Donald Trump’s vice presidential running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), endorsed a book published this month by Jack Posobiec, a right-wing influencer famous for helping spread the Pizzagate conspiracy theory in 2016.
Posobiec’s book, written with Joshua Lisec, is titled “Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and How to Crush Them).”
Vance wrote an “editorial review,” commonly known as a blurb, praising the book. It’s a small but fresh example of how conspiracy theorists have become massively influential among Republicans.
“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,” Vance wrote. “In ‘Unhumans,’ Jack Posobiec and Joshua Lisec reveal their plans and show us what to do to fight back.”
Posobiec has amassed over 2 million followers on X (formerly Twitter), and some party operatives last year described Posobiec as the next George Will in terms of his influence over GOP thought — despite, or perhaps because of, his radical views.
The book’s premise is that communists of history and modern-day progressives fundamentally oppose civilization itself — and therefore they’re not even really people. Hence the title.
“By becoming consumed by nihilism, unhumans oppose everything that makes up humanity,” Posobiec and Lisec write in their introduction. “As they are opposed to humanity itself, they place themselves outside the category completely, in an entirely new misery-driven subdivision, the unhuman.”
Book blurbs are part of an elite reciprocal favor economy and typically are written by people who have not actually read the book they’re blurbing. But it’s clear why Vance might have liked the premise of “Unhumans,” since he has used strikingly similar rhetoric. In 2021, he claimed the “childless left” was motivated by its own misery to immiserate the entire country.
“We’re effectively run in this country, via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too,” Vance said on Fox News.
The “unhuman” concept also jells with Donald Trump’s authoritarian description of his political opponents as “vermin.”
Posobiec’s book purports to give its readers strategies to “crush” the unhumans and suggests that it can’t be done through democratic means. “Democracy has never worked to protect innocents from the unhumans. It is time to stop playing by rules they won’t,” the book says.
Posobiec and Lisec stress in the final chapter, however — after having excused the Jan. 6, 2021, mob attack on Congress by Trump supporters as a “lawfare trap” — that they don’t support violence.
“Illegal and harmful acts to further any political cause should be condemned totally. We do,” they write. “Thus, all commentary of ours should be interpreted in the spirit of law and order. We cannot save civilization by suspending it.”
Instead of illegal means, Posobiec and Lisec encourage their readers to make public lists of unhumans, to make fun of them, to attack them with “lawfare” and cancel culture, and to support legislation that would increase “tax transparency” and ban public teacher unions.
Posobiec achieved notoriety in 2016 by propagating the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, which some have described as a precursor to QAnon and the “big lie” about the 2020 election being stolen.
Pizzagate’s proponents posited with no evidence whatsoever that top Democrats were running a child sex ring out of Comet Ping Pong, a pizza place in Washington, D.C. Posobiec fueled the fake story with a livestream from inside the restaurant in November 2016.
“We threw him out,” the restaurant’s owner recalled in 2021. “But he was also just like a loser with a livestream that anyone could have. But the incident heroized him or something.”
The next month, a 28-year-old North Carolina man brought an assault rifle to Comet Ping Pong and fired three rounds inside. Nobody was hurt and police arrested the man after he’d spent more than half an hour searching for the restaurant’s nonexistent sex dungeon. The judge who sentenced him to prison said it was “sheer luck” nobody was killed.