On an unusually frigid day last month, masses of Donald Trump supporters stood in line outside of Capital One Arena in Washington, D.C., watching the inauguration on their phones. From a podium in the Capitol Rotunda, besieged by his followers just over four years ago, Trump promised to upend the status quo. “The scales of justice will be rebalanced,” he said. Hours later, the president granted clemency to all of the nearly 1,600 rioters charged in relation to their participation in the January 6 insurrection.
Trump won the popular vote in November, but it hasn’t stopped the right from spelling doom and gloom. “The people who did this, they need to feel the heat. They need to be put behind bars,” former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio—whose sentence for seditious conspiracy Trump commuted—told conspiracy theorist Alex Jones upon his release. The radical left set the country on a collision course. The only remedy is to upend federal affirmative action requirements, cull the civil service of the disloyal, halt foreign aid, and freeze federal assistance under the auspices of ending supposed “Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies.”
Apocalyptic rhetoric isn’t new on the right. In September 2016, right-wing essayist and erstwhile men’s fashion forum user Michael Anton published “The Flight 93 Election” under a pseudonym at the conservative Claremont Review of Books. In it, he compared the 2016 election between then-presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump to United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed into the Pennsylvanian countryside after passengers wrested control of it from four al-Qaeda hijackers on September 11. Voters, like the passengers of Flight 93, had two choices: “Charge the cockpit or you die.” “To ordinary conservative ears,” Anton admitted, “this sounds histrionic.” (It still does.) But the theatrics of Anton’s essay caught on. And like so many far-right hysterics, Anton found himself at the center of “ordinary conservative” politics under Trump, joining the National Security Council in 2017. Each election after 2016 brought its own wave of content depicting Trump as engaged in a life-or-death stand.
Much like the so-called alt-right in 2016, Trump’s millennial and Gen Z supporters have been granted considerable attention in recent weeks, with one writer in The Point describing right-wing and post-liberal spaces as the source for “intellectual vitalism in my generation.” While the novelty and grassroots appeal for the ideas of this so-called “new right” are arguably exaggerated, that has done little to stop the conservative machine from feeding its astroturfed cultural renaissance. Among these gifts to MAGA’s vibrant canon is a book, published in the midst of the 2024 presidential campaign, by rightwing shitposter-cum-political operative Jack Posobiec and prolific ghostwriter Joshua Lisec titled Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (And How To Crush Them). Unhumans is Posobiec’s fifth book since 2017, and has already been followed by the publication of a made-to-order hagiography of Trump’s campaign-trail brushes with death, Bulletproof: The Truth about the Assassination Attempts on Donald Trump.
An eerie vacuousness pervades Unhumans, and perhaps the Trump movement writ large, that simply labeling it fascist cannot explain.
Posobiec, a regular guest at Mar-a-Lago and an all-but-official surrogate for Trump’s 2024 campaign, is far from a fringe figure. But J.D. Vance, Trump’s terminally online vice president, propelled Unhumans from relative obscurity when he hailed it as a guide for “what to do to fight back” against the left-wing radicals who have allegedly seized control of American society. Several mainstream media outlets characterized it as “an anti-democratic screed” and “a far-right declaration of war.” “The word ‘fascist’ gets thrown around a lot in politics, but it’s hard to find a more apt one for Unhumans,” Michelle Goldberg wrote in the New York Times.
There is, without a doubt, truth to these descriptions. The authors see themselves at war with a nebulous cluster of enemies, including communists, socialists, leftists of various stripes, and mainstream progressives, who are poised to “undo civilization itself.” These are the titular “unhumans,” a nonexistent word that also happens to be the title of a 2022 comedy-horror zombie movie that has a 53 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
“This book is . . . the story of a playbook. A playbook that every far-left uprising, insurrection, and usurpation of order, goodwill, and freedom follows, in the precise order it follows, and what has been done to fight back, for good or for loss,” Posobiec and Lisec write before stumbling through accounts of the French and Russian Revolutions, the rise of Maoism, and Soviet-allied communist regimes. They turn to Spanish dictator Francisco Franco for inspiration; claim, without evidence, that 1960s “cultural Marxism” was responsible for the ethnic cleansing of 4.5 million people; and praise the heroics of Joseph McCarthy. The phrase “white genocide,” a conspiracy theory that neo-Nazis popularized to describe a Jewish cabal of elites using immigration and even violence against white people, appears twice. Their thesis, that the “unhumans” are “opposed to humanity itself” and have “place[d] themselves outside of the category completely,” bears striking similarities to a 1922 book by American eugenicist and Ku Klux Klan member Lothrop Stoddard, cited by German Nazi Party members in their writings on racial hierarchy.
Yet an eerie vacuousness pervades Unhumans, and perhaps the Trump movement writ large, that simply labeling it fascist cannot explain. It has followed Posobiec throughout his career as a political operative. Since 2016, he has used his public profile on social media and elsewhere to promote the alt-right, conspiracy theories, Russian influence campaigns, and the anti-democracy “Stop the Steal” movement. He has exaggerated portions of his résumé while downplaying his demonstrable ties to white nationalists, neo-Nazis, and other extremists. Within the span of a few months, he can move seamlessly from telling the audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference that his goal is to “overthrow” democracy because “we didn’t get all the way there on January 6” to portraying the rally-turned-riot in Unhumans as a “lawfare trap” designed to “destroy” conservatives.
Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that Posobiec does not see his political adversaries as worthy of intellectual engagement or as tethered to any real ideology; fealty to Trump and the robber barons staffing his administration have subsumed whatever commitments he and other MAGA supporters may have once had. To him, leftists are enemy combatants—a nuisance to be done away with, not understood. After I criticized his book on X, he wrote to me: “I dont [sic] need to wrestle with the ideas of people who have none.”
Posobiec could not, and would not, have risen to prominence without X. He used it and X’s now-defunct video livestreaming platform to promote Pizzagate, a nonsensical conspiracy theory popular during the 2016 election cycle. Proponents claimed that a pizza parlor in northwest Washington, D.C., was harboring a Democrat-backed pedophile ring, so Posobiec, phone in hand, traveled there to “investigate.” While he found nothing, a man named Edgar Maddison Welch traveled from North Carolina to Washington, D.C., less than a month later to conduct his own investigation—this time carrying a loaded firearm.
To others, Posobiec presented himself as a political operative with strong connections to the intelligence and conservative political worlds. At a bar near the Republican National Convention in 2016, he introduced himself “as a Roger Stone associate” to then-alt-right leader Richard Spencer, referring to the former Trump advisor. Posobiec has also leaned on his career in the U.S. Navy Reserve, where he was enlisted as an intelligence officer from 2012 to 2018, to portray himself as an expert on military affairs and espionage.
But Posobiec’s backstory crumbles under scrutiny. Of his career in the Navy, another former active-duty intelligence officer told a reporter at the Southern Poverty Law Center (where I also happen to work, though I had no involvement in this reporting) that Posobiec was “unlikely in the extreme to have ever done any intelligence gathering of any national-level importance.” A Task & Purpose investigation found that Naval records listed Posobiec’s duties in 2017, when he lost his security clearance, as “administrative.” Documents obtained by journalist Eric Levai via a Freedom of Information Act Request specify “Urinalysis Program Coordinator” as one of his ancillary duties.
Posobiec has spun more than his naval record. The same SPLC investigation found that Posobiec said he attended the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania in one of his first books, Citizens for Trump, as well as on his résumé. The school had no record of him receiving a degree, nor taking classes. He put “fmr CBS News” in his Twitter profile for upwards six months, despite CBS News saying that he never worked there. To the public, Posobiec has presented himself as a “Mandarin linguist” and an “expert” on the Chinese Communist Party. The section in Unhumans on China cites no Mandarin-language sources but does cite the Netflix adaptation of the sci-fi series 3 Body Problem.
Perhaps more than any figure within Trump’s orbit, Posobiec’s career exemplifies how the Republican Party has leveraged a network of influencers to appeal to the movement’s rightward fringe. Through his account on X, speaking engagements, and his videos for various right-wing media outlets, Posobiec has adopted political causes, figures, talking points, and memes associated with fascist groups and spread them to a wider audience. Sometimes he has collaborated with open extremists to do so, appearing at and alongside white nationalist events and figures throughout 2016 and 2017.
In return, the establishment right has graced Posobiec with career opportunities and bolstered his public platform. The Claremont Institute, which published Anton’s pseudonymous essay, awarded Posobiec a fellowship in 2019. He has held positions at a range of right-wing media organizations, from One America News Network to Human Events. He is a regular speaker at Turning Point USA events. Despite these opportunities, Posobiec and Lisec depict those with worldviews such as theirs as marginalized by the “unhumans.” “Voice concern and you face ‘lawfare’—financial death by a hundred bad-faith lawsuits. Speak louder and unleash a ravenous appetite for vengeance—to deplatform you, debank your family, and destroy your good name,” Posobiec and Lisec write.
For some on the radical right who lack the same access to power, Posobiec’s dalliances with their movement are a source of frustration. Last February, after Posobiec shared a meme on X with the slogan “The Great Replacement!”, racist livestreamer Nick Fuentes asked, “What’s going on with Jack Posobiec? So this guy’s like a Nazi now?” He described the meme, which depicted black people in the Global South encroaching on a handful of white people in Europe, Russia, and Canada, as “explicit.” A reverse-image search that I conducted showed that users had posted the same image to racist pro-Trump sites on other platforms, such as “r/The_Donald,” which Reddit banned in 2020 for violating the platform’s rules. “You might as well just post Madison Grant because that was the thesis of his book. The great American racialist a hundred years ago. He said that it was ‘the global tide of color against white world supremacy,’” Fuentes said. “And by the way, that’s what it is. That is exactly what it is. It’s hell.”
Madison Grant, a prominent twentieth-century eugenicist, didn’t author The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy; his mentee, Lothrop Stoddard, did in 1920. But Fuentes had a point—and it wouldn’t be the last time Posobiec channeled Stoddard’s work.
Born in 1883 in Brookline, Massachusetts, Stoddard received his education from Harvard and Boston Universities. Not long after graduating with a PhD in history, Stoddard published the 1920 tract The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy, which saw a coming explosion in non-white populations as threatening the political domination of whites. Stoddard, following the model of his collaborator Madison Grant, divided whites into three categories: Mediterranean, Alpine, and Nordic. Ensuring their racial dominance was crucial for the survival of Western civilization.
Stoddard further elaborated on the stakes in his 1922 book, The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under-Man. Stoddard warned that “racial impoverishment” represented the root cause of civilizational decline. An external force wasn’t what brought about collapse; rather, civilizations died because of “a decline or breakdown from within.” Among those who could usher in this “decline and ruin” was a figure Stoddard called “the Under-Man.”
The grievances of Stoddard and his successors have become, in some form, the white-hot center of the U.S. conservative movement.
The anxieties of Grant, Stoddard, and other proponents of “racial Nordicism” undergirded anti-immigrant and pro-eugenics legislation in the United States, but they also found eager audiences abroad. Writing in 1930, Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg opined in The Myth of the Twentieth Century that a series of “demons” had besieged the Russian people, who were now firmly under Soviet rule. He turned to Stoddard for an explanation. “The demonry of this blood directed itself instinctively against everything which outwardly still had some honest effect, looked manly and Nordic, like a living reproach against a type of man whom Lothrop Stoddard rightly described as the underman,” Rosenberg wrote. The concept of the “underman,” or Untermensch in German, proved crucial to the Nazis for excluding racial undesirables from society.
According to Stoddard, ineptitude and an inability to fit into the social order tortured “the Under-Man.” “Sooner or later, he instinctively senses that he is a failure; that civilization’s prizes are not for him,” Stoddard wrote. “The Under-Man” developed a hatred for his superiors and for civilization progress, vanquishing himself from society. Thus, with “nature herself having decreed him uncivilizable, the Under-Man declares war on civilization,” Stoddard wrote. It was through Russian Bolshevism, which Stoddard describes as “the philosophy of the Under-Man,” that such a revolt had begun.
Just as “the Under-Man” is ultimately defined by his permanent state of conflict with civilization, rather than by any specific ideology, Stoddard argued that the problems posed by Bolshevism were not limited to Russia alone, nor to his own movement. “Viewed historically, it is merely one of a series of similar destructive, retrograde movements,” Stoddard said.
Posobiec and Lisec don’t cite Stoddard, but I found the parallels between the two books, both in their chosen terminology and their contention that “Under-Men” or “unhumans” pose an existential threat to whatever civilization they dwell in, hard to ignore. “To understand why unhumans do what they do, understand their frame: anti-civilization. . . . These ends justify any means. Anything and everything unhumans do is derivative of the anti-civilization frame,” Posobiec and Lisec write. Elsewhere they say that “evidence of the unhuman activity is everywhere we look.”
“I’m sure Posobiec would deny any similarities,” John Jackson, a professor in James Madison College of Public Affairs at Michigan State University, told me after I directed him to several sections of the book that reminded me of Stoddard’s writings. Yet, Jackson added, “Posobiec’s position is even worse: he is warning against human beings being conquered by unhumans. . . . This, if anything, goes beyond the racist paternalism of Stoddard: this is the dehumanizing of one’s political enemies.”
Or, as Posobiec and Lisec put it: “By becoming consumed by nihilism, unhumans 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.” In their telling, this “nihilism” that drives “unhumans” could include anything from redistributing wealth and opportunity from the “haves” to the “have nots” to executing an even graver crime: restricting right-leaning accounts from social media platforms for violating their policies. To the extent that there’s a coherent explanation for the left’s disdain for civilization, it lies in the fact that this supposedly all-powerful Leviathan is made of a bunch of losers. Resentment—Posobiec and Lisec write, trying and unambiguously failing to channel Friedrich Nietzsche or Max Scheler—is “an emotion bred by those who lose the lottery of life.” These are the people who seek to upend the esteemed social order, an order that, for whatever reason, Posobiec and Lisec never truly define.
Just as Stoddard described “the Under-Man . . . [as] unconvertible,” so, too, are “unhumans” incapable of change. As Posobiec and Lisec claim about “unhumans” forty-nine times throughout their nearly three-hundred-page book, usually in places where they mention violence, chaos, or general mayhem, “This is what they do.” The solution for handling these inferior beings is to excise them from society. In both Stoddard’s work and Unhumans, Jackson noted, the authors have deemed that “the enemy is unfit to live in the same geographical space” as the civilized whites.
The goals of Stoddard and his compatriots were clear. “The character of a country depends upon the racial character of the men and women who dominate it,” Henry Fairfield Osborn wrote in a forward to Madison Grant’s The Conquest of a Continent. To preserve it, Osborn, Grant, Stoddard, and others advocated for eugenics as well as draconian anti-immigration policies, ranging up to and including Grant’s proposal for “the absolute suspension of all immigration from all countries,” in the interest of preserving America’s racial, and thus national, unity.
Trump’s appeal is multiracial and emblematic of the declining white majority in the United States. His acolytes have touted their war on racial equity in hiring practices as rooted in a commitment to “colorblindness.” Yet in the early days of the second Trump administration, as high-profile ICE raids give way to open threats to end birthright citizenship, there can be no doubt that the grievances of Stoddard and his successors have become, in some form, the white-hot center of the U.S. conservative movement.
Last March, my husband, Tom, and I were taking part in the time-honored D.C. tradition of mingling with hordes of tourists on the National Mall to enjoy the cherry blossoms. As dusk fell, we wrapped up our lap around the Tidal Basin, where some 3,700 trees bloom each year. After paying homage to an old tree that had been damaged by erosion and eventually became a minor local internet sensation, we started walking back toward our parking spot when Tom stopped.
“Isn’t that Jack Posobiec?” he said.
Posobiec, phone in hand, was standing near a concrete barrier, located on the shore of the basin to the right of the Jefferson Memorial. He appeared to be livestreaming. “Even tourists know that Trump won. The whole world comes here, knowing that Trump won the 2020 election!” he said, pointing his phone at the crowd as we passed by.
As we wandered off, I pulled up Posobiec’s now-concluded livestream. He had posted about thirteen minutes of video showing himself yelling variations on the phrase “Trump won the 2020 election” in English and, at one point, Mandarin. He encouraged people to preorder Unhumans, whose forthcoming publication he had announced at Mar-a-Lago during a pro-Trump event for Catholics a few nights prior.
Four years prior to the outbreak of the Second World War, theorist Walter Benjamin wrote that “the logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life.” Instead of disrupting the “property structure which the masses strive to eliminate,” fascism offers them an aesthetic mode in which to express their discontent while thwarting any hope of structural change.
Fixing egg prices isn’t a concern for MAGA’s most die-hard supporters; only retribution can sate their appetites.
I’m hesitant to call Posobiec a fascist because that is precisely what these pro-Trump influencers want. He, and others on the Trumpian right, yearn for liberals and leftists to fear them. It’s why books such as Unhumans exist—to inspire others on the right to demonize and dehumanize their political opponents for the sake of defeating them through what Posobiec and Lisec call the “iron law of exact reciprocity.” To that end, Trump and his acolytes have threatened to imprison their political opponents, shutter universities and other organizations that disagree with them, deport millions of immigrants, enforce a nationwide crackdown on reproductive rights, and dismantle what remains of the administrative state. These are dangerous policies that would impact the lives of millions of Americans, and have already begun to do so.
But Benjamin’s diagnosis still applies. Despite moving quickly to dismantle the federal government to quash “wokeness” and “DEI,” Trumpism is even at its heart more spectacle than cohesive ideology. Efforts like the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 fall short of capturing its essence and endless postmortems and mainstream media bromides have failed to comprehensively explain the motivations of his supporters. The Trumpist movement is most effective not when it is concerned with a flurry of policy proposals and executive orders—many of them contradictory or bound to be short-lived—but when the president can serve as a raw, unfettered expression of the right’s id. Fixing egg prices isn’t a concern for MAGA’s most die-hard supporters; only retribution can sate their appetites.
It is here—and perhaps only here—that people like Posobiec, whose obsession with Trump has done more to shape his worldview than the strictures of any ideological commitments, or others within the sprawling network of pro-Trump influencers are able to thrive. And it is here that we see the danger of Trump and Vance’s reliance on breathless livestreamers and social media CEOs who provide a perpetual motion machine of aesthetic grievance that distracts from the movement’s lack of coherent political doctrine or structural solutions.
When opponents such as these seek to deem us less-than-human, the greatest insult is to treat them as nothing but.