“Burn Down Washington”

Republican vice-presidential nominee J. D. Vance wrote the foreword for a new book by Kevin Roberts, Dawn’s Early Light, scheduled for release in September.

Roberts is president of the Heritage Foundation, the organization behind Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership, which lays out a vision for a Trump presidency (he’s named more than 300 times) that would eliminate abortion and gay rights and dismantle the Department of Education, just for starters. It also calls for banning pornography, which it equates with any mention of trans gender identity.

Vance says the Heritage Foundation is “the most influential engine of ideas for Republicans from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump.” He calls for “an offensive conservatism” and quotes Roberts’ call for action: “When the twilight descends and you hear the wolves, you’ve got to circle the wagons and load the muskets.” He’s so enamored of the passage that he repeats it: “We are now all realizing that it is time to circle the wagons and load the muskets.”

I have not gotten my hands on an advance copy of Roberts’ book, so I can only tell you what’s in the promotional materials. And that is an interesting story. A weird story, even. The subtitle of the book, as announced by HarperCollins, is “Taking Back Washington to Save America.”

But when Vance first took to X to laud the “incredible” book’s “bold new vision,” it was subtitled “Burning Down Washington to Save America.

Two days later, Vance deleted that, and posted a new tweet: same text, new title, no match in the cover photo.

Apparently whoever updated HarperCollins’ web page for the book forgot to change the title and description associated with the audiobook. Over at Amazon, the title given for the hardcover and the ebook has “taking,” while the CD version use “burning.” Amazon’s audiobook also gives the title as “burning,” but the description of the book is yet another different version.

Amazon’s description for the hardcover and ebook mirror HarperCollins’ copy for the book. Amazon’s audiobook description has the same sentence structures and paragraph breaks, with some word changes. Both versions claim that “a corrupt and incompetent elite” is brainwashing the nation, and call Roberts’ book “ambitious and provocative.” Then they diverge.

In HarperCollins’ current book description, Roberts’ book “blazes a promising path” for conservative change. On Amazon’s audiobook page, the book “blazes a warpath.” The FBI, Ivy League universities, the Gates Foundation, and the New York Times are “too corrrupt to save.” HarperCollins: “All these need to be dissolved.” Amazon: “Conservatives need to burn down these institutions.”

The copy on the Amazon page for the CD version of the book — and, as of this writing, on HarperCollins’ website for the audiobook — is yet more extreme. I took the screenshot at 11:15 pm on July 30 and am reproducing it as there is no knowing when HarperCollins might change the website.

In this version, Democrats and Republicans alike belong to a “Uniparty” aligned with “globalist elites” that promote centralized government and “endless wars.” (Real Americans, on the other hand, “prioritize winning wars worth fighting.” Which wars are which?) The list of institutions to be “destroyed” includes the Boy Scouts, the Fairfax County School System, and the World Economic Forum.

By “globalist elites,” right-wing conspiracy theorists mean the secret worldwide Jewish cabal that, in their fevered imaginations, controls multinational corporations and international finance. Some of them think the entire cabal consists of George Soros. Some dream up space lasers. The fantasy of malicious and powerful Jews is hundreds of years old. It was peddled by the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Henry Ford, and Adolf Hitler. White nationalists just keep breathing new life into it.

But where do these different descriptions of the book originate? The publishers of both of my books asked for marketing descriptions of various lengths when preparing the contract. What I wrote for the first book, and my co-author and I, for the second, later appeared on the publishers’ websites and on Amazon.

It is quite likely that the title and language that still linger on HarperCollins’ digital audio page and on Amazon’s page for the audio CD represent Roberts’ original vision for the book, but when Trump tapped Vance as his VP, somebody at HarperCollins got nervous.

In an excerpt from Roberts’ book published online by the Institute on Public and Religious life under the title “Burning down Washington,” Roberts writes that patriarchy is “the natural form of familial relations.”   In the “Foreword” to the Project 2025 Mandate, he calls government “unnatural” (4) and urges the next president to delete references in all federal documents to “gender, gender equality, gender equity … abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights” (5).

I think what he is attempting here is to claim that contraception and gender equality restrict his free exercise of religion. But his slash-and-burn method denies other people freedom of religion and freedom of speech. In labeling patriarchy as “natural,” he tries to delegitimize any other perspective. It’s kind of impressive, rhetorically, but still ugly.

These are the ideas that vice-presidential candidate J. D. Vance lauds in his introduction to Roberts’ book, for which he was “thrilled” to write the Foreword, and which he says is “an essential weapon” in the battle that he wants to provoke. Censorship. A sweeping denial of basic civil rights to gay and trans people. Loading his gun to fight. Burning universities, newspapers, charitable foundations, federal offices, and the boy scouts. The boy scouts?

I used to think Trump was the country’s most dangerous politician. I have begun to think that Vance might be more dangerous.