Glenn Beck - The Eye of Moloch

Perhaps he’d been mistaken.

That burning question—whether it was safer to wager the world’s destiny on the potential anarchy of human freedom, or to trust instead the steady, merciless hand of tyranny—perhaps it had already been answered.

Perhaps men even more astute than he had once wrestled with that same fundamental puzzle. They wrote and ratified their astounding solution in four simple pages—those pages were on the table in front of him—then they’d risked everything to establish a place—one single haven—where good people could come and prosper and live their lives free from the ceaseless meddling of the ruling class.

They hadn’t presumed that they could save the whole world, and they’d never intended to conquer it. But if this brash experiment could manage to banish the tyrants and succeed on its own shores, and if the wider world was then saved through its example, all the better.

Such thinking was backward, simple-minded, a laughably naïve concept completely unfit for modern governance—that’s what Arthur Gardner had always believed. These were only more lies of a different flavor than the ones he created, aimed to be embraced mainly by flag-waving, gun-toting, Bible-thumping misfits.

But his earlier thought arose again, and it persisted: perhaps he’d been wrong.

And so, in accordance with his late wife’s final wishes, a few days ago he’d come to a decision. While he was far from a convert, as a social scientist he’d discovered an error in his method. There was an important hypothesis that had been neglected in his work, and that must be corrected. He would do nothing more in aid of either side, then, until the matter had been put to the test.

For this trial he would bring in a fair and impartial judge—a clear-eyed and apparently incorruptible pillar of virtue named Virginia Ward. If Jaime had been right, if these self-styled patriots truly had a cause worth fighting for, this woman would see it. And when she’d rendered her decision perhaps even Arthur Gardner might finally reconsider which side he should be on.

PART TWO

Chapter 22

Virginia Ward eased her Wrangler to a crawl, leaned right, and took her eyes off the rocky, pitted road just long enough for one last check of her face in the rearview mirror. Her features were lit warm in the last light of the day and she saw what she needed to see. There wasn’t a speck of vanity in the gesture; this was a field inspection, nothing more. Surviving the night was the main thing on her mind.

During the three-hour inbound flight she’d put herself together to make a mission-critical first impression, and yes, the woman in the mirror would deliver the needed effect. Dollar Store makeup with a hard working day’s wear; a sun-dried, honey-blond, no-nonsense hairdo, now mostly tucked up under a weathered bent-brim lady Stetson—she wore no wedding jewelry, and her Los Diablos sweatshirt was authentically faded from the decade or so since a woman of her age might have led the pep squad at Arizona State, back in her glory days. To the ruthless men she would soon be facing she’d look like a nonthreatening nobody, maybe the only neighbor willing and able to help her friends in need, the harmless and somewhat attractive single rancher-mom from the next spread up the interstate.

In a word, she looked disarming, and that should do.

The command post soon appeared ahead at the bleak descending end of a desert trail just barely fit for a rugged four-wheel drive. The post itself wasn’t much, and none of it had been there yesterday. A dark barracks-length tent, a hasty perimeter, and a couple of uniformed guards walking the line—still, it was the only trace of law and order in all these empty miles.

She saw that there was a diesel generator off to the side of the tent but it was still strapped to its trailer, untouched. Apparently these geniuses had decided to let the sun go down before anyone thought to get their power going. Such a lack of foresight didn’t bode too well for the brilliance of the rest of their plan, if they had a plan at all.

One of a pair of young sentries straightened himself up and began motioning toward a parking spot, sporting his best hard-guy face in preparation to challenge and screen the new arrival. But the wiser of the two, his weapon ready, wouldn’t peel his eyes from the long, hostile flats stretching south toward the horizon, down toward the border where the real danger lay.

Virginia made the turn and pulled to a stop as she was directed, just to the side of a freshly planted government-issued warning sign. She scanned what it said as she unbuckled her seat belt and got her ID and her sidearm in order, and then she paused to read over the sign once again, but slowly. After seven years attached to the Special Activities Division of the CIA she’d made a lot of vivid memories, but if she happened to make it back to the motel alive tonight, this sign would get its own four-star WTF page in her personal journal.

DANGER—PUBLIC WARNING

TRAVEL NOT RECOMMENDED

• Active Drug and Human Smuggling Area

• Visitors May Encounter Armed Criminals and Smuggling Vehicles Traveling at High Rates of Speed

•

Stay Away from Trash, Clothing, Backpacks, and Abandoned Vehicles

• If You See Suspicious Activity, Do Not Confront! Move Away and Call 911

Then, as though to normalize the unreal content that preceded it, the last bullet included a friendly, official travel tip from the U.S. Bureau of Land Management:

• The Bureau of Land Management Encourages Visitors to Use Public Lands North of Interstate 8

In other words, my fellow Americans, despite those bold lines on the map that you can see with your own eyes, your fretful government strongly recommends a hasty retreat toward the distant lights of Tucson. Turn and run if you know what’s good for you, because past this point it’s every man for himself. Whatever this place is, it isn’t Arizona anymore; you’re no longer standing on the land of the free.

Well, then, she thought. I guess we’ll have to see about that.

Virginia pulled her satchel and her cane from behind the passenger seat and pressed a switch on the dashboard to activate an all-band communications jammer in the rear compartment. Then she pocketed the keys, left her hat on the seat, flicked off the headlights, opened her door, and stepped out, good leg first.

In the course of a long and painful rehabilitation she’d come to think of her left leg in that way, as her good one, though of the two it wasn’t the limb she was born with. On the positive side it could be whatever she needed it to be, with nearly all the utility but none of the frailties of mere flesh and bone. Synthetic from mid-thigh to the ground, it was interchangeable with a number of purpose-designed replacements hung in her walk-in closet at home. Most were best suited for any one application, be it running, rock climbing, biking, or barhopping. The model she’d chosen for that night was on loan from MIT, and it was special—smooth Barbie leg on the outside, bleeding-edge mechanics on the inside.

Not that all its high-tech and titanium imparted any superhuman abilities, but while this leg looked just like a standard, stiff cosmetic prosthesis, it also restored about three-quarters of the practical function she’d had before she lost the original. And as Virginia Ward had proved to all those skeptics behind her at the last Hawaii Ironman, three-quarters of normal is about a thousand percent more than most might expect from a unilateral amputee.