As frightening, depressing and infuriating as it can be, these days I spend more time reading about impending catastrophe than about any other subject.
When somebody I know produces such work, there’s a good chance they will get to buck the line and their book will go to the top of my TBR pile. I read R.A. Matthis‘ first novel, Ghosts of Babylon, a couple years ago and it deserves the five-star Amazon reviews it received. When I found out he was kicking off a TEOTWAWKI series… well, his new book went to the front of the queue.
The novel follows three principle characters through the final stage of America’s fundamental transformation–Eduardo, the news media personality; Hank, the small town sheriff (with a name like that you just know he’s a stand-up guy…ahem); and Cole, Hank’s son and an E-6 in the Army recently returned from a deployment to Syria.
For the awakened, the strongest subcurrents in the novel are familiar: economic collapse; the encroaching police state (as represented by the Department of Fatherland Homeland Security); utter and complete politicization of the Armed Forces, to be used against the American people, and purging of those who would honor their oath of office. But Mathis’ storytelling is so understated, I can almost imagine the typical normalcy-biased coincidence theorist reading it without being offended. Where I used a sledgehammer in False FLag, Mathis uses a small, quiet whisper (relatively speaking).
The cast is rendered expertly, and this is especially obvious with Eduardo. He’s got all the gray areas and “complexities” you could hope for in a three-dimensional character. The plot, pacing and dialog are also strong. Mathis is really firing on all cylinders here. The occasional typo snuck by the editor (as with seemingly every book these days–mine included), but not enough to pull the reader out of his immersion in this near-future dystopia.
It’s hard not to slip into cliches when describing this book, like “page-turner” and “couldn’t put it down.” I had family visiting, plus work and assorted other obligations, and didn’t think I could get much more than a chapter or two read in a 12-day period.
I was stunned to found myself finished with the entire book in two days. I still don’t know how I found so much time. (Getting this review ready for posting took longer, as it turned out.) But it’s that good, and I want more.
I’m pleased to turn over the reins today to a fellow author and soldier. Enjoy this guest post from R. A. Mathis.
– Hank
The author and the soldier live in very different worlds, but sometimes those worlds collide. On rare occasions, pen and sword are both wielded deftly by the same hand.
Many veterans record their wartime recollections in straight forward narratives and memoirs, but few filter their experiences through the lens of fiction. Of these, only a miniscule fraction is ever published. This is especially true of our most recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. A quick search on Amazon or the local bookstore will produce an avalanche of veteran-authored non-fiction about any conflict you care to name with a pitifully small sampling of novels penned by vets. But this small band includes some literary giants such as Hemingway, Vonnegut, and Tolkien to name a few. Torch in one hand, quill in the other, these brave souls explore the cavernous depths of human nature, illuminating its flaws, virtues, and fears. They peer into the places we try to keep hidden and pull out the ugly truths that plague us as individuals and society as a whole.
I imagine many of them turn to fiction for the same reason I did. The sights, sounds, smells, stress, and emotions of combat are a lot for the mind to take in…too much, actually. Eventually, you have to switch off your humanity for the sake of your sanity. Emotion is removed from your thought process because it has to be. The shredded body of a kid killed by an insurgent’s IED isn’t somebody’s child. It’s just a thing. You think, that’s a shame. But in the back of your mind, you know it was a six-year-old boy – what was left of him. You still hear the child’s mother wailing when you’re lying in your bunk or manning an observation post in the quite of the night. You still don’t sleep. Your stomach still stays in knots. Your loved ones still hear it in your voice when you call home. You try to stuff it all in the deepest corner of your head you can find. You tell yourself, “Just get through it. You can think about it later.”
Eventually, if you’re lucky enough to make it home, you do think about it…a lot. There were questions, doubts, and guilt. Did I make the right decisions? Did I take the right actions? What should I have done differently? Could I have saved a fellow soldier? Why did I make it home? Why didn’t he?
I turned to writing as a form of self-therapy to help work through what was going on in my head. Memoirs are invaluable historical documents and may even aid their writers in venting some of the emotional steam imparted by the pressure cooker of war, but they rarely delve into the deeper, darker places of the soul. Fiction does. I was soon writing for hours a night. It was as if a dam had burst and everything I’d stuffed away in those remote emotional nooks came spilling out all at once through my fingers and onto the keyboard. Eventually, a novel began to take form. The first draft was pretty rough. The final still isn’t Shakespeare, but it’s honest.
War, like all evil, changes everything it touches. All soldiers know that going in. At least they should. All they can do is try to make it a change for the better. My own writing is a product of this ongoing challenge.
Endeavoring to join the ranks of those warrior poets who successfully picked up the pen after laying down the sword, I present my own feeble effort. It’s an attempt to convey the grit, heartbreak, uncertainty, humor, brutality, camaraderie, despair, exhilaration, deprivation, and terror that is war. My predecessors have set the bar high and it’s frustrating as hell trying to reach it. But like them, I’m a soldier. And like a good soldier, I’ll press on.
A jack-of-all-trades and master of some, R.A. Mathis has worn many hats as a husband, father, student, teacher, soldier, and then some. However, he has always been a writer. After graduating from the University of Tennessee with a BS in mathematics, he served nine years in the army as an armored cavalry officer, rising to the rank of captain and holding a secret-level clearance. During that time, he served a yearlong combat tour in Iraq. He has since earned an MBA and transitioned to the field of finance. Rob currently lives in Tennessee with his wife and family.
Fate plays some interesting jokes. I was there to talk about my books, especially False Flag . I fully expected to rock the boat broaching some of the conspiritorial subjects FF deals with. (Truth be told, there wasn’t time to go into much detail anyway.) Bruno was there to talk about his book, Futureman. I couldn’t believe my ears when he mentioned researching Operation High Jump and Operation Paper Clip.
So here’s a guy in Portugul who chased down the same crazy historical facts-that-sound-like-pulp-fiction I had. The between-the-lines background for one sub-plot in False Flag is MK Ultra and Project Monarch. All of the above were related to Paper Clip.
It doesn’t sound as crazy coming from a foreigner, for some reason.
Anyway, the subjects were only mentioned in summary. Most of the interview focuses on other aspects of us/our fiction.
Ignorance abounds across the fruited plain. Pundit after pundit has remarked about the candidacy of Bernie Sanders, claiming he is the “first socialist” to do this, achieve that, blah, blah, blah.
Stop right there.
Sanders is not the first socialist to do or win anything. He’s merely the first one to be honest about his socialism. He differs from Hillary only by degrees (and few of those), not principles. The same applies if you compare him to John McCain, Mitt Romney or any of the Bushes.
Socialism has been gradually strangling the American republic since the 1930s, and the tools to start the snowball (or frog sauna) were put in place before that.
Here are some principles straight from Karl Marx:
Abolition of private property.
Confiscation of property.
Abolition of all rights of inheritance.
A central bank.
A progressive income tax.
Government control of communications and transportation.
Government ownership of factories and agriculture.*
Government control of labor.
Corporate farms, regional planning.
Government-controlled compulsory education.
*Under communism, government owns the resources outright. Under national socialism or fascism, private ownership is allowed but the government controls it.
For the intelligent person paying attention, it’s quite obvious that nearly half of this has been fully accomplished in the USA. The rest of it is in partial stages of completion–getting closer to absolute all the time.
The actual left-right paradigm is quite different from what you were probably taught.
Just so you know: public servants in the USA don’t swear to uphold and defend the Communist Manifesto during their oath of office (though they behave as if they did). They swear to uphold and defend something that is antethetical to this.
Captain Capitalism is confident the latest gyno-reboot (titled Ghostbusters) will flop:
For those of us who aren’t in the echo chamber of Hollywood and the media, we see this movie for what it is – a truly inferior, slipshod affirmative action piece that is so blatant in its pandering towards “team woman” it’s pretty much insulting everybody. It’s so bad even avid consumers of “Round House Kicking Chick Cop Shows” aren’t swallowing it, as evidenced by its trailer receiving more downvotes than a Hitler speech in a synagogue.
Not only does Hollywood lack the imagination to produce anything that hasn’t already been done, but they are compelled to feminize or sodomize it in the process. I wonder if Cappy’s right about its rightful failure, though. The Force Awakens is nothing but a remake of A New Hope, feminized and with updated special effects; yet sheeple poured into theaters by the millions to further their feminist indoctrination. Same with the so-called Mad Max movie, wasn’t it?
Yes, your average American is an idiot. And yes, your average American woman can be sold a bill of goods if you merely slap the label of “rah rah female” on it. But what Sony did was take a hallmark of American culture, a genuine apolitical cinematic classic that young and old hold dear to their hearts, and shit all over it with politics.
Here I slightly disagree: the original Ghostbusters movie, if you analyze it carefully, celebrates the free market with a strong capitalist message: A team of hardworking entrepreneurs recognize an unmet need in the market; launch a business tailored to meet that need; perservere through a dry period, at first, getting the business off the ground; find their big break via a client desperate enough to try something new and radical to solve his problem; their business explodes into insane profits…then some self-important government bureacrat strangles the industry with regulation and the entire city is plunged into violent chaos as a result.
There is no way Hollywood could leave a message like that intact, even when most people fail to recognize it.
Politics today are so full of hypocrisy, it makes politicians of yesteryear seem like straight-shooters, by comparison.
The rampant hypocrisy in feminism, for example, is pushing men into red pill lifestyles by the droves (now that men finally have that option).
When it comes to race, there have always been bigots (and some people will harbor bigotry or racism no matter what) but the blatant hypocrisy in Western culture has contributed to the rise of White Nationalism more than any other factor. White male heterosexuals in the post-baby boomer generations have been insulted, belittled, and unfairly treated all their lives, while simultaneously being told they are privileged and everyone but them are victims.
This systemic prejudice has many parallels with feminism. Most people today, for instance, don’t think of themselves as feminists. Yet they’ve been inundated with feminist ideas for so long, they’ve adopted them for their own. Yet they assume their worldview to be balanced.
In polite company, you can talk all day about the inherent flaws of men, and/or the inherent strengths of women, and you’ll get affirmations and accolades. Switch it around, however: talk about the inherent strengths of men and the inherent flaws of women, and “sexist pig” will be the nicest name you get called. Depending on how publicized your observations are, you’ll get death threats on Twitter and other venues.
In the same way, you can make broad-brush remarks all day long like:
white men can’t jump
white folks got no rhythm
white men are wimps
whites are punks
blacks are superior athletes
blacks are superior musicians
blacks are great entertainers
Latinos are great lovers
Hispanics take care of their families
Hispanics are hard workers
Asians are gifted academics
Asians are great with technology
…And so on. These are all socially acceptable generalizations.
But switch it around if you’re feeling entrepid–talk about what caucasians are good at, and/or what minorities are not so good at…and the pointing/shrieking will split your eardrums. Remember the Bell Curve? If you took it seriously, you’re obviously a bigot worthy of character assassination.
Consider the relative population sizes of the demographics and the disparity is about 25X worse than stated.
If one is on the political right, he’s been accused of racism all his politically-aware life. If the Marxists/SJWs truly were the “liberals” they pretend to be, they should be horrified to find their accusations are largely proving to be self-fulfilling prophecies.
For decades now blacks had gotten away with (in fact, were pretty much encouraged to harbor) a blatantly ethnocentric worldview. They looked at everything through a racial lens, and got a pass for their racist attitudes toward whites and others. They enjoyed Sacrosanct Victim Status by virtue of simply being born. And because they were Sacrosanct Victims, their own racism and bigotry was never recognized as racism and bigotry.
It wasn’t just blacks, of course. Women and other minorities also got awarded Sacrosanct Victim Status at birth. There were scholarships, institutionalized hiring practices, de facto public relations programs in Hollywood and the press, and armies of activists waiting to rush to the defense of anybody who suffered an inconvenience. Anybody except a white male heterosexual, who was forever barred entry into the Sacrosanct Victim Club.
…For decades, white men (those without the correct political affiliation, anyway) walked on eggshells for fear of offending somebody, and dared not make too big an issue when they were victimized because it ran counter to the overall Sacrosanct Victim Narrative.
But now that was changing. White men were growing openly contemptuous of everyone who habitually played the victim card…and those who maybe were innocent but still shared the genetic traits of the “social justice warriors” who did play the victim. …More and more white men were speaking and behaving like the bigots they’d been accused of being all along.
Some outspoken whites are no longer walking on eggshells. And they’re no longer on the “right” either, as they’re being seduced by collectivist ideals and cult-of-personality in their obsession with WASP identity, “western civilization” and the Trumpening.
Whether or not you can sympathize, you should at least recognize that this was inevitable. For decades the right-leaning white male heterosexual suffered, while evils were sufferable, and didn’t stoop to the level of his antagonists. But as he wakes up to the fact that his country has been hijacked by those who hate him, it’s only natural that he would abandon the magnanimous high road and begin adapting the same in-group/out-group mindset of those hell-bent on being his enemy.
Hardly anybody knows history anymore, and less still are capable of learning from it; otherwise his enemies would have been reluctant to back the white male heterosexual into the tribalist corner.
The nature of Trump’s response to the endorsement from David Duke is different depending on what source reports it. In the “mainstream” (left-wing) media echo chamber, of course, it means Trump is the next Hitler who is best buds with Duke and likes to attend lynching parties dressed in white sheets. To organizations less-rabid, it was a curious blunder.
What might this mean?
1. There is some truth to what the left-wing propagandists are pushing this time, and Trump may, in fact, have sympathy for white nationalist groups and figureheads.
2. Trump has his finger on the pulse of the electorate right now; believes that a significant portion of his voter base harbor some sort of white identity consciousness; and doesn’t want to alienate them by pointing and shrieking, “Rayciss!!” as he was expected to. After all, he technically is a politician ever since announcing his intention to run.
3. Trump was caught off-guard and didn’t have a thoughtful, polished response ready. On three occasions. And perhaps he didn’t anticipate the frenzied blowback his nebulous reaction would inspire. (If that part is true, then he is more than a little naive.)
4. The puppetmasters absolutely will not allow the Executive Branch to escape their control. There are a few tricks available to them to ensure it doesn’t. If Trump is not, himself, bought-and-paid for, one possibility is that he will be persuaded to self-sabotage his campaign so a “made man” (or woman) can be installed.
But can this actually drain his support? With the rise of tribalism among whites, I can’t assume that it will.
There’s still a lot of Star Wars nerds out there. Maybe some of them even read this blog.
The production values here are pretty impressive. Looks like a lot of money went into this (costumes, props, sets, actors, etc.) and I KNOW it took a lot of time to put it together.
For all you manosphere bloggers out there who prefer the stick figure silicone Barbie Dolls, you might get a chuckle out of this.
For the red pill aspiring alpha who believes that for a chick to have a “feminine” figure she must resemble a transgender poster child…this video is for you!
Happy Friday.
Red-Blooded American Men Examine Pop-Culture and the World
