Bluesky

Imagine that Tim Walz had blurbed a book praising Mao Tse-Tung as a model for leadership in these troubled times—firm hand on the tiller, knew how to get things done. It would be a headline in every newspaper, the major topic on every talk show. The scandal would go on for weeks. It could decide the election.

As it turns out, there’s a real-life case of super-extremist book-blurbing by a vice-presidential candidate, but unless you came across Michelle Goldberg’s excellent New York Times column or an item in USA Today, you probably haven’t heard much about JD Vance’s endorsement of Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (And How to Crush Them). Unhumans is a far-right call to arms by Jack Posobiec and his ghostwriter Joshua Lisec, with a foreword by Stephen Bannon. Who is Jack Posobiec? He’s a far-right propagandist and trickster, best known for promoting conspiracy theories like the Great Replacement, Stop the Steal, and Pizzagate—the proto-Qanon hoax that claimed Hillary Clinton and other top Democrats were engaging in child sex trafficking in the basement of a Washington, DC, pizzeria. (The restaurant has no basement.)

According to this distinguished scholar and his collaborators, everyone to the left of Herbert Hoover is a communist and worse, “unhuman,” not qualifying as a human being at all. If you’re reminded of the Nazis, who famously demonized Jews and others on their hate list as“vermin” and “subhuman,” you’re not far off. Here’s the book’s thesis: Communists have no actual beliefs; they just live to make normal people poor and miserable. “They simply hate those who are good looking and successful,” Posobiec writes. “The egalitarian ideology is just window dressing.”

Fortunately, a few “great men of history” have stood up to these gargoyles: Spanish General Francisco Franco, Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek, Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, Senator Joe McCarthy, and oddly, Julius Caesar. Oh, and Elon Musk, “the sole protector of anything like freedom of speech on the internet.” Are you ready to join the world’s wealthiest man and fight the reds, “an eye for an eye”? Posobiec approvingly quotes Franco: “We do not believe in government through the voting booth.”

The truth is, there’s nothing like an organized communist movement in America today, which Posobiec occasionally concedes. The label is basically shorthand for the usual culture-war villains: LGBTQ people, public school teachers, college professors, feminists, Black Lives Matter activists, DEI bureaucrats, immigrants, progressives. All of the above are too sneaky to call for the appropriation of private property—yet. They’ve “rebranded” as “cultural Marxists,” a flexible term that seems to mean anyone who thinks Fascist Spain was not the height of human civilization. This sleight of hand allows Posobiec to tar everyone from drag queens to former Harvard president Claudine Gay with the crimes of Stalin and Pol Pot. Of the crimes of Mussolini, Hitler, and other mass murderers on the right, the book has virtually nothing to say.

This is what JD Vance has to say about Unhumans:

In the past, communists marched in the streets waving red flags. Today, they march through HR, college campuses, and courtrooms to wage lawfare against good, honest people. In Unhumans, Jack Posobiec and Joshua Lisec reveal their plans and show us what to do to fight back.

First cat ladies, now communists. We live in a dangerous world.

You would think this menacing manifesto would be kryptonite to Vance, whose one job is to impersonate a normal, non-scary Midwestern family man. I guess that’s all over now. It’s hard to undo praise heaped on a book that anoints Franco as the gallant leader of a modern Christian crusade, “a righteous, justified war for the sake of the cross.”

Why isn’t Vance’s endorsement of Unhumans a major news story? Is it too serious? The cat lady tirade, after all, is funny, fitting the theme of “weird” that the Harris campaign has been pushing ever since adding Walz to the ticket. Unhumans is hard to be lighthearted about. It’s not an imaginary tryst with a sofa. There are no cute vermin memes out there, no pretty girls posting photos of themselves stamping on cockroaches.

Are the media powers that be afraid of going after on Vance lest they be accused of bias? Or is it just the embarrassment of riches? At this point, not a day goes by without its own Vance revelation—as I write, a story is circulating about Vance attending a law school beer-pong party in drag. (Nothing wrong with that, but it seems unlikely to meet his boss’s approval.) Whatever the reason for not making a big deal out of it so far, the media should take Vance’s involvement in Posobiec’s hateful worldview seriously. We have every reason to think he means what he says.