Recently Kevin Roberts, the now-resigned president of the conservative slop pail the Heritage Foundation, released a book that tells us everything we ever wanted to know about JD Vance’s actual political agenda.
Roberts’ work was supposed to debut in September, but ended up being pushed back until after the election. Why, you ask? Because the book’s foreward was written by none other than JD Vance.
But what does this foreward reveal, you ask? A lot. Maybe too much.
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As if the book’s title—Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America—wasn’t enough of a red flag, let’s consider the book’s original title: Dawn’s Early Light: Burning Down Washington to Save America. You can see why they changed it after the Project 2025 plans started to become more widely known.
You can change a book’s title, but you can’t really change the content, and the content is what really matters here. Because in the book’s foreward, Vance reveals his political ideology in detail in one overstuffed analogy.
“Imagine a well-maintained garden,” Vance writes, “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 also kills many of the good things. Undeterred, the gardener keeps adding solution. Eventually, the soil becomes inhospitable.”
Vance continues, explaining that: “In this analogy, 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.”
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As TikToker @thedanicook explains, the 1960s and 70s “mistakes” Vance notes can only refer to the progressive wave of legislation for equality and transparency that activists fought hard for in that era, including the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968, as well as the 1966 Freedom of Information Act, which allowed citizens to access U.S. government documents, and the Equal Credit Opportunity act that allowed women to open their own credit cards.
JD Vance, in addition to calling for a seemingly total regression to a pre-civil rights age, clearly believes that all this progress was a mistake. He’s saying it loud and clear in this foreward, and aligning himself with the goals of Project 2025 in the process.
Obviously, we knew this, but it’s scary to see it in black and white. “JD Vance refers to [these freedoms] as ‘mistakes,'” Dani Cook explains. “He also says that it’s not enough to ‘undo’ the mistakes of the past. We have to ‘recultivate the garden.'”
It’s a sinister glimpse into the mind of someone who we already knew wasn’t going to let any moral concerns stand in the way of his quest for power. As Americans everywhere—even those who voted Republican—consider just how easily we could end up with Vance as acting President in the next four years, these words feel more chilling than ever.
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