Letters from an American - A Deeply Unpopular Push

Episode Date: July 19, 2026

July 17, 2026Trump and his team are throwing the weight of the government behind a far right conspiracy, The preoccupation with communism leads to a claim that all political positions designed to regulate business and provide a basic social safety net reflect a left wing radicalism, cost tax dollars, redistribute wealth, and are a slippery slope to socialism, Reactionaries have demonized Black Americans, people of color, and women, But the modern government has broad support, Trump and his loyalists are trying to push a fantastical vision of current conditions in the US that has been debunked, Trump pointed to documents to say that China had created an election security nightmare that was downplayed by the “deep state,” but the documents Trump released showed nothing of the sort, just evidence that Russia tried to influence the election on Trump’s behalf, Demands that states run voter rolls through a federal digital tool have been blocked repeatedly, Steve Bannon called for immediate action against “communists,” Stephen Miller resorted to claims that protestors were ugly and deformed.Watch today's recording here: https://www.youtube.com/live/g9TUa1Rwd6U?si=T8_KKcHQZElhpnZ-Get full, free access to Letters from an American here: https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/subscribeYou can also find me:Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/hcrichardson.bsky.socialInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/heathercoxrichardson/?hl=enFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/heathercoxrichardson/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@heathercoxrichardson  Get full access to Letters from an American at heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/subscribe

July 17, 26. Yesterday, President Donald J. Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Deputy White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, all through the weight of the U.S. government behind a far-right conspiracy theory that says Trump and his loyalists are defending the United States of America against a communist takeover. As Gil Duran of the Nerd Reich recalled today, two years ago, far-right influencer Jack Posobiac and co-author Joshua Lissick wrote a best-selling book called Unhumans, The Secret History of Communist Revolutions, and How to Crush Them. Trump ally and media guru Stephen Bannon wrote the introduction. Donald Trump Jr. blurbed the book, saying that it provided a playbook to deploy immediately to save the West. Then Ohio Senator J.D. Vance also blurbed the book, saying, In the past, communists marched in the streets, waving red flags. Today, they marched through human resources, college campuses, and courtrooms to wage lawfare against good, honest people.

In unhumans, Jack Posobiac and Joshua Lysic reveal their plans and show us what to do to fight back. Bosobiak is a loyalist who worked to keep Trump in office after voters elected Democrat Joe Biden in 2020. He's known for court and controversy by promoting what Maya Oppenheim of the Independent in 2018 called holy erroneous and debunked conspiracy theories, including the infamous 2016 Pizza Gate conspiracy theory, the Democrats were operating a child's sex ring in the basement of a Washington, D.C. pizza restaurant. In Unhumans, Sposobiac and Lysic argue that the United States is under siege by the left, which in their view means anyone from communists to progressives. For the purposes of this book, we will call them the Unhumans, the authors write,

because they 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. Lissick explained to Nathan J. Robinson of current affairs that the reason they called the book Unhumans is because it's a verb to unhuman someone. To unhuman someone means to deprive someone of their rights to life, liberty, and property. The authors insisted that Communists were trying to unhuman those they, they, consider good Americans and that we can't tolerate an ideology like that, and so must do it to them

first. Ignoring the fascist revolutions that gave rise to World War II, the authors tied together left-wing revolutions from the late Roman Republic to the French Revolution of 1789 to the Russian and Chinese revolutions to the present, and claim that all political positions designed to regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, promote infrastructure, or protect civil rights, reflect that same left-wing radicalism. In their telling, Spain's fascist dictator Francisco Franco, who said, wherever I am there will be no communism, is a hero.

Franco ordered illegal detentions, torture, and mass killings in the name of social cleansing. As Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times noted in 2024, the right wing has often championed Franco, but it's extremely unusual for a candidate for vice president of the United States to openly align himself with autocratic terror. The embrace of authoritarianism in unhumans reflects the modern version of an ideology shaped after World War II by those determined to get rid of the modern state. Although the great majority of both Republicans and Democrats embraced such a government, right-wing reactionaries insisted it was a slippery slope to socialism. Defending business regulation, social welfare, infrastructure investment, and civil rights

cost tax dollars, and so, they said, redistributed wealth. Over the years, reactionaries insisted that Americans who believed in such a system were un-American takers, sucking dry the country's makers. Increasingly, they demonized black Americans or people of color and women as lazy and looking for government handouts, breaking laws with impunity, corrupting the country with their godless ways, and winning elections only by cheating. And yet, voters continued to elect lawmakers who supported the modern government. This infuriated the far right. But even establishment Republicans recognized that voters liked social security and cancer research,

clean air, and reproductive rights. While they turned out voters by railing against the liberals who supported regulations on the welfare state, they made sure not to cut into those programs deeply enough to cause a backlash. Trump has unmasked that facade. He has put the far right in power where they are destroying the modern, American state. Right-wing officials have undermined the world trade system that underpins American prosperity, empowered economic monopolists by slashing regulations and public lands, decimated reproductive rights and health care, cut social safety programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance

Program and Medicaid, slashed medical and scientific research, and dismantled the post-World War II rules-based international order that has maintained global stability for 75 years. But the right-wing push to get rid of the modern state is deeply unpopular. And so, Trump and his loyalists are embracing the idea that his opponents are in league with a historic through line of left-wing revolutionaries. Trump's speech last night began with a completely fantastical vision of current conditions in the U.S. that has been widely debunked, point by point, by fact-checkers. But his portrait of a nation doing really well was a setup for his warning that the prosperity and success he touts are under direct threat by leftists, both abroad and at home.

Trump claimed to present evidence that, beginning with the 2020 election cycle, China carried out what was believed to be the largest compromise of election data in history. He referred to China's illicit acquisition of 220 million U.S. voter files and called this an unprecedented election security nightmare. In fact, as Lewis Jacobson and Amy Sherman of Politifact report, documents the White House itself posted show that such information is publicly available, for purchase, and such purchases are common. Trump also said documents showed that members of the deep state worked to actively suppress and

downplay information about the extent of China's sinister election meddling. But, in fact, the intelligence community told Trump about foreign interference in 2021, and Biden released its report when he took office. The report said China did not make an effort to change the outcome of the 2020 election. Actually, one of the documents Trump released yesterday shows that Russia tried to influence the 2020 election to defeat Biden. Its operatives worked with U.S. officials and other prominent persons to spread claims about former President Biden as well as Ukrainian politicians, an alleged Ukrainian influence in the 2016 U.S. elections. Trump has denied Russian interference in U.S. elections.

Trump tied American journalists to this alleged plot, claiming the Chinese government was paying journalists to write negatively about him. He then attacked the media for being part of a plot to continue this election fraud for whatever reason. They want to keep it going. They want to protect the radical left. He called for the government to revoke their broadcast licenses. The findings are stunning, Trump said. And indeed, if they were true, we should expect dramatic diplomatic rifts and lawsuits.

But does Trump actually believe any of this? The White House today said plans for a lavish state visit of Chinese leader Xi Jinping to Washington, D.C. in two months have not changed. Trump's warning of a communist threat against U.S. elections was a setup for his insistence that future elections could be rigged and that the country must do as he says to stop that danger. He said he had ordered the Department of Homeland Security to notify every state about non-citizens on their roles and direct them to be deemed ineligible. and he demanded Congress pass the Save America Voter Suppression Act, saying,

the only reason you wouldn't do it is you want to cheat because your policies are so bad and your candidates are so pathetic that you can't get elected in any other way. These reforms are urgently needed to stop the vulnerabilities that I have mentioned, he said, and he told Americans to call lawmakers to demand they pass the Save America Act. Today, Secretary of Homeland Security, Mark Wayne Mullen, demanded states-run voter rolls through a federal digital tool designed to identify non-citizens who are ineligible for certain government programs. Federal judges have blocked federal demands for those roles 16 times and prohibited the use of the federal tool, noting it was not designed to scan citizens' information and often flags recently now. naturalized citizens as non-citizens. Blocked by the courts, Mullin threatened state officials with criminal prosecution if they

don't comply with Trump's demands. Yesterday, Secretary of State Rubio expounded on the administration's opposition to radical left terrorism. A meeting at the State Department was billed as an examination of the transnational nature of far-left terrorism. But Shannon K. Kingston of ABC News noted that Rubio and other officials from the Trump administration spoke primarily about what they call Antifa and conditions in the United States, including the assassination attempts against Trump. Kingston noted that a 2025 analysis by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, or CSIS, shows that left-wing political violence in the U.S.

remains much lower than historical levels of violence carried out by right-wing and jihadist attackers. Nonetheless, the White House said, under the leadership of President Donald J. Trump, far-left extremism will be treated with the same seriousness and ferocity the world has long reserved for jihadist terrorism. There is a point to all this. Bannon argued in Tuesday's war room podcast that the idea of communists threatening to take over the United States through corrupt elections is a predicate for immediate action.

That immediate action, he said, would be for Trump to declare a national security emergency executive order that took all of Save America Plus Plus Plus. And then we can be sure the Republicans will win the 26 elections, and as Trump keeps saying, all the elections for the next 100 years, they would do so by default as the administration purged so-called communists from public life. The parallels between unhumans and the administration's current rhetoric showed yesterday in Miller's

speech at the State Department. Bannon's introduction to unhumans begins with an epigram that reads, Communism is when ugly, deformed freaks make it illegal to be normal, then rob and or kill all successful people out of petty resentment and cruelty. The ideology is all just window dressing. Miller told the State Department attendees, it's not a coincidence that when you look at these violent Antifa demonstrations, you see any photograph of those who are assembled, to be blunt, not one of the people that is demonstrating looks like a normal person. Not one looks normal. They're all deformed in some way, in their appearance, in their dress, in their mannerism. Why is that? You look at two photographs and you see, you know, a normal American street. You see an

Antifa protest. Why did the people that are violently demonstrating, why is there not one normal-looking person among them. Every one of them, through the course of their life and their decisions, has scarred their body and their appearance in many different ways, to the point in which their outer appearance becomes a manifestation of their inner hatred. In response to Trump's address last night, the chair of the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, Cisco Aguilar of Nevada, released a statement. saying that was some bullshit. Letters from an American was written and read by Heather Cox Richardson.

It was produced at Soundscape Productions, Dead in Massachusetts. Recorded with music composed by Michael Moss.