Adolescence is toxic, we can all agree on that. But I wonder whether Reacher isn’t more dangerous.
Unlike Adolescence, which you’d only watch if you were a member of the brainwashed Normie chattering classes gulled by the notion that it’s landmark, important, state-of-the-nation TV, Reacher is the sort of thing you might easily mistake for harmless escapism.
I did so myself when I watched the first season, which I reviewed in the Spectator. “It sounds contrived, cartoonish and formulaic, which indeed it is a bit, but it’s done in so delightful a way that you really don’t mind,” I wrote. And: “…Great fun, one of those series you look forward to and could happily binge-watch, even though you know it’s not going to add much to your quotient of brain cells.”
Well, at least I was right about the brain cells. But Reacher isn’t just dumbed-down TV so moronically stupid it makes even retards feel brainy. It also serves a very deliberate and cynical propaganda purpose, which is stunningly obvious when you notice it but which most of its audience never will notice because they’re so busy congratulating themselves on what dumb-ass, so-bad-it’s-good, old fashioned entertainment they’re enjoying.
Perhaps the most shameless propaganda lurks within the central premise. Jack Reacher is an ex-Army investigator. His dad - Semper fi - was a Marine. He regularly collaborates with the police and with the three-letter agencies, sometimes going to bed with them if they are female and implausibly hot which at least one of them is per season. The guys he prefers to hang out with are all ex-military. The values he upholds are those of the military. Everything that is good about America is embodied in the military and, for the most part, by the mostly honest, decent, courageous, long-suffering, wise-cracking cops and the mostly brave, efficient, if frustratingly by-the-book three-letter agencies.
Do you see what might be wrong with any of that? Well, no, obviously if you’re a Normie, you wouldn’t. And therein lies the problem.
I’m reminded of my early days venturing down the rabbit hole and coming upon the work of Alan Watt, host of the Cutting Through The Matrix podcast. Watt knew more about the conspiracy realm than I’ll ever know and his podcasts were part of my education. Such a shame that I never got to have him on the Delingpod before he died (not unmysteriously, as is the way when you are too much over the target).
Anyway, I remember listening to one of Watt’s monologues where he was explaining that TV and film drama served two purposes - the ulterior one of entertainment and the hidden one of mass mind manipulation. The key to spotting the hidden one, he said, was to ignore the distractions of plot, character and incident and instead to focus on the broader overview of its depiction of the world.
So, for example, screen drama is a relentless promoter of sexual infidelity - to the point where if you’re not having an affair in your own life you feel like you’re missing out. Ditto drug and alcohol use. And - definitely worth listening to the podcast I did with Jason Christoff on this subject because it’s a real eye-opener - coffee-drinking.
But perhaps of all the narratives that TV drama pushes, none is so prevalent as the one that Reacher, and series like Reacher, ram down your throat until you almost choke: Authority is your Friend; the cops are there to help you; police corruption is so rare as to deserve its own BBC TV series Line of Duty illustrating just how exceptional it is; crimes get solved in the end, even if it has to be by one of those cold-case sleuths; and in the unlikely event that the police can’t help, well there’s always the super police - those amazingly talented, committed and professional three-letter agencies which are the last line of defence protecting all us humble, grateful ordinary folk from Those Who Would Seek To Destroy Us.
Rarely, if ever, is it mentioned that among Those Who Would Seek To Destroy Us are those three-letter agencies themselves. Nothing personal. They’re just doing their job. The three letter agencies - MI5 and MI6; the CIA; the FBI; the DEA; etc - do not work for us useless eaters and never have. Like the police, like the military, like all the various branches of the ‘security state’, they are there to serve the interests of the true rulers of this world, whom we might term the Predator Class or the Cabal.
Some readers may be offended at so bleak a characterisation of our heroic forces of law and order. Look, I’m not saying everyone who works for them is bad. Ted Gunderson: he was FBI, so there’s at least one exception straight off. But I am saying they are all bad institutionally because that is how they were designed. [See, eg, just how many police departments across the US states have the Masonic square and compass in their logo. Do you think in the eyes of such institutions everyone is equal before the law?]
It’s a hard pill for many of us to swallow, this notion that the Authorities are NOT our friend. And the reason it’s so unswallowable a pill is because it contradicts everything we’ve been told throughout our lives, not least by the idiot box in our sitting room. Dixon of Dock Green; Hawaii Five-O; The Sweeney; Kojak; Starsky and Hutch; The Professionals… I shudder now to think how many hours of my impressionable early years might have been squandered allowing myself to be brainwashed while under the delusion that I was being entertained.
Big-budget, mass market entertainment series like Reacher play an important role of this deception process. As Alan Watt used to explain, most of us have a false understanding of why it is that leading newscasters, top actors, high profile movie directors and bestselling writers are paid so much. We think - because we have been trained to do so - that it is all the result of public demand or market value. But it’s not. The real reason these people are paid so much is because their services are so valuable to the Cabal, which derives much of its power - and maintains that power - from their ongoing ability to push false narratives on the mass of the populace.
One of these false narratives concerns the identity of all those scary baddies who are out to get us. We are told, depending on the mood of the times, that we are threatened by evil Commies or Mafiosi or wicked Muslim terrorists or deranged serial killers or merciless drug dealers or - in the case of Adolescence - 13 year old white kids radicalised by Andrew Tate. I’m not trying to claim that there are not people in these categories who may pose a threat. (Well, apart from the 13-year old white kid one, which is the purest bollocks). What I am saying is that in reality most of these threats emanate, ultimately, from the small number of ‘elite’ families who run the world like a criminal cartel. Their business model includes: disaster capitalism; drugs; child trafficking; revolution; war. The ‘security services’ are there to facilitate this process, whether in the form of cover ups and misdirection (eg the police) or in the form of the assassinations and other black ops carried out by the Special Forces and the three-letter agencies.
Perhaps it now becomes clearer why the Reacher series of novels were allowed by the publishing industry and book trade to become such massive bestsellers. And why the latest TV adaptation is enjoying its third season on Amazon Prime. While its mainly Normie audience and readership are going “Tee hee! Reacher just did that cool thing where he breaks the dead guy’s limbs with his bare hands so he can hide the body in the trunk of the car!”, they are quietly being programmed into becoming the compliant idiots of the controlling elites.
Once you’ve started noticing, you can’t stop noticing. Another thing heavily promoted on Reacher is junk food consumption. Reacher himself is ludicrously buff, with the kind of physique you could only acquire as the result of hours, daily, in the gym, and a diet comprising raw eggs and grass fed beef. His crew are lean and agile. The women - at least the designated love interest ones - are toned. Yet not once do we see any of them doing anything that might contribute to this health and fitness. On the contrary, they are forever visibly bingeing on take outs and the kind of trash you might find on sale in gas stations. None of the good guys smokes, it’s true. (In Reacher, smoking is a bad-guy signifier). But I doubt that is for audience health-promotion reasons. More likely, it’s because the Cabal have realised that tobacco or nicotine are actually beneficial in warding off the ill-effects of some of the other stuff they use to poison us, like vaccines or 5G.
Then there are the baddies. The baddies in Reacher are baddies because they’re just EVIL. They’re guys like the latest baddie Xavier Quinn, a wrong un of indeterminate ethnicity whose main purpose in life - whatever he might imagine to the contrary - is to be so horrible, so brutal, so cacklingly villainous that when he is eventually killed by Reacher we can all go “Yay! Reacher finally nailed the bastard!”
But why is this series so eager to whip us up into a state where we don’t merely want the bad guys brought to justice but killed - and the more mercilessly the better? Because, of course, it wants to make us morally complicit in the kind of thing the security state already does, all the time, anyway - albeit unofficially. “I don’t want this bastard to have the luxury of a fair trial and life in prison,” you’re meant to go. “I want to see him die now!” So many cop films and TV shows do this - the tradition goes at least as far back as Dirty Harry (1971) where we just can’t wait to see that horrible, crazy evil guy wasted by Clint Eastwood’s .45 Magnum - that we now take it almost for granted. Reacher simply takes this formula to the next level. That is, if you are a baddie in Reacher, even if you’re just some kind of low-level henchman, the likelihood is that you’re going to exit the show not in handcuffs but via some savage, extra-judicial summary justice courtesy of our friend Jack Reacher.
In one particularly revolting scene in Season Three - well, I found it revolting, anyway - Reacher and his cute but capable girl DEA squeeze leave a wounded bad guy stranded on a blazing boat and rejoice as he goes up in flames. Really? Is this where we now are in our civilisational advancement? Where popular TV encourages us to rejoice in someone being burned alive because, hey, he deserves it, he’s a bad guy? Whatever happened to the rule of law? Whatever happened to the Christian possibility of redemption? Oh - and if summary justice is such a cool, sexy thing, how would we all feel if it were being administered against us, by some security state apparatchik without quite the same exaggeratedly refined sense of justice of the impeccably, nay almost tediously, moralistic Jack Reacher?
The other main function of the baddies in Reacher, of course, is to distract the viewer from thinking too hard about who is really behind the world’s worst criminal activity. Xavier Quinn is presented to us as some random, deus ex machina, mastermind of a gun-running operation attempting to supply all those cells of evil foreign terrorists who have infiltrated America and are trying to destroy it from within. Of course, in real life there would be no need for Reacher to spy on this operation and bust it wide open because the Authorities would already be aware of it and steering well clear, for fear of jeopardising a vital, Elites revenue stream run by the CIA. That’s why series like Reacher tend to get large amounts of technical advice and even financial support from the three letter-agencies. They tell the public exactly what the three-letter agencies want them to hear.
Watching Reacher with Awake eyes transforms your viewing experience. It’s unintentionally hilarious. There’s a scene in season three where one of the characters suddenly announces: “Pack your sunscreen. We’re going to LA.” Excuse me? You’ve got to admire the diabolical genius of this shoehorning-in, on the flimsiest of pretexts, of a product which every half-Awake person - but not Normies sadly - knows damn well to avoid like the plague. (Mind you, for the ‘no-sunscreen’ protocol properly to work you need to steer clear of seed oils. Which obviously Reacher and his crew don’t do: their diet is drowning in them…).
I guess the Normie hot-take counter to my thesis might be that Reacher, who is continually on the move, staying in cheap motels because he has no fixed abode, living out of a suitcase in the same rancid t-shirt which he has picked up in the local thrift store, is actually some kind of anti-Establishment off-grid role model. Nope. That doesn’t wash with me. If anything, he’s the poster boy for Klaus Schwab’s “You will own nothing and be happy.”
