Behold, a book that lusts openly for revenge:
Humiliate the unhumans. Ridicule the unhumans. Disgrace, debase, and deride the unhumans. Put the unhumans to shame. Tease and taunt and parody the unhumans. Scorn, scoff, and sneer.
Who are these “unhumans”? According to Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and How to Crush Them), by Jack Posobiec and Joshua Lisec (Skyhorse, 2024), the unhumans are the revolutionaries of the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the Spanish Civil War, and the Chinese Revolution; sundry postcolonial revolutionaries in Africa and South America; and finally the progressives or “gray-zone revolutionaries” of the United States circa 2024. They all claim, these revolutionaries, to seek equality for the oppressed against their oppressors. Posobiec, editor of the right-wing news and opinion website Human Events, and Lisec, a prolific ghostwriter, pronounce the claim fraudulent. The truth, they disclose, is that these soi-disant champions of the people are not humanists but inhuman, or “unhuman,” nihilists:
Leftists operate from envy. There is no way to reason with those who manipulate the have-nots en masse to loot and to shoot. They simply hate those who are good-looking and successful. The egalitarian ideology is just window dressing.
It’s not about equality; it’s about revenge.
The French revolutionaries’ fiery hatred of their forebears sees its mirror today in modern leftist ideology. You destroy something because it feels good to destroy something beautiful and orderly. You couldn’t make it in society, so you tear that society down without regard for what replaces it.
Is there a counterrevolutionary force capable of “crushing” these monstrous American-communist “unhumans”? Of getting even with them? Yes, but don’t think that an election can do it.
Our study of history has brought us to this conclusion: Democracy has never worked to protect innocents from the unhumans. It is time to stop playing by rules they won’t.
Or, as the authors put it at another point, “We cannot vote our way out of this.” No, at such a dread impasse, suffering America must hope for one of the “Great Men of History” to ride to the rescue. Think Julius Caesar, who was not taken in by the specious rhetoric of res publica, senatus populusque romanus, and so forth, but who recognized, Great Man that he was, that what the Roman Empire needed was a true emperor. The Great Man of the Russian Revolution was the czarist Black Baron, General Pyotr Wrangel, who commanded the anti-Bolshevik White Army against the Bolshevik Red Army (and lost, but never mind). The Great Man of the Maoist Revolution was, of course, Chiang Kai-Shek (who also lost). But among the historic Greats, the authors’ special favorite is the Great Man of the Spanish civil war, Generalissimo Francisco Franco (who won).
Let Cultural Marxists tremble in fear that they will be named and shamed…
But now, in AD 2024, who is the Great Man who will crush the regime of “unhumans” that has the United States of America in its vile grip? Think, for openers, of a Joseph McCarthy redux. McCarthy, if perhaps only a near-Great in the authors’ pantheon, counts at least as a component in what is required: “The great American counterrevolution to depose the Cultural Marxists … is achievable only with the resolve of Franco and the thoroughness of McCarthy.”
But even a fusion of McCarthy and Franco will not quite be the Great Man of History that suffering America requires for its liberation. No, what America needs is one of those whom the authors name “Great Men of Means.” The Great Man of Means whom they have most in mind is not Donald J. Trump but Elon Musk:
Consider Elon Musk, the sole protector of anything like freedom of speech on the internet, who has been subjected to cruel and unusual lawfare by unhuman bureaucrats and activists. He must have our full support. Franco needed his generals; Bonaparte his officers; Musk his netizens.
Musk is lauded for grasping the true nature of the counterrevolutionary cause:
… communists can manufacture grievances to their dark little hearts’ content—just to make people mad and gain power over them. How do you deal with that?
For one, accept that this is our situation. Elon Musk put it this way, “Most reasonable people, because they are reasonable, cannot believe that the goal of the far left is to end America.” You’ve come with us this far and so you now believe, or at the very least find the premise believable. Now comes the action. What to do about it?
The authors’ answer to that key question, coming immediately in a boldface section title, and linking the conclusion of this review to its start, is: The Iron Law of Exact Reciprocity. Counterrevolutionaries must beat the revolutionaries—the progressives, the “unhumans”—at their own game: “Terror is a double-edged weapon.”
What we need are lists. Turning Point USA publishes a “Professor Watchlist” with dossiers on college and university staff…. This is a start, so let’s keep going…. We need men and women of action to do the same—and to fund it. Yes, in education but also in the media, throughout the economy, and more.… Whichever organizations and influencers across the social terrain are engaging in microrevolution against normal people, put them on the list. Then, publish that list. Then promote it. Advertise the counterrevolution. Let Cultural Marxists tremble in fear that they will be named and shamed.… Reciprocity works. It’s mutually assured cancellation. The unhumans will not stop until they are stopped.
Speaking of lists, Politico published, one day after the election, an article by Josh Gerstein listing one hundred or more people whom Trump has singled out for legal prosecution. For many on the list, Gerstein provides angry quotations from the president-elect—now, of course, immune from prosecution for any abuse of the instruments of the governance to execute sheer revenge. The last entry on Gerstein’s list is Politico itself:
Trump has also called for stern measures—including imprisonment—for journalists who refuse to identify their sources. He specifically seized on Politico’s exclusive report in May 2022 about a draft Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe v. Wade…. At a rally in 2022, Trump raised the specter of prison rape as a potential tool to identify a leaker.
Harry Litman, in a November 7 column in The Los Angeles Times, on the likelihood that Trump will seek revenge against those he has deemed enemies, quoted a Trump motto that was read into the evidence at one of his trials: “My motto is: Always get even. When somebody screws you, screw them back in spades.” This is precisely not the “eye for an eye” or lex talionis (law of suchness) of Torah (Exodus 21, Leviticus 24). Trump’s principle, “screw them back in spades,” is the one that Torah repudiates—namely, two eyes for an eye, two teeth for a tooth or, for Trump, prison rape for a journalist’s concealing the identity of a source.
In an October 13 interview with Martha Raddatz on ABC’s This Week, JD Vance said that Donald Trump “was president for four years, and he didn’t go after his political opponents”—a statement for which The Washington Post awarded him “Four Pinocchios” for lying. Leaving aside the question of Trump’s past presidential persecution, if any, of political enemies, how does Vance feel about Posobiec and Lisec’s “Iron Law” for crushing “unhuman” American progressives?
On the back cover of the book’s jacket, Vance’s blurb, preceding others by Tucker Carlson, Donald Trump Jr., and Michael Flynn, reads:
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. Jack Posobiec and Joshua Lisec reveal their plans and show us what to do to fight back. [Emphasis added.]
At a Turning Point Action conference in June 2024, Steve Bannon was happy to name a few names:
We’re coming after Lisa Monaco, Merrick Garland, senior members of DOJ that are prosecuting Donald Trump. Jack Smith. And this is not about vengeance. This is not about retribution. This is about saving this republic! [See Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling, “Steve Bannon Exposes Trump’s Chilling Revenge List,” The New Republic, June 17, 2024.]
Unhumans is in the end a book that defies civil review. What to say of a work that, in its attempt to lend historical credence to its indictment of American liberals, manages to omit any mention of World War II—the epic war against world fascism? (Posobiec’s alt-right record includes his promoting the work of Obóz Naradowo-Radykalny, a Polish neo-fascist movement that bombed Jewish homes in the 1930s.) And what to say about the slovenly editorial practice of Skyhorse Publishing, which manages to omit the entire complement of endnotes for the work’s heavily endnoted chapter two?
A reviewer can only allow a book so extreme in its agenda to speak for itself in representative excerpts. And let the last of these come from Stephen K. Bannon, in the book’s foreword:
Unhumans is a clarion call to every American citizen. Be aware. Too often, the most dire and significant moments in history are only realized afterward, when civilizations are already defeated or too broken to continue.
Substitute “This election” for the subject of Bannon’s first sentence, and it could have been spoken by either side in the just-concluded presidential election. Perdition for either side was salvation for the other, whether it was the country, the planet, democracy, or, as here, “civilization” that was said to be at stake. But this rhetorical equivalence certainly did not and could not mean that the two sides were simply equivalent versions of the same thing. The utility of Unhumans for those who do not hear it as Bannon’s “clarion call” is the utility of an extreme articulation of what conservative intellectuals like JD Vance increasingly see as political salvation—namely, the United States in the hands of an American Caesar, an American Bonaparte, or an American Franco—a benevolent, counter-revolutionary dictator who knows what the people want better than they do themselves and who will rescue them from the meretricious promises and ruinous effects of liberalism or, if you will, of blunderingly bureaucratic self-government.
The incoming Trump Administration, operating as a unitary executive unchecked by legislative opposition and unthreatened by judicial review, may take office as this salvific vision made programmatic for the first time. Such is decidedly the program of Project 2025’s chapter on the Office of Management and Budget, written by Russell Vought, President-Elect Trump’s nominee to head the OMB for the next four years.
And then what? Vance’s billionaire patron Peter Thiel has promoted the career and political philosophy of the radical-right, quasi-monarchist Curtis Yarvin, and Vance himself has expressed sympathy. What is their vision for 2028 and thereafter? Lee Konstantinou described their vision in Arc: “The best we can hope for is a strong and wise CEO-like figure who might step in and manage the chaos, doing what needs to be done with quiet efficiency.” This philosopher-king might be Vance himself, but Posobiec and Lisec seem already to have cast their vote for Elon Musk, whose “netizen” army now numbers more than 200 million.