JD Vance's foreword to Project 2025 founder's book says Democrats are "wolves" who must be killed

Republican vice presidential nominee Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) compared Democrats and left-leaning liberals to “wolves” who must be shot dead and gardeners who have poisoned American soil in his foreword to Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America, a book written by Kevin Roberts. Roberts uses similarly violent and dehumanizing imagery in his book.

Roberts is president of the right-wing think tank Heritage Foundation and the architect of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for gutting federal agencies and undoing longstanding civil rights under Donald Trump’s second presidential term.

Vance begins his 1,091-word foreword to Roberts’ book by referencing Pulp Fiction, a 1994 Quentin Tarantino film that depicts its three gay characters as violent kidnappers, rapists, and BDSM leather freaks.

Near the end of his foreword, Vance writes, “We need an offensive conservatism, not merely one that tries to prevent the left from doing things we don’t like.” He then uses an extended metaphor of a garden to vilify liberals as gardeners who have poisoned American soil. (The line echoes Trump’s claim that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.”)

“Here’s an analogy I sometimes use to articulate what the previous generation of conservatives got right and wrong,” Vance writes. “Imagine a well-maintained garden in a patch of sunlight. It has some imperfections of course, and many weeds…. In an effort to eliminate the bad, a well-meaning gardener treats the garden with a chemical solution. This kills many of the weeds, but it also kills many of the good things. Undeterred, the gardener keeps adding the solution. Eventually, the soil is inhospitable.”

“In this analogy,” he explains, “modern liberalism is the gardener, the garden is our country, and the voices discouraging the gardener were conservatives. We were right, of course: in an effort to correct problems—some real, some imagined—we made a lot of mistakes as a country in the 1960s and 1970s.”

While Vance doesn’t explain what those mistakes were, it’s worth noting that the 1960s marked the height of the first U.S. Civil Rights Movement and a time when landmark federal legislation outlawed segregation; banned racist voting prohibitions (like literacy tests, poll taxes, and other disenfranchising practices); and banned workplace, educational, housing, and public accommodation discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.

The 1960s also marked a time of widespread anti-war, pro-worker, women’s liberation, and LGBTQ+ rights movements that continued to flourish into the ’70s. Also, the first birth control pill became publicly available in 1960, giving women increased control of their own bodies, reproductive rights, and decisions on whether or not to have children. (This is important later on in Roberts’ book as he claims that contraceptives, in vitro fertilization, and childless individuals have all ruined America.)

Vance returns to his garden metaphor, writing, “To bring the garden back to health, it is not enough to undo the mistakes of the past…. It needs to be recultivated. The old conservative movement argued if you just got government out of the way, natural forces would resolve problems—we are no longer in this situation and must take a different approach.”

“The old conservative movement argued if you just got government out of the way, natural forces would resolve problems—we are no longer in this situation and must take a different approach,” Vance continues. “As Kevin Roberts writes, ‘It’s fine to take a laissez-faire approach when you are in the safety of the sunshine. But when the twilight descends and you hear the wolves, you’ve got to circle the wagons and load the muskets.’”

Vance then repeats Roberts’ violent line with urgency, writing, “We are now all realizing that it’s time to circle the wagons and load the muskets. In the fights that lay ahead, [Roberts’] ideas are an essential weapon.”

One can argue that Vance and Roberts are just using pioneer imagery, referring to covered wagons and old-timey firearms. But in this metaphor, wolves are primal, deadly predators who threaten the lives of civilized humans. Vance knows the popularity of gun rights among the right-wing, and other conservatives have invoked muskets in the past as a way to “defend” marriage from same-sex couples.

Roberts himself has recently called for a “Second American Revolution” — a modern-day repeat of the eight-year conflict that killed between 25,000 and 70,000 Americans. Roberts himself said that the second revolution will be “bloodless” but only “if the Left allows it to be.”

However, it’s unlikely that many Americans would take Roberts’ suggestions peacefully. His book’s description on Amazon lists U.S. institutions that “are too corrupt to save: Ivy League colleges, the FBI, the New York Times, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the Department of Education, BlackRock, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the National Endowment for Democracy, to name a few.”

In the book, Roberts expresses his opposition to contraceptives “that shape American culture away from abundance, marriage, and family,” and claims they have somehow increased abortion rates. He calls in vitro fertilization (IVF) — a method of conception used by LGBTQ+ and other families — a “snake strangling the American family.”

He calls childless families “decadent and nostalgic” and says they lead to a society “less capable of innovation (a young person’s game) and more and more stuck and decrepit every year.” He says “America’s teachers have gone insane” and pushes for taxpayer-funded private schools, a major goal of anti-LGBTQ+ Christian conservatives.

He then invokes his own violent rhetoric, writing, “It’s time for a conservatism of fire, to burn it down and steward once again the natural order of the world, the Western order of civilization, and the American order of government.”

He asks readers, “What’s your Alamo? What are you dying for?… There’s a time for writing and reading—and a time to put down the books and go fight like hell to take back our country and build our future.”

Similarly, Trump told his followers to “fight like hell” before they raided the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 202. That “fight” resulted in five deaths and injured roughly 140 police officers with things like a broken spine, a lost eye, lost fingers, brain damage and multiple cases of PTSD. Trump has said that riot arrestees who attacked police on that day should be pardoned.

Roberts’ Project 2025 has proven so toxic that Trump has dishonestly claimed he has nothing to do with it, and the Heritage Foundation claimed to have shut it down (though they continue to recruit and train foot soldiers willing to do Trump’s bidding in a second administration).

Roberts’ book became so unpopular that he has delayed its planned release from September until after the election is over.

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Originally published here.