SFR Sits Down with Brad Thor

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Frank Gaffney: We’re back; this is definitely the high point of my week. It is just another interview for our guest but he is in the midst of working many of them and I’m hoping that it will be as memorable for our audience as it certainly will be for me. Our guest is Brad Thor, the extraordinary author of some fifteen book now on various topics addressing in the most thrilling, the most provocative of ways the national security challenges of out time. He is extraordinarily good at it and has sold something like 11.5 million copies, but that doesn’t take into account those that will be sold for the new book, Code of Conduct. Act of war, Hidden order, Black list, Full Black are other ones, but Code of Conduct is the one were delighted to have a chance to talk with him about today. Brad Thor, thanks so much for joining us and this terrific new book

Brad Thor: Frank, it is always my pleasure to be with you, and I tell you as a thriller author, as somebody who writes fiction, I can’t tell you what a nice introduction that was. Thank you

Frank: it was heart felt and warranted needless to say. Listen, if you can, briefly, tell us a little bit about Code of Conduct. I’m part way through it and just transfixed by it, but I don’t want you to get too much out there, but enough to get our audience engaged as I know they will be in this book as they have in the past

Brad: so my job is to give people a white-knuckle edge of their seat thrill ride. So if you want to take it to the lake, to the pool, to the beach, I’m selling escape. That’s what I do I’m an entertainer. But I call what I do “faction”, where you don’t know where the facts ends and the fiction begin in my thrillers. I was captivated by two real life events that I said ‘if can put these into this summers book, this will be the most exciting book I’ve ever written’. The two items are: number one, somebody spent a fortune erecting what people have called the America Stonehenge down in Georgia, called the Georgia guide stones. It is a set of these huge slabs of rock that are basically predicting an incredible forced reset of the world. It is this globalist agenda. Now I’m not a black helicopter, tinfoil hat guy, but I thought ‘wow this is fascinating’. Nobody knows who erected these stones down in Georgia, but a lot of the things they are calling for also got leaked a couple years ago out of a top secret United Nations meeting in the Austrian alps. And I’ve never included the UN in any of my books because I just hold them at such a low esteem

Frank: It gets you to the black helicopters pretty quick doesn’t it?

Brad: Exactly! And that’s not my style, and that’s not what my thrillers are about, but as I see some of these issues bubbling up with different people that I consider villains, whether it’s a George Soros or a Maurice Strong, I just thought ‘wow, if I can weave just a tiny bit of this into my new thriller its going to be fascinating’. Especially set against Washington D.C., which in Code of Conduct I call the new Rome on the Potomac. There is no collapsing real-estate prices there, paychecks are only going up and I tell my children that D.C. is like Jabba the Hut from Star Wars, if you suggest Jabba the Hut go on a diet, he’s going to send Boba Fett after you in the form of a weaponized IRS, or EPA. So to take a kind of international espionage story and mix in some of these things that are starting to jump up in front of me and say ‘hey you know what, some of these things warrant people paying attention to’. That’s the fun from my novels, you actually have that great beach read, but you close the book hopefully smarter. You walk away from a great piece of fiction saying ‘alright, I can actually talk about some of these thing and would like to know some more about it

Frank: yeah that’s the key thing I think you are really opening doors to all of us to focus on matters that really could be determinative of our future security; and I love the concept of faction because you really are bringing an awful lot of facts and insights to real world operations and capabilities, but doing it in a very deft and fictionalized way. Brad Thor, let me ask you about one of the other issues that has vexed you and informed some of your faction in the past. That is the vulnerability of our electric grid. I was talking earlier in the program with congressman Lee Zeldin about this as a concern and I know it is for you, whether it is induced by the kind of attacks that your characters address in book after book, or from natural occurring phenomena. How serious a problem do you think this really represents?

Brad: I think it’s a huge problem and I dealt with it in my thriller last summer, Act of War. I think it’s a huge, huge problem that we all need to be tuned into. And I will say something to you Frank and to your listeners particularly about this issue. If anyone has any doubt whether or not what Edward Snowden did was a good thing or a bad thing–you know he exposed the mass collection of metadata by the NSA–he’s a bad, bad guy. And the American public has no idea how badly we have been compromised and how much he has handed over to the Russians and the Chinese. I will say this: the fact that the Russians can shoot down a jetliner with absolutely no consequences, that they can go in and take the Crimean Peninsula with no consequences, shows you how impotent the United States is now to stand up to Russia because we don’t have any force. We have lost any ability to threaten them with consequences because of Snowden. So this idea of a nuclear EMP weapon being used: you know, everyone laughed at the North Koreans when they had their underground tests several years ago, and they said the yield was so bad. Well, the yield may be unimpressive if you think they’re developing a conventional nuclear weapon. If they are miniaturizing things that can be used for EMP purposes, that suddenly takes on a whole new light. So I hate to be on someone’s program and promote books other than my own, but I love reading and there’s three hundred sixty five days in the year and I love turning people onto great books and probably the best piece of fiction, one of my favorite all time books that dealt with an EMP was William Forstchen book called One Second After. I get chills just saying the title. It was just fantastic. So if somebody was looking for an additional great beach read this summer, I highly, highly recommended it. They will walk away going ‘I get it and I’m terrified but what a great thriller that was’.

Frank: let me just say were talking with Brad Thor, he is the author most recently of Code of Conduct, read it first because you’ll read it very quickl,y it is the thing you truly can’t put down, and then turn to Will Forstchen book. Let me ask you in closing Brad because you have a sense of the vox populi as well as how to appeal to it. President Obama has made much of the fact that we’re better respected around the world. What you’ve just said about Russia, for example, certainly suggests otherwise. Looking forward to the 2016 election, how important is it to you, do you think, and to the American people that we engage in a kind of course correction to get that respect rooted once again and sort of what Reagan called peace through strength.

Brad: You just read my mind. I know that you and I have a shared love of president Reagan and peace through strength was exactly what I was going to say. That needs to be at the very forefront. The way we get peace through strength is a President who believes in our military and who also has the tool to help us rebuild our economy. Because when the American economy is strong, and we are humming along, that really smooth the road in so many other areas. So the economy is very important, but also a president who believes in our military. I don’t believe you know this, but I have thrown in with Governor Perry, who ran the twelfth larges economy in the world, Texas. And if he can do for the United States, and I spent a lot of time with him cause I was unimpressed with his debate performance last time around, so I went in the rhetorical ring with him and boxed with him for several days on foreign policy, domestic policy issues, all the way down to monetary policy, and I walked away very, very impressed, not only by his intelligence, but his leadership skills, and his commitment to the United States, and his belief which I share and I know you share that our best days as a national are in front of us, not behind us. We don’t need to go back to the 1990s of the Clintons, America is great, and America will re-achieve that greatness and be a beacon for the world once again. But it matters that we put the right person in the White House obviously my choice is Governor Perry, people may have other choices, but this really is an incredibly important election.

Frank: Brad Thor, I’m afraid well have to leave it at that. I cannot tell you how much I look forward to completing my own reading of Code of Conduct, your terrific new best selling book I’m quiet confident out on the seventh of July. We thank you for the time you’ve taken to discuss both it and other matters of state and for the great job you’re doing helping all of us understand how important our personal responsibility for thinking about them and voting concerning them is. Keep it up my friend. I hope you come back to us again very soon.