The dystopian future writers once imagined has quietly become our reality, and Blaze Media co-founder Glenn Beck has been sounding the alarm for years — but not everyone is paying attention.
“We’ve slipped into ‘Brave New World’ and Orwell at the same time,” Glenn tells best-selling author and former Navy SEAL Jack Carr, adding, “and then didn’t even notice it.”
“Some of us noticed it. Some of us did,” Carr responds. “But you have to be a reader to notice these things. You have to be a reader, both fiction and non. You have to build that foundation so that you’re aware of the manipulations and are able to apply the wisdom of the past to current problem sets.”
“And we’re not very good at doing that in this country, especially with the manipulation devices in our pockets,” he adds, before the conversation turns to Carr’s hit series, “The Terminal List” — a work of dystopian fiction with some unsettling real-world parallels.
In the series, the main character, James Reece, is a Navy SEAL commander who unknowingly leads his team into an ambush orchestrated by the U.S. government. The attack is meant to cover up the government’s alleged experimentation on his team, which left the men with brain cancer.
As the sole survivor, Reece sets out to exact revenge on the powerful figures responsible for his teammates’ deaths.
Glenn points out that the storyline is one Americans can easily relate to, given the growing distrust of the nation’s institutions.
“I think that’s the real message that everybody should, in Washington, get,” he tells Carr.
“And that’s scary. No country can survive that. If your institutions are completely distrusted, there’s nowhere to go. In ‘Terminal List,’ you have James, you know, exacting justice because the government, you know, gave these guys brain cancer,” he continues.
“Where’d that come from?” Glenn asks.
“Is that just a response to looking for something that, you know, people will relate to?” he says.
“Or did any of that come from any of the stuff that the American government has done to our soldiers in the past?”
“Certainly,” Carr responds.
Carr recalls the Church Committee hearings of the mid-1970s, which he tells Glenn “brought to light a few instances of our government using drugs on soldiers, on mental institution patients, on university students, prisoners, those sorts of things, doing those experiments back then.”
“So that’s really where some of that idea came from,” he says.
“And I thought, well, what if somebody didn’t get the memo all these years later? And of course, while I was in the military, I was getting poked and prodded with all sorts of things, anthrax shots and all that,” he continues.
“So I thought, well, what if one of these things is a test? Because they’ve done it before,” he adds.
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Brave new world, Jack carr, Navy seal, The terminal list, Blazetv show
