Republican vice presidential nominee Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio likened Democrats and left-liberals to “wolves” who should be shot and gardeners who are poisoning American soil. Dawn’s Light: Reclaiming Washington to Save Americaby Kevin Roberts. Roberts uses similarly violent and dehumanizing imagery in his books.
Roberts is president of the right-wing Heritage Foundation think tank and the architect of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for eviscerating federal agencies and overturning long-held civil rights rights under a second term for President Donald Trump.
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Vance begins Roberts’ 1,091-word preface to his book See pulp fictionThe 1994 Quentin Tarantino film portrays three gay characters as violent kidnappers, rapists and BDSM leather fetishists.
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“What we need is an aggressive conservatism, not just a conservatism that tries to stop the left from doing things we don’t like,” Vance writes near the end of his introduction, and goes on to use a lengthy garden metaphor to accuse liberals of being gardeners who have poisoned American soil. (The line echoes Trump’s claim that immigrants are “polluting the blood of our nation.”)
“Here’s an analogy I sometimes use to describe what previous generations of conservatives got right and wrong,” Vance writes. “Imagine a well-tended garden in a sunny spot. Of course, it has its flaws and is full of weeds…. The well-intentioned gardener sprays the garden with chemicals in an attempt to eliminate the bad ones. This kills many of the weeds, but it also kills the good ones. Undaunted, the gardener carries on spraying. Eventually, the soil becomes inhospitable to plants.”
“In this analogy, modern liberalism was the gardener, the garden was our country, and the voices trying to stop the gardener were conservatives. Of course we were right. In our efforts to fix problems – some real, some imagined – we made a lot of mistakes as a country in the 1960s and 1970s,” he explains.
Vance doesn’t explain what those mistakes were, but it’s worth noting that the 1960s was the height of America’s first civil rights movement, a time when landmark federal laws banned racial segregation, prohibited racist voting bans (such as literacy tests, poll taxes, and other disenfranchisement practices), and prohibited discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin in the workplace, education, housing, and public accommodations.
The 1960s was also a time of widespread anti-war, pro-labor, women’s liberation, and LGBTQ+ rights movements that thrived into the ’70s. 1960 also saw the first oral contraceptive pills being sold to the public, giving women more power over their own bodies, their reproductive rights, and the decision of whether or not to have children. (This is a key part of Roberts’ argument later in her book that contraception, IVF, and childfree people have all ruined America.)
Returning to the garden metaphor, Vance writes, “To restore a garden to health, it is not enough to simply undo past mistakes; the garden must be re-cultivated. The old conservative movement argued that if we removed government, nature would solve the problems. But we are no longer in that position, and a different approach must be taken.”
“The old conservative movement argued that if government didn’t get in the way, nature would solve our problems, but we’re no longer in that position and we need a different approach,” Vance continues. “As Kevin Roberts writes, ‘It’s all well and good to take a laissez-faire approach when the sunshine is safe. But when dusk falls and the wolves start howling, it’s time to gather up the wagons and load our muskets.'”
Vance then repeated Roberts’ fiery words with urgency: “We now realize that the time has come to shore up our ranks and load our muskets. In the battle to come, [Roberts’] Ideas are a vital weapon.”
Some might argue that Vance and Roberts are simply using frontier imagery, with their references to covered wagons and old-fashioned firearms. But in this metaphor, wolves are primitive, fearsome predators that threaten civilized life. Vance knows that gun rights are popular among the right, and other conservatives have invoked muskets in the past as a way to “protect” marriage from same-sex couples.
Roberts himself has recently called for a “Second American Revolution,” a modern-day version of the eight-year war that left between 25,000 and 70,000 Americans dead. Roberts himself has said that the second revolution would be “bloodless,” but only “if the left allows it.”
But it is unlikely that many Americans would peacefully accept Roberts’ proposal. His book description on Amazon reads, “Ivy League universities, the FBI, The New York Timesthe National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the Department of Education, BlackRock, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the National Endowment for Democracy, the list goes on.”
In her book, Roberts opposes contraception, which she says “pulls American culture away from affluence, marriage, and family,” and argues that it increases abortion rates. She calls in vitro fertilization (IVF), a pregnancy method used by LGBTQ+ and other families, “the snake strangling the American family.”
He calls childless families “decadent and nostalgic” and says they lead to a “society that stagnates and declines with each passing year, with less capacity to innovate (the young person’s game).” He says “American teachers have lost their minds” and promotes the creation of taxpayer-funded private schools, a primary goal of anti-LGBTQ+ Christian conservatives.
And, quoting his own fiery rhetoric, he wrote, “Now is the time for fire conservatism. It’s time to burn down and retake control of the natural order of the world, the order of Western civilization, and the American order of government.”
He asks his readers, “What is your Alamo? What are you dying for? … There is time to write and time to read. And time to put the books down and fight tooth and nail to take back our country and build our future.”
Similarly, Trump urged his supporters to “fight like hell” before they stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 202. That “fight” left five people dead and around 140 police officers injured, including fractured spines, blindness, missing fingers, brain damage and multiple cases of PTSD. Trump has said that those arrested for attacking police that day should be pardoned.
Roberts Project 2025 It proved so harmful that Trump disingenuously claimed he had nothing to do with it and the Heritage Foundation shut it down (though it continues to recruit and train soldiers who do Trump’s bidding, even in his second administration).
Roberts’ ideas were so unpopular that he delayed the publication of his book from September until after the election.
