Authors: Reed Sprague
The phone calls Peterson placed for his work as a lobbyist were seldom answered or returned. No one recognized his name on their Caller I.D. He was never able to bed down with the people in Washington who offered their money to the politicians in exchange for political favors, and he couldn’t seem to get to know the politicians who offered to sell their services to the lobbyists. He was a lousy middleman. He had no club memberships, connections, or influence of any kind with the people who mattered. Nothing. He ate lunch alone each day.
Politicians ran for elected office without considering Peterson’s advice or even noticing that it was available to them. His political counsel could be found only on his radio talk show; he had no individual clients. The few politicians who had heard of Peterson believed that his advice wasn’t worth looking for on the radio dial or anywhere else.
Peterson’s radio talk show on WNWD, 1420 AM, is still broadcast daily at two o’clock in the morning. It has been broadcast live at that ungodly hour for twenty–one years. His show attracts a handful of listeners and even fewer actual callers. His listeners are those odd individuals among us who live their lives on the outer fringes of one extreme philosophy or another. They are the people you hear about who stay awake all night and well into the following morning festering because of their obsessions over the conspiracies that they believe fuel society’s engines of inequity. Before Peterson’s listeners go to bed each morning, they write voluminous e–mail messages and blog entries to their virtual friends telling them of the “real story” they heard on Peterson’s show.
Dante Hall, Martin Samuel and Stuart Gualt are the only three of Peterson’s listeners who are known by name. They’re fake callers who are each known by hundreds of false names and nearly as many fake voices. Each calls into Peterson’s show on a regular basis and uses a disguised voice and a false name to make it seem that Peterson has an audience. Peterson means that much to them. These are three guys you want your children and grandparents to stay away from. They’re the cream of the rotten coconuts—the toxic milk. Prime loons. Intelligent, but not smart. Truly dangerous. Years ago they were referred to as the three blind disciples or three blind stooges. Take your pick. Not any longer, though. They’re Peterson’s gulls, alright — his and only his — but they’re nobody else’s fools. Peterson’s many strange explanations of society’s conspiracies are gospel to them.
These three would get even with the world if they ever got their hands on a nuclear bomb or on any other weapon of mass destruction. It’s all so simple to them: God is an instrument of vengeance, Peterson is God’s puppeteer, and they are Peterson’s obedient followers. Their job is to be astonished and enamored by Peterson, and so they are. They love Peterson with a very strange love.
Peterson’s claims that his radio talk show reaches uncounted thousands each day seem true. And in a way, those claims are true. It’s a play on words, though. The thousands are not counted. Peterson doesn’t count. The radio station that broadcasts Peterson’s talk show doesn’t count either. The station can’t afford a ratings survey.
It became clear last February that behind all the murky numbers, Peterson’s professional efforts had produced no fruit. He had suffered through a life of professional humiliation. The depressing facts about Peterson’s life to that point were that few people knew who he was, and even fewer cared that he existed. Peterson was a nobody. His life for twenty years was one of bondage and obscurity in a black hole called the smalltime. Still, Peterson believed that he was a somebody—a somebody that the world stubbornly refused to revere or even acknowledge.
Peterson recently experienced a powerful personal vision. He described it as “an awakening that will morph into my own personal epiphany.” That’s how he chose to spin it. A more accurate version of his vision: Twenty years in his decrepit office, staring at his sad surroundings and rigging the numbers finally got to him. He was desperate. He had to make a move, and his move had to be dramatic. It had to catapult him out of the depths of his dark pit where few could see him and all could look down on him. He longed to be up, seated majestically on his perch, so that all could behold and admire him. With no other options available to him, Peterson began a campaign last February that he believed would deliver him to the liberty and prominence available in the bright lights of big–time public notoriety.
It actually worked. In eleven short months, Peterson did what he had been unable to do in twenty years: He succeeded at something. His campaign culminated with tonight’s acceptance speech to the annual convention of the American Conservative Consortium. These ACC people are amazing. They bought Peterson’s numbers without checking his math. They now own his story and he owns theirs. Peterson is their hero, and they are his admirers and followers.
As I write this, Peterson is addressing the ACC as its newly–elected president. He is now officially out of his black hole. As he speaks, the bright spotlights of the auditorium shine only on him. His new disciples here tonight are listening intently to his proclamations.
Tonight’s acceptance speech caps Peterson’s coronation ceremonies, begun three days earlier, and officially kicks off his three–year term. He began his riveting speech fifty–two minutes ago after ACC’s outgoing president, the Rev. Dr. James Vernon Wilder IV, laid hands on him and prayed a special prayer of blessing on him and his coming three–year term.
Sydney Albert, my boss at the United States Federal Intelligence Agency, is sick of hearing my repeated warnings about Peterson. Albert considers Peterson to be harmless. I disagree. Perhaps to appease me and shut me up, Albert told me to go ahead and attend Peterson’s coronation ceremonies, especially tonight’s speech. Albert instructed me to keep an eye on Peterson and his new flock, and report back to him with what he undoubtedly hopes will be my final report on Peterson.
After I submit my report, Albert will probably spend an hour or so of his time listening to me ramble while acting interested in my report and in what I have to say to explain it. He’ll file away my report in some archive at a remote USFIA office, then get on with what he feels is the truly important work of the USFIA—work that does not include concerns about Peterson. Albert will then be satisfied that he allowed a junior agent of the USFIA to voice his opinions, regardless of how outrageous those opinions seem to be.
I have made it known that I suspect that Peterson has evil motives. I have already written several reports to my superiors and peers alike at the USFIA in which I stated that I believe that Peterson might position himself to seize more power and influence well beyond that of the presidency of the ACC. I wrote that Peterson demonstrates the early signs of a person with the potential to one day mount a revolution against the United States. No one listened to me. The gossip in the office was that I was right about Peterson, but someone at the very top was for Peterson and against me, so my opinions about Peterson were to be quietly set aside while I was constantly assigned to cases that were far removed from Peterson.
Anyway, back to Peterson. The man can deliver a speech. That’s his one skill. Even before his eleven–month campaign, Peterson was known for his speaking abilities. Except that in those days, he rarely got the opportunity to deliver a speech.
Peterson is known for telling a crowd what they want to hear and for using the rhetoric of the speech he delivers to them to manipulate them while appearing to maintain deep, immutable convictions of his own. I am concerned that Peterson possesses only one deep and unchangeable conviction: to grab power for himself.
Whatever his motives, Peterson is an opportunist who knows how to seize the moment. He can convince a crowd that they need to act in unison to save their grandmothers, or he can convince the same crowd that they need to turn against their grandmothers to save the U.S. for God. Tonight’s crowd is being told that they must save the U.S. for God. So far there has been no mention of their grandmothers.
Peterson’s speeches are often in conflict with one another. To one group he might rail about the evils of socialism; to the next he might speak of the necessity for the government to provide for the basic needs of its people. Though Peterson seems to speak in absolutes, he always leaves himself an out. His speaking skills are such that he is able to appear to make an irrefutable case during a particular speech, yet he could later claim to have meant something that was the opposite from what had appeared to be clear during the speech.
Tonight’s speech is shaping up to be a masterpiece of Peterson–speak. Peterson’s voice and physical gestures are becoming more intense as he approaches the end of his speech. It’s difficult to decide if his words are toxic, harmless, or somewhere in between.
“…and so, in closing, I leave you with these final thoughts.
“Perilous times are here, and America is in serious trouble. Not due solely to her recent economic and political catastrophes or her obvious moral decadence. And not even due exclusively to the fact that senseless, violent crime is completely out of control, and that her streets are owned by punks and thugs—monsters who roam wildly, seeking whom they may destroy. They were taught from an early age that they came from primates, and today they are acting the parts. No, as bad as these problems are, they are only symptoms. The root causes of these immense and pervasive symptoms, and more, are even worse; they’re far worse.
“America is in distress because for decades, nearly a century, her citizens have been invading her treasury. And she is in trouble because her businesses are run by her government. Her Christianity has been arrogated and hopelessly compromised by doctrinal imbeciles who occupy the see of theological elitism. They’re usurpers, all of them. May they be forever damned for their apostasy!
“Sound economic policy has been defined by those in government and by liberal university professors to be nothing more than the reckless distribution of money, food, medicine and any other commodity. They have decided for us that ‘economic policy study and analysis’ can only determine that money must be printed and then distributed to the citizens. Their agenda is socialist. The success of their reasoning and even their level of intelligence are measured by the number of agenda items accomplished rather than by logic, intellectual honesty or the lessons of history.
“America is in trouble because she has become a socialist state. She is guilty of the crime of socialist oppression. A government that gives to its citizens will take more than it will give. For every dollar distributed to citizens, one freedom is taken. For every bureaucratic social program America enacted to help her citizens, she created one or more laws that restricted her people’s freedom. In her drive to be disparate, unique among history’s capitalist democracies, she has become hopelessly desperate. But we can save her. We must save her because God is watching us, and He is calling us to action.
“American businesses now suffer under intense regulation, and even outright government seizure. The principles of socialist government are being forced on our businesses today to the point that many of them operate as zombies, corporate somnambulists, marching about blindly, waiting for the government to tell them their next move.
“Our business schools want to produce future business executives who are individualists, capable of creating and operating successful independent businesses. But American business colleges can’t do that today. Their commodity, the business graduate, is not produced in their factories using their precise recipe, even though that recipe is well known and well tested.
“Their graduate is, instead, venturing out into the business world as a sort of strange hybrid—one–third independent, one–third socialist, one–third zombie; but the math doesn’t add up. These hybrids are one hundred percent dependent and one hundred percent socialist. The business training they receive in business school means nothing to the graduates. The government is in full control. That’s all these graduates need to remember.
“Raise capital? No. The government will hand over capital to the businesses it determines to be worthy. Satisfy customers with a quality product? No. Products will be distributed to the populace by the government. Negotiate with and hire reliable workers and pay them fair wages and benefits? No. Not unless the government says that it’s a fair wage. Benefits paid by employers are not needed. The government provides all benefits. Outright communism would be better.
“And America has allowed her science to be defined by those who would dare to deny the Holy Word of God in favor of trying to prove the impossible—that His holy and sanctified species, human beings, descended from apes. We have replaced Christianity with scientific reasoning. It’s not that we now have science without God. It is rather that we have god without good. Evolution is now America’s god, so the good that was once defined by the one true and living God, and agreed on by the vast majority of Americans, no longer exists.
“It’s all going to change, though. Liberals — like their dinosaur ancestors they lay claim to — must take their places in the register of extinct species. The dinosaurs lose; look at the company they must keep from now on. Can you imagine? With the problems the dinosaurs have already, they now must share history with all of the failed liberal philosophies. What an awful way to live out your extinction!
“I appeal to you today to fight to the bitter end to stop this madness we now call America. We must demand the repeal of every social program ever enacted in the history of this nation. We must demand an end to socialism and we must do so now.
“It is incumbent on each of us to demand better from our leaders. Better through less. The people are best served by a government that serves least. It is time for a change, and we can and will usher in this new era. Just as the reckless liberal agenda shaped the previous hundred years or so, our ideals must shape the next century and even beyond.
“I encourage you to stay the course. Believe it or not, our current perils are signs that the war can be won. Big government is mortally wounded. Evolution suffers from its own malignancy. Communism has failed. Socialism is suffering immeasurably as it fights death to the end. Christians are disillusioned by the never–ending compromising of their faith by Christian leaders who find new ways each day to water down and render irrelevant the Christian message and faith. They’ve had enough, and they are now demanding leaders who are called by God rather than by His adversary.