Reddit reviews The Terminal List: A Thriller (1)

Text wall rant about a TG doing something stupid and silly that dishonors the teams inbound. Hey, it is the off topic section.

I read this book, The Terminal List by Jack Carr, a retired SEAL who mentions it really prominently in marketing the book. He tries to use the Trident to build its brand, in other words.

I thought the premise sounded ridiculous but that it might be kind of fun to read. Instead it just pissed me off. Basically, it's a masturbation fantasy by a Trump supporter about murdering Hillary Clinton. The main villain is Secretary Lorraine Hartley (take out an R and A and it's a perfect anagram for 'Hillary Clinton'); to make it extra clear she's described as a liberal cabinet secretary who is the next prospective POTUS, as having began her political career as an activist before being captured by the system, and as having a husband with white hair she isn't close to who has a widely-known habit of infidelity that the American public nonetheless forgives him for because of his charm and charisma, which is said to exceed hers. Anyways, Lorraine is testing preemptive anti-PTSD medication with dangerous side effects on a random SEAL platoon as guinea pigs at the behest of a Pharma donor she is in bed with. A satisfactory reason for why they couldn't just, you know, use guinea pigs never really becomes apparent, although Carr tries lamely to answer that a couple times. We are assured that those in the know stand to make billions (I mean really, selling bad PTSD medication? That's the lamest conspiracy motivation I ever heard; there's maybe a couple million in that tops, which given that Clinton makes 400k a speech is a couple days worth of money to her). It gives them all brain tumors, so Clinton Hartley reaches out to the Taliban and organizes an ambush that kills all but a few of them, then has the rest killed by New Jalisco Cartel hitmen and corrupt NCIS agents, who also murder the whole family of the main character, Lieutenant Commander James Reece, who commanded this platoon that was otherwise wiped out. He survives, so she taps into a secret U.S. government program that radicalizes Muslims who believe they are really serving ISIS and deploys one of those sleeper agents against him, with the aid of a drone she puts up to track him on American soil. No one appears to notice or question that this breaks the law and is incredibly odd. Anyways, Reece survives that attack, too. He also has a brain tumor from the meds that will eventually kill him as far as he knows. Now having been transformed into a man with Nothing Left to Lose(TM), he has to kill everyone with a ton of weapons he stole from a SEAL armory. This includes Bill and Hillary the Hartleys, the cartel hitmen, the bigwigs in that Pharma company, the ranking SEAL admiral who is also an ally of hers, a JAG officer assisting him, and SoCal's highest ranking moderate muslim imam, who of course is really an ISIS operative that Lorraine organized the ambush by the Taliban through. Lorraine tries a few more wildly implausible ways of stopping him, like deploying a SEAL platoon on U.S. soil to kill him (no one really presses back very hard or resigns when it is repeatedly pointed out that this violates a huge number of laws; the issue that an incredible number of people now are in on the conspiracy, from the SEALs to that drone pilot and crew to everybody else listed is also not really addressed). Finally, Reece succeeds in killing everybody with weapons ranging from sniper rifles to truck bombs and coerced suicide bombers (whose family he is holding hostage; Carr assures us this is OK because he would never really hurt them, it's just a bluff) and flees the country. Reece shows all the evidence to a ballsy female reporter, who writes a muckraking piece that every single major media outlet turns down to Lorraine reaching out through the deep state to stop its publication. The Drudge Report finally courageously runs it (yes, the actual Drudge Report, not an analogous publication in the book's universe), and the elites reject it roundly as "fake news." Lorraine also uses the specter of Reece to try and paint him as a deranged domestic terrorist to make a broader point about how white men are the real terrorist threat and to push a domestic surveillance measure and a gun control act that outlaws private ownership. The media gleefully plays along by reporting that Reece is using a fully auto AK with a "fully automatic assault clip" he bought without a background check or something like that. Like I say, it's partisan red meat, a caricature of the world according to an extreme Trump supporter.

Ok, I can see why people might be asking at this point why any of this matters and heading to the downvote button. The reason why it pissed me off so much is two-fold. The first is that writing assassination fantasies about real people and selling them to those who dislike that person is obviously not cool. I'm not a Hillary fan, but you can't kill everybody who is unethical and/or disagrees with you. Carr is way outside of his lane on that one, especially given that this isn't exactly in line with the idea of respect for civilian control of the military and the authority of country's lawful leaders as granted by the Constitution. You know, the thing he swore an oath to. The second is that it wasn't enough for Carr to do that, he just had to abuse the SEALs' rep and prestige to try and sell it. Beyond the main character and his prominently displayed bio, he stuffed it with as many references to the Teams as he possibly could. This is blatant abuse of a revered and widely-regarded institution to try and do something very destructive that makes the problem of toxic partisanship much worse and helps further divide America while sending an implicit message that politicking with bullets instead of ballots is OK. I have a very big problem with that message. Making it worse is the fact that Jack Carr is not the only one who's doing this. Carl Higbie is advocating for creating a national Muslim database based on the Japanese internment camps as precedent, guys like Larry Bailey, Ben Smith, and others have gotten on the "Obummer is a secret Muslim who was born in Kenya" bandwagon, and Ryan Zinke keeps doing stuff like this while wearing a Trident lapel pin, which just sums up the whole problem. These guys can't just be clowns unto themselves, they're reflecting their light back onto their units as intensely as they can.

It's pretty clear that this a cultural problem specific to the SEALs, because I don't see members from many other units acting like this. It really needs to stop, because it's going to be really, really bad for the country if people start seeing the Teams as being pro-one candidate or another and if racists and conspiratards can wrap themselves in the Trident.