Christopher Wilde's Blog
October 19, 2017
July 4, 2017
A New Novel
My new novel, "The-Loyal," is in the hands of my editor. Hope to have it available by the end of the summer. It's the story of a second US Civil War that takes place in 2018. Here's a little introduction:
There were few large gatherings to usher in the 2020 New Year, but even here, in New York, the excitement was muted. Our nation’s celebration was constrained like a Fourth of July that fell during a drought. Everyone wanted the fireworks, but no one wanted to risk the ravages of yet another wildfire. The bloody civil war was over and we had won without artillery, rockets, or missiles. In the end, our forces swept the battlefield and overtook twenty million of theirs. They’d barely gotten ten thousand of ours: approximately five thousand dead and another fifty-five hundred imprisoned.
Times Square was by far the most crowded, though not a soul over fifty. Martial law had only been lifted the month before. The young had successfully claimed this night as their own celebration. It was as close as The-Loyal might ever get to an Independence Day of our own. The ball dropped at midnight and our eyes followed the fireworks with a few oohs and aahs, but our hearts and minds were already on next week.
All political parties had unilaterally agreed to announce their candidates for the November election on Monday. It was a concession to bipartisanship, an acknowledgment that the nation needed healing and not another long, dragged out, political culture war. This détente might not last. Hopefully, it will hold until the memory of the war has faded after we’ve grown long in the tooth ourselves and look with some trepidation upon the sharp elbows of a younger generation.
The last fire flower had bloomed and died, its ghostly shadow was still clinging in the unseasonably humid air. People had started to silently shuffle to subway steps or were checking their phones for their Lyfts and Ubers when a voice cried out. “Atwood!”
Everyone stopped, turned, and looked back up. Her face on the city block long mega-screen. A clever hacking of the screen or a direct subversive act by a worker. Come morning there would undoubtedly be an investigation and someone would probably lose their job.
Like an ocean wave precipitating the rise of some ancient leviathan a chorus of voices crested and crashed down all around me. “Atwood, Atwood, Atwood.” Some brave souls beat their chests twice, extended their arm, and hung their heads.
There were few large gatherings to usher in the 2020 New Year, but even here, in New York, the excitement was muted. Our nation’s celebration was constrained like a Fourth of July that fell during a drought. Everyone wanted the fireworks, but no one wanted to risk the ravages of yet another wildfire. The bloody civil war was over and we had won without artillery, rockets, or missiles. In the end, our forces swept the battlefield and overtook twenty million of theirs. They’d barely gotten ten thousand of ours: approximately five thousand dead and another fifty-five hundred imprisoned.
Times Square was by far the most crowded, though not a soul over fifty. Martial law had only been lifted the month before. The young had successfully claimed this night as their own celebration. It was as close as The-Loyal might ever get to an Independence Day of our own. The ball dropped at midnight and our eyes followed the fireworks with a few oohs and aahs, but our hearts and minds were already on next week.
All political parties had unilaterally agreed to announce their candidates for the November election on Monday. It was a concession to bipartisanship, an acknowledgment that the nation needed healing and not another long, dragged out, political culture war. This détente might not last. Hopefully, it will hold until the memory of the war has faded after we’ve grown long in the tooth ourselves and look with some trepidation upon the sharp elbows of a younger generation.
The last fire flower had bloomed and died, its ghostly shadow was still clinging in the unseasonably humid air. People had started to silently shuffle to subway steps or were checking their phones for their Lyfts and Ubers when a voice cried out. “Atwood!”
Everyone stopped, turned, and looked back up. Her face on the city block long mega-screen. A clever hacking of the screen or a direct subversive act by a worker. Come morning there would undoubtedly be an investigation and someone would probably lose their job.
Like an ocean wave precipitating the rise of some ancient leviathan a chorus of voices crested and crashed down all around me. “Atwood, Atwood, Atwood.” Some brave souls beat their chests twice, extended their arm, and hung their heads.
October 23, 2015
For Top Reviewers
If you are a top reviewer on GoodReads, YouTube, or another verifiable site please contact me for a free review copy of "Patriot of Last Resort."
Christopher Wilde
Christopher Wilde
October 22, 2015
My Life In Talk Radio: Why I Wrote, "The Patriot of Last Resort"
The novel “Patriot of Last Resort” is a story about two best friends, one a hard-core conspiracy enthusiast, the other a skeptic. The book was in part inspired by my experiences working as a late-night talk-radio host interviewing every manner of conspiracy peddler. The two characters are a reflection of the changes that have occurred in me over the course of a decade as I began to see the long-term detrimental effects that the conspiracy market was having on otherwise sane and rational people.
Oliver Stone’s conspiracy film “JFK” came out in 1991, setting the stage for the immensely popular “The X-Files” the following year. Conspiracy theories had gone mainstream, and I was part of a generation brought up in the wake of Watergate to mistrust the government. By the end of the ‘90s, Art Bell’s nationally syndicated talk-radio show on the paranormal was at the height of its popularity.
I’d just landed my first professional talk radio gig. I was going to be on the air seven days a week, six hours a night. You read that right: I had a lot of late-night air time to fill. We were a new, ambitious radio station, and we didn’t have a five-minute news feed at the top of the hour. We also had few commercials. This meant that I talked a lot with very few bathroom breaks.
In promos I was billed as the “Ironman of talk radio” because of the nonstop, triathlon-esque format. My show was called “Wilde in the Night,” and the mandate from the program director was that I was to do a show like Art Bell covering conspiracies and the paranormal.
At the time, I was just young and naive enough to find conspiracies titillating. Back then, conspiracy theorists were barely on the Internet. My interviews mostly consisted of authors publishing books about the illuminati, JFK, and Bigfoot. They had books to sell and we had time to fill. It was as fun as telling ghost stories around the campfire. The best stories always had an edge, a hint of believability.
Personally, I tried to keep an open mind. For me, that meant trying to give equal space in my head for the possibility that any particular conspiracy could be true, while trying to maintain some degree of skepticism. It’s a difficult balance to maintain, and in the end it’s not very useful at finding the truth of anything. Discovering truth is exclusively the domain of skepticism. Holding your head open to every crackpot conspiracy theory just means you’re wasting a lot of time not being skeptical, ignoring the most likely conclusion: that the person pitching the conspiracy theory is just spinning a yarn trying to make some money.
Night after night, I brought out guests to amuse and entertain my audience. We covered UFOs, ghost stories, and conspiracy theories trying to pump up our ratings. That all changed with one specific show. I was interviewing an author who’d written a book that claimed we’d never gone to the moon. I can’t remember his name, and when I look today at books related to the moon hoax, there are simply too many titles to determine which author I interviewed all those years ago. To be fair, I was very open to the possibility that we’d never gone to the moon. I wasn’t even born when we went to the moon; how could I know? To make the show more interesting I had another guest on at the same time: a local astronomer named Patrick Wiggins. Patrick worked at the planetarium and was known for taking groups of people out into the desert to assist them in looking at the stars through their telescopes.
The show lasted for about an hour with me playing devil’s advocate between the two guests, but mostly I was aggravating Patrick — a man of science who was annoyed that I was even pretending to go along with this hokum. Eventually, Patrick had had it. He said, and I’m paraphrasing here: “You know how anyone can prove that we’ve gone to the moon? When the Apollo astronauts landed on the moon, they erected large reflectors so that back here on Earth we could bounce lasers off the surface of the moon and take measurements. You can go to any one of a number of universities and observatories around the country and watch this being done.”
Lasers. It made such perfect sense to me. Patrick’s statement completely swept away every argument the moon-hoax guy had put forth during the show. His argument was so powerful that the popular show “MythBusters” did a segment about it in 2008.
I immediately turned to my guest and said, “Well. that’s compelling evidence. What do you say to that?” The moon-hoax guy stammered! It was clear he’d never received that rebuttal before, and he was completely unprepared to respond. During the whole interview he’d been pitching all of the “scientific research” he attested was in his book. In that moment, to me, he looked and sounded like a fool — and I felt like a fool for hosting him on my show. What really shocked me was the way the author was fishing around for an answer. It was clear the same guest who’d been pushing my audience to learn the truth wasn’t actually concerned with the truth at all.
Up until that moment, I’d held a belief that the authors pitching their conspiracies on my show actually believed they were true. In retrospect, that seems so silly; of course they don’t believe the conspiracies. They are in it to make money. I’ll grant you, there are some who have advocated the truth of a particular conspiracy for so long they have convinced themselves they believe it. But those people also tend to exhibit lunacy in many areas of their lives, not just this one.
I left radio in 2000. Before 9/11 occurred; before the explosion of conspiracy theories that can be found on the Internet at the touch of a button. Today, conspiracy theorists are a full-time multimillion-dollar propaganda industry. Thousands and thousands of websites exist covering every kind of conspiracy imaginable. You can listen to radio shows and podcasts for free, or you can pay money to buy books and videos.
After my career in radio, I became a grade-A skeptic and have sought to systematically unchain myself from false beliefs. I turned to writing fiction, and over the next decade I practiced my craft on and off like every good starving artist.
I joined Facebook around 2008, and by 2010 my “friends” list contained a few hundred people, all of whom I’d met in my adopted hometown of Salt Lake City.
Some of those friends turned out to be conspiracy theorists who believe that a U.S. government special-ops team blew up the World Trade Towers, that a plane hadn’t crashed into the Pentagon, and that our government is crop-dusting its citizens with chemical trails released from airplanes. Like a good talk-radio host I argued with them, and like a good skeptic I spent a ridiculous number of hours researching the veracity of 9/11 conspiracies.
Take any conspiracy video about 9/11, and with a modicum of research you can usually uncover a direct lie in the first ten minutes of the film. The people producing this propaganda do so using the same tricks conmen have always used: sleight of hand and misdirection. Pay attention and you can always learn the trick. Unfortunately, a lot of intelligent and otherwise rational people believe a lot of silly things. You can show them that they are being lied to and instead of getting angry at the liar or the lie, they’ll get angry at you for pointing it out.
I found myself constantly contrasting my past talk-show-host self with the man I had become. When I argued with people who bought into verifiably false conspiracies, I saw myself in them. I eventually realized it does very little to argue about the truth with people who want to believe a lie.
What was most frustrating is that these same people who claim to want to “wake up the world to the truth” have little use for and little interest in real conspiracies.
Any time two or more people plot to commit a crime, that is a real conspiracy. When major corporations bribe officials, deliberately put their workers in danger by skirting safety regulations, or bury reports and information about the safety of their products, that’s an actual conspiracy — and yet the same people who make noise over an alleged 9/11 conspiracy never raise a finger to demand that these companies are punished.
As I sit writing this, the automaker Volkswagen is embroiled in an actual conspiracy stemming from their use of software to skirt emissions tests. Their cars have been pumping dangerous poison into the air. Right now I know I could fill a small banquet room by giving a completely fabricated presentation showing how chemtrails from airplane exhaust is poisoning our children. I could not get those same people to picket for an hour protesting the industrial pollution coming out of any one of a number of nearby refineries. Listening to stories about chemtrails is entertaining; actually doing something to stop a real conspiracy is work.
At the heart of “Patriot of Last Resort” is a story about people who decide to do something drastic. It’s an exciting action adventure tale about two men in love with the same woman who are fed up with being lied to, fed up with doing nothing, and willing to go to extremes. It’s also a subtle taunt to conspiracy theorists: Put up or shut up. The characters are compelling, the writing clean and clear; you’ll find yourself caught up and entertained in their lives as much as you will in any conspiracy theory. The moral of the story is simple: Either we learn to do the hard work of holding corporations and government responsible for real conspiracies, or we risk a breakdown in our system that invites vigilantism. Get a copy for yourself and buy one for the conspiracy theorist in your life. The next time they go on about “the truth,” ask them a simple question: Are you going to do more than talk about it?
Click Patriot of Last Resort to order a copy.
Oliver Stone’s conspiracy film “JFK” came out in 1991, setting the stage for the immensely popular “The X-Files” the following year. Conspiracy theories had gone mainstream, and I was part of a generation brought up in the wake of Watergate to mistrust the government. By the end of the ‘90s, Art Bell’s nationally syndicated talk-radio show on the paranormal was at the height of its popularity.
I’d just landed my first professional talk radio gig. I was going to be on the air seven days a week, six hours a night. You read that right: I had a lot of late-night air time to fill. We were a new, ambitious radio station, and we didn’t have a five-minute news feed at the top of the hour. We also had few commercials. This meant that I talked a lot with very few bathroom breaks.
In promos I was billed as the “Ironman of talk radio” because of the nonstop, triathlon-esque format. My show was called “Wilde in the Night,” and the mandate from the program director was that I was to do a show like Art Bell covering conspiracies and the paranormal.
At the time, I was just young and naive enough to find conspiracies titillating. Back then, conspiracy theorists were barely on the Internet. My interviews mostly consisted of authors publishing books about the illuminati, JFK, and Bigfoot. They had books to sell and we had time to fill. It was as fun as telling ghost stories around the campfire. The best stories always had an edge, a hint of believability.
Personally, I tried to keep an open mind. For me, that meant trying to give equal space in my head for the possibility that any particular conspiracy could be true, while trying to maintain some degree of skepticism. It’s a difficult balance to maintain, and in the end it’s not very useful at finding the truth of anything. Discovering truth is exclusively the domain of skepticism. Holding your head open to every crackpot conspiracy theory just means you’re wasting a lot of time not being skeptical, ignoring the most likely conclusion: that the person pitching the conspiracy theory is just spinning a yarn trying to make some money.
Night after night, I brought out guests to amuse and entertain my audience. We covered UFOs, ghost stories, and conspiracy theories trying to pump up our ratings. That all changed with one specific show. I was interviewing an author who’d written a book that claimed we’d never gone to the moon. I can’t remember his name, and when I look today at books related to the moon hoax, there are simply too many titles to determine which author I interviewed all those years ago. To be fair, I was very open to the possibility that we’d never gone to the moon. I wasn’t even born when we went to the moon; how could I know? To make the show more interesting I had another guest on at the same time: a local astronomer named Patrick Wiggins. Patrick worked at the planetarium and was known for taking groups of people out into the desert to assist them in looking at the stars through their telescopes.
The show lasted for about an hour with me playing devil’s advocate between the two guests, but mostly I was aggravating Patrick — a man of science who was annoyed that I was even pretending to go along with this hokum. Eventually, Patrick had had it. He said, and I’m paraphrasing here: “You know how anyone can prove that we’ve gone to the moon? When the Apollo astronauts landed on the moon, they erected large reflectors so that back here on Earth we could bounce lasers off the surface of the moon and take measurements. You can go to any one of a number of universities and observatories around the country and watch this being done.”
Lasers. It made such perfect sense to me. Patrick’s statement completely swept away every argument the moon-hoax guy had put forth during the show. His argument was so powerful that the popular show “MythBusters” did a segment about it in 2008.
I immediately turned to my guest and said, “Well. that’s compelling evidence. What do you say to that?” The moon-hoax guy stammered! It was clear he’d never received that rebuttal before, and he was completely unprepared to respond. During the whole interview he’d been pitching all of the “scientific research” he attested was in his book. In that moment, to me, he looked and sounded like a fool — and I felt like a fool for hosting him on my show. What really shocked me was the way the author was fishing around for an answer. It was clear the same guest who’d been pushing my audience to learn the truth wasn’t actually concerned with the truth at all.
Up until that moment, I’d held a belief that the authors pitching their conspiracies on my show actually believed they were true. In retrospect, that seems so silly; of course they don’t believe the conspiracies. They are in it to make money. I’ll grant you, there are some who have advocated the truth of a particular conspiracy for so long they have convinced themselves they believe it. But those people also tend to exhibit lunacy in many areas of their lives, not just this one.
I left radio in 2000. Before 9/11 occurred; before the explosion of conspiracy theories that can be found on the Internet at the touch of a button. Today, conspiracy theorists are a full-time multimillion-dollar propaganda industry. Thousands and thousands of websites exist covering every kind of conspiracy imaginable. You can listen to radio shows and podcasts for free, or you can pay money to buy books and videos.
After my career in radio, I became a grade-A skeptic and have sought to systematically unchain myself from false beliefs. I turned to writing fiction, and over the next decade I practiced my craft on and off like every good starving artist.
I joined Facebook around 2008, and by 2010 my “friends” list contained a few hundred people, all of whom I’d met in my adopted hometown of Salt Lake City.
Some of those friends turned out to be conspiracy theorists who believe that a U.S. government special-ops team blew up the World Trade Towers, that a plane hadn’t crashed into the Pentagon, and that our government is crop-dusting its citizens with chemical trails released from airplanes. Like a good talk-radio host I argued with them, and like a good skeptic I spent a ridiculous number of hours researching the veracity of 9/11 conspiracies.
Take any conspiracy video about 9/11, and with a modicum of research you can usually uncover a direct lie in the first ten minutes of the film. The people producing this propaganda do so using the same tricks conmen have always used: sleight of hand and misdirection. Pay attention and you can always learn the trick. Unfortunately, a lot of intelligent and otherwise rational people believe a lot of silly things. You can show them that they are being lied to and instead of getting angry at the liar or the lie, they’ll get angry at you for pointing it out.
I found myself constantly contrasting my past talk-show-host self with the man I had become. When I argued with people who bought into verifiably false conspiracies, I saw myself in them. I eventually realized it does very little to argue about the truth with people who want to believe a lie.
What was most frustrating is that these same people who claim to want to “wake up the world to the truth” have little use for and little interest in real conspiracies.
Any time two or more people plot to commit a crime, that is a real conspiracy. When major corporations bribe officials, deliberately put their workers in danger by skirting safety regulations, or bury reports and information about the safety of their products, that’s an actual conspiracy — and yet the same people who make noise over an alleged 9/11 conspiracy never raise a finger to demand that these companies are punished.
As I sit writing this, the automaker Volkswagen is embroiled in an actual conspiracy stemming from their use of software to skirt emissions tests. Their cars have been pumping dangerous poison into the air. Right now I know I could fill a small banquet room by giving a completely fabricated presentation showing how chemtrails from airplane exhaust is poisoning our children. I could not get those same people to picket for an hour protesting the industrial pollution coming out of any one of a number of nearby refineries. Listening to stories about chemtrails is entertaining; actually doing something to stop a real conspiracy is work.
At the heart of “Patriot of Last Resort” is a story about people who decide to do something drastic. It’s an exciting action adventure tale about two men in love with the same woman who are fed up with being lied to, fed up with doing nothing, and willing to go to extremes. It’s also a subtle taunt to conspiracy theorists: Put up or shut up. The characters are compelling, the writing clean and clear; you’ll find yourself caught up and entertained in their lives as much as you will in any conspiracy theory. The moral of the story is simple: Either we learn to do the hard work of holding corporations and government responsible for real conspiracies, or we risk a breakdown in our system that invites vigilantism. Get a copy for yourself and buy one for the conspiracy theorist in your life. The next time they go on about “the truth,” ask them a simple question: Are you going to do more than talk about it?
Click Patriot of Last Resort to order a copy.
