By Russ Bellant
PREFACE
A person has just been elected President of the United States who has said that he will have the legal authority to kill his opponents. When asked for a reaction to that statement, his vice-presidential running mate said, “What’s wrong with killing a few people.”
When the president of the Heritage Foundation (sponsor of Project 2025) was asked for a response to the killing remark, he said that he could not predict what would happen “if people try to block our plans.”
When Trump tried to stay in office in January 2021, he deployed organized militias, the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, to employ terror to stop the election certification.
In 2024, Trump promised a “bloodbath” if he was not named the election winner. He apparently had more covert forces to employ for that promised bloodbath, but it is not known with certainty whose blood was going to be spilled.
Now comes a book from Trump-aligned authors that intends to create an appeal for recruiting, seducing and motivating more people into “a movement to crush” those people, organizations and networks they deem as “Unhuman.” They claim that they are not advocating violence but recommend men as idealized models who employed great violence as means to totalitarian ends.
THE BOOK
Untermenschen was the term used by German Nazis to reference people as subhuman. Its use made it easier for Nazi shock troops to rationalize their mass murder.
In a 2024 book titled “UNHUMAN,” the co-authors apply the eerily similar term “Unhuman” to large numbers of Americans they want to “crush.” This book is clearly being pushed to “create a new filter and mental model to understand the world,” say the authors. And with that new mental model, they seek to build a movement to destroy those labeled as “Unhuman.”
Before elaborating on their warped narrative, let’s look at the background of those who created the call for dehumanizing and crushing large segments of the American population. And the power advocating for the book’s message.
The authors are Joshua Lisec and Jack Posobiec. The foreword to the book was written by Steve Bannon. The book is recommended by J.D. Vance, Tucker Carlson, Donald Trump Jr. and retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn. It was co-published by Skyhorse and Steve Bannon’s War Room.
Lisec is a Dayton, Ohio ghostwriter and author. Posobiec’s profile from the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks racist hate groups, says that Posobiec was linked to white nationalists and neo-Nazis.” Their website has a July 2, 2020, report titled “Jack Posobiec’s Rise Tied to White Supremacist Movement.”
Wikipedia has a detailed account of his activities. He has been close to Trump for years. The foreword was written by Steve Bannon, a long-time strategist for Donald Trump and former head of Breitbart News, which was turned into a racist news outlet when Bannon took it over. Skyhorse Publishing produced a number of books for Trump, Bannon and their allies.
The book cover has some symbols that are a warning of what is to come. It has a skull with a hammer and sickle, suggesting a murdered communist. On each side of the skull is a pure white hand, the symbol of the death squad The White Hand of Guatemala (La Mano Blanco) that spread terror and death for decades. And there is the fierce owl graphic of The TECOS which is the group in Mexico that is the umbrella of all the death squads in every country in Latin America. Their role is to exterminate dissenters and voices for justice in the non-Anglo hemisphere.
The TECOS was set up by Horia Sima, the leader of the Romanian Iron Guard, which was an ethnic part of Hitler’s SS during World War Two. Sima, sheltered in Spain after the war by the Franco regime, helped maintain Nazi networks after the war that were set up by the Third Reich with the help of Franco. This is relevant to our later discussion.
THE BOOK NARRATIVE
This book claims to evaluate epochs in the last two thousand years across the planet. They praise Julius Caesar for suppressing the citizen demands of ancient Rome. Those citizens were “Unhuman.” Same for Napoleon Bonaparte quelling those inspired by the French Revolution. Their pseudo-history basically puts devil’s horns on rebels, except for American rebels against the British Empire. They give some detail to each epoch to appear scholarly but are short of facts that undermine their conclusions. They paint caricatures instead of complex understanding of events and peoples.
But these shortcomings could be missed when being read by their target audiences. The authors see America in the grip of “Unhumans.” Their standard is simple: anyone who advocates for “equality” and “fairness” is “Unhuman” and needs to be neutralized or crushed. Whether they are moderate, liberal, progressive or any shade of left politics, they all fit in one basket that the authors alternately call communist or Cultural Marxism agents, all of which they call “Unhuman.” It does not matter to them at all that these labels do not describe the people that they disparage. The authors’ simple reductionism makes it easier to target and harm those that they wish to neutralize.
Most of the book tells stories of “great men of history” that neutralized, mostly by killing, the “Unhumans.” The authors propose that in order to “crush” (one of their favorite words) the “Unhumans,” one route is to adopt the methods of their great men of history. It does not matter to the authors that the people that they idealize are seen in history as bad actors, seen as sinister, destructive and evil. In order to explain the real thrust of this book, these so-called great men and their methods will be summarized now. After all, if MAGA adherents are to be indoctrinated into becoming crushers of “Unhumans,” we need to understand what that indoctrination really is.
“GREAT MAN” #1: FRANCISCO FRANCO
Franco was head of the Spanish Army in the 1930s. After a secular, progressive government was elected in Spain in 1936, he led a military force that attempted to take over the government. The Spanish Civil War began. Franco got heavy military assistance from Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Germany led one of the first aerial bombardments of population centers in world history in Spain in 1937. It inspired Picasso’s famous Guernica painting. Hitler wanted power in Spain as a step toward allying with the landed elites of Latin America, which were mostly of Spanish origin. He would get that when Franco defeated the anti-Fascist forces and established a brutal dictatorship. Hitler also got the Spanish Blue Division to help him after he invaded the USSR in 1941.
The authors commend the aid of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy that made Franco’s victory possible, because that is how Franco was able to kill the “Unhumans.” The authors never criticize Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy. In fact they praise Nazi Germany for killing so many Soviets. They ignore the facts that Hitler declared war on the U.S. a few days after Pearl Harbor and that the Soviets were allies of the US and Britain. The Soviets defeated two thirds of the German army, along with the Spanish Blue Division and the Hungarian, Bulgarian and Romanian armies. It is not clear who the authors believe should have won World War II. But they want to make Franco a hero to the Trump world, even though he destroyed his elected government and provided a haven for post-war Nazis like Horia Sima.
“GREAT MAN” #2: AUGUSTO PINOCHET
Pinochet was a general in the Chilean army when Salvador Allende was elected president in 1970. He was made army chief by Allende. As president, Allende instituted social reforms and nationalized some foreign corporations that were exporting natural resources. Attempts were then made to destabilize the government. In September 1973, Pinochet led a military coup and rounded up and killed thousands of Allende supporters. It also led to the death of Allende. Pinochet then established a brutal dictatorship that would hold power until 1990. The authors praise these events: “All allies of anti-civilization were ruthlessly excised from Chilean society.”
“The tossing of communists out of helicopters hails from elimination of communism during the mid to late 1970s.” So, forget elected governments with their diversity of opinions. The authors say that the “Unhuman” problem cannot be solved at the voting booth, “that we cannot vote our way out of this.” They embrace the Franco and Pinochet solutions. What does that tell you about what they want for the United States?
“GREAT MAN” #3: CHIANG KAI-SHEK
Chiang was the leader of the Chinese nationalist army before, during and after the Japanese World War II invasion of China. He had a truce with the larger Chinese Communist Party’s Red Army, which was also fighting Japan. After the war the nationalists tried to finish off the Red Army but failed. They retreated to the Chinese island province of Taiwan in 1949, killing thousands of Taiwanese residents in the process. After conquering the island’s population, Chiang Kai-Shek declared the island was the Republic of China and ruled it with a brutal dictatorship. The authors praise him as a model that could inspire “crushing” “Unhumans” in the U.S.
“GREAT MAN” #4: IAN SMITH
The authors’ hero on the African continent is Ian Smith, who from 1965 to 1978 was the Prime Minister of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), a former British colony. Smith was a militant white supremacist who blocked internal efforts to broaden the country’s constitution to include participation of the Black population that was the overwhelming majority of the country. His determined efforts and alliance with apartheid South Africa won support from white supremacy worldwide as he tried to suppress the liberation campaign. The authors praise his high “kill ratios” in his war against liberation. This parallels their blanket criticism of anti-racist initiatives in the U.S. as part “Unhuman” agendas.
“GREAT MAN” #5: JOE McCARTHY
Finally, the praise of Joe McCarthy, a U.S. Senator in the early 1950s, who said the U.S. State Department, the Army, Hollywood, etc. were filled with communists. The authors endorse this nonsense, ignoring the fact that the U.S. called for a strategy of “containing” the U.S.S.R. and they built a military alliance against it. But McCarthy also deepened his criticism of the U.S. government by attacking the U.S. prosecution of a Nazi military unit for war crimes. They had massacred U.S. soldiers in 1944 in Malmedy, Belgium, who had surrendered when they were surrounded. Why McCarthy stood up for these criminals is not fully understood, but the UNHUMAN authors fully back McCarthy and say how right he was on everything, without commenting on this. McCarthy also backed the U.S. pro-Nazi Silver Shirts that formed one day after Hitler took power in Germany in 1933. As a side note, McCarthy had an attorney, Roy Cohn, who had mob links and went to work for the Trump family after his work for McCarthy.
WHO ARE THE “UNHUMANS” THEY WANT TO CRUSH?
So how do the authors describe those they seek to crush, those they label “Unhumans?” They tell the reader that “You’ll notice throughout this book the persistent, perennial UNHUMAN obsession with cliched sociopolitical adjectives like ‘fairness’ and ‘equality.’ The UNHUMAN desires not to build a better world…but to cut down and destroy all individual achievement and cultural greatness so the world is as miserable as they are.”
Thus, those who seek justice on economic, racial, gender or sexual orientation matters are mental misfits without humanity and are undeserving of tolerance. The book’s authors assert that there were past racial injustices in the U.S. and South Africa but condemn the movements that opposed those injustices.
They continue: “Take your pick of nefarious reasons: exploitation of the workers, oppression of women, systemic racism. These are Marxist messaging strategies deployed on a functioning society to destabilize it and bring the UNHUMANS to power.” So, no worker justice, racial justice or gender justice is legitimate, as they reinforce throughout the book.
that MAGA wants to eliminate.
They spend 1.5 pages bemoaning the killing of the Czar’s family in Russia over a century ago but vilify those who opposed murderous dictators over the last century.
They call civil rights litigation “lawfare” (a play on warfare) and assert that it has mutated into something “Unhuman.” Black studies at universities began “the permanent ghettoization of the university system.” Also, “academia…began to communize the races of America.” Then they raise their fists and call for going beyond fighting “Woke” and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI).
They advocate that “Attorney Generals in red districts could easily be going after Antifa, BLM or the array of Soros-affiliated NGOs. RICO lawsuits could easily be brought as well.” They say that these actions would be done to consume their time and money.
But they want to go further. “The best way to defeat the irregular revolution (their exaggerated term for reform campaigns) is to stop funding it. The second-best way is to deplete it of revolutionaries (my emphasis). Just as great men of history target the subversives…” Here again is the strong implication of killing their targets, Franco- Pinochet style, adopting the authors’ “great men” methods.
To this end, they advocate infiltrating groups. They also call for “immediate banning of all public education unions…a full lawfare assault against the teachers’ unions until every one is shut down.” This union destruction is likely tied to the agenda of dismantling public education and replacing it with private charter schools or private schools with a voucher system. That ties in with the far right evangelical agenda to educate generations to come on a theocratic worldview to replace Constitutional government.
This is one of the keys aims of the Trump world. According to a Newsweek report, incoming Secretary of Defense, Peter Hegseth, talking on a Christian podcast, has called for establishing Christian schools to build an “educational insurgency.” His plan calls for using those schools as a base to “build your army underground with the opportunity later on of taking offensive operations in an overt way.”
The podcast host replied by saying “I think that we need to be thinking in terms of these classical Christian schools as boot camps for winning back America.” This complements the UNHUMAN authors, who aim to do the same on a broader terrain. They describe Franco’s civil war as “Christian vs. anti-Christian, civilization vs. anti-civilization, human vs unhuman.”
Each reader must decide whether this is a manipulation of faith commitment for devious political ends. They characterize the “Unhumans” as those who “run operations in media, government, education, economy, family, religion and arts and entertainment.” Additionally, “they hold key prosecutorial and judicial positions.”
The seven categories of societal life enumerated above are identical to the Seven Mountains of society conceived by the Christian Reconstructionist movement to dismantle secular society and create a theocracy based on Old Testament law. These elements, sometimes characterized as the New Apostolic Reformation, are an important element of the Trump coalition. Using their societal framework and occasional references to Christian issues in past conflicts could be an attempt by the authors to amalgamate with the zealotry of some in the theocracy movement.
So really the “Unhuman” as they see it aren’t really just the street radical on a picket line. They are mainstream liberals to moderates in every realm of social life. To target for displacement this range of citizens means goals of extreme rightist coercive transformation. Like their “great men” heroes did.
(Russ Bellant is a Detroiter who has spent over 50 years researching and publishing reports on fascist, Nazi and theocratic elements in North America and beyond. He has published three books on these topics. He also fought state-imposed dictatorships on cities and school districts that only looted Black-governed structures as the state severely weakened self-determination and resources for the targeted communities.)
Be the first to comment