April 9, 2011 Show Archives/Podcasts Hour 1 – Hour 2 – Hour 3 – Hour 4
Author Preston Fleming has identified five (5) stages that could open the door to tyranny in the United States, including (1) concentration of power, (2) corruption, (3) polarization, (4) crisis, and (5) conflict. In order to dramatize and alert people about the kind of life we might expect under an authoritarian regime, Preston has written three novels, known as the Kamas Trilogy. His first book in the trilogy, Forty Days at Kamas, tells the story of prisoners at a corrective labor camp in Kamas, Utah, in 2024. In this future America, natural and man-made disasters have produced an impoverished, low-tech nation. A ruthless dictator has risen to power and instituted one-party rule, and dissidents are disposed of in a network of corrective labor camps. Couldn’t happen here, you say? Think again! According to Preston, we are already in stage 3, polarization, and it may only take a crisis (earthquake, volcano, solar flares taking out power grids, EMP bomb) to push our country into the conflict stage, where the government would implement structures already in place to create a despotic regime.
Preston Fleming was inspired to write Forty Days at Kamas by his vision of a failed America that unfolded in his mind long before September 11, 2001. He wrote the book to awaken and alert people about preventing the infrastructure from being put in place so tyrannical power cannot happen here. His qualifications to write about failed states and despotic rule include a decade as a Foreign Service Officer serving in U.S. Embassies around the Middle East and frequent business travel to the heart of the Gulag in the Russian Far East after the fall of the Soviet Union. His academic credentials in government and economics include an Ivy League law degree and an MBA. Over the years, Fleming has studied the institutions and methods that despotic regimes have used to crush their opponents. From this study, he has concluded not only that tyranny could happen here, but also that conditions are quickly falling into place that could bring camps like Kamas within a decade.
Preston Fleming was born in Cleveland, Ohio. He left home at age fourteen to accept a scholarship at a New England boarding school and went on to a liberal arts college in the Midwest. After earning an MBA, he managed a nonprofit organization in New York before joining the U.S. Foreign Service and serving in U.S. Embassies around the Middle East for nearly a decade. He later studied at an Ivy League law school and has since pursued a career in law and business. He has written five novels.
Preston’s website is www.prestonfleming.com.
PLEASE CALL 800-259-5791 TO SPEAK WITH PRESTON DURING THE INTERVIEW.
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