100%: The Story of a Patriot (Version 2)

1920 America is a powder keg of fear. After the Great War ends, a nation terrified of Bolshevism turns on itself, and into that inferno walks a young drifter with nothing to lose. Peter Gude is a street-wise, uneducated charmer who drifts into the orbit of the "Patriots" - a violent vigilante organization dedicated to purging America of Reds, radicals, and anyone who doesn't look quite right. What begins as a way to eat and belong becomes something darker: a convert's ferocious faith, a soldier in the war against the enemy within. Sinclair, drawing from real persons and real events, maps the psychology of radicalization with uncomfortable precision - how grievance becomes ideology, how belonging becomes violence, how a lost boy finds purpose in persecution. The novel pulses with the era's actual terror: Palmer Raids, midnight raids, the Red Scare's snarling paranoia. But it also asks an uncomfortable question that still echoes: what happens when patriotism becomes a weapon, and who profits from fear? For readers who want to understand the recurring American nightmare of hunts and loyalty tests, this is where it began.