Why Trump Keeps Talking About Communism: The 'Unhumans' Playbook

https://www.thenerdreich.com/why-trump-keeps-talking-about-communism-the-unhumans-playbook/?ref=theframelab.org

Donald Trump and his MAGA fascist party have a desperate new strategy for the midterm elections: a fake hysteria over “communists.”

Trump is screeching about the imaginary threat he calls more dangerous than “World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor, or even 9-11.” He invoked “communism” 81 times between June 23 and July 6, according to Reuters. On July 13, House Speaker Mike Johnson joined the fray, declaring that “THE BARBARIANS ARE INSIDE THE GATE” and the nation is poised to “GO DOWN THIS DARK ROAD OF DEATH TO COMMUNISM.”

This dangerously unhinged propaganda comes from Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and How to Crush Them), a genocide-themed 2024 book that depicts liberals as bloodthirsty demons hellbent on murder. Steve Bannon wrote the book’s foreword and JD Vance gave the book a ringing endorsement. Unhumans lays out a blueprint for demonizing Democrats as communists in order to seize power.

Here’s what I wrote about Unhumans in August 2024:

Unhumans, by right-wing conspiracy theorists Jack Posobiec and Joshua Lisec, offers a sinister thesis: Progressive-minded Americans are not humans. Instead, they are "communists." In turn, the authors define communists as bloodthirsty "unhumans" hellbent on the destruction of civilization.

Right-wingers, they write, must stop these unhumans with a policy of “exact reciprocity.” This means doing exactly to these so-called unhumans what the authors claim the unhumans are planning to do to them.

The 283-page screed reads like an effort to incite a civil war. It strains to create a sense of urgent terror in its readers. On nearly every page, it demonizes and dehumanizes “the left”– a vaguely defined group that apparently includes journalists (“the unhuman-occupied media”) and people who believe in things like diversity, equity, social justice and the rule of law. The definition is so broad that it seems most Democrats would qualify as unhumans.

*snip*