Can the train wreck that is America be stopped?  Or is our fate sealed?  K.M. Breakey spends his life asking these questions. he's written a stream of fine, fast-paced novels he calls "reality fiction."  Breakey is after the who, what, when, where, why, and how, and he's not afraid to name what he sees, like Black crime stats.  The late, great Colin Flaherty was a fan.  Colin might have said, "Breakey calls a spade a spade," a courageous thing these days, and something Colin was master of himself.

Breakey's latest, Shout the Battle Cry of Freedom, is a taut page-turner that leaves no stone unturned: COVID, race, immigration, elites and oligarchs, and the near-total surveillance state.  Breakey poses an interesting thought experiment: what would it take to save this country?  Can freedom be reborn?  What might that look like?  What kind of leader could pull it off? 

Meet Tom Baker, former football star and recent congressman.  A proud Virginian with roots going back centuries, Tom wants to stop the train wreck.  Around him, he sees greed, corruption, the bloodlust of clenched fists, and shouts of "burn it down!"  Cowed whites either do nothing or throw gas on the fire.  No one is interested in America first, or even America's survival.  But Tom Baker and his merry band have other ideas.  They follow a path that may seem extreme but may also be the only way to save America.

Some characters in STBCOF will break your heart because you know these people.  There's Troy, a blue-collar man from Baltimore, a minority in his own city.  After a long stint in the Army, Troy can't get hired in law enforcement because he's white.  So he tries the trades and manages to get a job, but it's soon shipped overseas.  American manufacturing can't compete with China's slave labor and lack of safety regulations.  Troy is reduced to call center work (soon to be shipped to India), where he fails the wokeness gobbledygook because he won't admit that whiteness is intrinsically immoral and privileged.

Troy is so privileged that on his way home, he runs out of gas in deepest, darkest D.C.  You'll never hear from the media what happens when whites run out of gas in these neighborhoods, except in euphemisms — teens blowing off steam.  Why must we risk our lives to traverse the cities our forebears built?  It's a question Troy (and, one hopes, readers of the book) can't dodge anymore.

No doubt, some will dismiss Breakey's novel as the propaganda of angry white men.  Perhaps even a novel that should be banned.  Read STBCOF while you can and see how you feel about Tom Baker's path forward.  The story is visionary.  It's even capable of giving hope.

Cassandra O'Connor is an Irish grandmother living in America who sees too much.

Image: K.M. Breakey.