J.D. Vance wrote foreword for ‘incredible’ book by president of group running Project 2025
No matter how much they lie about it, Donald Trump and his running mate are joined at the hip with reactionary extremists
As public concern over the radical right’s Project 2025 has grown, Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans have been at pains to pretend they have no connections to the organization. Those efforts hit a brick wall on Wednesday after it was revealed that Trump’s vice presidential running mate Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) wrote a glowing foreword to a book by one of the group’s top executives.
In a June 19 post to the social network formerly known as Twitter which have re-surfaced, Vance said that he was “thrilled” to have written an introduction to a book written by Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, the right-wing think tank that is spearheading Project 2025.
“I was thrilled to write the foreword for this incredible book, which contains a bold new vision for the future of conservatism in America,” Vance wrote, urging his followers to “get your copy.”
Roberts became nationally prominent a few weeks later after he appeared on extremist podcaster Steve Bannon’s show and boasted that Trump and his allies were “in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
The manifesto is currently listed for sale on Amazon as “Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America,” but an archived version of the Amazon page indicates that the book was originally sub-titled “Burning Down Washington to Save America,” with a photograph of a match superimposed over the text. In a reply to Vance’s post which has since been deleted, a graphic designer named Andrew Beck claimed that his company had created the cover.
“We’re happy to have designed the cover,” Beck wrote. “The gauntlet has been thrown. Look forward to seeing the debate and action that comes from this book.”
Trump’s selection of Vance as his vice presidential pick has proved troublesome compared to past running mate picks, even as it appears to have drawn the financial support of far-right technology investors like David Sacks and Elon Musk.
While reactionary oligarchs are huge fans of Vance, a protégé of PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, he seems to have little appeal to the broader public. His July 18 RNC speech was flat and unremarkable, and public opinion surveys released since then have demonstrated that Vance is the most unpopular vice presidential nominee in the history of polling. According to CNN election analyst Harry Enten, past veep choices finished their conventions with approval-disapproval ratings of +19, whereas Vance ended up at -6. During his 2022 Senate campaign, Vance ran nearly 10 points behind Ohio’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine in the bright-red state.
Vance’s extremely radical policy viewpoints surely are a factor in his negative public perception. In addition to proclaiming that he would have illegally refused to certify the 2020 election which Trump lost, Vance has said that he wanted abortion to be illegal nationwide, and he has even signaled support for bans without exceptions for rape or incest.
“It’s not whether a woman should be forced to bring a child to term; it’s whether a child should be allowed to live, even though the circumstances of that child’s birth are somehow inconvenient or a problem to the society,” the future senator said in a 2021 interview.
Vance’s friendship with self-proclaimed fascist writer Curtis Yarvin has also come under recent scrutiny. Like many younger Republicans, Vance has read deeply from Yarvin’s disturbing work. In a 2021 podcast interview, the future Ohio senator name-checked Yarvin while spelling out an ideal scenario in which Donald Trump fired “every single mid-level bureaucrat” and then refused to abide by any judicial ruling saying this was illegal.
Yarvin, a former computer programmer who was brought into Thiel’s orbit, has sketched even more extreme fantasies. Beyond repeatedly praising Hitler, slavery, and overthrowing democracy, in a 2008 series of essays, Yarvin fantasized about how poor people should be imprisoned for life in cells inspired by the sci-fi movie The Matrix, to prevent them from exercising political power:
However, it helps us describe the problem we are trying to solve. Our goal, in short, is a humane alternative to genocide. That is: the ideal solution achieves the same result as mass murder (the removal of undesirable elements from society), but without any of the moral stigma. Perfection cannot be achieved on both these counts, but we can get closer than most might think.
The best humane alternative to genocide I can think of is not to liquidate the wards—either metaphorically or literally—but to virtualize them. A virtualized human is in permanent solitary confinement, waxed like a bee larva into a cell which is sealed except for emergencies. This would drive him insane, except that the cell contains an immersive virtual-reality interface which allows him to experience a rich, fulfilling life in a completely imaginary world.
The virtual worlds of today are already exciting enough to distract many away from their real lives. They will only get better. Nor is productive employment precluded in this scenario—for example, wards can perform manual labor through telepresence. As members of society, however, they might as well not exist. And because cells are sealed and need no guards, virtualization should be much cheaper than present-day imprisonment.
I like virtualization because it can be made to scale. I don’t think there is any scenario under which San Francisco is burdened with more than a few thousand wards. Many other regions of the earth, however, contain large numbers of human beings whose existence may well prove an unequivocal liability to the owners of any ground on which they would reside. If so, they can be virtualized, creating giant human Wachowski honeycombs of former bezonians, whose shantytowns can be cleared and redeveloped as villas for retired oil-company executives.
Of course, virtualization is a drastic alternative and itself unlikely to happen. Charity is just too popular these days. Before anyone becomes a ward of the realm, any person or organization is free to adopt him as a dependent as a matter of mutual agreement. His new guardian is (a) responsible for his actions, and (b) free to tell him what to do: the ideal relationship for any attempt at rehabilitation. (It’s basically what the Salvation Army does now, I believe.) If all else fails, there’s always the honeycomb.
I think this problem gives a flavor of the kind of thinking we would expect in an entrepreneurial sovereign. The result is quite foreign to the democratic philosophy of government, obviously, and it takes some imagination to picture. But I seriously doubt that many who had a chance to live in this future would have much interest in restoring the past.
The news media needs to ask Vance about his radical agenda and his close connections to a new class of oligarchs who seem to have made him their vessel to replace the American government with fascism.
