People's Republic (Kelly Turnbull, #1)

by Kurt Schlichter

It was remarkable how a nation so focused on rooting out what it called bigotry under various labels always seemed to uncover more and more of it lurking inside itself.

They flocked to the blues, where the People’s government doubled benefits in an effort to fight inequality and racism, as well as, apparently, individual initiative and fiscal stability.

“Well, I was thinking I’m not going to die for her or her bullshit politics. If she wants to confiscate all the guns, she can suit her sickly ass up in Kevlar and go do it because I’m not going to make war on my own people just because she hates anyone who doesn’t live in a coastal city. That’s pretty much verbatim what I was thinking.”

You know the Army runs on sergeants, and when the sergeants aren’t with you, nothing happens.

“What’s the fun of accountability when it means admitting you hired incompetents? No, it’s better to blame greedy wreckers and saboteurs and, of course, the US. Because all their misfortunes are our fault.

Welcome to the PR. Everything is racist, everything is sexist. And you’re terrible. Why do you think they have privilege levels on their ID cards? At home, it’s about the individual. Here, unless you’re elite, you’re not an individual. You’re just your skin tone, how you pee, who you pray to, and who you want to fuck. That’s it.

They were rich, they had resources, they had freedom, and they threw it all away for a bunch of bullshit notions about social justice. And every time things get worse for them, instead of going back to what worked, they double down on what screwed everything up. Do you get it?”

the People’s Republic figured out that it is a lot easier to control the people if they are packed into cities – especially when you control the food.”

No obedience, no dinner. Country people didn’t need the government before. They could grow their own food, or buy it from each other. And the People’s Republic can’t tolerate that.” “I thought they liked diversity.” “They do – they like a diverse variety of people who all agree with them and obey their commands.”

Facts, he found, were beside the point. Truth, he learned, was simply an abstract concept that served only to distract from the all-important narrative.

You could print what you wanted and protest what you wanted, assuming what you wanted was what the ruling elite wanted.

“The best thing we ever did in the red was not let the people coming in from the blue bring their shitty politics with them.”

I guess the bullshit stops when the people decide they’ve had enough of social justice and climate justice and economic justice and all the other kinds of justice except justice justice.”

Besides, I think these people in here are in on the scam. The signs aren’t going to fool anyone in here. The propaganda is for the nobodies.”

After all, to provide his very best service to the People’s Republic, he and those like him needed to be insulated from mundane concerns about material matters.

He had learned that watching the Hillary Clinton email debacle of the mid-teens. If they have your communications, they have you, he noted, and he resolved to be the one who had them.

“Imagine being a blue shirt. You come in here every day, work like a dog, see all this, then stand in line for three hours to buy food before you go home to a house with no electricity,” Turnbull

In the next box was the UCLA student paper, The Daily Entity. It had been The Daily Bruin until a few years before when a student from Marin County, who claimed to be part Cherokee, demanded that the name be changed because bears were sacred to his people. The new symbol of UCLA was a circle; the original smiling bear had been changed to a stick figure human, but despite its lack of sex-specific characteristics it was deemed too “cispatriarchal,” so the symbol morphed into what was essentially a happy face. Then there were objections to that image by the visually impaired community, because it had eyes, and by protesters against “facial normativity” who passionately argued that the presence of a nose and mouth “disempowered and invalidated” the deformed. The present circle had its critics too; the student government was scheduled to discuss eliminating the mascot altogether. UCLA’s new mascot was likely to be, literally, nothing.

“Yes, that will be on the final. Which is open book, open notes, and a collective effort.”

“Remember the free market? Well, it works. And now we are seeing what happens when you replace it with a bunch of useless college professors, untalented artists, moronic movie stars, and San Francisco chardonnay sippers who think they can personally run every aspect of a country when they know absolutely nothing about how a country works.”

“There’s a story about the Jews. They were surrounded on a hilltop by Romans. There was no way out, so they killed themselves rather than being taken alive. It was called Masada.” Rios-Parkinson looked at his deputy with a measure of disgust. “So?” “I was just thinking that the Jews, well, they’re still around. And the Romans…they aren’t.”

“To America. As it was. As it should be. As it might be again.”