Glenn Beck: Turning Fiction Into Reality
June 16, 2010 - 0:43 ET
| Watch Glenn Beck weekdays at 5p & 2a ET on Fox News Channel |
Today, I'm asking you to really change the way you think. You are going to want to take your time with this one; it's going to require some imagination.
Let's start by taking a look at these things:
• Marxists in the White House
• Overspending
• Cloward and Piven
• Cap-and-trade
• Net neutrality
• Government health care
• Pushing away Israel
• Global governance
Do you think all of these things exist on their own or are they in some way connected?
Let me put it this way: Data points. When banks and investors look at economy they look at a variety of factors: unemployment; the stock market; consumer debt; price of energy; the price of food; imports; exports; the Baltic Dry Index, etc. They look to see what the overall picture tells them.
But the media want you to only look at one of these stories at a time.
When you buy a house, do you only look at the price? Do you only look at the location or the schools or the size? No, you look at everything together to get the full picture. That's what we try and do on this show: Take all of these data points and put them together and show you what the complete picture looks like. But in doing that, the media try to say they are not connected and anyone who thinks so is paranoid.
If you are a long-time viewer of my program, you may have noticed a trend in the past year or so. Yes, I'm getting a little pudgier, thanks for noticing, but that's not it. We don't have many guests, but when we do, the overwhelming majority of them are either historians or fiction novelists. You may be thinking, OK, historians, I get that. But fiction novelists? They write fun books and everything, but why feature them on a news program?
| |
Well, here's the reason I love talking to these guys: They're war gamers. They think out of the box. They're the people who force you to think the unthinkable. But not only that, many times they are right. Because they aren't just making stuff up, they base their stories in truth. They're called paranoid by many people, in fact, The Washington Post called my new fiction thriller paranoid: "Glenn Beck's Paranoid Thriller, 'The Overton Window.'"
They fear that it will incite rebelliousness among "anti-government extremists" who will tuck the book into their ammo boxes on their way to becoming the next Timothy McVeigh. Hmm, who's the paranoid one here?
But why ridicule someone for thinking out of the box? People don't consider it war gaming when the Pentagon does it and they shouldn't. It's actually the smart thing to do.
Which of the following options sounds more irresponsible to you:
A) Think of as many different unlikely (yet possible) scenarios and play them out
or
B) Assume that we've got every possible situation covered already and there is nothing that can catch us by surprise
All of these think tanks out there, most of them are just produce papers of policies. They aren't thinking out of the box and they're not actually running scenarios and computer models based on their ideas. Except for one: The Center for American Progress. If you are not familiar with that, it's the pet project for uber-wealthy progressive George Soros. But most think tanks don't get it. Fiction authors do.
And the Pentagon knows that. After the Sept. 11 attacks, the Pentagon convened a group of fiction writers like Brad Thor, Vince Flynn, Nelson DeMille and asked them to join in the war game sessions. It wasn't the first time they had talked to authors. I had Nelson DeMille on radio a couple of days ago, he had written a story in 2000 about terrorists hijacking planes and gassing everyone. Here's what he was told by war gamers in D.C. a year before the 9/11 attacks:
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
NELSON DEMILLE, AUTHOR: I did a lot of research with the Joint Terrorist Task Force here in the city and they said to me — I said, what is the next target in the United States? What is the next target in America for terrorists? And they said, the World Trade Center. And this was in the year 2000. The World Trade Center had been attacked, if we remember, in February 1993 with a truck bomb in the basement. They said, look, they missed and they are going to do it next time. And they said to me — and this is 18 months maybe before it happened — it will be Learjets full of explosives and gasoline flying into both towers with suicide bombers...
What happened, it was not a shock to me when it happened that morning because I had heard it a year and a half before.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
These guys won't reveal their sources, but they will tell you what people honestly think and what could be coming our way in the future. It's why I love talking to them; they are well-informed, and many times, way ahead of the game.
In his 1994 book "Debt of Honor," Tom Clancy imagines a rogue pilot taking control of a jet and crashing it into the U.S. Capitol as the president of the United States addresses a Joint Session of Congress. From the book: "The entire east face of the building's southern half was smashed to gravel which shot westward — but the real damage took a second or two more, barely time for the roof to start falling down on the 900 people in the chamber: 100 tons of jet fuel erupted from the shredded fuel tanks."
Did you know that Ayn Rand, author of "Atlas Shruugged," had a hard time getting a publisher in America for her book "The Anthem"? One publisher rejected it on the grounds that the author does not understand socialism, which is particularly funny because she was born in St. Petersburg. She was 12 years old the revolution of 1917 broke out. She was there when it happened and violence took place right in front of her. She lived there until she was in her 20s. She saw the brutality of communism.
You'd think the media would love a success story like this, but Ayn Rand was soundly mocked in the media. Even after achieving success, she was still routinely bashed by critics. Here's what the media elite thought of "Atlas Shrugged":
• "Not in any literary sense a serious novel" — The New York Times
• "Somebody has called it: 'Excruciatingly awful.' I find it a remarkably silly book. It is certainly a bumptious one. Its story is preposterous." — Whittaker Chambers
• "As an instrument of propaganda, this book is a moderate success; as a work of art, it is a noble failure" — Portsmouth Star
• "1,168 Pages of Soap Opera Philosophy and Propaganda" — The Savannah News
Just how strange were the concepts in it? Let's see: The book focuses on how politicians respond to crises — many times created by themselves — by creating new government programs, laws and regulations. She wrote in "The Voice of Reason": "One of the methods used by statists to destroy capitalism consists in establishing controls that tie a given industry hand and foot, making it unable to solve its problems, then declaring that freedom has failed and stronger controls are necessary."
Is that not happening today? How many times have you heard "capitalism has failed"?
She also showed how politicians would dress their redistributive legislation in happy sounding names. Sound familiar? Tell me which ones are from the book and which one is real:
• "Anti-greed Act"
• "Emergency Economic Stabilization Act"
• "Equalization of Opportunity Act"
Clearly, Ayn Rand had no idea what she was talking about.
— Watch Glenn Beck weekdays at 5p & 2a ET on
