On the menu today: Wrapping up one of the last big primary nights of this cycle, and sharing some big, big news: The third book in the Dangerous Clique thriller series is coming out later this month.
A Primary-Night Rundown
Eric Greitens, please make like Marvin K. Mooney and just go away. As of this writing, former governor and Missouri Senate candidate Greitens has less than 19 percent of the vote and is in a distant third place. State attorney general Eric Schmitt won the multi-candidate GOP senate primary with a commanding 45 percent. Trump fans will try to spin this as some sort of symbolic victory for the former president, but Trump looks like a chump for not clearly backing the better candidate and the better man who was an obvious frontrunner and hedging his bets by endorsing “ERIC.”
In Michigan, the Trump-endorsed-but-relatively-sane Tudor Dixon won the GOP nomination for governor in the effort to unseat incumbent Democrat Gretchen Whitmer. (One of the more curious aspects of this primary was Dixon’s rivals arguing that Betsy DeVos — Donald Trump’s secretary of education, who endorsed Dixon — was one of the “RINO establishment’s leading never-Trumpers.” If you’re a never-Trumper, you don’t spend four years running the Department of Education for him. Do words have meaning anymore, or do people now just blurt out whatever sounds good in their crazy little heads?) A mid July survey found Whitmer just above 50 percent against Dixon, but the GOP field was a bunch of relative unknowns. Dixon’s grandmother’s died in a Norton Shores, Mich., nursing home during the pandemic, and she says Whitmer’s policies on nursing homes exacerbated her grandmother’s isolation and loneliness. Keep an eye on this race.
Two incumbent House Republicans from Washington who voted to impeach Trump, Jaime Herrera Beutler and Dan Newhouse, are currently leading their primaries as vote-counting continues. They are expected to survive their primary challenges.
Score one for the DCCC’s support for election-truthers: Representative Peter Meijer lost to Trump loyalist John Gibbs in Michigan’s third congressional district. Democrats spent nearly a half-million dollars to elevate a candidate they will now insist is a dangerous extremist who must be kept out of office. As of this writing, Gibbs is ahead, 51.6 percent to 48.3 percent; it’s easy to imagine that without that $500,000 in Democratic support, Gibbs loses and Meijer remains a sane Republican representing that district.
Once again, the DCCC is wildly reckless, and its decisions undermine all of its rhetoric that candidates such as Gibbs represent a threat to democracy and the rule of law. It’s easy to understand why some Republicans would like to see this move blow up in the DCCC’s face with a Gibbs general-election victory; failure on that scale is the only way it will realize the consequences of meddling in GOP primaries. But there’s also that not-so-minor problem that 48,199 or so Republicans in this district preferred Gibbs to Meijer.
In Arizona, they’re still counting the votes as of this writing; conspiracy-theorist Kari Lake leads sane conservative Karrin Taylor Robson by about 12,000 votes, or 1.8 percentage points in the race for the Republican gubernatorial nomination. Blake Masters won the GOP Senate nomination in that state and will take on Mark Kelly in November.
The night also brought some indisputable setbacks for conservatives. The pro-life movement suffered a significant defeat in Kansas, as voters rejected a referendum that would have allowed lawmakers to enact sweeping restrictions on abortion. The vote wasn’t even close, a 59 percent to 41 percent split. Ramesh, who grew up in Kansas, lays out what went wrong:
Kansas (where I grew up) is by no means a pro-life state, but it would probably never have adopted a sweeping abortion-protective constitutional amendment by popular vote. Once the state’s high court effectively amended the state constitution by itself, though, dislodging its mini-Roe by referendum became — as the result suggests — impossible.
If we held national referenda, one on abolishing Roe in favor of some policy regime TBD would almost certainly have lost in most states. Pro-lifers by and large understood that the polls in favor of Roe didn’t mean Americans were deeply committed to an abortion regime as expansive as the one Roe actually entailed.
Coming Soon to Your Bookshelf or Tablet: Gathering Five Storms and Saving the Devil
Readers, I have terrific news: The third book in my series of thriller novels, Gathering Five Storms, will be published by Amazon on August 23. In addition, to whet the appetite, the short-story e-book Saving the Devil is now available, and it’s just 99 cents.
What is this thriller series?
The Dangerous Clique series follows the adventures of a small, almost-off-the-books CIA team of misfits, established to eliminate minor-league terrorist threats before they grow into major-league threats. Our protagonists are the Uzbekistan-born Bukharin Jew Katrina Leonidivna, a skilled, tough, polyglot, and acerbic senior case officer, and her husband Alec Flanagan, a snarky terrorism-finance analyst. Along with a grumbling former U.S. Army ranger, an inordinately cheery NSA hacker, and a frequently exasperated FBI agent, the team hunts down threats overlooked by the rest of the byzantine bureaucracy of America’s national-security state.
Between Two Scorpions pitted the team against a mysterious terrorist group that seems like it could be a new branch of Islamist extremists, or it could be something new, different, and even more disturbing: a malevolent, anarchic force aiming to spread fear and paranoia for its own sake.
Hunting Four Horsemen, written during the Covid-19 pandemic and set in the aftermath, investigates a plot revolving around the creation of an “ethnic bioweapon” — a virus deliberately engineered in a lab to only afflict those with particular genes — and determining just who would be willing to pay to use such a devastating weapon.
What is Saving the Devil?
I suspect there are a lot of Morning Jolt readers out there who enjoy this newsletter but who aren’t sure if they want to shell out the money and time for a thriller novel. I can’t blame them; the world has some excellent thrillers out there, and it has a lot of lesser-quality knockoffs. There are a lot of suspense thrillers about allegedly relatable single moms who are dealing with serial killers, kidnappers, stalker ex-boyfriends, abusive ex-husbands, or the angry incel teenager down the street — often, it seems, all at the same time. There are a lot of military thrillers about characters with names like Rod “Firepower” Stronger, the roughest, toughest, meanest, grittiest ex-SEAL, ex-SWAT, ex-fighter-pilot, ex-FBI profiler, ex-secret-agent-turned-extreme-sports-pro/bounty hunter, who’s hunting down the notorious ISIS mastermind Ali Ali-Oxenfree.
The Dangerous Clique stories aren’t like that. They’re the threats of 24, the memorable personalities of Firefly, the quips and references of a Dennis Miller stand-up special, the far-flung fascinating locales of Atlas Obscura, and just a touch of the otherworldly eeriness of Twin Peaks all wrapped into one.
The magazine Abyss and Apex wrote of Between Two Scorpions,
This is not your typical terrorism spy thriller, not at all. The terrorists in the story understand how American society works and they are doing their best to destroy us from within by playing on our existing divisions and fears, to increasingly devastating effect. . . . The book has some really fascinating and different villains, with unusual motivations, and a lot of globetrotting and suspense as they chase down the clues to barely stay ahead of the total destruction of the USA. It’s a page turner.”
Saving the Devil is the 99-cent tapas serving of the Dangerous Clique series, a low-cost way to see if this is your kind of leisure reading — with the team confronting a mission that’s supposed to be simple: Find, and along the way rescue, an irredeemably notorious terror financier who’s marked for death by other sinister forces.
Set shortly after the events Hunting Four Horsemen, this short story has some spoilers for that preceding novel.
What is Gathering Five Storms about?
Did you ever feel like the world is spinning off its axis? As Katrina and Alec grapple with the life-changing revelation at the end of Hunting Four Horsemen and contemplate a hopeful new chapter of domestic tranquility, chaos almost literally pulls up to their front door: An attempted truck-bombing of the CIA’s main entrance gate arrives with a note bearing a simple menacing message: “THE DANGEROUS CLIQUE WILL PAY FOR ITS CRIMES FROM 2003.”
Someone’s out for revenge against the Clique for its tumultuous first mission, which occurred just as the invasion of Iraq began. But the team is more than a little befuddled because everyone it fought back then has been dead for years. In a series of flashbacks, we see how Katrina, Alec, and the rest formed the team, investigating the kidnapping of a child, and revealing an under-the-radar menace while the world focused on the prospect of another war in the Middle East. Then, in the present day, the team hunts for the scourge that’s hunting it . . . and finds former friends and foes battening down the hatches, warning about the gathering of five storms, a series of interlocking international crises that will shake the world.
Is there political stuff in it?
I don’t intend to put it in there or make it polemic, but one reviewer noticed how my worldview shapes the world the characters live in:
Anyone familiar with his journalism will recognize the nods towards the primacy of family life: respect for law enforcement and first responders; support for the Second Amendment; the importance of hard work; the essential goodness of American traditions; and, ultimately, the existence of God.
I liked The Weed Agency but I’m not into thrillers. Are these books anything like that?
These novels definitely feature a lot more office politics and portraits of government inefficiency than your typical thriller. And someone who reads all the books closely will recognize that they’re taking place in the same “universe.”
ADDENDUM: You know, it’s always nice to be called a winner. But it’s a little unusual to be called a winner for the once-in-a-blue-moon time I praise Nancy Pelosi.