A new satire takes on the Biden administration and the publishing industry.
By: Daniel Greenfield
President Joe Deadhorse, a “deranged old man,” is busy bankrupting the country – or perhaps someone is doing so in his name; Vice President Pamela Farris cannot find any country on the map, including her own, and a Marxist-Islamist alliance of China and Iran, backing Venezuela’s narco-socialists, is closing in on the small, mineral-rich country of Guyana.
Who will you call?
The answer is Pierce Polk, a talented, billionaire wunderkind who is so good at making money that he is practically the living embodiment of capitalism. He has built his own libertarian paradise in the middle of the jungle and is not about to lose it to a Venezuelan invasion.
Washington DC, however, is more than ready to give up, to give up on Polk and everything else.
You can read “King of the Jungle,” conservative journalist Scott McKay’s latest venture into near-fiction and near-future fiction, as an update of Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged,” a relentless satire on the Biden administration’s dysfunctional foreign policy and an attempt to find hope in the hopeless headlines that flood our social media feeds every morning.
And it is all that.
But it’s also an attempt by McKay, best known in Louisiana for his work on The Hayride and nationally and internationally for his contributions to The American Spectator, to claim the largely abandoned territory of the patriotic thriller popularized by Tom Clancy. The ’80s are long behind us, and so are the days when a new conservative author writing for an audience not interested in DEI could even get a hearing from a major publisher.
In an era where James Bond has been replaced by a gay, black and disabled superspy and even Dr. Seuss has been posthumously censored and rewritten, there is little room for the old, hard-hitting macho thrillers in which communists are confronted and defeated rather than appeased.
And that’s where McKay comes in with his serial novel, a classic format that is all too often neglected. It is published by his own publisher RVIVR. With a healthy dose of “toxic masculinity” and a whole lot of satirical jabs at the broken system we live in, “King of the Jungle” begins with a showdown far south of the border about who will own the future.
The characters are obviously based on real people and the crisis is real too. Venezuela has been threatening Guyana for some time without the Biden administration showing any meaningful response.
Instead, the answers of the fictional Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in “King of the Jungle” sound all too true to life. “When asked about the situation, Deadhorse said Guyana was already part of Venezuela. His press people went into overdrive and walked that back. Then Pamela Farris, the vice president, went on TV and gave a speech about Guyana being a country next to Venezuela.” It’s not hard to imagine Biden and Kamala doing both, but it’s even easier to imagine them doing nothing. Just like they did in real life.
And the State Department’s response is also absolutely realistic. “The State Department sent the Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, a woman named Fawn Bass-Weaver. She had studied at Yale and was half white, half black, but she wore flowing dashiki dresses everywhere she went.”
Unfortunately, in real life there is no Elon Musk stand-in with a private army ready to intervene against Venezuela’s real threat of invading Guyana, but in King of the Jungle there is one. And so the story plays out the way we would like it to in real life, but it rarely does.
Sometimes fiction is insightful and sometimes escapist, and perhaps McKay’s novel does both: it shows what is wrong with our political class and creates a world in which there are people who have an answer to the decadence and idiocy that reign in our system.
Even though the scenario in “King of the Jungle” is semi-fictional, we are left with the same basic question: Which is better, weakness or strength? We’ve tried weakness and the world is on fire, whether it’s the real events in Israel and the Middle East or the fictional response to China’s takeover of Taiwan in “King of the Jungle,” where “a flood of Taiwanese left the island by air and sea, many of them landing in Hawaii and the Philippines.” Meanwhile, “the Deadhorse government congratulated the Taiwanese on their ‘peaceful change of government.'”
In King of the Jungle, the outnumbered and outgunned soldiers of a small country and a fictional billionaire stand up to the forces destroying the world. But the book itself is a real-life jab at a publishing industry that has “woken up” and is abandoning readers and profits to spread its political messages.
Like Hollywood, the publishing industry has consolidated. Fewer companies control more market share while their audiences shrink. The surviving major publishers have woken up aggressively, while authors who want to write fiction that doesn’t fit the DEI mold are forging their own path, self-publishing their books and exploring new business models.
Young male authors and conservative writers are disappearing from fiction shelves, making way for multicultural beach reads about broken families or fantasy novels about the evils of transphobia written by authors with initials and multiple pronouns. The old dinosaurs may be allowed to continue producing books, even if they are, like Clancy, dead, to serve a shrinking audience, but new authors are not allowed to sully the right-wing side of publishing history.
Too many conservatives watch movies and buy books by directors and authors they hate. King of the Jungle is an antidote to woke politics, woke literature, and a woke publishing industry.
(FrontPageMag.com)
Daniel Greenfield, Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and author who focuses on the radical left and Islamic terrorism.
