" 'In a nutshell, if you believe it, Mohammed was told that war and conquest were not the answers. He was told to put down the sword and live peacefully among people of other faiths.' "
In the Thor version -- "if you believe it" -- the revelation is why Mohammed was assassinated: So Muslims would never get the word of peace. Jefferson, we're told, became interested in Islam and the thwarted final revelation because he was the first American president to go to war against Radical Islam -" that is, the Barbary pirates who plagued US commercial ships.
In the novel, "Islamists" have infiltrated the Defense Department and all levels of the US government. On the first day The Last Patriot was appearing in bookstores, Thor told Beck this:
"There has been a plot afoot that was set in motion by the Muslim Brotherhood in this country to undermine the United States and to basically destroy the Constitution and to replace our democracy -" as crazy and far-fetched as it sounds -" with Sharia Law."
While Thor never served in the military, he told Military.Com, "I have the greatest respect for the warrior class." His dad was a Marine, though "a strictly support person." For his novel The Apostle he says he "shadowed" a special-ops assassin team in Afghanistan.
With all his manic energy, Glenn Beck has also written a thriller called The Overton Window about a mysterious power to shape the future, that, according to the back cover, "manipulates public perception so that ideas once seen as radical become acceptable over time."
Following "a horrible terrorist attack, ... an apathetic young man is plunged into the maelstrom of political discourse." In the course of the book, he uncovers the conspiracy behind the terrorist attack and "saves the woman he loves and the freedoms he once took for granted."
In an introduction, Beck says he really loves the thriller genre, especially "fiction rooted in fact," which he calls "faction."
We live in an entertainment culture so dominated by fantasy and so corrupted by special effects that the real world is becoming boring. And that seems to apply to real history. As "exceptional" people, we seem to now require more than reality. The Romans famously encouraged "bread and circus" to keep their citizenry distracted and unquestioning.
As irony and slapstick overlaps the news on the left with John Stewart and The Daily Show and as Howard Beal went rogue in the film Network , the paranoid thriller similarly seems to be overlapping and seeping into the world of rightwing politics. When Beck and Bachman perform, they seem to feel liberated to spin paranoid fictional plots from their very active minds. And the scary part, people seem to eat it up.
Thor assures us he's only a writer of "fiction," but then he brags he was a member of the Department Of Homeland Security's Analytic Red Cell Program, which is an effort to mine the popular mind for terrorist ideas.
The New York Times recently reported that Thor is working with Duane "Dewey" Clarridge, the CIA agent convicted of lying to Congress about his murderous activities in Nicaragua recruiting the Contras, people he himself referred to as "like a bunch of cattle rustlers. Bandits."
I recall that period well from a half-dozen trips to Nicaragua and El Salvador. For anyone who got off the couch and witnessed Reagan's proxy war, Clarridge's Contras were noted for brutal attacks on innocent villages and for killings of good people like US development worker Ben Linder. These were real murders, not silly thriller scenarios.
Along with Oliver North, now a writer and TV personality, Thor is regularly fed information from the rogue Clarridge's current "off the books" operation in Afghanistan/Pakistan. The Times called this information "an amalgam of fact, rumor, analysis and uncorroborated reports."
In May, Thor claimed he had insider information that Mullah Omar was being held by Pakistanis without US knowledge. By all accounts the story was garbage. The irony is, if it had been true, it might have compromised a secret US mission and put him up there with WikiLeaks.
In an interview with Military.Com , Thor unabashedly advocates the need for "pro American propaganda" and "stories that highlight American Exceptionalism." He ridicules Hollywood for not having the courage to make movies of his pro-American propaganda.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
