#joshua lisec

[justinspoliticalcorner]

JD Vance Wrote Book Blurb For Far-Right Influencer Of Pizzagate Fame

The book, “Unhumans,” suggests progressives aren’t really people.

Arthur Delaney at HuffPost:

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.”

[...]

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.

Trump VP Pick J.D. Vance wrote a blurb in Neo-Nazi Pizzagate pusher Jack Posobiec’s book co-written with Joshua Lisec that is titled Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and How to Crush Them).

[redshift-13]

The Horrifying Fascist Manifesto Endorsed By J.D. Vance

A disturbing book plans a ruthless total war against the “unhuman” left.

"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.

...

A perennial feature of right-wing rhetoric is absurdly exaggerated threat. Its hyperbole is typically unconnected to reality or the magnitude of a given change or any reasonable understanding of the consequences of that change.

Threat rhetoric is maximally exaggerated and sees fundamental categories of human existence cast into dire jeopardy: civilization, the family, marriage, human nature, the west, the correct understanding of a god or just God, truth, morality, true religion and faith. In any one of these categories, everything is at stake. Pristine idols sit on an altar and even dirty fingerprints might cause them to crumble. The reactionary’s rejection of reason must have a substitute content for its mental operations, and that substitute is the idol - an eternally fixed, crassly simplified and concretized notion to which abiding obeisance must be paid. Absolutist religious impulses seek to create safe foundations to alleviate anxiety.

The firm lines the reactionary says that you must not cross are often undefined, but their transgression nonetheless is dangerous. When they are defined and no catastrophe results in crossing them, a new line is announced and the exaggerated hyperbole resumes as if nothing has happened.

Large scale institutions and practices, rooted in history, habit, human nature, law and belief are according to this rhetoric fragile and liable to be knocked over by even slight winds of change. These same fundamental institutions are simultaneously the only available bulwarks against change.

At its core what the mind in thrall to exaggerated threat is kicking against is a form of intelligence: the values, practices and consequences of rational, evidence-based criticism of everything that exists. The necessary uncertainties and self-doubt inherent in this approach is the problem that the reactionary mind is trying to solve by erecting calming certainties and comfortable simplifications.

There needn’t be any communists in elected office at the national level nor anywhere else in significant numbers for reactionaries to nevertheless claim that there are. If idols of thought have their profane other, then any label that captures some opposition to the idol will suffice: perversion, satanism, Marxism, communism, liberalism, the “elites,” feminism, nihilism. It’s not necessary for any of these labels to be accurately applied in good faith since their function isn’t empirical description but the creation of a politically useful category of radical otherness that then authorizes extreme measures.