Jake Rivers is a military veteran and a college student who believes Keynesian economics is ludicrous, Antifa are wannabe political dissidents, and the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is good guys with more firepower.
If Rivers sounds like a stereotype, he is. He’s the fictional hero of Trigger Warning, a novel released in August but only recently making the rounds on Twitter. Written by William W. Johnstone and J.A. Johnstone, the 384 pages are a fictionalized screed against the right’s favorite stereotypes about the politically correct college campus: pronoun policing, Antifa run amok, and sexual paranoia.
If you were to build a religion around the most extreme higher-ed stereotypes peddled by the likes of Breitbart and Campus Reform, Trigger Warning would be its sacred text.
For starters, there’s enough blood to rival the Old Testament. A lot of people die in this book, mostly at the hands of armed men who raid Kelton College, a fictional liberal-arts college in Texas. But more than a few come at the hands of Rivers, while he delivers quips against stereotypical leftist causes.
“S-social justice,” a beaten character says to Rivers.
“Is bull. There’s just justice. And sometimes it’s a bitch just like karma,” he responds.
From the beginning, Rivers strains credulity. Before he even sets foot on campus, he has served four years in the Army Rangers, a special unit, somehow getting his GED and his bachelor’s degree along the way. He enrolls at Kelton because he wants a master’s degree, but deadly forces conspire to interrupt his plans.
Rivers spends the novel under siege both physically and ideologically, though he’s always preternaturally equipped for whatever the danger. In an orientation session with a professor, he laments requirements to take classes about gender or feminism.
On campus, Rivers is persecuted. Early on, a stranger in a hooded sweatshirt confronts him and immediately labels him a Nazi and says Rivers’s kind isn’t welcome at the college. Rivers retorts: “The Nazis were socialists! Your side.”
What’s behind Kelton College’s vilification of Rivers? Trigger Warning is clear: His fellow students hate him because he served in the military, supports All Lives Matter, and defends President Ronald Reagan. But Rivers bears no ill will toward the students who, he thinks, have been fed a pack of lies by “their teachers, the media, Hollywood, and more than half of Washington, D.C.”
Even after he single-handedly beats back a pack of violent anarchists, students and professors continue to treat Rivers as an enemy of the campus, and newspaper headlines paint him as a member of the alt-right (though one person seems sympathetic: Rivers’s female criminal-justice professor, with whom he — sigh — has a romance).
There’s just justice. And sometimes it’s a bitch just like karma.
Rivers finds his ultimate foil in Mathias Foster, the leader of a band of armed men who raid the college, though their motives are opaque. Foster, who attended Kelton briefly, deeply resents the institution, whose students harassed him for being poor. His plot includes an attempt to extort money from the wealthy students’ parents, but it’s not clear to what end.
The book closes with Rivers shooting his way through wave after wave of bad guys aided by the people formerly critical of him. But first he has to lament the campus’s ban on guns.
“That whole concept was one of the stupidest things Jake had ever heard of, a glaring neon sign of an invitation for evil to march right in and have its way, unchecked, but that was the situation and wishing it was different was pointless.”
In the end, Rivers decides college isn’t for him. He’s headed for greener pastures; the story implies that he becomes a mercenary for hire. As if it hadn’t been painfully clear already, the authors spend the final lines of Trigger Warning laying its ethos bare, in the description of the firefight that caps off the narrative.
“This had been a macroagression,” it reads. “And some of these easily triggered snowflakes would never get over it.”
Chris Quintana is a staff reporter. Follow him on Twitter @cquintanadc or email him at chris.quintana@chronicle.com.
Correction (12/6/2018, 10:50 a.m.): This article originally described a character in the book as “dying.” A more apt description is “beaten,” and the text has been updated.
