Jack Posobiec calls leftists “inhuman.” JD Vance seems to agree.

Imagine Tim Walz had advertised a book praising Mao Zedong as a model of leadership in these troubled times: a steady hand at the helm, he knew how to get things done. It would have been a headline in every newspaper, the main topic on every talk show. The scandal would have raged for weeks. It could decide the election.

Apparently, there is a real case of a super-extreme book review by a vice-presidential candidate, but unless you’ve come across Michelle Goldberg’s excellent review The New York Times column or an element in USA TodayYou probably haven’t heard much about the JD Vance endorsement Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and How to Suppress Them). Non-humans is a far-right call to arms by Jack Posobiec and his ghostwriter Joshua Lisec, with a foreword by Stephen Bannon. Who is Jack Posobiec? He is a far-right propagandist and swindler, best known for promoting conspiracy theories such as the Great Replacement, Stop the Steal, and Pizzagate, the proto-Qanon hoax that alleged Hillary Clinton and other prominent Democrats were involved in child sex trafficking in the basement of a Washington, D.C., pizza restaurant. (The restaurant does not have a basement.)

According to this distinguished scholar and his collaborators, everyone to the left of Herbert Hoover is a communist and, worse, “nonhuman,” not even human at all. If the Nazis, who famously demonized Jews and others on their hate list as “parasites” and “subhumans,” come to mind, you’re not far off. Here’s the book’s thesis: Communists have no real beliefs; they live only to make normal people poor and miserable. “They simply hate those who are beautiful and successful,” Posobiec writes. “The egalitarian ideology is just a facade.”

Fortunately, some “great men of history” have stood up to these gargoyles: Spanish General Francisco Franco, Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek, Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, Senator Joe McCarthy, and, oddly enough, Julius Caesar. Oh, and Elon Musk, “the sole protector of anything like free speech on the Internet.” Are you ready to join the world’s richest man and fight the Reds, “an eye for an eye”? Posobiec quotes Franco approvingly: “We don’t believe in government by the voting booth.”

The truth is that there is no such thing as an organized communist movement in America today, which Posobiec occasionally admits. The label is basically shorthand for the usual villains of the culture war: LGBTQ people, public school teachers, college professors, feminists, Black Lives Matter activists, DEI bureaucrats, immigrants, progressives. All of these are too subtle to advocate for the appropriation of private property, at least for now. They have “rebranded” themselves as “cultural Marxists,” a flexible term that seems to apply to anyone who thinks fascist Spain was anything other than the pinnacle of human civilization. This sleight of hand allows Posobiec to accuse everyone from drag queens to former Harvard president Claudine Gay of the crimes of Stalin and Pol Pot. The crimes of Mussolini, Hitler, and other right-wing mass murderers are virtually nonexistent in the book.

Here’s what JD Vance has to say about Non-humans:

In the past, communists marched through the streets waving red flags. Today, they march through HR, college campuses and courtrooms to fight the law against good and honest people. In Non-humansJack Posobiec and Joshua Lisec reveal their plans and show us what to do to fight back.

First the cat ladies, now the communists. We live in a dangerous world.

You might think this menacing manifesto is kryptonite for Vance, whose sole job is to play a normal, non-scary Midwestern family man. I guess that’s all over now. It’s hard to undo the praise heaped on a book that establishes Franco as the courageous leader of a modern-day Christian crusade, “a just and justified war for the sake of the cross.”

Why Vance Does Not Support Non-humans big news? Too serious? The cat lady rant is funny, after all, and fits the “weird” theme the Harris campaign has been pushing since adding Walz to the list. Non-humans It’s hard to take lightly. It’s not an imaginary encounter with a couch. There are no cute memes about vermin floating around, no pretty girls posting pictures of themselves stomping on cockroaches.

Are the media powers afraid to go after Vance for fear of being accused of bias? Or is it just an embarrassment of riches? At this point, not a day goes by without a Vance revelation: As I write, a story is circulating about Vance showing up to a law school beer pong party in drag. (There’s nothing wrong with that, but it seems unlikely to meet with his boss’s approval.) Whatever the reason for the lack of coverage so far, the media should take Vance’s involvement in Posobiec’s hateful worldview seriously. We have every reason to believe he means what he says.