The Last Zealots: Hack History on the Right

By John Grant

It was a dark and stormy night and Scat Horbath was glad to be out of the weather in the Washington DC metro, where he was to meet the sinister Ali Ben al-Masseur in the last car of the Blue Train.

Al-Masseur ran the Brothers Of Islam Charity Center in Arlington, and he held the clue to a two-thousand-year-old secret that had been scratched in code into the bottom of John Hancock’s pewter chamber pot. The fate of the free world hung in the balance.

The doors opened, and Scat entered the nearly empty car. As the car moved off he became aware of the subtle smell of falafal. Then he saw his man, seated at the end of the car chewing as he read from a copy of The Koran.

Al-Masseur looked up and flicked his tongue, projecting little pieces of yogurt sauce into the air.

“So, Scat, we meet again.”

That’s the opening of my new thriller, The Last Zealots, to be published under my pseudonym Rand Wotan. It’s the first in a series featuring Scat Horbath, a US assassin suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder who, for reasons of grave national security, is recruited back into the business by his colleagues in The Agency.

You know the drill: Scat has to come in from the cold and do one last mission.

If my calculations are correct, the novel will bring a fatwah down on me, and the book will sell millions. I plan to Save America one bestseller at a time.

OK. OK. All the above is hogwash. It’s actually a lame satire on the bestselling thrillers of Brad Thor, author of The Last Patriot and The Apostle. Thor is a regular on the Glenn Beck Show and on blogs like Military.Com where he sells his clever books and spreads anti-Islamic phobia.

The similarities between Thor's fantasy approach to history and that of certain right wing commentators and politicians would seem to suggest a trend.

For example, Rep. Michele Bachman confidently presents a totally whacked narrative of US history in which “our founding fathers worked tirelessly to overturn slavery,” while Glenn Beck spins a fictional narrative in which the 14-year-old Jewish George Soros -- being hidden by Christians -- was actually “a collaborator with the Nazis … helping the Nazis to send Jews to the camps.”

Shamefully exploitative thrillers and irresponsible history are not new, of course, and have never precluded popularity or electability. But some of this stuff feels more Joseph McCarthy than Ian Fleming...

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