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A new satire takes on the Biden administration and the publishing industry.
By: Daniel Greenfield
President Joe Deadhorse, a “deranged old man”, is busy running the country into the ground, or maybe someone is doing it on his behalf, Vice President Pamela Farris can’t find any country, including her own, on a map, and a Marxist-Islamist alliance of China and Iran backing the narcosocialists of Venezuela is closing in on the tiny country of Guyana with its mineral riches.
Who are you gonna call?
The answer turns out to be Pierce Polk, a talented wunderkind billionaire who is so good at making money that he’s practically the living embodiment of capitalism, and who has built his own libertarian paradise in the middle of the jungle and isn’t ready to lose it to a Venezuelan invasion.
Washington D.C. however is more than ready to give it up, to give up 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 ruthless satire of the Biden administration’s dysfunctional foreign policy and an attempt to find hope in the hopeless headlines that stream through our social media feeds every morning.
And it is all of those things.
But it’s also an attempt by McKay, known best in Louisiana for his work on The Hayride and nationally and internationally for his writing at The American Spectator, to claim the mostly abandoned territory of the patriotic thriller popularized by Tom Clancy. The eighties are long in our rearview mirror and so are the days when a new conservative author writing for an audience that isn’t into DEI would even get a hearing at any major publishing house.
In an era where James Bond was replaced by a black gay disabled superspy and even Dr. Seuss gets posthumously censored and rewritten, there is little room for the old two-fisted macho thrillers where Communists are confronted and taken down, instead of appeased.
And that’s where McKay has stepped in with his serialized novel, a classic format too often neglected, through his own RVIVR publishing arm, and with a big heaping of ‘toxic masculinity’ and a whole lot of satirical jabs at the broken system we’re in,‘King of the Jungle’ gets underway with a showdown well south of the border over who will own the future.
The characters are obviously drawn from real life figures and the crisis is drawn from real life too. Venezuela has been threatening Guyana for some time with no useful response from the Biden administration.
Instead the responses of the fictional Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in ‘King of the Jungle’ sound all too true to life. “Asked about the situation, Deadhorse said that Guyana was already part of Venezuela. His press people went into turbodrive walking that one back. Then Pamela Farris, the vice president, went on TV and gave a speech about how Guyana was a country next door to Venezuela.” It’s not hard to imagine Biden and Kamala doing both of those things, but it’s even easier to imagine them doing nothing. As they have been doing in real life.
And the State Department’s response is easily true to life as well. “The State Department sent the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Western Hemisphere Affairs, a woman named Fawn Bass-Weaver. She was Yale-educated and half-white, half-black, but wore flowing dashiki dresses everywhere she went.”
Unfortunately in real life there’s no Elon Musk stand-in with a private army ready to intervene in Venezuela’s real-life threats to invade Guyana, but there is one in ‘King of the Jungle’. And so the story plays out the way that we would like real life to, but rarely does.
Sometimes fiction is revelatory and sometimes it’s escapist, and perhaps McKay’s novel taps into both, showcasing what’s wrong with our political class and offering a world in which there are those who have an answer to the decadence and idiocy that rules in our system.
Even if the scenario in ‘King of the Jungle’ is semi-fictional, its fundamental question is the same one facing us: what’s better, weakness or strength? We’ve tried weakness and the world is on fire whether it’s the real life 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 had taken to the air and sea to get off the island, with lots of them turning up in Hawaii and the Philippines.” Meanwhile, “the Deadhorse administration had congratulated the Taiwanese on their ‘peaceful governmental transition.’”
In ‘King of the Jungle’, the outmanned 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 shot at a publishing industry that has gone ‘woke’, abandoning audiences and profits, to push its political messages.
Like Hollywood, the publishing industry has consolidated with fewer companies controlling more market share while shrinking their audience. The surviving big publishers have become aggressively woke while authors who want to write fiction that doesn’t fit the DEI mold have gone their own way, self-publishing their own books and exploring new business models.
The young male author and the conservative author are disappearing from fiction aisles to make way for multicultural beach reads about broken families or fantasy novels about the evils of transphobia written by authors with first initials and multiple pronouns. The old dinosaurs may be allowed to keep turning out books even if, like Clancy, they’re dead, to serve a diminishing audience, but no new writers are allowed in to sully the right side of publishing history.
Too many conservatives watch movies and buy books from directors and writers who hate them. ‘King of the Jungle’ is an antidote to woke politics, woke literature and a woke publishing industry.
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
