The Situation: The Plot to Lie to Children

The Situation on Tuesday critiqued the incumbent president’s decision to pardon his son. 

Today let’s consider the sort of stories you might read to your own children. 

Noted children’s book author Kash Patel has written three books for young kids. Only the first, The Plot Against the King (2022), has won particular notice amid the writer’s newfound celebrity. 

But the other two, which I am not making up—The Plot Against the King 2,000 Mules (2022) and The Plot Against the King 3: The Return of the King (2024)—merit attention as well. In fact, the trilogy warrants a careful read as a series, since it reveals a fair bit about the author and his thinking and intentions. Indeed, the latter two books are arguably more important in this regard than the initial one, though the press has focused almost entirely on Patel’s first offering. 

If you have followed the controversy over the author’s sudden rise to national prominence, you might have heard something about this first book, published by Beacon of Freedom Publishing House, in which Patel casts himself as a wizard named “Kash the Distinguished Discoverer” in a mythical kingdom called the “Land of the Free.” You might have heard something about how the book tells the story of an election for king between “Hillary Queenton” who “says queenly things like thee and thou and forsooth” and “the merchant Donald” who had promised to “Make the Kingdom Great Again.”

After Donald defeats Queenton and becomes King Donald, a “shifty-looking knight” accuses King Donald of not being “the rightful king. Inside this steel box,” he says, “I have found a paper that says Donald cheated his way to the throne.”

A duke named Devin, however, doesn’t believe that King Donald had conspired with the “Russonians” and petitions the wizard Kash for help in discovering the truth. Together, they discredit the paper in the box, and the shifty knight, and they acquit King Donald of collusion in the election. 

The book’s cover says it is for “Children Ages 3 and up.”

While the latter two books in the “Plot Against the King” series have attracted less attention, they are arguably more telling. The first story, after all, spins a yarn in which there is, at least, some merit to Patel’s claims. In real life, after all, the FBI surveillance applications with respect to Carter Page did contain multiple errors, and some of Duke Devin’s and the wizard Kash’s criticisms of it turned out to be correct. While Patel’s fairy tale ludicrously uses this discrediting of a single aspect of the Russia investigation that never panned out anyway to dismiss the entire investigation and its findings, the first book, at least, has a kernel of truth behind it. 

The second book, published by Brave Books, however, takes a sharp turn into the department of mythologizing a simple lie. It is based on the documentary by Dinesh D’Souza called “2,000 Mules”—a documentary for which D’Souza recently apologized to a person he had slimed in the film and admitted that the film had been based on an inaccurate data analysis. “I now understand that the surveillance videos used in the film were characterized on the basis of inaccurate information provided to me and my team,” D’Souza said. “If I had known then that the videos were not linked to geolocation data, I would have clarified this and produced and edited the film differently.” Despite the apology, D’Souza says he still stands by the core claims of the film. 

In “The Plot Against the King 2,000 Mules,” however, the heroes “Dinesh and Debbie the curious candlestick makers” do not have to apologize to anyone. They emerge victorious after Joe and his sidekick Comma-la-la-la steal the election. They follow—and I swear I am not making this up—a trail of mule dung, recruit the wizard Kash to help find the truth, and determine that “Someone used mules to cheat the night of” the election. “Life was not always easy for these curious candlestick makers; they knew it would get worse before it got better. But as they kept looking for the truth and helping other people, Dinesh and Debbie were heroes from that day forward,” Patel writes. 

Unlike the first book, this one contains no element of fact at its core. It is the Big Lie that Trump won the 2020 election and that it was stolen from him, told as a fairy tale. And it notably contains a coda written by D’Souza himself, in which the filmmaker spells out precisely the conspiracy he has now admitted was false. In his statement the other day, D’Souza admits: “I know that the film and my book create the impression that these individuals were mules that had been identified as suspected ballot harvesters based on their geotracked cell phone data.” That is precisely the claim he makes in Patel’s book, and that Patel makes through the use of (and I’m really not making this up) mule dung. “We have evidence that people would pick up stacks of ballots and drop them at various boxes, usually in the middle of the night,” D’Souza writes in a book, which is also labeled for “Children Ages 3 and up.” “They’d drop off three, four, five ballots at a time, and then drive directly to the next box to repeat the process.”

The final book, “The Plot Against the King 3: The Return of the King,” published by Brave Books in September of this year, is arguably the most significant narratively, as it offers a window into Patel’s ambitions in a second King Trump administration. 

In this offering, Shifty—who has somehow transformed from a knight to a jester—tries to set the Dragon of the Jalapenos, nicknamed DOJ (get it?) on King Trump, as the latter is trying to wrest his kingdom back from the evil Baron Von Biden. Shifty lies to the dragon that King Donald and the wizard Kash hate dragons, and DOJ goes on the attack, “lighting abandoned homes on fire with his flaming breath and singeing King Donald’s ear.” (Singeing his ear. Get it?) King Donald runs to Kash for help:

Everything seemed hopeless. King Donald was about to become a king-sized snack, until, suddenly—the dragon squealed in pain as Kash stomped on his foot and screamed, “You shall not pass!”

Seeing his opportunity, King Donald … kicked the dragon in the chest, and did a double backflip before dropping to the ground.

Having violently subdued the dragon, Kash and King Donald then convert him, show him the error of his ways, and, of course, set DOJ on their political enemies. “And the last thing anyone saw of Baron Von Biden, Comma-la-la-la, Shifty, and all the rest of their comrades was their behinds as the Dragon of Jalapenos chased them out of the kingdom, never to be seen again,” writes Patel.

What can we conclude about the author from these mythical works? A few things, I think. For starters, there is something odd about telling stories about democracy using royal figures. King Donald might be elected, but he’s still a king, and Patel has no doubt about his right to rule. 

Moreover, Patel makes himself remarkably central to the action. In the first book, he is no mere staffer to Duke Devin. He is the master, and Duke Devin petitions him for help and becomes his sidekick—not the other way around. The climactic moment occurs when he—Kash, not Devin—makes a speech before the people declaring King Donald innocent. Likewise, in the third book, King Trump comes to the wizard’s house for help. “Open up, oh great and powerful Kash,” the king begs. “Who is it?” Kash responds. “I don’t need any magazines or cookies.” Yes, Trump is king, but there’s no doubt who the hero is in Patel’s story. 

There’s also the small matter of the use of violence to suppress the dragon. Yes, I know, it’s a fairy tale, and that’s what happens to dragons in fairy tales, but the story does have Trump and Kash violently beating the DOJ into submission and then reprogramming the dragon and setting it against their political foes. 

And then there’s the ultimate weirdness of these books, which is that Patel wants to talk to three-year-olds about the Russia investigation and the Steele dossier, about how the 2020 election was stolen, and about how the Justice Department has been set against Trump—and, of course, about how he, Kash Patel, has held the line. It is bad enough to perpetuate the lie that Trump won the 2020 election. The desire to have parents read books to their children mythologizing the lie is next-level weirdness and carries a particularly cult-like vibe.

But one aspect of turning reality into fairy tales for small children is that an author’s analysis and intentions become crystal clear. These are not nuanced stories. There is very little room to hide in them. And once you’ve sicced a dragon on Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and Adam Schiff, it’s hard to argue you are interested in investigative impartiality. 

The Situation continues next week.