Peacock Breeds a Jackal

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On July 13 in Butler, Pennsylvania, Thomas Matthew Crooks, a 20-year-old with no tactical training, avoided the Secret Service detail and local police, scaled a rooftop, and got off eight shots toward the podium where Donald Trump was speaking. One bullet struck Trump in the ear and other shots killed attendee Corey Comperatore and wounded James Copenhaver and David Dutch. In the wake of this attempted assassination comes a television series on a similar theme.

“The Day of the Jackal,” from NBC’s Peacock, features “an elite contract killer with his sights set on some of the world’s most powerful people.” Some viewers may be unaware that this show knocks off The Day of the Jackal, the 1971 best-seller by Frederick Forsyth, who knew what the deal was.

In the early 1960s, the Organisation de l’armée secrète (OAS) sought to prevent Algerian independence and attempted to kill, among others, General Charles de Gaulle. The OAS perceived France’s “vast bureaucracies” as a glaring weakness, giving the Jackal time to operate. Forsyth follows him step-by-step, in meticulous detail.

The Day of the Jackal movie, from 1973, is quite faithful to the book. Not so the 1997 The Jackal, in which “an imprisoned IRA fighter is freed to help stop a brutal, seemingly ‘faceless’ assassin from completing his next job.” This brand of rip-off is what now passes for creativity in the dream factories. The Peacock project takes it to another level.

The writer and executive producer, born in Northern Ireland, is Ronan Bennett, known for Top Boy, in which “two London drug dealers ply their lucrative trade at a public housing estate in East London.” In Bennett’s Public Enemies, “the Feds try to take down notorious American gangsters John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, and Pretty Boy Floyd during a booming crime wave in the 1930s.” Bennett is also the producer of Gunpowder, a 2017 television mini-series in which “a group of English Catholic traitors plan to blow up the Palace of Westminster and kill King James I in the infamous Gunpowder Plot.”

In Bennett’s vision, the contract killer (Eddie Redmayne) “meets his match in a tenacious British intelligence officer (Lashana Lynch), who starts to track down the jackal in a thrilling cat-and mouse chase across Europe, leaving destruction in its wake.” Forsyth’s detective was inspector Claude Lebel, a white male, so by current DEI standards Peacock’s sleuth must be a black female. Potential viewers may wonder about the jackal’s potential targets.

Will the “most powerful people in the world” include politicians opposed to globalism, and mass immigration?  Will Peacock’s jackal take money from Islamic terrorists to kill Dutch politicians, or French editors who publish cartoons of Mohammed? If the price is right, will he unleash rapid fire on music festivals?

As readers of Forsyth may recall, the bombing of a fishing boat in 1979 killed Lord Mountbatten, a 79-year old war hero and cousin of Queen Elizabeth, his grandson Nicholas Knatchbull, teenager Paul Maxwell, and Lady Doreen Brabourn, 83.  Would Peacock’s jackal take money from British royals to gun down those responsible? By all accounts, this bombing was the work of the IRA, so a story like this may be off limits. America offers other possibilities.

Could globalist billionaires, allied with America’s deep-state, pay the jackal enough to target a populist presidential candidate looking strong in the polls? With two attempts to kill Donald Trump, the people have cause to wonder. Crooks easily avoided the well-armed security force responsible for the protection of presidents, and since the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in 1968, presidential candidates as well.

Criminal Ryan Routh, 58, travelled thousands of miles from Hawaii and was able to set up a sniper’s nest on the Florida golf course where Trump was playing. Both scenarios, particularly the Butler incident, would make a great movie. Lawfare and FBI raids have failed to derail the surging candidate, so powerful figures plot to kill him. Potential producers, directors and actors should check out the back story.

The US Secret Service, once part of the Treasury Department, is now under control of the Department of Homeland Security. The DHS is the federal agency that was set up after the CIA and FBI failed to prevent 9/11, and which failed to prevent later terrorist attacks at the Boston Marathon, Fort Hood, San Bernardino, and Orlando, all with massive loss of life. The DHS is now headed by the man who allowed more than 10 million foreign nationals into the United States with no criminal background checks. It’s possible that one, a dozen, or hundreds of the illegals could be plotting terrorist attacks or assassinations.

Maybe some potential assassin is out to avenge Abu Bakr al-Bagdhadi, the Islamic State terrorist the former president took down, or Hezbollah member out to avenge Iran’s master terrorist Qassem Soleimani. So the hero of this movie would be up against incredible odds, and that makes for good drama. In the right hands, such a film could be true cinéma vérité.

Expect nothing of the sort from Peacock series, which starts November 14. Best to stick with Forsyth’s book and the 1973 movie, which in 2024 packs a warning, particularly for those who want their nation to be great As inspector Lebel (Michael Lonsdale) explained to Madame de Montpellier (Delphine Seyrig), “be in no doubt as to the seriousness of your position.”