KM Breakey’s Shout the Battle Cry of Freedom

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K.M. Breakey
Shout the Battle Cry of Freedom
Self-published, 2022

What happens when a fun, breezy read turns into a time capsule of the crazy days of insurrection and COVID? You get K.M. Breakey’s 2022 novel Shout the Battle Cry of Freedom. Breakey must have been paying close attention to right-wing news during the first Trump administration and the first two years of the Biden presidency, because so much of the regrettable ephemera from that era—which this writer would like to forget but knows he shouldn’t—comes to life on the page of Battle Cry. We’re talking everything from the Mueller investigation to vaccine mandates to the Great Reset to how much fentanyl was in George Floyd’s body when he expired.

We start with our first-person narrator, Thomas Baker, a college football star turned MAGA congressman. He’s riding high on the Trump train in 2016. He’s an “old stock American,” a Southerner, a Christian, and proud of all three. He likes Trump and appreciates him as a transformational figure in politics, but he cannot help but notice that the man started making compromises and welching on promises almost as soon as he stepped into the White House. Still, he’s hopeful. This puts him at odds with his two closest friends: Wyatt, a liberal political science professor opposed to all things Trump, and Jeff, a beer-swilling conspiracy theorist, who sees Trump as a big bust.

How many of us had conversations with people like that back in 2018?

Tom’s fortunes continue to rise in Congress as well as in his romantic life with a hot conservative journalist named Sofia, whose parents escaped Communism in their native Hungary. Rumors of a nasty disease originating out of China, however, soon come to the fore. COVID. Trump’s “Chyna Virus.” Easy to ignore at first, but getting worse by the day. More and more it seems like Trump is in over his head:

Borders closed all over the world, even our border with Canada for Christ sake. Canada, you hear me? Amidst the hullabaloo, Trump was still trying to build his Wall. The poor guy couldn’t win – closed borders bad, cause racism. Open borders worse, cause COVID.

Of course, Breakey takes us through the stolen 2020 election:

The path to 272 was clear as day. My God, we were gonna win and we were gonna win big. Goddamn Trump – what an absolute unit. A marvel of nature. Cause everyone knew, it was all him.

Then.

Something happened.

Something strange.

A discontinuity.

Like a message came down from the top.

At 11:20 p.m., out of nowhere, Fox called Arizona for Biden. What the fuck? It was a gut punch. Trump was beside himself. We all were. How could they call a swing state with hundreds of thousands of uncounted ballots? The math didn’t add up.

This was not right.

I didn’t know it then, but the steal had started.

Breakey makes it hurt now almost as much as it hurt then—and that’s a good thing for the sake of the novel. The story, however, really gets going on January 6th. Tom was there, at the Capitol, doing his job. He had lost his seat in another dubious election, but wasn’t crying about it. He then witnesses the “insurrection,” and pretty much has the right take on everything—the peaceful intentions of Trump, the cowardice of the GOP, the presence of feds in the crowd, the complicity of the police, the good behavior of the vast majority of the protestors. All of this has been vindicated since the publication of Battle Cry.

It seems that Breakey’s inspiration for this novel was to respond to the Left by saying, “You think that was an insurrection? I am going to show you a real insurrection.”

Tom falls into cahoots with members of a secretive, right-wing cabal who have had enough and are plotting an actual overthrow of the illegitimate Biden regime. A “dream team” of dissident elites, if you will. One of them has a great line when explaining why they’ve decided to recruit Tom as one of their leaders: “The delta between your public and private self is small. The trait of an honorable man.” From here, Tom has to navigate the tricky course between righteous power and the abuse of power. How dirty should they fight until it gets too dirty? How much fascism is too much fascism? How many people killed are too many people killed? All the while, Breakey maps out what a real insurrection would look like, and it’s thrilling.

Two important subplots require mention. Geroy Jenkins is a black rabble rouser who causes no end of trouble throughout the story—for dissidents like Tom as well as for his shady globalist handlers. Breakey does not shy away from Jenkins’ thuggish cunning, crass theatrics, and ebonics-laden speech. Yet he manages to humanize him somehow.

Troy Bingham, however, is the everyman white. He’s a military veteran with lingering injuries. He’s divorced with kids he would like to see more often. He also has dwindling career prospects, and faces overt racial discrimination wherever he goes. He’s not happy, but holds up as best he can. That is, until he gets beaten within an inch of life after stumbling into a Black Lives Matter riot in Baltimore. It is through this character that Breakey demonstrates not only the oppressive, anti-white double standard of the Biden-era Left, but also the endemic violence and criminality of blacks. Thankfully, he does not hold back.

During the riot, before he gets beaten up, Troy witnesses this ugly scene:

One large Black [sic] woman began laying into them – insulting, cussing, commenting on sexual proclivities. Then she got into the twerking. Her spandex-clad ass was enormous, big and round as a beachball, and she gyrated like a gymnast, her great mammoth breasts swinging to and fro. Troy stared at the spectacle. The primitive savagery of it.

It’s extremely refreshing to have fiction this honest and unflinching. In Shout the Battle Cry of Freedom KM Breakey does us all a great service by shining a light on some of the darkest days of the American Right, so we will never forget.