It has been noted that multiple conservative critics denounced a recent James Bond novel for vilifying former President Trump and other conservative politicians in a story about a dastardly international plot against King Charles III.
Author Charlie Higson had been authorized by Ian Fleming Publications, who own the rights to the James Bond franchise, to write a new book to celebrate King Charles III’s coronation. Higson touted that his new book, “On His Majesty’s Secret Service,” would feature “sex, violence, cars, a colorful villain with a nasty henchman, and of course, Bond himself, so well-known and yet so unknowable.”
However, in early September, conservative culture critics from multiple outlets condemned the novel as yet another beloved franchise that has been corrupted by modern “woke” political messaging.
The New York Times opinion columnist Ross Douthat scorched the novel in a piece headlined “How America Made James Bond ‘Woke,’” warning that it juxtaposes a progressive version of the globetrotting spy against a caricature of conservatism, “007 is charged with protecting King Charles III from a dastardly plot hatched by a super villain,” Aethelstan of Wessex, who can be described as a “Brexiteer, a right-wing populist, apparently the true and natural heir to Goldfinger and Blofeld.”
He goes on to note that Bond, known for womanizing in the past, is in a romantic “situationship” with an immigration lawyer he permits to sleep with other men, and that his mission is that he “must travel to Viktor Orban’s Hungary to infiltrate the vast right-wing conspiracy and avert a terrorist attack at Charles’s coronation.”
Douthat criticized the spread of “American-style wokeness” in countries connected to England.
Joel Abbott of NotTheBee, the real news offshoot of satirical humor website The Babylon Bee, wrote a similar review mocking the book for pandering to far-left cultural politics.
UK politician David Kurten had posted an excerpt from the novel where Bond sees a villainous conservative among a gathering of evildoer, the book describing him as being “famous for promoting COVID/vaccines/mask-wearing/5G conspiracy theories, which had spilled over into the usual anti-immigrant, anti-EU, anti-BBC, anti-MSM, anti-cultural Marxist, Climate Change Denial pronouncements,” noting that this villainous Englishman had made an infamous “anti-trans diatribe.”
The baddie in the new woke James Bond novel sounds like a top bloke. pic.twitter.com/gUjYEcokBa
— David Kurten (@davidkurten) September 5, 2023
