The book Unhumans, by Jack Posobiec and Joshua Lisec, is a fascist manifesto. It argues that the “Great Men of History” should take their cues from homicidal dictators like Augusto Pinochet and Francisco Franco, reject reason and democracy, and ruthlessly annihilate the gangs of communist “unhumans” who are currently threatening to destroy the United States. It explicitly advocates “eye for an eye” justice, promising a new McCarthyism complete with blacklists, along with the immediate banning of all teachers’ unions. It is perhaps the most paranoid, hateful, and terrifying book I have ever picked up. (I say this as someone who has read Mein Kampf.) And it comes with a warm and supportive blurb from Ohio senator J.D. Vance, who is currently the Republican party’s vice presidential nominee.

Vance had this to say of Unhumans: 

In the past, communists marched in the streets waving red flags. Today, they march through HR [Human Resources], 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.

Vance, then, has endorsed without qualification both the analysis and the plan laid out in Unhumans, saying it’s what needs to be done to “fight back.” Several other figures in Donald Trump’s orbit have also praised the book. It comes with additional blurbs from Donald Trump Jr. (who says it shows the “playbook” needed to “save the West”), Michael Flynn (“[Unhumans] offers a fifth-generation warfare system to fight back and win”), Tucker Carlson (“Jack Posobiec sees the big picture”) and Steve Bannon, who wrote the foreword. (“Study this book. Share this book.”) Trump himself has probably not read it, since it is a book, but he has previously boosted co-author Jack Posobiec on Twitter.

Posobiec himself is a far-right activist who is possibly an outright neo-Nazi, but, at the very least, both antisemitic and demonstrably fascist. The text of Unhumans, as we will see, leaves little room for dispute on the latter point. He is known for spreading political falsehoods (such as the Pizzagate nonsense, which caused the employees of a D.C. pizza place to be relentlessly terrorized by unhinged strangers from the internet). He engages in quixotic acts of political disruption, such as making a scene during Shakespeare In The Park, calling for a boycott of Star Wars, and planting a “Rape Melania” sign among anti-Trump protesters to discredit them. He has worked for Turning Point USA, OANN, and Human Events, as well as Citizens for Trump, “the largest Trump grassroots organization in the US.” Co-author Joshua Lisec is less infamous, being a professional ghostwriter who has worked with Dilbert creator Scott Adams as well as various influencer and life coach types.

Unhumans is both a manifesto and a guide for action. Its central argument, which I will state as dispassionately as possible, is that leftists are not fellow human beings who should be accepted as part of a pluralistic society, but rather “unhumans” bent on destroying the civilized order. Citing the usual parade of 20th century communist dictators (Mao, Lenin, Stalin, Pol Pot), Posobiec and Lisec argue that even if it may not look like the contemporary United States is under threat from a communist revolution, we are under threat, besieged by furtive, scheming unhumans who must be rooted out before they can consummate their fiendish plot to commit mass murder. Stopping the unhumans will require shedding commitments to democracy, free speech, reasoned debate, and tolerance of alternate points of view. Instead, they argue, the right should find its role models in Caesar, Joseph McCarthy, and various murderous anti-communist dictators of the 20th century. 

Like I say, I’ve tried to put this fairly dispassionately. But it’s incredibly disturbing, and argued very seriously in the book, which repeatedly praises Spanish dictator Francisco Franco—who, let us remember, was responsible for “mass killings, torture and the systematic, general and illegal detentions of political opponents.” Franco’s White Terror killed hundreds of thousands of people, based on Franco’s notion of “social cleansing,” and “turned the country into an immense prison.” How do Posobiec and Lisec rationalize their praise of dictators? Essentially, they argue that to stop communism, ugly means are required. They advocate what they call “the Iron Law of Exact Reciprocity,” which means, essentially, do unto others what they have done unto you, no matter how horrible. It is the dark inverse of the Golden Rule, which is “treat others as you would like to be treated,” and while it sounds superficially similar it’s actually a moral justification for brutal revenge: 

To fight back, conservatives, centrists, moderates, and even good liberals will need to embrace something they have never considered. They must embrace exact reciprocity. That which is done by the communist and the regime must be done unto them.

They imply that because Mao and Stalin used torture, suppressed dissent, and executed their opponents, these methods were legitimate and necessary when deployed by Pinochet and Franco. The priority should be to eliminate communism altogether, even if that means engaging in widespread human rights abuses like throwing people to their deaths from helicopters:  

Pinochet offered reciprocal punishment to the communist revolutionaries, demoralizing their cause and diminishing their ranks. All allies of anti-civilization were ruthlessly excised from Chilean society. The story of tossing communists out of helicopters hails from Pinochet’s elimination of communism during the mid to late 1970s. Wherever Pinochet was, there was no communism. And the globalist intelligentsia didn’t like that. Not one little bit. 

Pinochet’s extrajudicial executions and torture, then, including the killing of Chilean poet and singer Victor Jara, were therefore praiseworthy acts of resistance to the sinister plot of the “globalist intelligentsia.” Posobiec and Lisec claim, without the slightest evidence, that democratically-elected socialist president Salvador Allende might have “kill[ed] upward of a million of his countrymen to gain absolute power,” hence Pinochet was justified in staging a coup and imposing a dictatorship. (With, of course, the full backing of the Nixon administration.) 

Unhumans follows the standard conservative modus operandi of conjuring a terrifying bogeyman, trying to scare the shit out of you, and warning that unless the bogeyman is stopped, civilization is going to collapse. Paranoia and fear are at the core of right-wing politics, with a rotating cast of villains including marauding immigrants, LGBTQ “groomers,” BLM activists coming to burn down your city, The Chinese, Antifa, Iran, teachers’ unions, The Online Social Justice Mob, “globalists,” and now even “childless cat ladies.” Unhumans says the enemy is still communism, which they say is very much a threat in the 2024 United States, and wants to kill a billion people: 

Unhumans still support communism after it killed 100 million people in the twentieth century. They are not bothered that communism killed 100 million people. In fact, they think 100 million deaths is just a good start. Those wholly possessed by resentment want to 10X that number. On a base level, unhumans seek the death of the successful and the desecration of the beautiful. They want to smash civilization. And so whenever and wherever they gain power, they do. And yet, conservatives would rather whine about equal treatment while unhumans are drawing them toward freshly dug graves.

Now, Posobiec and Lisec are aware that when they say things like this, the average person will think it sounds wildly out of touch with reality, on the level of someone who sees pink elephants or thinks the feds are sending radio signals to their dental fillings. They admit that the actual U.S. Communist Party has “no meaningful influence.” But, they say, communists are sneaky. The “communist cause” is a “chameleon” with “many shades,” and “complements whoever has the power to wedge a society into separate, angry factions.” This allows them to lump all contemporary progressives in with the communist plot. They see aspects of the plot even in incidents that seemingly have nothing to do with communism, such as when people got mad after Scott Adams suggested white people should “get the hell away from Black people.” (They claim Adams’s “one and only offense was to state a viewpoint that no one disagreed with,” namely that “Americans [should] stay away from embittered groups who hate them.”) The authors blow up Twitter controversies into signs of civilizational rot and a communist guerrilla insurgency. You see, “the Scott Adams story is not an isolated incident.” It “is one among many of easy-to-find examples of the low-intensity, highly targeted uprising against normal people the unhumans force on individuals every single day.” “Communism has been rebranded,” which is part of the “covert tactics” that communists use. What proof is there of this? Well, who needs proof when instead you have a vague feeling of unease: 

Something is deeply wrong with the way things are going and you know it. You may not be able to explain it with studies, surveys, or statistics, but you feel it. You’ve felt this way for a while. Like there’s some outside force or group or . . . something . . . that’s sent us all off course from the libertarian utopia we should’ve achieved by now. It doesn’t seem like one -ism or -ation is entirely to blame, like globalism or immigration, capitalism or inflation. … Evidence of the unhuman activity is everywhere we look. But can we really pin all those on communists? Nobody pays attention to CPUSA. And there hasn’t been a Carmelite nun–style massacre. Or mass arrest and torture of landlords. But they’re arresting landlords in New York City, now. And yet . . . the history of the revolution . . . the present day . . . it feels directionally accurate, doesn’t it? [idiosyncratic ellipses in original] 

To summarize: there may be no evidence that there is a vast communist plot to destroy the country. The crimes of Stalin and Mao are long in the past, and in no way does contemporary American life contain anything similar. And yet: people are unhappy. They think something is wrong. And so why not believe it’s all part of a giant sinister conspiracy? It “feels” accurate, at least “directionally,” and after all, as the right loves to say, feelings are just as legitimate as facts.

We can see here some of the common techniques of right-wing propaganda. Not only do they always identify a sinister civilization-destroying enemy, but they also encourage you to blame that enemy for every problem in your life, even the problems that are obviously caused by the policies that the right supports. So, for example, your low wages are the fault of immigrants, not the fabulously rich employer who underpays you. The right encourages working people to hate and fear their fellow workers instead of banding together with them. So, for instance, your children’s public school teachers are actually your enemy, and their collective bargaining rights must be destroyed: 

We recommend the immediate banning of all public education unions in the United States, as these institutions hold a near-monopoly on the rearing of America’s publicly schooled children and are thus uniquely responsible for the disparity in outcomes between and among underclass, working, middle, and upper- class students. They’ve got to go. … A full-scale lawfare assault against the teachers’ unions until every last one is shut down is a necessary path forward.

We can observe here further proof that right-wing “populism” is a fraud. J.D. Vance is supposedly one of the leading right-wing “populists,” but has endorsed a plan for a full-scale legal war to break the back of a major part of the labor movement. Posobiec and Lisec make it clear that they’re on the side of elites against uprisings by the masses. They defend Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. (She “was not some obstinate socialite. In fact, she gave greatly to philanthropic endeavors and founded charity houses all over France.”) According to them, Franco just wanted a “traditional Catholic monarchy, which had been foundational to Spanish civilization for centuries,” and thus became “a Washingtonian figure but without term limits.” (George Washington, famously, loved monarchies.) The Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza is praised because he “graduated from West Point, loved America, and hated communists.” They argue that white Rhodesia and South Africa were wrecked by the anti-racist struggle. Nelson Mandela, for instance, was a "communist" who became the “darling of the Western progressive elite” and helped put South Africa onto a “downward equity spiral.” Of course there’s also a section on the U.S. civil rights movement, which was not the “moral fable” of your history textbook but in fact set cities on fire and did lasting damage to the social order. 

I don’t know if it’s worth noting that the book is, uh, not particularly scrupulous about getting its facts right. Who expects scholarly rigor from a Pizzagate promoter like Posobiec? Nevertheless, anyone who checks will find some howlers. Jan. 6th was in fact a “trap,” an “insurrection…against President Trump,” and “the locking up of patriots was always the goal.” Of George Orwell, they say that “prior to service in the [Spanish Civil War], he had been pro-socialist. But after witnessing the violent purges of the Rojos side for himself, he was put off by all left-wingers from then onward.” Anyone who has read Orwell’s memoir knows that it contains a stirring defense of socialist values, even though he was harshly critical of Stalinism. In 1946, well after the Spanish Civil War, Orwell wrote that “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism as I understand it." 

But I don’t want to spend too much time fisking Unhumans for sloppiness, because the point is not that it’s error-riddled, it’s that it’s terrifying and fascistic, encouraging readers to embrace a paranoid view that literally dehumanizes their fellow Americans and fosters an atmosphere of total war. Anyone who believes what this book says, which apparently includes our possible future Vice President, is going to be capable of utterly monstrous deeds.

Posobiec and Lisec do insist that, while they praise brutal dictators who threw people out of helicopters and tortured them by the thousands, “nothing here in this section or in this book advocates illegal violence.” Some of what they say on this is contradictory. For instance, they say that “Unhumans rob and kill. We do not.” But elsewhere, they encourage readers to embrace the tactics of the “unhumans,” due to the Iron Law of Reciprocity and the validity of the “eye for an eye” principle. Their specific recommendations lean towards “lawfare” (intentionally filing frivolous criminal charges and lawsuits in order to harm people), “infiltrating” institutions (such as getting onto university governing boards so you can fire professors), publishing blacklists, and following the “Libs of TikTok” strategy of exposing people to public hatred. But even this, they say, “amounts to perhaps 0.01 percent of the effort required to identify and oust Cultural Marxists from positions and institutions in their clutches.” They do not say what extreme forms of behavior might be included in the remaining 99.99 percent of their counterrevolutionry warfare. 

However, even though they don’t come out in favor of outright exterminating the “unhumans,” they do encourage their readers to think in ways that make extreme violence a much more reasonable-seeming proposition. After all, the enemy is unhuman. Steve Bannon says in his introduction that “‘humanity’ only happens when you have an actual civilization—principles of civility, rules of law and order, respect for basic human rights.” The unhumans possess no humanity. So would it be that bad to place them in concentration camps? Why would you have a problem exterminating them? They’re unhuman. And they’d do the same thing to you! After all, as Posobiec and Lisec say, “violence is nature’s way.”

So even if the authors of Unhumans haven’t advocated killing the “communists” (a category that seems to include all contemporary social justice activists and anyone who criticizes Scott Adams on Twitter), they have reduced or eliminated many arguments for not killing them. And it would be trivially easy for someone a notch further to the right of Posobiec and Lisec to use the premises of their book to prove to them that they are simply refusing to face the ugly, necessary conclusions that follow. “If you say these people are unhumans, and you say they are bent on destroying humanity,” this person may say, “then not to exterminate them is pure spinelessness.” Even if they don’t think Pinochet’s practice of dropping people from helicopters needs to be revived, they make it clear that it is in no way to be condemned. (And they deplore the human rights groups who tried to hold Pinochet accountable for his crimes, saying that they “used lawfare to harass and discredit Pinochet after he stepped down from power to terrorize future leaders in South America and abroad from putting up effective resistance to communism.”) 

Notably, Posobiec and Lisec do not seem to care at all about civil liberties. They say that they “believe in beauty, truth, law, and order.” Tolerance and freedom of expression are absent from that list. They are very explicit in saying that democracy is not a priority, admiringly quoting Franco saying “we do not believe in government through the voting booth.” They comment that “Democracy has never worked to protect innocents from the unhumans. It is time to stop playing by rules they won’t.” The “great American counterrevolution to depose the Cultural Marxists” must be conducted “with the resolve of Franco and the thoroughness of McCarthy.” Beyond Franco, McCarthy, and Pinochet, their models include “Julius Caesar, Napoleon Bonaparte, Pyotr Wrangel, [and] Chiang Kai-shek.” These men were not squeamish about using violence, or terribly concerned with popular legitimacy.

Reasoned discourse itself must be jettisoned. We do not “reason with unreasonables,” Posobiec and Lisec say. Humility is weakness. “Never apologize,” they say. (Never fact-check either, of course.) Steve Bannon has similarly said that he rejects being “reasonable” because he sees himself as being in a war. “Conservatives have lost years of ground by being obsessed with debating ‘facts and logic’ rather than doing the grubby work of entering institutions and remaking them from inside,” Posobiec and Lisec write. You should not listen to or empathize with people. You should not scrutinize your own ideology to see if it might be a paranoid ghost story wildly out of touch with reality. You should just be hell-bent on making war against your inhuman enemies, because “The unhumans will not stop until they are stopped. And we must stop them.”

I recently spoke with one of the world’s leading experts on dehumanization, philosopher David Livingstone Smith, author of books like Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others, On Inhumanity: Dehumanization and How to Resist It, and Making Monsters: The Uncanny Power of Dehumanization. Smith warns that dehumanization has been a critical step toward the enactment of history’s worst atrocities, such as the Holocaust or the Rwandan genocide. When we see people as less than human, as monsters, it feels less wrong to do horrible things to them. This is a seemingly obvious point, but Smith argues that it’s not obvious, because perfectly normal, moral people don’t notice themselves doing it. Dehumanization is, Smith argues, one of the most dangerous tendencies there is, because of what it implicitly licenses. 

Lisec has denied that Unhumans treats contemporary progressives as subhuman. The book has attracted press coverage because of Vance’s endorsement, and in a statement (sent to me by his publicist) he denied the allegation against it:

[T]hese non-conservative media publications are spreading misinformation, including saying that JD Vance endorsed our book, which they claim calls progressives "unhuman." If you even read the book, it's about communism, exposing dehumanizers on the Far Left. Nowhere does anyone call progressives "unhuman."

Now, I’m not sure how “saying that JD Vance endorsed our book” is “spreading misinformation,” since Vance’s blurb appears on the back cover and in a previous statement the authors said “we are honored to receive Senator JD Vance's acknowledgment and praise for our new book. … To have someone on the right with his influence understand the Iron Law of Exact Reciprocity as detailed in ‘Unhumans,’ is civilization-altering.” As for Lisec’s claim that the book isn’t branding progressives unhuman, he’s simply lying about the contents, perhaps because he realizes the book threatens to be an explosive political liability for Vance. After all, if the book is not calling progressives “unhuman,” then who are all the contemporary “unhumans” the book spends page after page exhorting us to ruthlessly fight? They admit that actual self-declared capital-C Communists are rare these days. In fact, precisely what the book is doing is treating the contemporary left as less than human, which Posobiec made clear in a speech to the Heritage Foundation-sponsored National Conservatism Conference: 

We don’t negotiate with globalist neo-Marxists. We don’t negotiate with the political version of an auto-immune disease. In a word, ladies and gentlemen—taken from the title of my book—we don’t negotiate with un-humans. Because that’s the stakes of this battle: humanity versus un-humanity. Populist nationalists versus atheist Marxist globalists. Strength, beauty, and genius versus weakness, ugliness, and stupidity. Civilization versus barbarism. Crime and chaos versus law and order…

Hamilton Nolan notes that after Posobiec finished, Kansas senator Roger Marshall praised him: “Boy, great job, Jack… When people ask me what’s the hope out there, Jack’s voice is one of them.” This means that the outright dehumanization of the left is fully mainstream in Republican politics. Speaking of Posobiec’s address, David Livingstone Smith told me that history shows this kind of rhetoric needs to be taken very seriously. “This is,” he said, “in my view, a fascist style of politics. That style of politics is particularly associated with demonization… This is very, very dangerous.” And it’s not just Posobiec. Smith warns that Trump’s own speeches are full of exactly the same kind of demonization, the talk of “vermin” and enemies who are “poisoning the blood of our country.” I have written before of the alarming presence on the right of outright fascist rhetoric about weak “bug men” who must be ground underfoot.

Now, I have made clear before that I don’t think it’s easy to know what J.D. Vance actually believes, since he has a record of being an opportunist whose rhetoric shifts. (An aspect of him I tried to capture in my lyrics to the song “The Ballad of J.D. Vance.”) But I don’t really care to speculate on how sincere he is in his endorsement of the plan in Unhumans. The fact is that he says he believes in a fascist manifesto, and the fact that a vice presidential nominee has outright endorsed Francoism should be treated as a five-alarm emergency in any country that wants to preserve its democratic institutions. Vance has suggested elsewhere that the right should ignore the law and “go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”

One of the points that we have made in Current Affairs for years is that we must always focus on the most important criticisms of the right. The latest Democratic line of attack against Trump and Vance is that they are “weird,” which is true, but I think somewhat beside the point, and gets us debating the wrong thing. (I’m a bit weird. Weird is fine.) Other criticisms are just in error, like suggesting Vance only wants “white children” when his own children are biracial. Kamala Harris suggested Vance is not “loyal to our country,” which I think is a foolish criticism to make of a military veteran whose stated politics are extremely nationalistic. I think we must be very clear about what the threat here is, which is that Trump and Vance have a radical authoritarian agenda and do not care about democracy or the rule of law. The Unhumans plan endorsed by Vance, Bannon, Don Jr., and Flynn is much scarier even than the “Project 2025” Trump is desperately trying to distance himself from. They are encouraging dehumanization and the creation of imaginary enemies, which lays the groundwork for acts of repression and violence. In encouraging people to embrace Unhumans, Vance has endorsed the outright dehumanization of the left, while Trump’s rhetoric about migrant “animals” fuels the paranoia of people like the guy who killed dozens of Latinos in a Walmart to stop the “Hispanic invasion.” (We should always be careful about making cause-and-effect links between political rhetoric and the acts of random shooters, of course, but it’s easy to see how telling people that they are in a war, that there are invaders everywhere, and that the invaders will rape or kill them is not making acts like this any less likely.) 

There are, according to Posobiec and Lisec, unhumans everywhere: 

You may already be a subject of unhumans. You are employed by unhumans. You are married to . . . you get it. You know. There’s nowhere for you to run or to hide. You are at the mercy of those who show no mercy. We will not fault you for doing what you must to survive… 

What is a person who believes this capable of? Well, we know what Pinochet and Franco were capable of, and J.D. Vance’s blurb doesn’t suggest he disagrees with Unhumans’ praise for these dictators. The worldview of this book is fascistic. And that means, if we take Vance’s words seriously, that the potential next vice president is also a fascist sympathizer. So are many of those in the orbit of the potential next president. I cannot overstate how dangerous this is. The word “fascist” is, notoriously, thrown around so much as to become meaningless. Personally, I try to be careful with it. I reserve it for mass murdering dictators like Franco and Benito Mussolini, and those who endorse these men’s methods. I think we can safely use it in this case.

Fortunately, America has a strong tradition of anti-fascism. Neo-Nazis have always been marginal in this country, because Americans are proud of their role in helping the Soviet Union beat the Nazis. Americans are, by and large, a rambunctious people who do not like to be ruled over by autocrats. If they understand that they are facing a genuine authoritarian threat, I am confident that the majority of them will oppose it. But will they understand? Books like Unhumans attempt to convince them that the threat in fact comes from immigrants, unions, or even their own spouses, rather than from people like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, oligarchs who think popular self-government was a mistake. We must do our best to show the true nature of the danger the country is in, and be ready to stand against it.