I always enjoy sitting down with Jeremiah and having a few laughs. This was a great episode. I hope you enjoy our conversation.
How have you been?
I’ve been good.
It’s good to see you.
It’s good to see you guys, too.
It’s been a long time. We've been trying to link this up, but you're a busy guy.
For sure.
We've been crushing it, too. It has been nonstop for us. I was in Vegas, and I got to go to Brooklyn.
That sounds fun.
I fucking hate it. Keep me in Colorado.
I hate the city.
I’d rather be in Colorado.
Colorado's enough for me.
We were talking about hunting. Nothing tastes better up elk hunting than the coffee with the grinds that are still in it. It’s out of the old steep little thing you throw in the campfire. That stuff's the shit. I was doing some pour-over stuff up there. Stanley makes a little thermos that's a pour-over thing. The old-school Stanley Thermos that keeps coffee off for fucking three days is wild. They make one that goes on top of that and it's a pour-over. That was pretty bad ass. I like the instant coffee, too, from Black Rifle. It’s not bad.
I had the bag. That's what Dayna brought. Those things are the shit. They're tea bags. I had some leftovers and I used them at the house. I wouldn't even make regular coffee. I was using those steep bags until they were gone. I was like, “These things are awesome.”
Especially if you're backpack hunting because they're light. That’s the way to go.
They're awesome. I like those a lot. Usually, in hunting camp up in Wyoming or if I'm guiding here off horses for an outfitter, we do everything super old school like you're talking about. You boil cowboy coffee. Mostly, we use Black Rifle or cheap coffee that we can take to camp. We bring buckets of it.
There's nothing wrong with Folgers.
We've been blessed in the last couple of years. Black Rifle hooks it up. It's been awesome because coffee is such a cool little booster when it's cold as shit. For us, the guides, we have to take care of all the stock, all the horses, and everything, so we're up first. Typically, when all the stock starts to come in at 4:00 AM, we'll catch them all, put them in the crowd, and then immediately go into the cook tent, start a fire, and start the coffee. I feel like hunting's also the only place where I drink coffee at 10:00 PM and go straight to sleep. You're like, “I need coffee. It's warm.”
You got to warm up. I don't think people realize that haven't done it before, especially during archery season or something like that. In the past couple of years, I haven't been lucky enough to go off horseback, but I should rent some horses.
With what I tell people, hunting off horses in that way is to go with an outfitter. Do a little bit of homework. Figure out what area you want to hunt. You can do plenty of research on outfitters. Most outfitters are old-school cowboys, so they're going to use Facebook as probably their biggest tool. The ones that have an awesome website, I'm not knocking those guys, but don't sleep on the guys whose website sucks and whose Facebook is okay. All they have are pictures of hunters slaying and they’re small and family-oriented. Especially the families that go into the wilderness, the wilderness hunt families, a lot of those are outfitters. They have small family-owned businesses.
I see what you're saying. Vet them by their Facebook and by how many photos and stuff they're getting tagged to. That makes sense.
You can look at it. A lot of times, those small family outfitters are booked for years. If you were to call someone here in Colorado and you start looking at the Ghost of Colorado Springs or someone at a Steamboat, if they are that small mom-and-pop one, they're probably good. The customer service is going to be awesome as the way they take care of their clients. They're probably booked for the next 3 or 4 years.
Once you start looking at other states like Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana because you have to acquire points or get the draw, a lot of times, you'll call an outfitter or start researching an area. You need to book them two years out to say, “I don't have enough points yet, but here's what I'm trying to do.” That's been my experience working for work for outfitters.
That’s especially if you've never hunted before because there's so much that you guys do as far as putting yourself on animals. Calling is huge. There is also animal behavior.
I would say even if you've hunted before, the thing with outfitters on horseback is there's a lot that goes into the stockmanship, taking care of horses, and the horsemanship that you're getting. I've talked with people who've had bad experiences where they're out with outfitters and the horses are bucking or they're having wrecks when they're packing in and packing out. Some of that stuff happens. You're working with animals. You never know what can happen.
There is a way, in my opinion, to try to vet some of this. Even if you're an experienced hunter, do your homework and have some conversations with those outfitters. I worked for three different outfitters and three different states in Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado. Every one of those is a small family business. They are always in direct contact with their hunters from the moment that they book. Sometimes, nine months out, I know which hunts I'm going to be on, where, who's coming, and what they are. Sometimes, the hunters will only want to talk, and sometimes, they don't. Sometimes, this is their 4th or 5th hunt with that outfitter. Those are the outfitters you want to find.
When you're working with animals, you never know what can happen. Even if you're an experienced hunter, do your homework.
Every year, some guy from Florida or Texas is doing everything he can to book Colorado Outfitters out of Meeker. He's doing everything he can to get to book that. That's a good way to try to vet what you're doing. I've seen people get the horror stories of the outfitters, and that sucks, too, as a guide. At the same time, on our end as a guide, anything in the cowboy world, in general, the pay is dog shit. The guys are doing it because they love doing it. It’s not necessarily like, “I'm going to make a bunch of money.” Oftentimes, it's hard to hire badass guides because the pay is not very good. It's got to be guys who love it.
That is what you want in that situation, right?
100%. Typically, what I've seen in the hunting guide world are the junkies. Here's an example. The guy ski patrols all winter at Lake Keystone, and then as soon as spring starts, he's scouting for the outfitter he is going to work for and is guiding fly fishing. He's on a raft somewhere guiding fly fishing. As soon as July hits, he's starting to pack clients in on fly fishing guides. He wants to be out. It's all this seasonal work. It's this 35-year-old dude who's single. Maybe he's married or has a girlfriend, but has no kids and lives that mountain man bounce-around style.
It sounds amazing, doesn't it?
It does if you don't have a family.
If I don't have a family at home or was single, I could do that. I could go make snow or something. I have a buddy of mine that's single. Shout-out to Rain. He does that. He works in Rock and Roll. In the winter, he loves to ski, so he goes and makes snow or grooms at night.
Here in Colorado, a lot of people understand that. They have friends that do it or they see it.
It's like that surf bum mentality, but you're in the mountains. It’s mountain bum.
Those guys and gals are the ones that connect the dots between the outdoor space and the hunting world. What's wild to me is you'll see two industries that are both conservationists who want to take care of the planet, but fight each other, talk shit about each other, one hates the other, and vice versa. Hunting brands are trying to make mountaineering gear when mountaineering companies already make it awesome, but they could collab and make it camo. It’s weird. It is cool to see people in that industry where a guy or a gal is a ski patroller that someone thinks is this super left, hippie, and a save-the-planet person but also guides elk hunts.
They might drive a Subaru. Who knows?
Exactly. It’s cool to see that mix of people. Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana have a lot of that.
Especially when I am in the back country and I run into other hunters or people that are recreating, no matter what my political values are, I'm not thinking, “Here come these liberals up the trail,” or, “These goddamn democrats.” Normally, I'm going to greet them and be like, “How is it going? Where are you guys going? That’s cool. Have a good day.”
For the first time in a while, it’s probably 10 or 12 years, I went solo. My brother was down and out with an injury and my uncle that I normally go with couldn't come into town from Montana. I had to work on an off-schedule, but I was like, “Fuck it. I'm going to go by myself.” I ran into so many dudes that were fucking awesome. They were like, “If you get something down, let me know.” Whether they were out-state or in-state or new hunters or old hunters, they were all pretty awesome.
If I'm on a trail, I try to talk to every single person that I'm passing. I don't necessarily talk to everyone at the trail head if it's really congested, but I do try to talk to everybody and see what's going on. Some of that, too, is to find out where they're hunting at and what they're doing, because then, that helps with pressure and I can play the wind off.
Sometimes, you can use their advantage. Also, you don't want to blow those guys out if they're sitting on something.
I ran into five dudes from Ohio and they were lost. They knew where they were on the map physically, but it was 4 or 5 of them who were stomping through the woods with bows. It was like, “Where are you guys going? I want to know exactly where you are.” It’s that, and I'm not Safety Steve, but it’s the same thing. I'm like, “I'm out here. I know this area pretty well. If you get something on the ground or you guys get into trouble, this is where our camp is at. Walk over to that camp and say, “My buddy's hurt, or whatever it is.”
Everyone who's going to come to rescue you or anybody that's going to come out there knows exactly where our camps are. Oftentimes, outfitters even facilitate a lot of that, whether that's through sat phone, bringing the helicopters in, or communicating and being like, “Have you seen these guys?” or whatever the case is. I try to pass on that information and be a good steward of the land. I’m like, “We're all out here. If you need help, I'm here.”
The last thing you want is even if they're nerds from Ohio, it is them getting messed up and it's on the news or something happens. It’s bad light in general. I have a love-hate for hunting on social media. I feel like it's such a sensitive topic and a way to advertise or market whatever you're doing. It's touch and goes. People either love it or hate it. It's one of those things where anything negative in hunting, there are people out there looking for that and trying to pull that out.
That's why I don't do the grip and grin photos.
Me either. I do it for my clients, but I don't take pictures of the stuff I put on there.
It’s my personal preference.
I look at it as one more way in which hunters and people that are experienced can help the guy that's not as experienced. The last thing you want is for someone to get injured, or hurt, or be a news story or a social media story.
The guys that crack me up are the guys that you run across that you can tell they're new at it, but then, they sit there and they're trying to bullshit you. They’re like, “I was in the Bulls.” Be honest with people, too. You’d probably get a lot more help. With those guys, I'm like, “That’s cool. Have a nice day. Have a nice trip.” It's wild to me.
The last episode we recorded here was with a game and fish warden from Colorado, Scott Murdoch. He is a fucking awesome guy. We've had him on 3 or 4 times. He's a back-country bow hunter off horseback. He does a lot of solo hunts. He is a hunter himself. We were talking about how when I went out solo this 2022, it was pretty warm still. I went on the last week of September 2022 and it was still 80 degrees for a couple of days. You know how much work it takes to get a bull cut up first off, right?
Yeah.
Even field dressing and then getting it out is even crazier. I set a limit. I’m like, “I might stay out overnight out of my backpack,” but I have a base camp where my truck is two and a half miles from where I'm at. I know for a fact that if I shoot a bull in the evening, I got all night. I'm good. In the morning, it’s a different story. I still got 24 hours, but I tuck it away someplace cool. Some of these guys I've run into before where we've been way back don't have any plan if they do shoot something. They're 7- or 8-miles in.
When I say I have a love-hate for social media and hunting, I'll give you a couple of things I hate. One, this is the biggest thing that I cannot stand. I know that some social media influencers or brands probably don't do it on purpose, but it is an insult. When you hunt private or with an outfitter and you don't tag that outfitter or that private ranch that you're on, you're taking credit where credit's not due. Let’s go back to the small businesses or family-owned businesses of outfitters. You're taking away that from them.
Some social media influencers or brands probably don't do it on purpose, but it's an insult when you hunt privately or with an outfitter and don't tag that outfitter or that private ranch you're on. You're taking credit where credit's not due.
I'll use campaigns for example. He made a post of what I thought was awesome. He was talking about the San Carlos Reservation. It's an all-Native-ran outfitting company. It’s a family-owned business. He gives shout-outs. He says where he is at. He tries to do a good job of that. I respect that and I like that. Here's the thing. It doesn't matter if you have 500 followers or 500,000 followers. If you put an animal on the ground and you didn't physically do every single thing on your own, give credit where credit is due.
People are so good at social media. You can't tell me that you are sponsored by all these companies and all these brands yet, you forgot to tag the people who took you out. I've had to sign NDAs for people that I've guided on hunts. That's fine because, at the end of the day, it was for the outfitter. I'm not saying I needed any of that credit. I'm saying maybe when that show comes out, maybe they’d give a little bit more shout-out to the outfitter.
Let’s go back to campaigns. Debone your meat. This is the most ridiculous shit I see on Instagram. Guys full quarters in the back country and then act like it's this cool, awesome, and prideful thing to pack out this giant backpack. It's like, “Tell me your 300 meters away from the side by side without telling me you're 300 meters away from the side by side.”
A lot of times, in Colorado, all these trails are so well-maintained because of mountain bikes and back hunting and angling. That is the biggest revenue source in Colorado. What a lot of these mountain bikers don't know is our trails are pristine compared to other trails. When you're on it with horses, it's not as rough. It’s not as crazy.
It's not like going into the back country in Wyoming or Northern Montana.
When I'm in the Bob Marshall or the Wind Rivers, 1) It's a grizzly bear country, so you're de-boning everything. 2) The terrain's so rough. It's so hard on the stock that you need to make those loads as light as possible. Unless you're by your vehicle, there's no reason for you to be packing out bones. The reason why I point those out on social media is that that, to me, is part of the bigger problem.
Some of the comments of the vegan or people who don't believe in hunting is crazy. I commend someone who campaigns to make that his complete identity of, “I'm a bow hunter. I kill animals for a living. I feed my family with these animals. This is what I do.” I respect that. That's needed and awesome. The things that are missing are teaching people how to plan. Let’s go back to what you were talking about your truck. I know the shape I'm in. If I'm going out with a dude I know is a badass mountain man and we can push ten miles in on foot, I'll go ten miles in on foot.
It’s way different when you have a team, right?
Exactly. I know that the guy that I'm with can put a 30-mile day in and be fine. Most people cannot do that. I'm not trying to brag in any way, but even for myself, the terrain might not allow you to do that. When I say ten miles in, I'm talking probably 7 or 8 miles on a terrain.
You could be doing easily 3,000 feet of elevation climb and descend over and over again depending on where you're at.
There's a reason why guys that chase sheep, goats, and those things train.
They’re on a whole other level.
These dudes train. What I like to tell newer hunters to do is to draw a 2.5 or 3-mile circle around their vehicle. Three miles away from your truck could be a 4,000-foot climb down and out of something. It could be super gnarly in the mountains. That still gives you an eight-hour window.
You also got to factor in the time of deboning it and cutting it up. That's a whole other few other hours involved.
What I mean is this. It keeps you in that planning process of being like, “I'm not that far away from my truck. It'll be a long day.” Everyone who's put an elk on the ground that wasn't on a private ranch knows where they go down and where they are.
They're in deep, dark holes.
That's one of the biggest mistakes. To get back to social media, the pro is that more people are getting out hunting. More people want to feed their families this way. More people are experiencing the land and why it's so amazing. The other side is it has become a business. Everyone wants to market. Everyone wants to sell themselves. Everyone wants to do something. All you companies that started this, whether it's SITKA or whatever, you were small family businesses at one point. Don't make these badass commercials and all this shit and leave out the outfitters that packed you in, busted their ass, and made $5 a day to get you to put you on those animals. For me, I will always call that out. I make videos about it all the time on social media.
I love that, too.
It’s one of my things. This is as American as it gets. Everything that we do is made in America. There are these products that you can only buy here. Other than if you’re native or something, you're not experiencing hunting and harvesting your animals to feed your family. This is a pretty Northern American concept. A lot of other places don't get to do what we do unless you're in the jungle of South America or Africa and you physically live off the land. Most countries don't hunt as we do.
They go to grocery stores or farmers' markets if it's a third-world country type of situation. There are also wet markets for that matter.
Most people are in cities. That's what I mean. I don't call it a sport because, for me, that’s how my dad put food on the table as a kid. We lived in Montana.
That's the only reason I do it. As much as I love hunting and as much as we talk about it here on the show, I don't ever want to come off like I'm some professional. I'm one of the worst fucking hunters out there probably. All the tag soup that I've made is so much. I've bought so many tags that I haven't filled. I'm never trying to put myself on a pedestal as a bow hunter, but I enjoy it.
One of the things that I enjoy about it is the phone goes off. I'll take some photos here or there. You know because you're an influence. That's your thing. That's a whole job in itself. For me, personally, it takes away from the experience. There's something about watching the sunset, watching it set, and then hiking out in the dark.
Plus, unless you have some badass cameras, with your phone, it is not going to look the way it looked to you. Back to the hunter influencer, that's their brand. If they don't put animals on the ground, then they look like a fake hunter.
It's a business.
They have to constantly put animals on the ground.
I was saying more on an individual basis. That's one thing that scares me about the trends that we're creating with social media. People, in general, are not living in the moment. Instead of going to a concert and watching a concert, they get their phone out and film it. They can go back and then watch it through their phone.
War Party Movement: What’s scary about the trends we're creating with social media and people, in general, is we’re not living in the moment. Instead of going to a concert and watching it, we get our phones and film it.
When I started social media, I started it to raise money for nonprofits. I was doing the Grand Traverse, raising money. I was like, “I've retired. I'll start social media. There's no other way I can get everything out there.” As it started to grow, I had more of the DMs from guys and gals saying how much I motivate them. They’re like, “Thank you for this,” or, “Thank you for that.” Every time I would get mad at social media and be like, “I don't give a fuck about this,” I get another DM. For one, I can't be fake so I'm always going to be me.
There’s a big difference between you because I genuinely know you. You're one of my buddies. You're a bro. You are yourself on social media. I've met other people that are the complete opposite of what they portray that they are and you watch them post about it.
What's frustrating for me, especially having the nonprofits and the business side off social media, are these content creators. If I make a reel, it's 30 minutes of my day gone that I'm sitting there. I'm not tech-savvy or anything, but I'm trying to look at these videos. The content is so badass. Many people have professional cameras for filming something. People will be like, “Post more cowboy stuff or do this.” I'm like, “How? I have two hands. I don't have a GoPro.”
You don’t have a film crew following you. A lot of those influencers like Cam, you notice they're not selfie-ing themselves the whole time. Even for the show, it got to be too much for the demand, so we have a full-on production team. They make all those clips and shit for me. I don't have time to sit there and do that. There’s no fucking way. It takes up so much time.
I look at it, too, as people are so good at it. I'm 42. I didn't have a computer until I was 40. My wife's like, “You need to buy a computer.” I'm like, “Ugh.” I used a computer when I needed it when I was in the Army and half my Special Forces career. I was at 18-Echo, which is communications. People are like, “You don't know computers?” I'm like, “No. I know how to use radios and what I need the computer for.”
The younger generations are growing up knowing how to use the software. Your amateur videographer that can record stuff with his cell phone, put it on his computer, and edit it makes the dopest shit. Someone who doesn't either have the time and the skill to do it is lacking. I made a post on Instagram about, “I'm so sick of all the Millie Vanilli shit. What is up with these grown-ass people lip-syncing movie quotes or songs? It’s so stupid.”
This is why I love following you, too. It’s fucking hilarious. You should be a standup comedian on your own. Be a cowboy standup for something because you make me laugh on a weekly basis.
I feel like authentic content has become something that is dying. Unfortunately, I even see authentic, awesome people trying to combat the algorithms or do whatever. This is where they’re combating the algorithm so they're almost buying into the trending audios and the trending things. I get it. I run a business off of social media. It sucks.
We do, too. There's a ton of good stuff that happens. I wouldn't know you probably if it wasn't for that. We know some same similar friends and stuff.
Social media's been an amazing tool for me retiring from the Army. The amount of awesome people I've met, I would say that alone has been well-worth the bullshit and the hassle of social media.
I agree.
This is what I do, though. Personally, the way I handle my personal account and business account is I don't play into any politics, bullshit, or negativity. You could be my brother, but if all you post is trash and stupid, I'm not going to follow you. I'm going to unfollow you. I’ll be like, “I'm not following you. Your shit's stupid.” People don't do that. It's so easy to get sucked into these rabbit holes of whatever your opinion is to pile onto that opinion.
If you're an anti-abortion person, then the only opinion that you're going to listen to is, “Abortion's bad.” It's feeding. It keeps pushing you farther away from understanding someone with a different opinion. I’m not saying you need to follow that. If you have a hard religious stance on something, that's fine, but be careful of how easy it is for these algorithms to send you into these dark places and get stuck where its only one opinion.
Not to mention the whole Elon Musk buying Twitter and how many bots they discovered. There's a whole sinister side of shit that's going on behind it that's propaganda. I even see it. I'm sure that you do, too, on your feed. We have a lot of friends that are former operators and you're one of them included. I swear to God. I get propaganda and I don't know where it's coming from. Those are shit that is happening in Ukraine. I don't know to believe if it's real or not.
I spent 22 years in the Army. I'm not going to say I'm anti-government, but I understand history. I'm fortunate enough to grow up very multicultural. I lived on an Indian reservation. What's crazy, to me, is that the government, constantly throughout our history of existence, has implemented things on society that was horrible and unwilling to be like, “This is fucked up.” It's not fucked up.
I don’t even have to use my people and natives as that example. It is a hard example to use because there was an expansion westward. There were a bunch of things. Look at World War II where they did the Japanese. If you were Japanese, they put you in a camp. It's like, “That was the government.” The government also thought it was a good idea to kill all the buffalo in North America because if we kill the buffalos, we kill the Indians.
They were using the resources. A lot of it was market hunter, too. You had to feed these people.
You look at that, and fast forward to 2022, nothing's changed. It's just on a different level. I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but a lot of dots don't make sense. Everyone thinks that the Republican party and the Democratic party are different, but when you look at who runs them and leads them, they're the exact same bird but with two different feathers. They both fuck you. One fucks you in the mouth and one fucks you in the ass. You’re still getting fucked. It doesn't matter.
Most Americans, if they're able to have a rational conversation, understand that. They sit in the middle or a little right or a little left on some social issues, but they generally understand that. What's happened with social media is it easily can push you to the fringes where it doesn't give you counter-arguments of an articulate nature. When you think of something on social media, it stacks more bullshit of the same exact opinion you have.
Social media can push you to the fringes where it doesn't give you counterarguments of an articulate nature. When you think of something on social media, it stacks more and more BS of the same exact opinion you have.
It reaffirms what you're thinking. You can find whatever you're looking for on the internet. You can find something that justifies your opinion.
My favorite thing about the Military was it was all walks of life coming together to accomplish a common goal. Most people don't get to experience that because most people stay where they're from. Even if they move, they stay in the same socioeconomic standing. A lot of people underestimate socioeconomic standing and how powerful that is because we like to combat it as everything's racist. I believe there's racism, but I believe there are more socioeconomic issues at play. Poor White America, Appalachia country, or wherever, the rural is the same as Baltimore City, Maryland.
At the same time, it's not. I get what you're saying.
What most people don't understand is if you're a White guy from San Diego and you take a White guy from Chicago, oftentimes, what social media has made us do with the media and the propaganda is they've dehumanized us. What they do is both White guys named Brad, one from San Diego and one from Chicago, they make them identical. The reality is they both couldn't be farther apart from each other. They have zero in common. They're not the same person. The guy from Chicago is this typical of what you think of as a Chicago guy. He's a firefighter. He loves hot dogs and sports. That's him. The guy from San Diego is like, “I ride a BMX. I skate. I smoke weed. I like burritos and Mexican food.” Culturally, they might look the same, but they're completely different.
They are of different spectrums. It’s the same if you had a Black kid from the inner city and one that grew up in the south.
Oftentimes, social media has removed those filters and made that Black kid from Brooklyn the same as the Black kid from Alabama. The Black kid from Alabama is like, “All I don't want to do is fish. That's what I like to do.” These stereotypes and images that society has portrayed us, we automatically take them. Social media can almost reinforce that. Let’s go back to the government. It’s not that I'm a conspiracy theorist, but there's too much shady shit the CIA's done from the ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s when it all came out to be like, “You're telling me they're not messing with this right now?”
We saw it firsthand with the pandemic, in my opinion. It was a way to keep people in order. You had to, at that point, so it wasn't some sort of pandemonium. It feels like a power overstep to me. I don't know if they knew exactly what they were dealing with, but it was a power overstep.
We're all hypocrites. It's hard not to be a hypocrite. The reason why I say that is because when you look at society, in general, you can take any argument you want, whether that's global warming, for instance. To people spouting the global warming stuff, you're taking pictures of polar bears wearing 300 pounds of plastic to keep you warm in the arctic where you shouldn't be anyway. Let the polar bears be.
Everything's a contradiction. Everything's hypocrisy. It's hard to find that middle ground. If you only look for the negative, then the adversary of that argument is only going to poke it. It’s like, “Why did you bring all that plastic? You say you're for the planet, but your entire vehicle is made of plastic.” There's always an argument or exposure to hypocrisy.
An electric car thing is the same thing.
It's an oxymoron.
This reminds me. You made an incredible post that I read. It hit home to me. It was a bunch of native kids lined up. It was something about history. I'm probably going to butcher it, but it was something like, “History is here for us to learn from, not forget about and wipe away. Whether it's bad or good, you should take it for what it is.” That's what we're doing. It scares the shit out of me with my kids going to a public school. We’re like, “That's a race.” We don't want to talk about that or be like, “Genocide is bad,” or whatever the case is.
History, to me, is a big one that goes back to the government. We are quick to erase and forget about it if it's negative. We don't want to bring it up. One of my favorite sayings in life is, “One man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist.” You can flip that to one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. Going back to my time in Afghanistan and Iraq, only because I worked hand-in-hand with commandos and lived with Iraqis and Afghanis did I see the culture and those people. I don't feel like I was the freedom fighter or the terrorist there because I know those people and I know what they're fighting for.
One man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist.
At the same time, I've interrogated, had prisoners, and gotten in gun fights with guys that we bag. They're here. They're still alive. With the way they talk and the things they're saying, they're not wrong. I have a crazy different view of being a warrior than most people do because of the way my family raised me. I have respect for those warriors. Would I still fucking chop their head off? Yeah. I don't give a fuck. At the end of the day, I understand.
Going back to that phrase, I feel like I genuinely understand that phrase more than other people do. The thing about it is everything in our country that has a history, people want to bring up only one side of it. Did the Calvary stack babies on Sabre as a game?” They did. Did Geronimo stack Mexican babies on a pike? Yeah, he did. War is terrible. It fucking sucks.
One of the things you do in war is to scare the shit out of your enemy and make sure that they know they never want to be around you, ever. In those aspects, especially when you're looking at that brutal environment, that's normal. No one wants to talk about how we are slaves sold into slavery versus being stolen. There are all these small things. As ugly as everything may seem that your culture may have done, you still have to talk about it. You can't go to Germany and act like the Holocaust didn't fucking happen. I’m like, “You guys should still be sorry about it.”
It's incredible.
I've been to Dachau and some of those camps out there.
Even walking around the cities and looking at some of the histories, that's one of the things. I got bored later in my rock and roll career with touring, so I went and sought out World War II stuff, like chunks of a building missing from a mortar. It's all over there. It's crazy. They've rebuilt bridges in Germany. In Cologne, there's a bridge that was completely in the water. You can walk through it and still see all the bolts.
Think of how many wars they had. It wasn't back-to-back.
It was for centuries, though.
Were they twenty years apart?
Yeah.
The right, if you will, is at fault because it's always, “What about?” instead of having an articulate answer in a sensitive nature, whether you're talking about slavery or something else. Somebody who is White's like, “The Irish were slaves, too.” Here's an example, Columbus Day. I'll get into it. I'm sure people will give me shit for this. I don't give a fuck. Columbus is the weirdest fucking holiday we have, in my opinion, in the United States.
Is it gone away now, though? There are indigenous people there.
It should be indigenous. It should be Indigenous People’s Day. If you lay out the facts, Columbus didn't even set foot in North America. He was lost and made his way to the Caribbean. The Tejano people were like, “We've been here. This is what we have.” He never made it to North America. To say that this guy discovered something is false. We already know that. If you want to talk about white Europeans coming to North America, we already know the Vikings were here hundreds of years before the Spanish came. It doesn't make sense if you wrote it on paper and asked a seventh-grader to read this.
It’s almost like a fairy tale.
They'd be like, “This is dumb. Why are we celebrating him?” I do go out of my way to highlight some holidays that people on the right conservatives would look at and be like, “This is fucking dumb.” One is Columbus Day. It doesn't make sense that we celebrate this guy. He never made it here. He didn't do anything. He was also a fucking terrible person. People will argue with me in comments and be like, “Have you read his biography?” I'm like, “His autobiography? Do you think he's going to write bad shit about himself?”
That was his social media back in the day.
You look at it and you're like, “This dude didn't discover it. There were already these badass people here.” Militarily speaking, every single thing that we get, we get from natives. The reason why we were fucking awesome at it was that we did what the natives did. The reason why we fucking kicked out the fucking British is that we listened. We fought with the fucking Mohawk and the Mohican. We adopted their fucking style of fighting to bring it to the enemy on a scale that they'd never seen before.
It was so much more effective than lighting it up in a line.
When you look at that aspect of it, I'm like, “What's more fucking American than these badass people who lived here first and then took care of rigors?”
You want to talk about freedom. In that culture, you're pretty much free to do whatever you want.
It’s like, “Why are we celebrating this person and not highlighting a lot of the people of this country?” Another one that I like to talk about is Juneteenth. I'm one of those guys who is like, “If we're going to make everything a holiday, then make it a holiday. If we're only going to have Christmas and New Year, then only have that. Since we have 40, fuck it.” A lot of people, especially on the right, look at it as like, oh, “Here we go. It's pandering the right, pandering to the left, or pandering to a Black audience.” I'm like, “Let me tell you what happened as a constitutionalist and as someone who is libertarian.”
Fill me in.
To the same people who on talk the Second Amendment, First Amendment, and constitutional rights, I'm like, “after the Civil War was over, American citizens in Texas were still kept as slaves. They had their rights withheld from them for two fucking years after the war was over.” It wasn't until June 19th, I forget the year, that they finally got word like, “The war's over. You guys aren't slaves. You guys have been slaves for two years.”
It was kept in the dark.
When you fast forward to 2022, there are analogies there. The anti-COVID people or the Second Amendment and First Amendment people, instead of connecting those dots and using it as an example for their argument that would help them, especially if you talk to someone super left, they look at it as like, “We're pandering to the fucking Black people. It's this and that.” Don't look at it in a color sense. Look at it in an American sense.
In my opinion, a lot of it is viewed as a contest, whether I'm right or you're wrong, or whatever it is. That's not what it's there for.
I don't ever argue with anybody in comments anyways.
I ignore everything. Good or bad, I’m like, “Whatever.”
I have enough followers where if I put a post that's controversial to people, those followers will be like, “What are you talking about?” They'll go back and forth with these people, which I'm good with. I don't do the negative. I'm like, “I'm here to be positive. I'm trying to show you a different perspective on things.” The two guys named Chad from different places are so much alike but are so different. Sometimes, if you're able to take yourself out of all your experiences, what you know, and where you are and replace that with what this person and what they're going through, we don't do enough of that.
We're so much alike, but we're so different.We're so much alike, but we're so different.
You're 100% right. I believe it is more culture than it is the color of skin or actual race.
I don't even know if other countries have the same thing. What's White boy shit? If you're a Black kid and you like to skate, they're like, “You are into White boy shit.” If you're like, “Rock and roll's badass,” or, “I like to skate,” or vice versa, you're like a White dude. Sometimes, you're a product of like who you grew up around and who Influences you.
It's your environment, 100%.
In general, instead of glorifying some of those cool things, sometimes, people look at them as extreme. If a guy's a skier and he is the first Black skier to win an Olympic medal, instead of celebrating it, someone on the right will look at him and be like, “Why isn’t he White?” It’s a big deal because of the stereotypes we put on ourselves.
The outdoor industry is huge on that. We’re as much a culprit of it. The diversity that we've had here is not great. It's an outdoor show pretty much for the most part. It has turned into something more than that.
If you were in Texas or Georgia, I lived in both of those states when I was in the Army. Some of the most badass hunting and fishing motherfuckers I know are Black dudes from Georgia. Unless you've experienced that, you would never guess that. My buddy and I retired at the same time together. He was a team sergeant in the same hallway. He's a Black dude, but he's this badass hunting, fishing, and mountaineering man type of dude. He's from Georgia. He is from South Georgia. Outdoors is his thing.
That's what they do.
That's what he does. It's an example of how we've put stereotypes on ourselves.
It's about where you grew up. My buddy, Max, grew up in Washington and spends his time in the Cascades as a photographer, mountaineer, and snowboarder.
It's not any different for minorities than it is for White people. What's back to the social constructs or those stereotypes we put on ourselves is that Black and Brown people are the original people of the outdoors. This is our roots. We’re like, “This is where we come from.” Everyone knows all the stuff that you get from nature, how healing nature is mental health-wise, and all these amazing things. To me, it's cool to see that. To break that stereotype, it is needed to show that no one cares what color your skin is.
It’s not only for mental health. The adversity that you face sometimes out there is good and lifeless in a niche. I'm so fortunate I grew up within an outdoors family. Some of the biggest adversity I faced was when I was a kid hiking into a spot over glaciated peaks and breaking down crying like, “I don't think I'd go anymore.” They were like, “Pick your ass up. Keep going. Get your fucking pack back on. We're about to make the summit.” Those things are instilled in work ethic. Field dressing an animal and deboning it makes you appreciate life a lot more. Especially when you're 10 or 11 years old, you’ve never seen anything.
It is a way to also bring you back to the reality of who we are as humans. Most people's arguments would be like, “Most people from the inner city don't have the opportunity.” I get that. They live farther away.
It is not cheap either to go do.
It's a skill that you have to learn because we have removed learning that skillset from our society over the years of how easy life is. Here's an example. On Rogan, they'll go into their weird shit about how someone's going to plug this thing into your brain and you're going to talk to each other telepathically. I'm like, “You guys are so fucking lost.
There's no running water in places in the United States and people fucking don't know that. Indian reservations don't have fucking running water. Inner cities are fucked up. Do you think that some kid from fucking Baltimore City, Maryland is thinking about telepathic fucking shit? If it comes out, do you think he's going to plug himself into the matrix? He is trying to fucking survive.” There are still people in our country struggling to survive. What we've done is made ourselves bigger and completely keep removing ourselves from the human experience.
It's very humbling, too, going to some of those spots. Traveling the world, going to favelas and stuff like that is South America, and seeing what those people have to deal with in their work ethic and what makes them happy is so humbling. You can get that right here in the United States, like going on to a riser or something like that.
Life is so easy here. That also ties into social media. All these things that everyone's at each other about, life is so easy we have the ability to do that. It takes such good skillset to go into the mountains or in the wilderness somewhere and be out there for 3 or 4 days. Most people can't even fathom doing that even if they were supplied with all the gear. It’s something they can’t do.
There's that, too. There are people that dial it back even further from that. My buddy, Donny, is an incredible dude. He made these stone points for us here. He's a Napper. That's how he hunts. He has dialed it back. He's like, “I had all the badass shit.” He is a former Marine and is super into rock climbing, backpacking, and all that sort of stuff. He fucking decided one day, like, “I'm going to go back to the roots and do it that way.” In a sense, you don't need to have all that stuff to go out and enjoy. They used to hunt deer in red flannels. I still do. I don't have to put on the SITKA $500 camo. There's a lot of misconception about that, too. They’re like, “You have to have all this.” It’s the world that we're living in. They’re like, “I got to have this to achieve this.”
I want to talk to you. We're burning through time. We got it all out on the political side. I want to talk to you about War Party and what you're doing there. It's a fucking amazing foundation. I don't see anybody else out there doing anything about the issues that you guys are tackling at War Party. It's something that flies under the radar and doesn't get a whole lot of attention. I want to give you the platform. Short of genocide, it's one of the worst things in human culture that can be happening.
It's pretty crazy. If I was to start with what War Party Movement is in general, I started it thinking, “How can I affect the MMIW issue?” That means Missing Murdered Indigenous Women. There is a number of women that are murdered and go missing on Indian reservations and in our country in general. There's a lot of what they call urban natives. There are a lot of people that live in the city as well. For whatever reason, even the ones that live in the city are targeted and trafficked a lot. There are a lot of rabbit holes we could go down on why all this is a factor and what's going on.
I want to go deep.
I would say the biggest one of them is that anywhere there is poverty, there's human trafficking. You could remove this from being a native issue and apply it everywhere. Every single community that is underprivileged suffers from human trafficking. They're more vulnerable. Whether they're from broken homes, have alcoholics and addicts in the family parenting them, and all these different things, a lot of it's generational. That whole term, generational trauma, I don't know if I believe in that. I know if your dad's an alcoholic, your life is different than someone whose father is not. We could call it generational.
It's so hard to break the cycle of trauma and the cycle of abuse. What ends up happening in these areas is if the mom's a drug addict and she's bringing home boyfriends all the time and your twelve-year-old girl and all her boyfriend are sliding into your room, these stories are the norm versus a story. One, social media suppresses that big time, and so does the media.
I run a non-profit that's shadow-banned because no one wants to talk about human trafficking. No one wants to talk about domestic violence. I'm getting all over the place, but no one does because everyone's favorite wide receiver beats the shit out of his fucking wife, and that's okay because he is fast and good at football.
Since it's not something that we openly talk about all the time, I know a ton of people firsthand that have either been around some abuse, whether it's sexual, physical, or verbal. Many of my friends have dealt with that with their close friends as young kids, young adults, or whatever. That gets silenced a lot. It's not something comfortable to talk about. I grew up in an environment that was like that. It was not fucking good.
Maybe you had an awesome uncle or an awesome grandpa, or something that was there for you to tangibly grab ahold of and realize, “This is not right. This over here is what right looks like. I'm able to get out of that.” A lot of people never understand what right looks like. It’s back to that poverty angle. We know women who make the most horrible decisions in men. Their boyfriends are always shitty. They're always like, “I’m with this fucking dirtbag again.” It's easy to victim blame or be like, “This is her process.” How did she grow up? What happened to her that she can't break that cycle? It is because she doesn't tangibly have something to show her what right looks like. She didn't have a father who treated her, or whatever it is.
She never has an example of right. She's trying to play this game of, “Is this guy going to be right? That sucked, too.” She's constantly in this turmoil about these relationships. That's very common in the domestic violence world in general. These women get abused. We call it breaking the cycle. It’s so hard for them to break that cycle of abuse. They constantly go back and forth in that. Whether that's poverty or especially sexual trauma or sexual assault, I would say that is another layer as a woman.
Alcohol plays a huge role, too.
When I say addicts, I'm saying alcoholics, drug addicts, and all those. If you keep stacking layers of shit on top of that, it makes it even harder. When you go specifically to native women and, in particular reservations, most reservations, especially in the West, are in the middle of nowhere. There are zero jobs. There's nothing there. Amazon is not putting a warehouse on the Navajo res. If you live on the Navajo res, it's not like you have something to look up to even though they have awesome humans in that community.
There is Farmington, Gallup, and Flagstaff. There are some cities where they could get jobs and do things. You could thrive. I'm not saying that there isn't that, but the problem is a majority of those natives don't live there. They live a couple of hundred miles away from there in the middle of nowhere. You have gangs and cartels move in. A lot of it is cartel-driven. If you're looking at the hierarchy structure of gang-related activity, the cartels are at the top and they filter everything.
They don't have to deal with nearly as much law enforcement there either, or if any at all.
There are a lot of factors that go into play. Sometimes, it's hard to expose it all because I don't want to sound negative to my own community because there are a lot of native people who are trying to influence this, correct this, and stand up for it. At the same time, I look back to that government analogy. There's so much bureaucracy and layers of bullshit that it's not that there's not money thrown at this. It's not that there's not an opportunity for this. It's that the money never gets to where it needs to be.
Here's an example. There are 567 recognized tribes or nations in the United States. Only 111 of them have implemented the Amber Alert System and the Server Alert system. On the Navajo reservation a couple of years ago, they implemented the Amber Alert system and the Server Alert system. However, here's how their system works. Let’s say you're going from Flagstaff to Denver. You're going to drive the length of the Navajo res from Flagstaff all the way to damn near Santa Fe. There could be three Amber alerts happening on the Navajo res and you would never get them because the only people who get Amber Alerts from the Navajo res are residents of the reservation. Those are enrolled tribal members that physically live on the Indian reservation.
Is it not networked into the pipeline of the reverse 911 or however you get those on your phone?
No. It's a volunteer system. It’s from somebody who has volunteered to say, “I will physically put this in the computer and add that.” That sucks. Let's say you live in Phoenix. You work in construction in Phoenix, or you have a little apartment there. You're still Navajo. You still go to Monument Valley to see your parents, cousins, friends, or whatever. Since you're not living on the reservation, you're not in that Amber Alert system. You still wouldn't get or receive those Amber Alerts.
How are people receiving these Amber Alerts? Do they have to go and look for them?
It's exactly the same way. You need to be put into the system.
They only spread it through so many cell towers?
They need to physically be in that system.
You have to register.
When you look at it as a whole, it's like, “Is there money for this? Is there funding for this?” It seems like an easy solution. As you start to dive down everything, there are layers of bureaucracy on top of that. Funding in the police force is hard. Like most police forces in the country, they're under man and underfunded. They lack resources.
The other one you need to add on there is not as big, but it does play into it. Anybody from a small town gets this. If I'm a deputy, we all know each other's business in a small town. They might not be able to prove it, but they pretty much know you beat up your wife all the time. Your wife is calling 911 and I show up. How do you think she feels or receives that? We're cousins. It’s back to small town vibe. Are you going to jail? I might be a good deputy that I’m like, “I get it. You are my cousin, but you broke the law. You can't beat up your wife.” You have that as another aspect of it. You add on top of that the way a culture feels.
Oftentimes, people that aren't native are quick to think that an Indian is an Indian. We're not. We all have different cultures and different things we experience. You have different subsets within that, whether that's different bands. At the same time, my family is a product of boarding schools. I grew up like a Mexican cowboy. I am straight Mexican. Even though we're Apache, my grandmother was very ashamed of going to a boarding school and how she speaks Spanish. There are all these different things. You have families like that. You then have families that are raised very traditionally and could live in an Adobe mud hut with no running water. A lot of that's not necessarily by choice. There's nothing there for some of these families to do.
Indians have different cultures and different experiences, and there are different subsets within that.
Organized crime seeks out spots like that, and people that are in desperate need for a reason.
It’s easy. When you look at a pack of wolves, they don't hunt down the big bull. They go after the sick, old, and young whatever. That is a long way of trying to summarize some of the bigger-picture issues that are going on in reservations and why it's such a factor. Over the last few years, I don't know if it's necessary because it's more in the line, but people are raising more awareness about it if there's something happening with men. A lot of native men are also going missing and are murdered. On some of these investigations I conduct, the majority of it is drug-related or bad actor gang-ish activity.
We're talking young men, probably.
I've seen everything from teenage boys all the way up to old men. Some of them have different factors. They are your runaway kids or your old man that's got dementia or something. Oftentimes, when you're talking about those past teens to 40s and 50s, a lot of these men that are going missing battled with homelessness and addiction. I'm not going to say that they're shady, but the circumstances are. They live in the gray area of life. At times, it's up and down, and then they get sucked into the wrong crowd.
I've been fortunate to work on some of those reservations, whether it was in the film industry, rock and roll, or some of the action sports stuff that I've done. I was at Monument Valley for a month almost. I'm a firm believer that if you take something away from people and tell them that they can't have it, it's more sought after. Let’s use poaching as an example. If you say, “You can't sell black bear gallbladders legally,” then it puts it into the black market. It’s the same with drugs and alcohol. On those reservations when I was there, they couldn't even sell hygiene products because people would misuse them. What do you do when you get around it or when you do drive to whatever the nearest town is, whether it is Moab or whatever?
Each place has its different nuances. The biggest factor that I've seen working on multiple reservations is poverty. There are no jobs. It's not like these reservations are in a place that can have a lot of jobs. There are some that are different. If you go to the Pala res in San Diego, they're not like that.
They’re far between.
That is especially in the West.
What I was getting at with that is then, it becomes a whole black market thing, right?
Yeah.
I don't know how many people approached me and said, “Do you want to buy some deer?” They're doing it on the black market illegally.
In particular with the native women, we had the whole Gabby Petito, the White girl that went missing. The media blew it up. It is one of those things where was it tragic and horrible that she was murdered and what happened to that woman? Yes. However, the media weighs who's more important than others. It also adds fuel to the fire by being like, “You care about the White girl, but you don't care about the Indian girl.” They don't.
The thing that I've seen working with human trafficking not just on the native side, but in other places is, to me, it's a poverty thing. When someone poor goes missing or someone’s gone, no one gives a shit. They all victim blame. They’re like, “She's a runaway, or, “She's a prostitute.” You're like, “I don't care if she's a prostitute or not. She's fucking missing. I don't care if she's a drug addict or not. She's fucking missing.” That's what happened with the Gabby Petito instance. She's this social media influencer. She’s this sweet little girl. They humanize versus victim blame someone else that's also missing or murdered.
Not to mention all the content that they had to promote it.
You can look at the opioid epidemic in the Rust Belt. That's predominantly White people dying. You don't hear about those women being missing and murdered. I do believe it comes down to socioeconomic standing. That is one of the biggest reasons why a lot of those cases aren't talked about and portrayed in the media in general.
I don't know if the conspiracy theories of the elites that drink baby blood and all this other crazy shit could be going on. I believe there are some evil ass people out there. The biggest thing, to me, is it's ugly. People don't want to know that people get off on raping kids, molesting kids, or kidnapping women and murdering them.
Maybe it’s close to them. It could be happening in this community.
It's dark and ugly, and we don't want to talk about that. When you look at that umbrella of human trafficking, whether it is sexual assault or domestic violence, all those things a lot of times happen behind closed doors. They’re things that we don't want to talk about, but we will openly talk about other crimes. That's okay. Our country's run off of money. That is back to how everyone's favorite wide receiver beats the shit out of his wife and that's fine. It’s like John Jones. I don't give a fuck if he's the best fighter on the planet. He beats the fuck out of women and no one's willing to be like, “You’re fucking done.”
That's not the only bad decision he's made. He's made multiple bad decisions.
He might be a nice guy going through a lot of shit, but that doesn't give him an excuse to put his hands on women. The problem is that we don't immediately put a stop to that in our society when it deals with money. If you're a cop and you don't have the money to have all these lawyers and all that shit when you get a DV charge, you're done. You're not a cop anymore. Your life's over versus someone else that’s like, “Whatever.” That's another subject.
I urge people to not be scared to point that shit out. Don't be scared to call somebody out. Don't be scared to be like, “You fucking put your hands on women. That's not right.” Don't be scared to do that. If you see someone fucking little kids, fucking say something. If someone looks creepy, find out if that's their dad or not. I do that shit all the time. I’d be like, “Who are you?” I'm like, “You look a little shady walking around here. Don't be acting like that.” They put the blinders on and they don't want to have anything to do with it until it hits them directly.
You almost got to slap them in the damn face because you do have all these other stimulants around you, like a cell phone to carry around. I was traveling. The guy in the fucking handicap golf cart at DIA is trying to get through to take this whole woman. They have fucking earbuds in and they're oblivious to it. What if that was an active shooter? What if a kid was getting kidnapped?
No one switched on. No one pulls security. There are no saber-tooth tigers or grizzly bears for us to be scared of. That's back to society and how it's so easy in our country. It's so easy that you can disconnect, be in the middle of nowhere, have zero situation awareness, and for the most part, 99% of the people will be fine.
I'm as guilty of it, too. When there are times when I don't want to talk to somebody on a flight, I put in my headphones and pretend like I didn't hear them.
Another one I like to tell people about is when I am talking about this, I don't always try to stay specifically in the native community.
You guys help outside of that community, right?
We do. If I can get people from all walks of life regardless of socioeconomic standing, whether they’re rich, poor, or wherever they fall, and all demographics to make it a little more personal, then it's easier to understand exactly what's going on in the Indian reservations because it's magnified times 1,000. Here's one I like to tell people. It’s what you were saying until it hit you in the face. Grooming online is so popular. Everyone hands their five-year-old their phone to watch YouTube videos instead of babysitting. As this grows, your fourteen-year-old girl is talking to grown-ass men online.
It could be something as simple as, like, “I put all these blockers and filters on.” I’m like, “Do you know that you can message on Pinterest? You probably don't know that. Your kids know that. Your kids know technology better than you do and better than you ever will because they grew up in it from the time they were born versus learning it.”
A lot of times, this is what happens. Let's take upper middle-class Lone Tree, Colorado. Parents wake up in the morning and sixteen-year-old Rebecca is gone. They call the police and the cop shows up. The initiating officer and how he handles that case is going to be what happens with the resources at hand. If I'm the initiating officer and I get there and you say, “We woke up this morning, and Rebecca's gone. Our daughter's gone,” You're like, “She's a runaway.” If I know nothing about what's going on and I don't do any kind of investigation, but I call this in and say this is a runaway, it's not all hands on deck. It's a runaway. They're going to look for it. They'll put out whatever maybe last knowns.
It goes to the bottom of the packing order.
It’s the bottom of the packing order because she's a runaway. I'm not speaking for all police agencies. Someone will probably be like, “It's not all true.” For the most part, it is true. What happens, though, is we didn't realize that Rebecca was being groomed online and she left in the middle of the night to go meet her sixteen-year-old boyfriend, which is not her sixteen-year-old boyfriend. It's a 30-year-old guy that's been grooming her for the last 3 or 4 months and who thinks she's in love with and is going to be in a better place because mom and dad don't let her do exactly what she wants. She can't. She's trafficked. She's in the system. She's on drugs. This is how this happens.
Let’s clear this up really quickly. The moment that I think about it, I think of a U-Haul truck with 30 women tied up in the back going to a brothel of some sort, like an underground brothel. That's what automatically pops into my head. There are cases that are like that, but trafficking can be as simple as what you explained, right?
Exactly. If anybody's ever been to whatever you want to call it, whether it is the red light district in your town or you're in a bad neighborhood and you see the prostitutes, they're not what you think of as Las Vegas call girls. People think that these women are selling their bodies by choice, 99.9% of them happened in a crazy situation. They might not come from an awesome house as Rebecca did, but they got there. They get on drugs.
That's usually what they do. They'll give them some kind of stimulant or make them an addict to something they need. They use that and hold that over their head like they're working for X. Some people will say, “They're a prostitute. They work in this corner.” They're working in that corner, but let me tell you the mindset of these fucking guys. They’re like, “This is my fucking corner.” You come on it and you're another pimp. They’re like, “I'll fucking stab you. I'll shoot you. I don't give a fuck,” or, “Do you want to work here? That’s cool. 80% of everything you make is mine.” She's like, “No.” They’ll beat the fuck out of her. They’re like, “Every single time I see you, I’m going to beat the fuck out of you until you're mine and you pay me my money and live with me.” It has a strong arm effect.
It’s organized crime.
There are also pimps that groom very lovingly. They’re filling this void that their father didn't have. There are all these angles. These guys are fucking masked manipulators. A lot of times, when we think about human trafficking, in this day and age, we think of movies that we've seen. It gives you a picture. You're thinking of Taken or some movie like that. The reality is it can be that drastic and it could be as low level in your mind as Only Fans or pornography.
I didn't even think about it on the virtual side. The whole Only Fans thing, there's got to be some pimp stuff going on in that.
I dealt with a woman that was in the porn industry. Their pimp would keep her three-year-old daughter in the hotel room next to her and burn her daughter with cigarettes if she didn't do what she was told to do on camera. You take porn. Porn's on another fucking level. You take the things that are fetishes and crazy things that people are into and want to do. Do some porn actresses or celebrities want to do this? I don't know what they want to do or how they got into it, but let's say they did. Are there a lot that probably didn't want to be in a 40-guy anal gang bang? Probably not.
In a sense, it becomes your career. It becomes your identity like rock and roll is mine. I'm lucky I fell into that and I'm not at a cubicle selling insurance over the phone. You get a car payment. You get a mortgage. You get all this stuff. You become almost a slave to whatever it is that is providing all that for you. It could simply be financial.
Those are some analogies or some of the things I've seen to keep people's minds rolling and be like, “This is bigger than we think. There's way more into this.” The statistics, when you talk about Native American women, are astronomical. It's 4 out of 5 that are abused in our lifetime. They're 30% more likely to be murdered before they're 30 than any other race in our country. 1 out of 10 is murdered. If you Google and you start reading, you're like, “Holy shit.”
Does a lot of this happen on the reservation specifically, or is it outside the reservation and is taken advantage of?
It is both taken advantage of. I don't know the exact statistic. The problem with that is you do have a lot of jurisdictional issues. The biggest one was in 2016. 60% of the aggressor were non-native actors.
It’s an outside influence in that community that pulls them out.
6% of all those instances were from non-native actors. As much shit as Ivanka Trump gets and the Trump administration gets, they did a lot of work for natives. She did a lot of work in instituting Savannah's Act trying to bring light on some of these issues.
What is Savannah's Act?
Savannah was a native woman in North Dakota. She was eight months pregnant and her upstairs neighbors kidnapped her, cut her baby out of her, and then dumped her body in the river. They use that law where agencies can interact and share data and information easier.
Sometimes it's federal land, right?
That’s right. If you're on the Arapahoe Police Department on the Wind River reservation or you're the Wind River Police Department, you're not sharing all your information with the regular Wyoming State Patrol. All those resources aren't going into play. It’s back to the scenario I was telling you with Rebecca. That initiating officer, because he said it was a runaway, it’s not all hands on deck.
Let's say he's a little bit familiar with this or they received some training. They're like, “Let’s go through some cyber stuff first. Here's your checklist. Let's figure it out. Maybe this girl is trafficked.” When you go to runaways in general, maybe there's a checklist for runaways. Let’s say Jefferson County has a checklist. They look through it and he's like, “This runaway might be trafficked.” In that instance, you would have state patrol on board. Once the states get involved, the FBI, and everyone, you have a manhunt. Your helicopters are in the air. People are sending Amber Alerts.
Does some of this stem from the parents, too, or whoever the closest family member is and they’re doing their due diligence to say, “This isn't like them,” or, “We want to investigate it this way.”
That's hard because as an investigator, you don't know who the bad actor is. You have to take everything with a grain of salt because you might be trying to steer me in a different direction while I'm conducting my investigation. It’s a yes and no.
If a parent is reading this and they're like, “I never realized this,” are there some certain keywords or something that you can insist on if you have a missing kid at some point that will help?
If you're a parent, you have to start young. As young as when they start talking, you can be like, “People are inherently bad. So-and-so can't see your private parts,” or whatever it is. You have to start these conversations that when someone is like, “I lost my puppy. Will you help me find it?” and they’re walking up to the leash for them to be like, “No,” and run. I'd rather have them freak out in stranger danger at the park versus doing that.
A lot of it is difficult shit to talk about.
Kids are easily manipulated by adults. That’s back to the sex exploitation of young women. We're married, but let's say you are single. You're in your mi-30s or early 40s. If you hit the dating scene and talk to twenty-year-old girls, not to downplay younger people, but they are not very smart. There is an amount of bullshit that some guy that's smooth talking or nice-looking can have.
Kids are easily manipulated by adults. That is why there is sex exploitation of young women.
They may have a fake profile.
The things he can say and do can manipulate a young mind. Add that to a 14-year-old girl versus a 21-year-old girl.
They haven't had those life experiences yet.
With all those things, it is a very complicated, twisted mess. Back to reservations, MMIW specifically, you have all those factors that come into play, like poverty. One of the biggest ones is the jurisdictional issues. Savannah's Act did help out a little bit. The governor of Wyoming has done a pretty good job of trying to get all his agencies to be able to share information and talk. As far as law enforcement goes, you're at the mercy of whatever law enforcement's willing to do as a parent.
There's a lot. It's not like there are a few organizations trying to help. Since I'm in this job field or demographic, I know and you know. They're all non-profit searches and rescues. When I say non-profits, there are 2 or 3 people that are paying out of pocket and don't know how to raise money. They’re trying to get grants and trying to make it happen to try to help their community.
I have friends that have a drone program where they got some funding. They got a bunch of drones where they're trying to train people in the reservations to be able to utilize drones in searches. Another friend of mine works in the Navajo res. She's Navajo. She runs cadaver dogs, so she has her own little search and rescue. She trains dogs and helps families conduct investigations. These are all resources that it's like, “Why doesn’t the police department have that?” If you look inside a patrol vehicle in an Indian reservation, there isn’t a computer in there. They're not running an NCIC. There might not even be a radio in there.
They probably don't have dogs either. That's what I was getting at with the lack of law enforcement. There are a couple of reservations that I had to work with law enforcement on those. It was 2 or 3 guys for the whole entire Monument Valley. I don't know what kind of training they've had, but it didn't seem like you're talking to an inner city cop, investigator, or an operator of any sort.
They don't have that same level of training. To show you how close it is to home and how most Americans are more alike than we are different, we're in Jefferson County. How many officers do you think are on patrol, and how big do you think they span? One of my buddies quit a couple of months ago. He was responsible from I-70 at Idaho Springs all the way down to Cheesman Lake. That's where his patrol area is. There's no radio service from pretty much when he gets off the freeway. The mountains block everything. He's going to calls, running code, and driving 45 minutes to 1 hour to get to a call. If you think of what could happen in that period of time, especially if you're trying to do an investigation or you're responding to something deadly or tragic, there are a lot of things that go into that.
There are a lot of people that live in that area, too, man, that are in dispersed living a little bit.
Your reservations are like that. They're very vast and broad. There's stuff all over the place. It's easy for the bad actors to go in. It was 2020 when the Biden administration passed a law where before if you were non-native, you couldn't be prosecuted on the reservation.
It should be a federal offense.
It is now. You can be prosecuted for crimes committed on the Indian reservation whereas before, it wasn't. What you'd have is you'd have these people who understand how that works and then you have bad actors. I’m not saying they’re the good old country boys because that's a bad way to describe it, but they’re a group of guys that jump in a truck and go shoot machine guns in the fucking desert while they're on the res so no one can fuck with them. The res cops are like, “Fuck it. We're getting a shoot-out. I don't care.” Especially if you think about these rural areas where there are zero people, they don't care.
You add layers of bureaucracy and different systems that are trying to establish something. There's so much that gets lost in the madness. Unfortunately, what's lost in the madness is the lower economic standard of living of those people. That's what I believe is one of the true contributors. There are a lot of them, but it is an opportunity. If you’re a cartel or some gang member, the opportunity to do what you want to do in the middle of nowhere is wide open.
We had John Nores on from California Game and Fish. He started many years ago. With the cartels that are coming in, he's like, “It’s not just Mexican cartels that are growing weed.” It's insane. There are some of the stories and tactics that these guys take, like building punji pits from the Vietnam era. They had to do full-on SWAT team tactics. It was beyond that because they're not dealing with inner city stuff, so then it turns into almost an operator mentality where they're getting regular patrolling.
I started War Party Movement. It was an apparel company. I was using the funds to try to assist the community where I can, and it wasn't just the native community. We've helped all walks of life. I’m not going to say it was easier to be in the native community. One, it was something that my mother started and was big. My mother is Apache, so that was easy. There is also the opportunity that these people need help more than anyone else does.
It's hard because I was always one of those people who like to show supporters where the money goes and what's going on. Oftentimes, I can't talk about all the things we've done or be specific. Even on social media, it's hard because I'm not trying to glorify that situation. I'm also trying to respect the family and what's best for them. We've done things as much as physically removing women from domestic violence situations and moving them across the country.
We’ve helped a woman on the run whose life is in danger. There's from the cartel, which is why the FBI doesn't have WITSEC or anything for them. We’re physically removing them, flying them, and stashing them in safe houses. Shit that you wouldn't think happens in our country, we do. It can also be as simple as paying for therapy for a woman to say, “What's next?” We’re like, “Let's get therapy until we can get a non-profit to step in and help fix that or break that cycle.”
That is the biggest thing.
I'm glad that I did it that way first and didn't start a non-profit to try to do a search and rescue non-profit to figure out where I could work best. By doing this, the biggest thing I saw was when we would assist a woman or a family and we're calling all these non-profits to try to figure out, “Where's the safe house? Where can I take her? Whatever it is, where can we take her?” Almost every single one of them is a 30-day program.
Let's say your sister is in an abusive relationship. She's like, “We need help.” You're like, “Do you think you can help?” I’d be like, Yeah.” This is her scenario. She has to leave there. There's no place for her to live. She can't live with kids. Let's say she's an alcoholic, but it's bad enough that you can't have a beer around her. She can't be in your home. She can't be here, so we're trying to find these places. We find a place for her to go. Let's say Albuquerque, New Mexico has a facility she can go to.
What happens is she goes to Albuquerque for 30 days, and at the end of 30 days, it's like, “Your time's up. Now what?” My margins aren't that great. I don't make that much money. If I spend $1,500 or $2,000 to get your sister removed from that situation, this is me paying 2 or 3 guys on my background, but it’s not even paying. This is volunteering. It’s giving them the gas money, feeding them, feeding her, or buying her cigarettes, some clothes, or whatever she might need.
It’s for her to be in a good position and have some protection along the way.
We get her to this facility, and when it's over, she leaves. While she's there, she's not looking for a job. They're not teaching her about life skills. She's on social media every day bitching to the rest of the girls that are in there. It's a fucking prison. I had a woman that I assisted down in Pueblo. She was an addict. I got her into a 30-day program. Everything was looking awesome. She was doing great. I was talking to her probably once or twice a week.
About eighteen hours after she got out of the program, she overdosed and died. I was like, “Fuck.” It's been the hardest thing I've dealt with post-Military. In the Military, all my buddies that died chose that. The first answer to the ranger is, “I recognize that I volunteered as a ranger fully knowing the hazards of my chosen profession.” They died as warriors. They chose that life, so I don't mourn them in that respect. I didn't have this grief or this feeling that I did. This is fucking heavy. That instance was one of the things that made me think, “There's got to be something we can do that's different from this 30-day program where they leave and they're back to the fucking wind.”
I’m looking at some of the veteran programs I'm connected to and saw going on. Heroes and Horses is a phenomenal program that's changing guys’ lives. I looked at stuff like that and I was like, “Is there something that I could do that I love that I do every day?” In my day-to-day life, I'm working as a cowboy, outfitting, guiding, doing all these things outdoors, and daily working. I'm like, “What if we started a program similar to Heroes and Horses, but with a different type of trauma?” He's got a little bit more of a mental, physical angle there.
What we've developed is War Party Ranch. It is our non-profit. War Party Ranch is a ten-week cowgirl program. We bring girls from across the country out to Colorado to spend ten weeks with us and then we help them find a job in the agriculture industry. That's for a rancher, outfitter, boarding facility, or horse trainer to get their foot in the door.
War Party Ranch is a ten-week cowgirl program. Nature and horses are so healing and so powerful in general. What better way to empower women to break the cycle of abuse and trauma than by giving them that skill set?
Nature and horses are so healing and so powerful in general. What better way to empower women to break the cycle of abuse and trauma than by giving them a skillset that 99% of the men in the country can't even do? Not only that, but five years down the road, let's say a girl that comes to our program doesn't work on a ranch anymore. She's whatever. When life gets hard, she'll chuckle and think back, “It’s not snowing. I'm sleeping in a bed tonight.” It’s the same as what you were talking about as a kid going on hikes and crying.
It’s that same adversity. If there's one thing about the agricultural business, it's a job that never stops.
It’s one of those things where we're empowering them with this awesome therapy. We're on ranches. We're in the mountains. They're on horses every day. They're learning a skillset to be able to be completely on their own. We started this summer 2022. This takes a ton of money to try to make happen. We've been in the fundraising stage and trying to make a name for ourselves also in the Western community.
Some mistake I've seen other programs make is their cadre isn't quite the cadre we think they are. What I mean by that is if you're a retired operator, Navy SEAL, or a Green Beret and you start a shooting company, you’re this badass dude who's highly trained and who's done all this. People are going to seek that business and want you to teach them versus a guy who is they’re like, “You’re a regular Marine. You don't know that much. You don't have the same street cred.” I’m not saying that it's not a good program. I’m not saying you're not a good shooter. I’m not saying you don't know what you're talking about.
What we've done is I pulled a group of the saltiest, badass cowgirls you can think of. Almost all of them are from Colorado. We also compete. We've used a lot of our own money to compete in ranch rodeos. We're headed to Art of the Cowgirl in January 2023 to showcase what we're doing. In the western world or Western community, we have real cowboys that have our backs. We know that they're not bullshit. They're fucking cowboys.
We start to go to these ranches and work with these girls. What the program looks like in that ten weeks is we might be in Nebraska for two weeks. We might be in Wyoming for a week. We’re working on these different ranches or different outfitters. By doing that, we're making a name for ourselves, but the hands and the cadre or the people we have teaching are also making a name for themselves. It's not just that the girl is just OJT-ing and trying to say, “Maybe I might be able to work on Bobby's Place in a month.” They might be, but we want to have that street cred, if you will, behind it.
Our first fundraising event was a ranch Rodeo we did in Kiowa, Colorado in September 2022. It was phenomenal. We thought it was going to be a small ranch rodeo. We ended up having 26 teams. Out of the 26 teams, we had four professional teams. I don't know if you know who the Silver Spur is, but the Silver Spur doesn’t send hands to shit, and they sent four teams. Those are big ranches. It was cool to see that community come in, support it, and then learn about what we're doing to be like, “You guys are taking female survivors of abuse, turning them into cowgirls, and doing that.”
In a nutshell, that's what we've done. To show people where the money goes and what we're doing, there was a native girl I've been working with for about a year on the War Party Movement side. We were friends. She is this awesome fucking human in her community and one of the most genuine rockstars. She is one of those people that you need to follow on social media if you're that type of person. She genuinely does great work.
Do you want to give her a shout-out, or are we going to a spot where we can’t?
I don't want to give her a shout-out only because I don't want to take away from her story and make her story mine.
That makes sense.
She reached out one day. We're friends. She's like, “Here's the deal. This is my situation.” I'm like, “Holy fuck.” When we're talking about abusers grooming everyone around them, it is the same way they groom the person they're abusing. Everyone thinks, “This guy's an amazing human. He's such a nice guy. She's got to be crazy.” They play the girl to be crazy, but the reality is she's perfectly normal. She's being abused and you're being groomed. You're not aware of what's going on in this situation. That was the situation that she was in. I was like, “Wow.”
I have seen that firsthand growing up as a kid. I don't know if many people know this. I don't think I've talked about it on here before, but my mother grew up as a single mom. My dad bailed early. I have half-brothers and sisters. They’re amazing people. You would never even know that we weren't full-blood because we grew up in the same house.
She had made a couple of bad decisions regarding the character of men, starting with my father who wasn't around and bailed on her. I don't think he ever beat her, though. I grew up in an abusive household. I was young, like 5 or 6 years old. I remember at one point my stepdad holding her down. He was a religious guy. My dad was a biker trash. My mom went the exact opposite and married the super hyper-religious guy. On paper, he is a sweetheart. He’s outstanding in the community. He’s a standup dude and works a construction job. He was nice to everybody and was nice to my mom and me for a few years until his true self came out.
I remember him at one point reading the Bible to her, holding her down by her hair, and beating her. He was deranged out of his fucking mind. I don't wish bad things on people very often, but still, I wouldn't mind if that motherfucker guy slipped and broke his neck going down the stairs. I had seen him later in life, but I'm not even going to go down that road. I was a young enough kid that I couldn't do anything about it. I didn't know any better. I didn't know whether this was normal or not normal.
Fortunately, I don't know if you've read me or if I've told you this story, but I had an amazing grandfather and uncles around me on my mom's side that were able to show me what a man is supposed to be and how he's supposed to treat a woman. One of the sayings that stick in my head is, “The best thing that you can do as a father is to love the kid's mother. Treat them with respect.” My grandfather was that kind of man. I had this one outstanding example, and then the exact opposite.
Long story short, my mom got out of that situation at the right time before something bad could have happened. She got into another relationship and the next guy was even more extreme. It was the same thing. It went on for months that he was a great guy. He was a great guy to be around and a fun guy to be around. There were then drugs and alcohol one night. Luckily, this time, I was old enough to intervene.
I woke up to my mom. It was a school night. I was maybe 13 or 14 at the time. I woke up to her screaming for me. He had her at knifepoint in our kitchen. It was a small house. I went straight after him. Luckily, nothing happened to my mom or me during that. He got arrested. He is still in prison over that, which is good. I don't know where I was going with that. Growing up in that sort of environment made me turn into a man automatically at thirteen. It was like, “No more kid shit. I’m going to get a job. I'm going to be a man.”
That's powerful that a lot of that, too, is because your grandfather and your uncles showed you what right looks like. What happens is that the abuser is grooming everyone. It's not just grooming the person they're abusing.
That's where I was going with it. These guys, on paper or if you went to the grocery store, you would never guess it. They’re like, “He is the nicest guy in the world.” They hold the door for a woman, but then hold my mom down and beat her.
It’s the theater, church, the gym, or whatever the case of their social setting is, everyone around them is like, “This is an awesome person.” That’s where we were at. She told me what was going on and I was like, “Shit.” This is a woman that I look at as a staple in the community, but also helping me. She is a person that I want other women to be like. It's one of those things where if it's going to happen to her, it can happen to anyone.
She shoots a trad bow. She's an archer. She is badass. She grew up in Monument Valley. She is very outdoorsy and super fit. To the board, I'm like, “One of the possible job fields these girls would go into is to be an outfitter to learn how to pack and be able to do that. Eventually, maybe if they like that, they can grow into being a guide or what have you.” I was like, “What better way to tie this all together than by showcasing what hunting and what that journey is like as well?” If you look at our mission statement, it's about horsemanship and the ag world, but outfitting directly ties into that.
Especially on the Western slope, a lot of those ranchers during the hunting season make an extensive amount of profit for their business out of outfitting.
A lot of hands, a lot of guys, and a lot of cowboys are out working. As soon as hunting season starts, they're looking to get some more tips and more money and they're packing. It’s another angle for jobs. What we want to do was, “How do we tell this story and tie it all in, but also give someone an opportunity of their lifetime to heal them? What can we do?” We raised money at the Ranch rodeo, but we were unable to bring in a bunch of girls and put them through a program. That's going to take hundreds of thousands of dollars to do that. In the meantime, I was like, “We have a couple of thousand dollars. Let's do something.” What we did was we hooked her up with Stick Sniper down in Tucson.
We've had Caleb on. He is an awesome guy.
Jenny Shipley, I’m friends with them. They were like, “Let's do this.” PSE Bows hooked us up with Stick Sniper. We went down there. She got her bow. We hooked her up with some mentors to shoot with. This was in July 2022. We were able to start. She then trained to shoot and did everything. In September 2022, we took her on an archery elk hunt. One of the mentors that we were able to partner her with was Dayna Monroe. She's a badass. Even if you're a dude, if you're not following Dayna, you're a fucking piece of shit. You're dumb. She is an awesome human, but also an example of so many different things. She is an outdoorsman and an archer.
They linked up, started talking, talking shop, and getting everything going. Dayna came through with her sponsors. We were able to wear clothes from SITKA, Black Rifle, and whatnot. We did eight days in the Zirkel Wilderness. Everything didn't go as planned as we wanted it to. I had been scouting and getting everything together at the last minute. One of my horses is a ranch horse. I worked him pretty hard gathering because fall was coming. We were getting ready to ship and get everything going. I had probably two hard weeks in a row. He was done. He was a little bit lame. I was like, “I can't take him.” I had another one, a two-year-old. I was going to pack, but I’m like, “I'm not taking him by himself without another horse with him.” Everything fell through. That was my plan B.
My plan A was we had a badass cowboy family out of Colorado that was going to take us in. They’re like, ‘We don’t want money.” That's how they are. They wanted to give back. Their kids got sick the Sunday before we were getting ready to roll, and it was bad sick. I was like, “How are we going to make this happen?” Everything didn't go as planned the way we wanted as an organization to be able to tie in the cowgirl. In the family, the wife is a badass cowgirl. She's a hunter. I was going to have her and Dayna mentoring along on this trip. All that didn't happen.
Needless to say, we spent a week in the Zirkel’s chasing elk. We got on elk almost every single day except for the super rainy, crazy two days we had. It was a life-changing experience for her to be able to do that, and for me, too. It was so rewarding. It was one of my favorite hunts I've ever been on even though we didn't harvest an animal.
I get shit for this all the time. I enjoy going to 3D archery shoots more than I enjoy hunting almost. For me, it’s more about being out there and disconnecting from everything. It's so good for you.
War Party Movement: Shooting or hunting is not only about being out there. It’s about disconnecting from everything, which is good for you.
As her first time hunting, this is setting her up for success to be able to do this in the future, to teach her kids this, and to be a part of what we're doing. Full circle, the hunt didn't go exactly how we wanted it to, but it was an amazing experience all the way around. She'll be hunting for the rest of her life. She’s using this as a platform to springboard, if you will, to start that.
The other cool thing is when we were talking about this 30-day program and we’re like, “What can we do?” my biggest thing was everyone I bring in that's a part of this, I want them to receive something out of it as well. Of our board members, there's one other male. It's me and another guy. Everyone else is a woman. They’re badass, crushing whatever industry they're in. I have everything from one of the best tattoo artists on the planet to one of the best cowgirls in the country.
Is that Marisa LaRem?
Yeah. Marisa is on the board.
I’m a fan of hers.
She is awesome. My co-founder, Micah Wysocki, is my long-lost little sister. She is one of the most phenomenal women. She has the trophies and has been there, done that. She has the t-shirt to back up how bad of a cowgirl she is. We have everything from that to journalists. The president of our board ran safe houses in Cambodia. We have some awesome, stellar gals that sit on our board.
Not to tell anyone else's story, but they all have their own experience with domestic violence and horrible situations in that way. I wanted this to be a way to start with the board members if I look at each one of them and be like, “I want to be able to break the cycle, but almost start a new cycle of giving back or starting something over. This isn't the book. It’s a chapter of the book of your life. Let's not make this one chapter the entire book. Let's make it a chapter. It doesn't mean you can't read it. It doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It doesn't mean it's not there, but let's start something new.”
It's like looking at that history quote that you posted. It's a learning lesson. It’s not something to dwell on.
All the women that are partnered with us, whether they're instructors or they sit on the board, are also doing something where they're receiving as much as we all are. We’re having cups full. You're doing something rewarding. You're seeing these women's lives be changed. Even if it's over a week-long hunting trip, you're seeing the effect of that. This woman, in particular, lives on the Navajo res. She's a staple in the community. She's going to be one of our contacts, if you will. I look at her as part of the team. What she'll be helping us do is vet some women. We're not pulling all of our students from the native community, but it’s probably about 50/50 pretty heavily. What that'll do is she will help us be able to find the right candidates from where she knows as we're building out this full-on program.
That's awesome. There is mentorship that can happen there, too. Maybe some of these women that have gone through your program can then mentor other girls.
Quite frankly, the role Dayna played on this hunt is like, “Next year, let's have her replace Dayna,” and I'm replaced with the girl that went through the course that's packing, taking them out, and doing this. In Special Forces, you want to work yourself out of a job. That's what I want to do. I want to be able to bring these girls in and then have them be maybe one of them. Maybe I do have an opportunity to say, “The little condo or the little apartment above the barn, you can live there. You can be a ranch hand. This is what you'll do.” That's where we'd like to be and what we want to build out, too.
A lot of that is financially dependent on us raising money, but at the same time, what we've designed is pretty straightforward. We'll be able to get a lot done with a little by the way we've done it. What we're doing is we only take students in the summertime. Ideally, everything goes perfectly over the next few months. The goal is to take four. That's the high goal. The low bar goal is to take two. What we want to do is run four women next summer in 2023 for ten weeks, put them through this course, and then help them get jobs, whatever that looks like, whether that's with an outfitter, on a ranch, a boarding facility, or whatever it is in the ag space.
The vision behind that is to take the girl from Mississippi that’s had a bad relationship. She's like, “This is what I want to do. I want to be a cowgirl. Let’s do it.” We’ll bring her from there to Colorado for ten weeks. If she shows up in a pair of jeans and vans, we give her everything she needs. She gets all her kit. She learns to be a cowboy, and then we help her get a job. In September 2023, she's up in Montana working at a ranch completely removed from her situation.
Oftentimes, one of the biggest inhibitors for these women that are trafficked regardless of background is financial stability, whether that's trafficked or domestic violence situations. A lot of women can't leave their abuser because it's not as simple as just leaving. They’re like, “Where do I go if I leave? What do I do?” Sometimes, their entire identity is caught up in this person. Maybe they're a big CrossFitter and they got 100,000 followers. They're this awesome CrossFit person, but their husband's also the awesome CrossFit person that everyone loves and he beats the shit out of her. How does she leave that situation that she's financially tied to because they own a gym together? That's an example.
People don't quite understand how close it hits home. I guarantee you know somebody that's in this situation. That is our plan. That's where we're going with the nonprofit side of it. That, to me, is a bigger long-term solution than just throwing $400 or $500 to get a cadaver dog out or a drone to help a search or conduct an investigation. Those things are important, but what is more important in the small circle of the community I've come to know and help with these investigations and stuff, especially in the native community, is there's no, “What next?”
It is almost the most important part. You’re hitting the nail on the head. If not, you're going to fall back into that cycle potentially.
The thing is how we can break the cycle of that abuse. We want to start a new one. If we fast forward ten years from now when a girl who came through our course when she was eighteen and she's then 28 and is a mom, was she able to make smart decisions? Is her husband an actual awesome human? Is she raising her kids and all these different things that we grow? It's not a short-term fix. This is a very long-term fix. Four women a year isn't a lot, but it is a whole fucking lot when you look at impacting those women's lives.
It is the stability that you provide for them then, whether it's mentorship, knowing that they have a community or somebody that they can look up to, or a long-term goal in mind. That's awesome. I'm glad that you came back and we were able to talk about it. I've learned a lot about it. You always have a platform here for anything that you guys are doing. I’ll stand behind you 100% on all of that. If any of them want to get involved in media or their own thing, you guys always got a spot here, too.
I appreciate it.
I'd be glad to mentor somebody or help them out with some stuff.
I always tell people, “Reach out.” People always ask, “How can I help?” A lot of times, if I’m running a program, then I have volunteers and I can do things. You guys are more than welcome to come out. Come check out what we're doing. I'll keep you filled in on where we'll be at. I’ll be like, “We're going to be at this ranch or here.”
How can people reach out to you? Is there a website? If somebody wanted to donate money, I'm sure that's greatly needed. Your guys' logo and everything is fucking awesome for War Party. You guys got some awesome hoodies, beanies, and all that sort of stuff.
War Party Movement is shifting into more of an awareness platform. It is apparel. I do need to do some revision on the website stuff. War Party Movement is a support arm for War Party Ranch. WarPartyRanch.org is the website for the non-profit. With donations, we always need that. I hate begging, like, “Help me be onboard,” but we can't get it done without people supporting, whether that's buying apparel or donating directly. I want to always be in full transparency with what we did. We were able to spend that money on a bow and a life-changing hunt for a woman. In the future, that's going to be put in this awesome program, jobs, and changing these girls’ lives. Every dollar goes to that. It’s super cool. I’m blessed.
You have a shirt that says, “Don't Be a Puto.”
I saw it on the website. I don't necessarily advertise on the War Party. I made them because it was started as a joke, but I was like, “I’ll see if anybody wants these.” People love them. It’s funny because it's a play on being a good person and don't be a piece of shit.
That is the key. That's fucking awesome. Are you still doing any of the stuff with Clandestine or any of that? Have you seen Matt lately?
I have not seen Matt. I miss that dude. The last time I worked with the guys was in Jackson. I have been so damn busy on my own thing. I love them to death. They're still an awesome crew. They always support what I'm doing. I’m blessed to have met them when I retired from the Military. They taught me a lot about media and content in general. I haven't done anything with them since February 2021.
I loved having you here. Thanks again.
Thank you.
You're welcome back anytime. We've been going for a couple of hours. I know you got to get out of here pretty quickly. You're welcome anytime. Go follow War Party. Check out Jeremiah. What is your personal Instagram?
It is @Jeremiah_BlackBeard.
Give him a follow. You are good at keeping up with everything that you guys got going on there. If you want some good humor, go give him a follow. Thanks. I love you.
Thanks. Take care.
Important Links
Scott Murdoch - #108 Colorado Parks & Wildlife – Scott Murdoch
John Nores - #103 Joh Nores – The Thin Green Line
Caleb Brewer - #083 Caleb Brewer – Stick Sniper Archery
@Jeremiah_BlackBeard – Instagram
About Jeremiah Wilber
WPM Founder Jeremiah Wilber’s earliest memories are of his mother testifying in court to save abused Indian children from a foster home. A Mescalero Apache, she was one of the strongest women warriors to dedicate her life to fighting the cycle of abuse experienced by women and children in tribal communities across America. He would spend his childhood helping her rescue women from domestic violence and children from sexual abuse. Raised in Montana, he became an avid hunter, fisherman, honing his cowboying skills.
He enlisted in the US Army after graduating high school, attending the Military Police School at Fort Leonard Wood. As an MP, he served two combat tours, completed the Sapper Leader Course and Army Ranger Course, and subsequently attended Special Forces Assessment and Selection (SFAS). He was selected for the elite Green Berets, where he served in 3rd Special Forces Group as a Special Forces Communications Sergeant and in 10th Special Forces Group as a Special Forces Operations (Team) Sergeant with multiple combat rotations to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Africa.