There’s been a lot of chatter about the intentions of the “zip-tie guys,” who were part of a pro-Trump mob that stormed the US Capitol on Wednesday. They were photographed in the building clutching zip-tie handcuffs. One of them has now been identified as retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Larry Rendall Brock, Jr., of Texas, the New York Post reports. Images show Brock, decked out in tactical gear, standing on the Senate floor holding the zip-tie cuffs. Brock confirmed to the New Yorker that he is the person in the images. But, he says, he didn’t come with the zip-tie cuffs. Instead, he claims he found them on the floor. “I wish I had not picked them up,” he says. "My thought process there was I would pick them up and give them to an officer when I see one.” Of donning a combat helmet, body armor, and other military-style gear, he tells the magazine: “I didn’t want to get stabbed or hurt” by “BLM or Antifa.”
Brock retired from the Air Force in 2014, per Fox News. Hillwood Airways, which had employed Brock, tells the Dallas Morning News that he no longer works for the organization. Some friends and family members tell the New Yorker that Brock has become more politically radical recently and expressed white-supremacist views. One says that Brock engaged in “weird rage talk, basically, saying he’s willing to get in trouble to defend what he thinks is right, which is Trump being the president, I guess.” Brock denies that he is racist, but echoed Trump’s unfounded election claims. “The President asked for his supporters to be there to attend, and I felt like it was important,” he tells the New Yorker, adding that he assumed he was welcome to enter the Capitol. A source tells the magazine that he notified the FBI that Brock was among those who stormed the building. (More insurrection stories.)
,
uBlock 
,
and
Ghostery 
)
