Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance has long espoused a Christian-centric form of social conservatism that he believes should inform how the government is run, how society is shaped, and what values families pass onto their children.

It makes all the sense in the world, then, that the junior U.S. senator from Ohio would write a foreword for a book that espouses those values, praising it for articulating a conservative vision for society at large.

In June — well before he was named Trump’s running mate — Vance bragged about writing the foreword, which effectively endorses the book’s central message, in a post on X.

Dawn’s Early Light by @KevinRobertsTX is available for pre-order now!

I was thrilled to write the foreword for this incredible book, which contains a bold new vision for the future of conservatism in America.

Get your copy here >> https://t.co/nVW14O7BcH

— JD Vance (@JDVance) June 19, 2024

Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America is written by Kevin Roberts, president of The Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank behind the extreme Project 2025 initiative, seemingly designed as blueprint for Donald Trump’s presidency, should the Republican nominee win.

Vance, who has said there are “some good ideas” in Project 2025, is particularly close to Heritage, and specifically Roberts, whom he sees as a kindred spirit, notes in the foreword that both men come from humble beginnings in areas of the country that have been forgotten or overlooked by government and societal elites. Both men are Catholic and both have risen to prestigious positions, both within the conservative movement.

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Vance has financial ties to many of the individuals at Heritage rumored to be behind the development of Project 2025. As reported by Wired, Vance’s public Venmo account shows activity and money transfers between the senator and Heritage employees.

Similarly, Roberts has praised Vance for helping turn the Heritage Foundation “into the de facto institutional home of Trumpism.” Roberts has also called Vance an ideological and philosophical leader within the conservative movement.

In his foreword praising Dawn’s Early Light — whose original subtitle of “Burning Down Washington to Save America” has since been changed — Vance praises Roberts for articulating the intellectual reasoning behind the Republican Party’s recent shift from traditional conservatism to a more populist form of conservatism espoused by GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump and younger, more “online” conservatives like Vance and Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley.

An essential part of this right-wing approach to populism is the endorsement of rigid views on social and cultural issues, including traditional gender roles, as informed by Christian religious values.

“Roberts sees a conservatism that is focused on the family,” Vance writes, as reported by The New Republic. “In this, he borrows from the old American Right that recognized — correctly, in my view — that cultural norms and attitudes matter.

“We should encourage our kids to get married and have kids. We should teach them that marriage isn’t just a contract, but a sacred — and to the extent possible, lifelong — union. We should discourage them from behaviors that threaten the stability of their families.”

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Vance employs a series of analogies, comparing modern liberalism to a gardener attempting to maintain a garden by using a potent weed-killing solution that roots out weeds but is also detrimental to the garden’s overall, long-term health.

“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,” Vance writes, never specifying which changes of those decades were problematic. “But to bring the garden back to health, it is not enough to undo the mistakes of the past. The garden needs not just to stop adding a terrible solution…[it] needs to be re-cultivated.”

Vance then employs an analogy comparing liberals and those who express non-conservative viewpoints on a host of issues as “wolves” threatening the safety of a 19th-century wagon train.

He argues that conservatives must be proactive rather than reactive, and seek to impose this new form of socially conservative populism onto society via a political and cultural revolution — even though such ideas will likely meet resistance from the cultural left.

“As Kevin Roberts writes, ‘It’s fine to take a laissez-faire approach when you are in the safety of the sunshine,” Vance concludes. “But when the twilight descends and you hear the wolves, you’ve got to circle the wagons and load the muskets.’ We are now all realizing that it’s time to circle the wagons and load the muskets.”

In this regard, Vance echoes Roberts’ own call for a “Second American Revolution” that could be “bloodless” — but only if the political and cultural Left surrender to the will of conservative revolutionaries. 

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Some of the specific approaches Roberts advocates for in his book might alarm ordinary Americans.

Roberts disparages Ivy League colleges, the FBI, mainstream media outlets, government health and education agencies, and so-called “woke” companies that employ pro-diversity initiatives in hiring and socially responsible investing as irredeemable insitutions that have to be gutted or razed because they are “too corrupt to save.”

Roberts decries the use of contraceptives as shaping American culture in a way that deprioritizes the importance of the nuclear family. He rails against abortion, which is par the course for conservatives, but also, puzzlingly, disparages in vitro fertilization — which helps straight and LGBTQ couples conceive children and form families — as a “snake strangling the American family.”

Roberts calls childless families “decadent and nostalgic” and says they lead to a society “less capable of innovation.” He also rails against teachers for allegedly pushing left-wing ideologies onto their students, and calls for the defunding of public education and the establishment of taxpayer-funded private schools.

“It’s time for a conservatism of fire, to burn it down and steward once again the natural order of the world, the Western order of civilization, and the American order of government,” Roberts writes. “What’s your Alamo? What are you dying for? … There’s a time for writing and reading — and a time to put down the books and go fight like hell to take back our country and build our future.”

The release of Roberts’ book was slated for September 14, but has been delayed until after the presidential election, which has some liberals calling foul, accusing Roberts and the book’s publisher, Harper Collins’ Broadside Books, of seeking to influence the election by hiding Vance’s foreword and preventing Roberts’ more unpopular proposals from being widely reported. 

Writing for The New Republic, Alex Shephard reported that Harper Collins “has apparently tried to suppress it amid the scrutiny of Project 2025 and Vance’s ties to Roberts,” also noting that some of the book’s more incendiary passages have been “softened” as scrutiny of Project 2025 increased.

The attacks on Project 2025 — which, surprisingly, have shown some success at penetrating voters’ consciousness — have made the initiative unpopular, according to recent polling.

Even Donald Trump has sought to distance himself from Project 2025, despite having previously traveled with Roberts, praised the work of the initiative’s authors at a dinner hosted by the Heritage Foundation, and appearing to endorse one of Project’s 2025 central tenets — the firing of hundreds of thousands of federal workers as part of a war against the alleged “Deep State” and replacing them with an army of political appointees who are loyal only to the next Republican president.