The Day of the Rope

Book Review: A fictional thought experiment about right-wing political violence

The novel is placed in a just barely hypothetical future America descending into leftist anarcho-tyranny.

The premise of the novel is black-pilled, reaching the pessimistic conclusion that political violence is the only way of retaking the USA from the communists, socialists, and psychopaths that have subverted and dominated the institutions of big tech, government, media, and academia.

Right-wing thinkers and voices are a bit hamstrung in discussing political violence. Any speech that could be construed as a dog-whistle calling for the kind of revolutionary violence that George Washington and the founding fathers used against the British to liberate the country in the first place will most certainly get right-wingers further censored, deprived of their audiences and perhaps even investigated by the FBI.

The right-wing protagonists of the book carry out a false flag attack on the fuel and water supply system that is the lifeline of San Francisco and southern California. It's clear that southern California is a hive of scum and villainy hell-bent on dragging the rest of the country along with them into this dystopian future of techno-communism, open borders socialism, degeneracy, and extreme progressivism. It's often discussed that cities are deathtraps, the vast majority of residents of major metropolises have only a few days (or less) supply of food and water. A few days' disruption of the influx of calories, fuel, and water and millions of people in cities will begin to become very desperate, especially left-wingers who generally have a short time preference and haven't prepared for societal collapse.

Those left wingers when they mock preppers probably think to themselves: If there's ever a major collapse of infrastructure here, I'll just move down the road to a city that doesn't have a water or food shortage. Problem solved!

But they ignore the inevitability that millions of their cosmopolitan cohabitants will have the same idea: freeways and highways will be gridlocked, exacerbated by vehicles running out of gas blocking egress from the city. Gas stations will be quickly exhausted. And what if rioters, protesters, or terrorists choose to block the main traffic arteries of the city? Quickly their cosmopolitan existence will start to look like something out of Mad Max or Battle Los Angeles. Their multicultural Shangri-la will poof and disappear in mere hours or days as tribal violence between blacks, whites, and Latinos escalates. They'll quickly experience just how Darwinian of a world we really live in.

Atlas Shrugged has this beautiful passage illustrating the complicity of proximity...

As the tunnel came closer, they saw, at the edge of the sky far to the south, in a void of space and rock, a spot of living fire twisting in the wind. They did not know what it was and did not care to learn.
It is said that catastrophes are a matter of pure chance, and there were those who would have said that the passengers of the Comet were not guilty or responsible for the thing that happened to them...
These passengers were awake; there was not a man aboard the train who did not share one or more of their ideas. As the train went into the tunnel, the flame of Wyatt's Torch was the last thing they saw on earth.

The train crash sequence describes how all the victims of the catastrophe contribute in their own self-serving and comfortable way to the decline of society. It illustrates their cowardice in the face of Ayn Rand's vision of a country descending into communism. They are complicit in their own demise not just because of their selfish unprincipled predation of their fellow man but also because of their willful ignorance of the consequences and their proximity to the worst of the evildoers.

Do those who still reside in Southern California (or any other liberal metropolis) fall into the same moral category as the passengers on Ayn Rand's train on a path to oblivion?

Maybe your mom, your dad, your brother, or your childhood best friend lives in southern California and you think that they are a fundamentally good person. Why don't you convince them to move? Escape the high taxes feeding the statist beast which shits back out on that beautiful corner of this country unending crime, lawlessness, subversive postmodernism, and all kinds of wickedness. In the Bible, Abraham's nephew Lot left Sodom and Gomorrah and didn't look back, shouldn't the good Californians do likewise?

Ultimately, I don't advocate or hope that the dissident right-wing yield violence in the way described in this book. I don't think we'll need to. Every summer we see California literally burning thanks to the mismanagement of its environment. I think that our entropic world in collaboration with the idiots in government running places like California will deliver the collapse scenario described and portrayed in so many books and movies.

What all of us can do is personally divest from and sanction the media corporations that broadcast nonstop streams of dehumanizing degenerate propaganda around the globe.

It also seems like we have a little more time left to take back our countries democratically with the art of the argument and I hold out some hope that the founding stock of the United States will manage a peaceful geopolitical divorce from the millions of rabidly identitarian "hyphenated Americans" that they have such utterly irreconcilable differences with.

I've spent a lot of time in Eastern Europe and in the center of many town squares you see statues of stoic-looking knights on horseback; these are often the heroes of these nations who liberated their people from the Ottoman empire. These men are not immortalized in metal because they had good arguments for freedom, they sharpened swords and drew blood. If I had ever joined the US Military and taken an oath before my God to defend my country from enemies foreign and domestic, I would gaze up at those statues and meditate deeply on my role in history.

I found The Day of the Rope very well written, especially for being an author's debut book. I often take chances on first-time authors and am disappointed in the quality of writing or find the storytelling uncompelling. No so with this one! The characters are gritty and complex. The themes and narrative are so politically relevant that I wouldn't be surprised to see this book banned eventually. The last piece of fiction that I found this downright spellbinding was Graham Hancock's War God series about the conquest of Mexico.

Update: I have to reduce my review of The Day of the Rope: Book 1 from five stars to four because this relatively short book ended on a cliffhanger and the author never wrote a follow-up book in the promised series. It's pretty low-integrity to sell a novel with an incomplete story for $10-$20 and then never bother to write a sequel! The author, Devon Stack, was a creator who used to produce some amazing metapolitical video essays BUT then he switched to doing rambling, low-effort live streams discussing the black-pilling news of the day. THIS is why I hate streaming...