The Heroes We Need or the Heroes We Deserve?
Political Fiction in the Shadow of the 2020 Election

2,386 words

Anonymous
Angry White Man
Free Future, 2020

Gerald McManus
Dark Millennium: A Visionary Tale
Ceshore Pub Co, 2001

Because he’s the hero Gotham deserves, but not the one it needs right now. So we’ll hunt him. Because he can take it. Because he’s not our hero. He’s a silent guardian, a watchful protector. A dark knight.

— Jonathan Nolan, The Dark Knight

As the US prepares for the first election under lockdown conditions (unlike today’s snowflakes, the Greatest Generation was apparently able to hold elections even whilst fighting literally Literal Hitler), with concert halls, sports stadia, and theaters off-limits and streaming services serving up nothing but PC junk, one might hope the citizenry is doing a bit more reading.

As a suggestion, here are two novels, one from the distant past before Covid, the other brand, spanking new, that give voice to the frustrations of the Average American in interestingly different ways.

The anonymous author of Angry White Man (a title that may sound generic but, as an online search of the usual book merchants reveals, actually a smart marketing ploy) supposedly “comes from the worlds of technology and entertainment,” specifically those “Hollywood circles” where “political correctness is enforced with draconian fervor.” I can’t confirm this, but the novel itself certainly shows signs of such an origin, resembling a screenplay: written mostly in dialog and relying on short scenes to move the story along with great efficiency.

The story is one we’ve seen before; Tom Maryland is a white, middle-aged high school teacher whose life is coming apart, first slowly, then all at once. Unlike Walter White, his main problem is not internal but external: his wife, his son, his mortgage, and above all, political correctness, which is making his daily life more and more unpleasant and, finally, costs him his job — he mentions the black IQ gap in answer to a student’s question. The principal is not amused.

“Why would you say that? Are you insane?”

“It’s my job as a teacher to tell my students the truth as best I can,” Tom says. “I won’t lie to them.”

Well, that proves to be the wrong answer again. After packing up his office and driving away, Tom switches on the radio and finds himself listening to Reggie Miles, a local DJ of the unctuous Black Nationalist sort, and one more “whites still got all the power” cliché proves to be the last straw. Tom drives to the station, and, since like the average American, his glove compartment provides a handy gun, takes Miles hostage, demanding a microphone so as to finally have that national conversation on race.

What follows is fairly predictable, in Hollywood fashion; although the Black Nationalist DJ is an interesting switch, as the talk radio host is usually a crypto-Nazi white guy or a Jew — here the Jew is the hostage negotiator, Jake, who has the usual self-doubts and conflicts with the cops, who are the usual collection of “Let me at him” hard cases and “hold on, Chief” good guys.

It’s not bad, but it’s not particularly new either. One recalls Dr. Samuel Johnson (not to be confused with our own esteemed Dr. Greg Johnson), one of the original trolls, with his infamous comment on women preachers: they were like a dog walking on its hind legs: the wonder is that it is done at all. [1]

In this case, it’s done well enough, but the wonder for our side is that it gives the author the chance to present a large amount of pro-white talking points. The author, though apparently more of a CivNat than One of Us, has certainly done his homework on the IQ and black pathology fronts. [2]

“Then what do you want?”

“Truth,” Tom says. “And respect.”

“That’s why you barge in here with a gun? Oh yeah, real respectful.”

“That’s right,” Tom says. “I’m here to hold you accountable. As an equal. Man to man. And the gun, well, the gun’s here to keep it real.”

You can buy James O’Meara’s book Green Nazis in Space! here.

The message seems to be that while we can live together if the truth is out there, keeping it under wraps, through political correctness or outright censorship, will instead lead not to utopia but to increasing social volatility until alas, regrettable amounts of violence will occur. Although the climax of Tom’s arc is suitably realistic, perhaps the dénouement, a nation inspired to reconciliation and a new social contract, is more of a CivNat fantasy. After all, black and white aren’t really “equal, man to man,” are they?

Precisely for all these reasons, however, this would make an excellent book to put in the hands of your normie neighbors and friends; the round-robin discussion of Tom, Reggie, and Jake presents all they need to know to get their heads straight on race, within a narrative that — unlike, say, The Turner Diaries — doesn’t scare the bejeebus out of them.

That certainly can’t be said of Gerald McManus’ 2001 novel Dark Millennium.

McManus’s novel falls into a recognizable genre, the political thriller, which includes such venerable classics as Advise and Consent, The Manchurian Candidate, and Seven Days in May. Usually, for obvious reasons, the action revolves around the President, producing a sub-genre that might be called the Presidential or White House thriller, but the last such bestseller I can think of is The President’s Plane is Missing, from 1968; the date is significant, since around then the Presidency appears to have lost a lot of its objective power and subjective fascination — more recently such works tend to center on a rogue operative (such as a Jack Bauer or Jack Ryan).

Sometimes the President is retconned as a fighter pilot or Green Beret to make him a plausible operative, as with Air Force One (1997) or Independence Day; although in the latter this is only one plot arc in an alien invasion story — at the time, audiences were more delighted with the scene of the White House being blasted by the aliens (the draft-dodging Clinton being the current resident).

Unlike Clinton, McManus’ hero, Alexander McGrail, is in the thick of combat in VietNam when we first meet him; at the same time, his musing on the Moon landing establishes a fascination with space travel that will link us to end.

His rise from returning vet, to successful computer salesman, to local politics, and ultimately the Presidency is fairly typical for the genre, even including the strategic use of blackmail. [3] When he arrives at the top office, however, things take a new tack.

For McGrail (I assume the name is to suggest some heroic Celtic legend, as well as an avatar for the author) is not only a more or less hidden racist, but a sociopath. It’s not so much his opinions that are psychotic (although liberals might think so) as his means of implementing them: martial law to lay the groundwork for the systematic, long-planned-out genocide of traitors, nonwhites, degenerates, and defectives, thus clearing the way for the implementation of a Star Wars defense system that makes the USA invulnerable as McGrail assumes the role of President for Life of the Earth.

We’ve been clued-in to this along the way, as McGrail’s occasional inner dialogues — clearly set off by being printed in italics — start to reveal his hidden agenda long before then; as does his treatment of women as little more — no, nothing more — than whores and tools for blackmail. [4]

I don’t recall any mainstream political novel that made the leap from objectionably ruthless to outright sociopathic. Yet, as many from the Dissident Right to the Dark Enlightenment to the Man-o-Sphere have observed, the smiling front and ruthless will of the sociopath is just perfectly made for politics.

The politician with a hidden agenda has likely always been with us to some extent, — just think of Nixon’s “secret plan to end the war” — but it seems increasingly prevalent.

In fact, twenty years on from its first publication, and despite being currently out of print, McGrail’s story is more relevant than ever. This is exactly how the Left and even liberals see Trump: a genocidal sociopath (for isn’t that the meaning of the “Orange Hitler” tag?) who has somehow charmed his way into the White House while concealing his real agenda, which emerges only through “dog whistles” to his opponents (although, if the Left can hear them, how are they dog whistles?). [5]

On the other hand, we might point out an element of typical Leftist projection here, as they are more than capable of exactly the same behavior, from Nancy Pelosi’s “we have to pass the bill before we find out what’s in it” to Joe Biden’s “voters don’t deserve to know [my] stance on packing the Court.” Indeed, the open secret in this year’s election is that Biden is himself nothing but an empty suit behind whom lurk those who will really be making and implementing policy.

Being fiction, however, McGrail has a few advantages over Trump; principally, access to several key government officials, military and civilian, who are, at least tacitly, on his side. Imagine what Trump could accomplish if he could say, as McGrail does, “I like that AG he does just what I want.”

However much one might enjoy the fantasy of McGrail’s righteous rampage, he is not, whatever the Left might think, “One of Us” any more than Anonymous. The great irony here is that McManus’s genocidal policies are in the service of implementing a CivNat utopia, based not on race so much as IQ.

As no less an authority than the SPLC describes it:

McGrail directs a worldwide extermination of all people of color, except for a few particularly intelligent Asians. McManus describes the victims being herded into pits and shot, massacred in the streets, and sterilized through tainted drinking water. Whites who fail an IQ test are sterilized, too.

To paraphrase a classic MST3k line: “It’s Steve Sailer — with a gun!” [6]

Moreover, here is McManus’ account of why all this is necessary:

The only way for humanity to prosper and expand into outer space is through some type of worldwide benevolent government. . . . We have to quell the population and produce the homogenous society that’s needed to survive. [7]

The domination and indeed survival of whites is contingent on their just happening to have the highest IQ currently (along with Jews and Asians, of course); otherwise, this is just the same old New World Order stuff that elites like Bezos are already promoting, but with a preferential option for whites being the ruling class that will not likely survive the implementation. [8]

So, once the smoke clears, we’re back to the “Can’t we all just get along” of Anonymous.

Comparing these two books, we can see that over the last twenty years authors feel freer to discuss racial differences and pathologies openly — albeit anonymously – without immediately grabbing guns or neutron bombs, but only if the issues are framed as matters of genetically determined intelligence — facts that we are forced to sadly acknowledge — leaving the JQ and the question of cultural survival unspoken; as with the election of Trump in 2016, there’s at least that to comfort us.

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Notes

[1] “I told him I had been that morning at a meeting of the people called Quakers, where I had heard a woman preach. Johnson: ‘Sir, a woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.’”

— Boswell: Life of Johnson.

[2] The author is careful to capitalize both White and Black, which epitomizes his CivNat viewpoint: why can’t we all just get along?

[3] In Allan Drury’s novel Advise and Consent, the President is enthusiastic about blackmail, while this was dropped from Otto Preminger’s film adaptation. Gore Vidal’s The Best Man also raises the issue of blackmail: should a good liberal President use such tactics to prevent his evil conservative opponent from winning the nomination? For more on Advise and Consent see my “Mad Men Jumps the Gefilte Fish,” reprinted in End of an Era: Mad Men and the Ordeal of Civility (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2015).

[4] “The exploitation of women is obviously sociopathic.” — Trevor Lynch, reviewing American Pimp (Hughes Brothers, 1999) in his collection Trevor Lynch: Part Four of the Trilogy (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2020).

[5]

When we see liberals screeching about Trump and his “white supremacy” or whatever, it certainly does seem like mindless caterwauling. But there is a rhyme and reason to it. Trump does stand for white America, but it’s an implicit white America. You can couch it in terms such as patriotism or Western chauvinism, but everyone knows that this stands for white people and the civilization they have created. Trump defends this often and with considerable spirit.

But what Trump dare not defend is explicit white America. He won’t go after such people himself, but he also won’t lift a finger to help them when the tech oligarchs or anti-white prosecutors or the Antifa-BLM rage mobs come a-knocking. So if you’re caught in this slender little door jamb, it’s gonna hurt. This must be addressed in any honest assessment of Trump.

— Spencer Quinn, “My Case for Trump.”

[6] In Episode 609: “The Skydivers,” Crow notices that the man in the plane shooting at the cast — the director himself, Coleman Francis — resembles “Pat Buchanan . . . with a gun!” (Here at 11:05)

[7] McManus has continued to reflect on man’s cosmic destiny, as in his most recent e-book, 2019’s Man’s Next 500 Years, available from the usual online merchants.

[8] Creating a world government, with perhaps sadly necessary amounts of genocide along the way, in order to save humanity and implement a strategy to take over the stars, is oddly similar to what we’ve seen more recently from Jason Jorjani, although he prefers to express himself with philosophy and parapsychology rather than outright fiction. As with McManus, the taste for genocide seems to be the only thing tying these ideas to the Dissident Right.