Book review: Kurt Schlichter’s The Attack

Kurt Schlichter’s People’s Republic series—eight thus far—has been tremendously popular. Its fictional hero, Army Captain Kelly Turnbull, operates in an America split apart into The People’s Republic—today’s blue states—and The United States, today’s red states whose capital is Dallas, TX. Turnbull specializes, among other things, in rescuing people from the blue.

Take the current state of woke with its pronouns, triggers, microaggressions, furries, trans, DEI, CRT, Antifa, BLM, anti-Constitution, anti-American orthodoxy and imagine a nation entirely overrun by those sorts of people, and you have the People’s Republic. In the reborn United States, everyone is armed, polite, and no one messes with a citizen’s weapons. Full citizenship depends on military service, and there is no question about the rule of law. 

Schlichter explains his books are not a how-to or a wish for that kind of schism, but a warning, an exposing of the anti-American, woke lunacy engulfing America circa 2024. In that we agree and a review of most of those entertaining books may be found here.  

On January 8, I posted Terrorists attacks in America: for what are they waiting? In that article I suggested we are probably not facing more 9-11 style attacks. They’re just not necessary. More likely are hundreds of smaller attacks, synchronized to occur in every state across the country at the same time. Churches, schools, theaters, WalMarts, every place Americans gather, every place we’re vulnerable.  I also suggested more sophisticated actors such as the Chinese military would strike at infrastructure, the Internet, the electric grid, water supplies, food supply lines, again, everywhere we’re vulnerable. Such attacks would kill tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands.

Graphic: scan of book cover by author

Schlichter has just released The Attack, a different kind of novel. It’s a first person, biographical history of precisely the sort of attack I suggested. I’m certainly no psychic, but one doesn’t need to be to forecast the kinds of terrorist attacks likely in an America with wide open borders and a mentally impaired President whose handlers appease, and perhaps even, ally with terrorist states. They certainly fund them.

As with Schlichter’s People’s Republic series, The Attack posits an entirely possible reality, told afterward through interviews with Americans who survived.

During The Attack, many Americans, radicalized college students, Antifa types and others, joined the jihadists and were shocked to discover this time, Americans had no tolerance for their revolutionary street theater. This from a history professor: 

Why did so many young college students from good families and with bright futures join an orgy of blood and violence? Programming, but also the excitement of being a part of a great, violent change. Do you remember the chaos of the first day? It seemed like everything was collapsing. The president was missing. Planes were falling from the sky and bombs were exploding. The police could not regain control. Everything seemed to be falling apart, and for those awaiting the collapse of the United States, it seemed that the time had come.

That was how, on the second and third days, so many of our young people joined in.

A Jewish liberal, finally confronted with a reality he couldn’t ignore, told the interviewer/author:

I’m not any kind of a Democrat anymore. Neither are my parents. I can’t forgive the party. I understand the party’s predicament, but right is right and choosing wrong set the conditions for what we went through. Now, I’m one of those gun-carrying, right-wing knuckle-draggers, and I raise money for the politician who takes the hardest possible line against the terrorists. Liberalism is a luxury when someone is targeting you for genocide.

When I say: “Never again,” I mean never again.

A reporter caught up in the massacres, but somehow surviving, remembered:

Jeff and I were there at the EOC when the Vice President spoke. The whole place was basically stunned that she was so disconnected from reality. The whole place was just silent as she finished, and then everybody just went back to work, but you could tell they did not think they were getting any help from Washington, D.C.

Firefighters, police officers, Americans from all walks of life, recount their experiences. There’s even a hard-core leftist whose dedication to all things left, and her anti-American hatred, was only strengthened by the slaughter of so many. After The Attack, America got serious, though elements of the Left continued to try to blame America and protect their terrorist fellow travelers.

As with Schlichter’s People’s Republic series, The Attack is an entirely realistic and plausible recounting of the consequences imposed by those who would destroy our constitutional republic to build a faux-utopian “our democracy.” All are worth reading, and perhaps The Attack might awaken some of those responsible for protecting America.

Sadly, I wouldn’t count on it.

Mike McDaniel is a USAF veteran, classically trained musician, Japanese and European fencer, life-long athlete, firearm instructor, retired police officer and high school and college English teacher. His home blog is Stately McDaniel Manor.