“Unhumans”- JD Vance Embraces Fascism and the Extreme Far Right

Far too many Republican "friends" and acquaintances, especially those in the "country club Republican" set who drink Fox News Kool-Aid daily continue to close their eyes and/or refuse to admit that the Republican Party is now controlled by extremists and a mix of "Christian" fanatics and white supremacist who hold democracy in contempt and who seemingly would happily murder political opponents.  Donald Trump has long pandered to the hideous and dangerous elements in the MAGA base. JD Vance, Trump's vice presidential pick, is all in on the embrace of these extremists, some of who are now labeling progressives and political opponents on the left as "unhuman" and following Hitler's playbook of identifying supposed enemies of the "real Americans" and setting about dehumanizing them as a prelude to violence and the type of horrors seen in fascist regimes over the decades.   Indeed, Vance penned an approving endorsement for a frightening new book bearing the name "Unhumans" that does everything but call out for the murder of opponents on the political left.  A column in the New York Times looks at this disturbing book and Vance's embrace of the extremist dogma it lays out.  Here are column excerpts:

In a normal political environment, there would be little need to pay attention to a new book by the far-right provocateur Jack Posobiec, who is probably best known for promoting the conspiracy theory that Democrats ran a satanic child abuse ring beneath a popular Washington pizzeria. But “Unhumans,” an anti-democratic screed that Posobiec co-wrote with the professional ghostwriter Joshua Lisec, comes with endorsements from some of the most influential people in Republican politics, including, most significantly, vice-presidential candidate JD Vance.

The word “fascist” gets thrown around a lot in politics, but it’s hard to find a more apt one for “Unhumans,” which came out last month. The book argues that leftists don’t deserve the status of human beings — that they are, as the title says, unhumans — and that they are waging a shadow war against all that is good and decent, which will end in apocalyptic slaughter if they are not stopped. “As they are opposed to humanity itself, they place themselves outside of the category completely, in an entirely new misery-driven subdivision, the unhuman,” write Posobiec and Lisec.

As they tell it, modern progressivism is just the latest incarnation of an ancient evil dating back to the late Roman Republic and continuing through the French Revolution and Communism to today. Often, they write, “great men of means” are required to crush this scourge.

The contempt for democracy in “Unhumans” is not subtle. “Our study of history has brought us to this conclusion: Democracy has never worked to protect innocents from the unhumans,” write Posobiec and Lisec.

One of their book’s heroes is the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, who overthrew the democratic Second Spanish Republic in the country’s 1930s civil war. The authors call him a “great man of history” and compare him to George Washington. They quote him on what doesn’t work against the unhuman threat: “We do not believe in government through the voting booth.

Nakedly authoritarian ideas like this one are not uncommon in the dank corners of the reactionary internet, or among the sort of groups that led the Jan. 6 insurrection. “Unhumans” lauds Augusto Pinochet, leader of the Chilean military junta who led a coup against Salvador Allende’s elected government in 1973, ushering in a reign of torture and repression that involved tossing political enemies from helicopters.

Pinochet-inspired helicopter memes have been common in the MAGA movement for years. And as the historian David Austin Walsh wrote last year, there’s long been a cult of Franco on the right. Nevertheless, it’s extremely unusual for a candidate for vice president of the United States to openly align himself with autocratic terror.

Vance provided the first blurb on the “Unhumans” book jacket. “In the past, communists marched in the streets waving red flags. Today, they march through H.R., college campuses and courtrooms to wage lawfare against good, honest people,” he wrote. “Jack Posobiec and Joshua Lisec reveal their plans and show us what to do to fight back.”

Other endorsements come from Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump Jr., a key figure in his father’s presidential campaign. The foreword is by Stephen Bannon, Donald Trump’s former chief strategist.

[U]nless and until he [Vance] credibly distances himself from it, we should take him at his word that he shares the book’s analysis. After all, some of the language in “Unhumans” resembles his own rhetoric.

“The great American counterrevolution to depose the Cultural Marxists must occur on all terrains of society they currently possess and on those they aim to seize,” write Posobiec and Lisec, adding, “It is achievable but only with the resolve of Franco and the thoroughness of McCarthy.” (They mean Joseph McCarthy, another of the book’s icons.) Compare that to what Vance said on the alt-right podcast “Jack Murphy Live” in 2021, when he argued that Republicans, upon taking power, should purge their opponents the way Iraq’s government once purged members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party.

Trump, said Vance, should “fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.” And if the courts try to stand in his way, Trump should “stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say: ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”

You can and should laugh at Vance’s melodramatic self-importance and creepy subcultural fixations. (On “Jack Murphy Live,” Vance respectfully references Curtis Yarvin, a right-wing blogger popular in reactionary Silicon Valley circles who calls for replacing democracy with a sort of techno-monarchy.)

“Much like the United States founding fathers, Franco and his fellows saw themselves as rebels intended to overthrow a corrupt, tyrannical government that aided and abetted murder and rape as well as other repugnant sins,” write Posobiec and Lisec. We should take seriously the possibility that Vance and his fellows see themselves the same way.