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As regular readers know, I’ve been reviewing attorney, author and infantry officer Kurt Schlichter’s Kelly Turnbull series since its inception.  The first review in March of 2019 covered his first three novels:  People’s Republic, Indian Country and Wildfire.  The protagonist, Kelly Turnbull, is an Army Captain pulled out of the Sandbox by Clay Deeds, a shadowy spy master who puts Turnbull to work combatting the evil of the blue states.

“Blue states?”  Here’s an excerpt from that initial article:

The world Schlichter creates, set in the near future, is an entirely logical extension of what is likely to happen as Socialists continue to reject American constitutionalism, and in the process, demonize everyone that does not slavishly support their deranged, murderous, socialist worldview.  I’m only annoyed I didn’t think of this narrative first.

The People’s Republic is a standard, one each, socialist worker’s paradise. Everyone has varying personal pronouns.  The wealthy elite live behind walled, guarded compounds.  They have all of the things middle class Americans have always had, and more. Everyone else is a communist worker. Grocery store shelves are mostly empty, there are virtually no choices, toilet paper is rare, everything is broken down and falling apart, and food is scarce and rationed.  Everyone must carry ID, which identifies their privilege level. There is a federalized police force composed of criminal thugs–all the real police fled to the red states at the split–and a secret police force, charged primarily with keeping everyone in line.  Education is political indoctrination–lies about history and the reality of red America. There are reeducation camps, ubiquitous government brutality and oppression, summary executions, all the delightful trappings of every socialist state that has ever existed.  Schlichter didn’t need to make anything up, merely mirror the realities of socialism and take political correctness a very few steps beyond its current state.

The world of People’s Republic, and the novels that follow, is a world where the blue and red states have split into separate nations.  As one might expect, Flyover country is the red, and the coasts, populated by the self-imagined elite, are socialist hellholes, as every totalitarian excess one can imagine, or learn by reading actual history, exists.  Turnbull’s initial adventures revolve around him infiltrating blue California to spirit people back to the red, which has a new capitol in Dallas.

Kelly Turnbull is a highly effective soldier, ruthless and deadly when necessary, but with a soft spot for dogs, women and kids.  A former Californian, he knows the area, and is mad as hell at what D/S/Cs have done to it.  He’s no James Bond.  He’s too busy for romance, though eventually succumbs to the charms of a female soldier.

I reviewed the next three books in the series in September of 2021: Collapse, Crisis and The Split.  An excerpt from that article:

As Crisis opens, Clay Deeds tells Turnbull, who is still fighting in Iraq, he’s been killed in a tragic helicopter accident, and is returning to America in a last-ditch effort to hold things together.  He has a team of former Special Forces operators to help.

Schlichter uses contemporary reality and projects logical near future events.  Minnesota, which abolished the police, has become a haven for Marxist revolutionaries, whose militia is the defacto government.  The Marxist leader, a charismatic rich kid who likes to kill people to make examples, arranges the theft of an Air Force B-52 with a nuclear weapon aboard.  His goal? Blow up the conference that will amicably split the country, avoiding war, which he very much wants.  Turnbull, of course, saves the day—barely—but the bad guy gets away—until the next book?

Stealing a nuclear-armed B-52?  Does that sound impossible?  Schlichter, a retired infantry officer, uses advisors who know about such things.  In the world of a nation coming apart, it would be possible indeed, and Schlichter tells a compelling story.

It is Crisis that provides the backstory for Schlichter’s seventh novel: Inferno. It opens ten years after the events of Crisis, and Turnbull is once again trying to rescue someone from the blue, this time, a brainwashed young woman who has fallen under the influence of a death cult.  His attempt ends badly and we next find Turnbull and a friend night hunting feral hogs at his Texas ranch.

It is this twist of fate that allows Turnbull to discover a kill team advancing on his home where his fiancé, Lorna, is preparing dinner.  Turnbull and his pal, in short order, kill the attackers, but not before Lorna is injured, and Turnbull discovers one of the attackers is a colleague from his old unit, the unit that prevented a nuclear explosion in Crisis.

In this world, the red have retaken the blue west coast, largely to prevent the Chinese from establishing a colony there.  There is tension in the red, because only those who have done military service can vote, and those citizens are being constantly called up for service, while slackers profit from their absence.  But not every part of the west coast, notably Oregon and Washington state, has been pacified.

Turnbull has to infiltrate those unpacified areas to recover the nuclear weapon that figured in Crisis.  It was not returned to the Air Force, but was diverted to the Hanford Plant, where a small group of scientists have been maintaining it and the Plant, and fighting off a group of cannibal lunatics—Annihilationists–who want to kill everyone to save the planet.  In charge of the red forces is a general who has stood up militias beholden to him, and who plans, with the nuke, to take over the red government.  It was that General who sent the kill team to Turnbull’s ranch, and who keeps trying to kill him.  An excerpt from the book:

‘You want to move at night and lay up in the day,’ Bill told him. ‘Though they go out day and night.  Out hunting.’

‘The best way to Hanford?’

Bill considered.

‘It’s a two, three-day walk.  You want to stay off the roads, so it’s cross-country.’

‘What about this Vantage Bridge?’

‘You stay the hell away from that.’ Bill warned. ‘Stay on the west side of the Columbia River and follow it south until the bend east.  Keep following it.  That will take you to Hanford, though I have no idea why anyone would want to go there.  It’s radioactive.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Everyone knows.  The whole area had been off-limits for pears.  The blues were always talking about the red’s earthcrime of poisoning the land and such.  Elizabeth Warren once came out and accused the United States of waging war on her people with gamma rays.’

‘Will I see many people on the way?  Any settlements?”

‘Not really.  Putting aside the Annihilationists, there’s no water, so no farms.’

‘What about the Columbia River?’

Bill laughed bitterly.

‘The blues declared taking water for irrigation an earthcrime about a decade ago.  Then they blew up the Priest Rapids Dam, the Wanapum Dam and some others too.  This place is fertile, only you need water.  Without water, everything blew away in the wind.  And then there’s the electricity.  They talked all day about climate change and renewable power, and then they demolished the dams that generated hydroelectric power.  You think what power they had left was going to their pals in Seattle, or out here to a bunch of angry country folk?’

‘So I’m walking through a man-made desert?’

‘Pretty much.  It was paradise when I came here before the split.’

‘The whole country was paradise before the Split,’ Turnbull said.  ‘People were just too stupid to realize it.’

The rest is the story of Turnbull outmaneuvering the corrupt general, defeating cannibals and militias, recovering the nuke, and in a scene reminiscent of Mad Max, getting the nuke out of the blue, capturing the general, and returning home, where Lorna has recovered and he has a new dog to add to his collection.

As with the other six novels in the series, Schlichter writes a fast paced, engaging and technically accurate story.  Schlichter notes in the forward and/or afterword of each novel he is not hoping for the world he depicts, but warning that current affairs may produce it.  He’s right.  Kelly Turnbull’s world is a logical extension of the schism imposed on contemporary America by those who disdain the Constitution and the rule of law, and who hate America and Americans.  Schlichter’s warnings mirror mine in the Second Civil War series.  

D/S/Cs are no longer subtle.  They’re constantly in the faces of Normal Americans, pushing outrage after outrage and smirking: “what you gonna do about it?”  They’re sufficiently stupid to believe they can spit on the Constitution, abrogate the rule of law, and abuse Normal Americans, who will forever continue to play by the rules and try to work within a system D/S/Cs have already destroyed.  They’re sufficiently stupid to believe every local, state and federal law enforcement agency will support them in oppressing, torturing and murdering Normal Americans, in establishing a socialist/communist utopia.  They think the military will turn on Americans as well.

In that stupidity, as in the Turnbull novels, they are partly correct.  As I’ve written in the SCW series, some law enforcement personnel will turn traitor for their pensions, because they think D/S/Cs will win and they want to be on the winning side, or out of a misplaced sense of duty, fidelity to a Constitution their masters despise and subvert.  But most won’t play along.  They live among the people they’ll have to brutalize, and know when the line is crossed Normal Americans will fight back—effectively, ruthlessly and personally, just like Kelly Turnbull.  When the line is crossed, Normal Americans will take the war to the doorsteps of those that would take it to theirs.  When that line is crossed and America is unquestionably a banana republic, citizens will know surrendering to arrest means they’ll never be seen again.  Civil wars are intensely personal, the betrayal unforgivable.  Turnbull knows one can’t win if they don’t clearly understand the enemy, and do what is necessary, tactically, strategically and personally, to destroy their will.  Normal Americans know this too, but hope to preserve our Republican—not “our democracy”—system, the system that has, until recently, worked better than any in human history.

That’s the trick: what, and where, is that line?  The Turnbull series lays it out.  The brief synopsis of Inferno I’ve provided might sound far-fetched, but because Schlichter understands human nature, the military, and politics, it’s logical and one easily suspends disbelief.  This is true of every novel in the series.

This series of books isn’t good art.  It’s not on a par with the works of Shakespeare, Michangelo or the other masters of various genres of artistic expression, but it doesn’t have to be.  There is nothing wrong with good entertainment, and the novels are good entertainment in the political/military thriller genre, guilty pleasure reading, but with an essential purpose.  They make no pretense of being other than they are, and provide a vital public service: they really do give us a chilling glimpse of a near-future America that seems, in our darkest imaginings, inevitable.

It’s stories like Schlichter’s that may help us avoid that future, a future all sane Americans of good will want to avoid.