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“I’m afraid optics are all that’s left inside the Beltway,”
For all its size and sophistication, even the American military was capable of little more than a lengthy string of elaborate failures.
The United States was as weak as it had been in human memory. Its people were unconcerned with anything but their own selfish needs and had turned their political system into just another source of cheap entertainment.
America’s ability to adapt and reinvent itself had been stripped away by politicians who had trained their constituents to view change with fear and anger.
was human nature to hate the traitor more intensely than the enemy,
The greatest obstacle ahead wasn’t the U.S. military or Irene Kennedy or even Mitch Rapp. It was his own arrogance.
took him back to a simpler time. A time when America’s enemies were external and could be eradicated with a gun.
“Being alone is simple. I like the freedom of knowing that I don’t have anyone to rely on and no one’s relying on me. There’s a clarity to it that you can’t get anywhere else.”
The malleability of truth was another disorienting thing that had crept into his world. There were hours of video and thousands of pages of documents demonstrating Barnett’s history of opposing U.S. operations in the Middle East. But it didn’t matter. All she had to do was get on TV and deny it. For her supporters, history would be erased.
This election is tearing the country apart as it is.”
He watched a woman struggle from the low-slung sports car with the help of the doorman and then teeter toward the entrance tugging at a miniskirt that seemed to be half-missing.
Where did he fit into a world where the definition of “enemy” was becoming a constantly shifting matter of perspective? Where people were judged by their words and not their actions? Maybe nowhere.
America’s refusal to deal with its addiction to narcotics and cheap labor was yet another gift from God. Instead of creating a coherent framework to provide those products and services, the very country that demanded them insisted that they be illegal. Predictably, the result was a spectacularly profitable black market that had generated a smuggling infrastructure unparalleled in human history.
And the American people…” His voice faded for a moment. “They faint if someone uses insensitive language in their presence and half of them couldn’t run up a set of stairs if you put a gun to their heads. What’ll happen if the real shit hits the fan?
Maybe it was time to hit the reset button on the world. Make people see that there were consequences to their actions. Make them remember what they had and value it enough to protect it.
There was no denying that the United States and its citizens had been strong in the early twentieth century—accustomed to death and hardship, led by competent politicians, and informed by an honest press. So much had changed in the last century. The American people were now inexplicably suspicious of modern medicine and susceptible to nonsensical conspiracy theories. They were selfish and self-absorbed, willing to prioritize their own trivial desires over the lives of their countrymen. Their medical system, designed less to heal people than to generate profits, would quickly collapse as it was
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The world was changing at an ever-increasing rate and that was a trend that couldn’t be stopped. These people were the ones who had been left behind. The ones who steadfastly refused to leave the dead cities they had been born in. The ones who saw themselves as America’s backbone but who survived on government aid and disability checks. Drug addicts, drunks, and halfwits incapable of performing anything but the simplest of tasks. Ironically, it was those self-destructive traits that made them so useful. Their inflated sense of worth and victimization was easy to manipulate. When asked what
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