Kingdom of Fear concentrates more on Hunter's personal life experiences than on public policy. Stories include teenaged tales from Kentucky, some of which are familiar to those who have read his collected letters. Thompson tells of his 1970 run for Sheriff, concentrating on the efforts of an undercover "agent" hired by a competing candidate to lure Thompson into illegal activity. (This reminds me of an anti-government group in Spokane some years back where the only people who ever talked about blowing up buildings were undercover FBI agents). He includes two short commentaries on September 11 written a day and a week after the event. Both are spot-on in terms of capturing our reaction to the event and predicting the fallout. Also included are some dispatches from Grenada after the US invasion, and from a 1999 trip to Cuba. The book closes with fiction along the lines of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas but more violent and in a less glamorous Nevada setting.
Two threads run throughout the book. The first is commentary on the Bush Administration and its "War on Terror". He tends to treat it not as a new thing, but another surfacing of a sinister force always at work in the American political system. The other thread concerns assault charges brought against Thompson by a one-time house guest in 1990. The details are pretty tame, involving little more than a shove of the woman in question. However, he was also charged with possession of trace quantities of drugs after a subsequent 66 man-hour search of his house. Several hearings were held and eventually all charges were dropped. But during that time he faced the very real possibility of jail time.
My first reaction upon completing the book was to wish for more condemnation of the current administration. After all, Thompson had plenty of experience with the Nixon administration, and they never said citizens who disagreed with them were "aiding the enemy". But leafing through Kingdom of Fear again, I see a theme of people in conflict with government power. Above all else, the government does not fight fair and the odds are in its favor.