https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/july-17-2026
"Yesterday President Donald J. Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and
deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller all threw the weight of the
U.S. government behind a far-right conspiracy theory that says Trump and his
loyalists are defending the United States of America against a communist
takeover.
As Gil Duran of
The Nerd Reich recalled today, two years ago, far-right
influencer Jack Posobiec and co-author Joshua Lisec wrote a bestselling book
called
Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and How to Crush
Them). Trump ally and media guru Stephen Bannon wrote the introduction. Donald
Trump Jr. blurbed the book, saying that it provided a playbook to deploy
“immediately to save the West.” Then–Ohio senator J.D. Vance also blurbed the
book, saying: “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.”
Posobiec is a loyalist who worked to keep Trump in office after voters elected
Democrat Joe Biden in 2020. He is known for courting controversy by promoting
what Maya Oppenheim of the
The Independent in 2018 called “wholly erroneous
and debunked conspiracy theories,” including the infamous 2016 “Pizzagate”
conspiracy theory that Democrats were operating a child sex ring in the
basement of a Washington, D.C., pizza restaurant.
In
Unhumans, Posobiec and Lisec argue that the United States is under siege
by “the left,” which in their view means anyone from communists to
“progressives.” “For the purposes of this book, we will call them the
unhumans,” the authors write, because they “oppose everything that makes up
humanity. As they are opposed to humanity itself, they place themselves outside
of the category completely, in an entirely new misery-driven subdivision, the
unhuman.”
Lisec explained to Nathan J. Robinson of
Current Affairs that the reason they
called the book “Unhumans” “is because it’s a verb, to unhuman someone…. To
‘unhuman’ someone means to deprive someone of their rights to life, liberty and
property.” The authors insisted that “communists” were trying to “unhuman”
those they consider good Americans, and that “we can’t tolerate an ideology
like that” and so must do it to them first.
Ignoring the fascist revolutions that gave rise to World War II, the authors
tie together left-wing revolutions from the late Roman Republic to the French
Revolution of 1789 to the Russian and Chinese revolutions to the present and
claim that all political positions designed to regulate business, provide a
basic social safety net, promote infrastructure, or protect civil rights
reflect that same left-wing radicalism. In their telling, Spain’s fascist
dictator Francisco Franco, who said, “Wherever I am, there will be no
communism,” is a hero.
Franco ordered illegal detentions, torture, and mass killings in the name of
social cleansing. As Michelle Goldberg of the
New York Times noted in 2024,
the right wing has often championed Franco, but “it’s extremely unusual for a
candidate for vice president of the United States to openly align himself with
autocratic terror.”"
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
