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Don’t assume I’m being hyperbolic when I describe Kurt Schlichter’s latest book as horrifying, violent, bloody and frightening. Even these words are not sufficient to indicate how devastated I was during and after I read Schlichter’s
Schlichter decided to write a book about how an October 7 massacre could happen in this country. My first reaction was skepticism—our conditions are so different than Israel’s. But I was still intrigued to see how Schlichter would address this topic, and I wasn’t disappointed.
Except it did scare me to death.
Schlichter explained his plans for, and purpose in, writing the book:
Understand that everything here is all plausible – I spoke to people in the know. I was also concerned that I not give out information helpful to the savages. I obscured some things and excluded others because I do not want to assist anyone who would do us harm. However, do not imagine that they could not think up everything I discuss here and worse. And believe me, there is worse.
He described those horrible three days through the stories he created of people who fought against the Attack and survived it. The people he featured were just like all of us: military, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, police officers, TV broadcasters, FBI, Colorado National Guard, paramedic, business owner/deer hunter, radical demonstrator, insurance risk specialist, professors, computer techs, and many more. No one came through the experience without being transformed. And everyone realized that if changes were not made in this country, it could happen again.
Schlichter related the many circumstances where we have neglected the security of our country and have lived in a naïve bubble, leaving us vulnerable. This is a partial list: open borders; an invisible currency exchange; illegal gun shipments; training bases in Syria, Iran and Libya; the cartels on the southern border; college radicals supplied by government loans and grants; complicity of college administrators; migration of military age males from Arab, Afghan and Muslim populations; long-term sleeper cells.
Americans assumed that diverse Arab populations from all over the world would not work together but led by Iran, they united under the goal of destroying the Great Satan.
The author kept me engaged, even when the brutality made it difficult to work my way through the book. Many of the characters he created had an ironic sense of humor; some of them demonstrated tremendous courage; others were resourceful and could anticipate the terrorist strategies and respond accordingly.
How were these acts carried out across the country?
Asymmetricity is how a nominally weaker force defeats a nominally stronger one by carefully applying each of its limited strengths against the limited weaknesses it identifies in the stronger.
He also clarified the mindset of these terrorists:
Some people try to call it madness. It is not. Do not think of them as insane. That gives them a moral pass for choosing a barbaric moral framework. They are not mad. They are evil. And they are usually fully prepared to die in perpetuating their evil, either from pride or what we see as ridiculous promises of paradise with their virgins and so forth.
I must say I especially appreciated his unnamed references to Biden and Harris (who were present for this calamity and were helpless to respond) and a new President who looked like Trump, after Mike Johnson stepped in to guide the country in the interim.
I’m glad I read the book, as disturbing as it was. The possibility, maybe even the probability for this type of event, can’t be ignored. Or if it is ignored, just like it was eventually forgotten after 9/11, we may lose even more.
Schlichter concluded his book with the following statement:
I hope The Attack helps make people think and inspires them to act before this nightmare becomes real, at least on the individual level, because there are bad people out there who want us dead. While this story is fiction, that part is not.
How do you see the possibilities of this type of attack?
[My thanks to the Ricochetti, whose name I can’t remember, who recommended this book.]
Discussion (19)
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I have been listening to Falling Empires and have paused it because it is too disturbing (and recognizable) as to how America can be destroyed. It is hard to imagine that we can make ourselves so vulnerable without suffering a terrible fate. It doesn’t mean that we don’t survive somehow, but the ordeal will be profound.
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William Forstchen's Day of Wrath is, I think, similar. I decided to set it aside; perhaps I'll finish it one day, or maybe not. I don't have a stomach for stories of plausible mass terrorism, and I'm not one who needs his eyes opened to the possibility: I've been vocally anti-Islam for decades.
We are a largely open society, and I like it that way. Yes, we're vulnerable: the cost of not being vulnerable is a level of surveillance and control that I'd find unacceptable -- and, at that, we'd still be vulnerable.
So what do we do?
Elect people who see no place for DEI in our various security and law enforcement agencies (nor, for that matter, anywhere else). Elect people who believe that nations need borders, and that those borders must be competently defended. Take national security seriously. Try to prevent Islamist theocracies from acquiring weapons of mass destruction.
Work to increase global prosperity by sensibly encouraging trade with relatively free people everywhere. Islam is a religion for impoverished and marginalized people. Use America's incredible energy wealth to pressure the Arab oil-producing nations to reform Islam. To the extent that the Constitution allows it, get Arab oil money out of our universities and other institutions, and take a hard look at Islamic madrasas here in the US.
Stop pretending that Islam is a "religion of peace." It isn't. It's an intolerant, supremacist quasi-political doctrine that effectively enslaves half of its members and threatens everyone else in direct proportion to its prevalence in a society.
Be armed and aware. I started carrying a gun immediately following the 2004 Beslan school massacre. An armed citizenry isn't enough to prevent organized state actors from inflicting carnage, but most terrorist acts are small.
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This. We are a hundred times more vulnerable to a terror attack than Israel. Israel is a response to the most horrible terror assault any people has endured. A nation born in the defiance of terror and annihilation. Our cultural core is avarice. We are led by a man who has sold his influence to hostile foreign powers and served by an FBI and CIA that has gone all in on the corruption of their nation. All driven by oligarchs pursuing a replacement population theory, chaos be damned, to suppress wages and so bloat their already monstrously bloated fortunes. The opposition to this bloc in the current election is a popular response to that disorder (thus populist must be made a cuss word) by monstrously rich oligarchs who retain some sympathy for the common man whose forefathers were the heroes of Lexington and Concord and Yorktown and Normandy. But incessantly harass me with texts in hopes that in my anger I will vote against them, too. For my part, whatever makes Whoopi, the oligarch-lite rage clown, livid beyond all reason must serve as my political north, text assaults notwithstanding.
It's all about the avarice.
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I think all your suggestions are possible, except this one I copied here. I can't imagine there's enough money for them to bow to our wealth, Hank.
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