Extremist who trained GOP poll workers will speak at Washington event with two rightwingers
“Steve Sailer to appear alongside a ‘proponent of scientific racism’ and a law professor suspended for ‘racist’ remarks
A rightwing activist who last month trained poll workers for the Republican National Committee will speak in Washington DC on Thursday night alongside an extremist writer who is a “proponent of scientific racism” and a law professor who was suspended after allegedly making “racist, sexist and homophobic”remarks and inviting a white nationalist to address her class.
Jack Posobiec, Steve Sailer and Amy Wax will appear together at the event, which will take place at the presidential suite at Washington DC’s Union Station, according to ticketing information obtained by the Guardian.
The event has been promoted by Sailer’s far-right publisher Passage Press, and was originally scheduled to take place after Sailer’s speaking date at New College of Florida (NCF), which the Guardian reported on last month.
The Florida event has now been postponed until next year according to the NCF spokesperson Nathan March, who said that the NCF campus has been evacuated in advance of the expected arrival of Hurricane Milton.
The event and Posobiec’s position as an influential pro-Donald Trump operative raise questions about the further penetration of openly racist politics into the Republican party. The Guardian emailed Events at Union Station and the Republican National Committee but received no response.
Sailer’s publisher, Passage Press, is marketing the event as a leg of his book tour, Noticing.
Last month, the Guardian reported on the contents of that book. In it Sailer claims that Black Americans are inherently more prone to criminal behavior on average; that liberal attitudes to race allows the purported criminal tendencies of Black people to go unchecked; that Black people around the world are on average less intelligent than white people; and that Black people are prone to “primitive” beliefs and behaviors.
Earlier this year, the Guardian identified Jonathan Keeperman as the man behind Passage Press and the influential “New Right” Twitter/X account “L0m3z”.
Posobiec’s history as a pro-Trump influencer has been extensively reported in the Guardian and other outlets. Posobiec has been prominent since 2016 in promoting disinformation on social media and on fringe, partisan news outlets including Rebel News and One America News Network.
The Guardian last year outlined Posobiec’s role in promoting conspiracy theories including “#Pizzagate” and claims about Hillary Clinton’s involvement in the murder of the Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich. Posobiec has used X, where his account now has 2.7 million followers, to “promote Russian military intelligence operations, pushed false claims of election fraud and collaborated with white nationalists, Proud Boys and neo-Nazis”.
But this has not hindered Posobiec’s rise in the Trump-era Republican party. Last year Semafor reported that Posobiec was seen by Republican strategists as the influencer with “the most clout with Republican voters” and Posobiec has used this influence to promote false narratives about elections.
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s extremist file on Posobiec, he spread falsehoods about primary and general elections under the “#StoptheSteal” banner in 2016, 2018 and 2020, with the latter campaign preceding the January 6 attack on the United States Capitol.
Posobiec has also spread misinformation in this election season, posting unsourced and unverified information about the election itself, about Haitian immigrants, and hurricane flooding in Appalachia.
Posobiec’s work as an author has so far drawn little scrutiny from reporters. Since 2017 he has published five books, including one children’s book, with a sixth title scheduled for publication later this month.
The Guardian has reviewed a selection of his extant books.
From 2018, 4D Warfare offers rightwingers “a new way of waging the culture wars–and winning!”, promotes tactics including “disinformation” (defined as “the dissemination of false, half-true, and misleading information”) and “large-scale deception programs”, and counsels: “Deception helps you to achieve your goals by confusing your adversaries about what they truly are.”
Last July, Posobiec released Unhumans, whose title is a characterization of Posobiec’s perceived enemies, including “communists in the twentieth century and progressives of our own day”.
The book comes with blurbs by rightwing luminaries including Tucker Carlson, Donald Trump Jr and his vice-presidential candidate, JD Vance. The latter wrote: “In the past, communists marched in the streets waving red flags. Today, they march through HR, college campuses, and courtrooms to wage lawfare against good, honest people.”
Posobiec writes of the titular “unhumans”: “They undo order. They undo the basic bonds of society that make communities and nations possible. They destroy the human rights of life, liberty, and property – and undo their own humanity in the process by fully embracing nihilism, cynicism, and envy.”
The book praises murderous dictators including Francisco Franco and Chiang Kai-shek for their opposition to communism, and recommends that “unhumans” in the US be subject to targeted “lawfare” including “RICO lawsuits” against “Soros-affiliated NGOs”, and “well-publicized lists with dossiers” targeting perceived opponents in “education but also in media, throughout the economy, and more”.
His co-writer on Unhumans, Joshua Lisec, has ghostwritten books for other rightwing influencers, and claims on his website to be “the only Certified Ghostwriter and Certified Hypnotist in the world”, marketing his process as “hypnowriting”.
Lisec is also co-author of the forthcoming Bulletproof, which claims to offer “the truth about the assassination attempts on Donald Trump”.
Posobiec’s history as a conspiracy theorist has apparently not discredited him in the eyes of the current, Trump-aligned Republican establishment.
According to the New York Times, Posobiec told Republican committee volunteers scheduled to monitor polling in Michigan that the key to elections is that “it doesn’t matter who votes, it matters who counts the votes”.
Heidi Beirich, chief strategy officer and co-founder of the Global Project against Hate and Extremism, said of Posobiec’s place inside the Republican party’s tent meant that “the Republican party has gone over the edge”.
Beirich added: “This Republican party and its officials associate with extremists of seemingly every stripe,” and that the party “is unrecognizable … What the hell happened to Bush’s party, or Reagan’s party?”
Wax, who will share the stage with Sailer and Posobiec, was suspended by the University of Pennsylvania this year after a string of controversial statements stretching back to 2017.
That year she co-authored an op-ed for the Philadelphia Inquirer claiming: “All cultures are not equal,” and criticized “the single-parent, antisocial habits, prevalent among some working-class whites; the anti-‘acting white’ rap culture of inner-city blacks; the anti-assimilation ideas gaining ground among some Hispanic immigrants”.
Later that year, Wax said in an interview that she had “rarely, rarely” seen a Black student graduate in the top half of their class at Penn Law, a claim which was later disputed by Penn Law’s then dean, Theodore Ruger.
In 2019, at the National Conservatism conference, Wax said that the US would be “better off with more whites and fewer non-whites”.
In 2022, she told the conservative economist Glenn Loury in an interview that the US would be “better off with fewer Asians and less Asian immigration”, and told Tucker Carlson the same year that “Blacks” and other “non-Western” groups harbor “resentment, shame, and envy” against western people for their “outsized achievements”, and non-white critics of the west know “on some level, their country is a shithole”.
Wax’s Washington appearance comes just over a month before her scheduled appearance at American Renaissance, the annual white nationalist gathering hosted by Jared Taylor. Other advertised speakers there include Martin Sellner, founder of Austrian far-right nationalist group Identitäre Bewegung Österreich.
Wax has invited Taylor to her classroom several times.
Beirich said that Wax is “a flat-out white nationalist with a ton of white nationalist friends. There’s no pussyfooting around her politics.”
A Penn spokesperson told the Guardian: “Last year, a five-member faculty Hearing Board determined that Professor Amy Wax violated the University’s behavioral standards by engaging in years of flagrantly unprofessional conduct within and outside of the classroom that breached her responsibilities as a teacher to offer an equal learning opportunity to all students,” adding: “These findings are now final.”
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