Red Frankenstein: How They Tried to Create a Caesar and Created a Monster

Trump’s open threat of political violence shows where the Red Caesar fantasy really leads

In the gilded Oval Office this morning, Donald Trump sat beside the strongman of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan for a presser. Asked about a shooting at an ICE facility, which left one detainee dead and two others wounded, with no ICE agents hurt, Trump said:

“The radical left is causing the problem. They’re saying things. And they’re really dumb people. I mean, I look at Crockett. I look at some of these people. They’re very low IQ people, actually.

But the radical left is causing this problem. Not the right, the radical left. And it’s going to get worse. And ultimately it’s going to go back on them.

I mean, bad things happen when they play these games. And I give you a little clue. The right is a lot tougher than the left. But the right’s not doing this. They’re not doing it. And they better not get them energized because it won’t be good for the left…

And it gets worse. It gets worse. And it’ll be a point where other people won’t take it anymore. That will not be good for the radical left. And we don’t want that.”

In my view, this is the most dangerous statement ever given by a president, closely followed by Trump’s speech on January 6th, 2021, at the Capitol.

The president openly threatened his political opponents—a promise of domestic terrorism carried out by his own radicalized supporters, with an unmistakably racist subtext. It was a much more explicit and broader threat than his answer of “Stand back and stand by” when asked about the Proud Boys in 2020.

This is a pretext for a violent crackdown based on a murder that was not motivated by the left. In fact, the shooter at the ICE facility was a nihilistic denizen of right-wing websites like 4chan. The basis for Trump’s lie that the shooter was “ANTI-ICE” is a picture of bullets at the crime scene that Kash Patel tweeted out while the crime scene was still active—less than an hour after the murder—an extraordinary breach of investigative protocol.

This is the first time in history an FBI Director has released information while a crime scene was still being processed.

This unprecedented, deliberate disinformation gave people like Ted Cruz and JD Vance the ability to gaslight America about yet another murder.

What JD Vance “got wrong” is the fact that the “ANTI-ICE” messaging was designed to cause violence, to create chaos. The shooter was a product of the same right-wing radicalization environment that inspired all of the recent political violence. It’s no longer “politics” inspiring these killers.

• Attempted assassin of Nancy Pelosi in her home

• Attempted assassin of Donald Trump, Butler

• Assassin of Melissa Hortman

• Assassin of UnitedHealthcare CEO

• Fire bomber of Josh Shapiro’s home

• Charlie Kirk’s murderer

• Murderer of a detainee at an ICE facility

In each of these cases, Trump, MAGA, and the right-wing propaganda machine tried to blame the violence on the “radical left.” In each case that was false.

What’s different now is the setting and the stakes. Trump has already signed an Executive Order against “Antifa”—a figment of the alt-right’s imagination. But now Trump says he “will be signing an Executive Order this week to dismantle these Domestic Terrorism Networks” followed by a demand that “DEMOCRATS… STOP THIS RHETORIC.”

This is the kind of language that dictators have historically used before inspiring violence by their supporters. Examples include:

• Mussolini, Blackshirts

• Hitler, brownshirts

• Perón, descamisados

• Erdogan, government persecution/AKP

• Duterte, vigilante killings

• Mugabe, youth militias

• Trump, January 6th, Proud Boys and other paramilitaries, QAnon, MAGA

This clear pretext for government-sanctioned political violence is accompanied by another disturbing development. Pete Hegseth appears to be preparing for a military purge.

Hegseth ordered a highly unusual emergency meeting next week of all his generals and admirals, two days after Mike Flynn posted a message demanding a purge of anyone who won’t go along with Trump’s unconstitutional use of the military for domestic law enforcement.

The military’s oath to the constitution is the last, best hope for American democracy. It is this sacred vow to the nation that Hegseth will try to shatter.

Simultaneously, Donald Trump is the first American president to demand a prosecution, in this case of former FBI Director James Comey, and then engineer his Justice Department to make it happen. It is being widely reported that despite the former US Attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia, the prosecutors in the office, and even Pam Bondi saying there is no case, Trump’s operative Lindsey Halligan—a former Trump beauty pageant participant—is prepared to indict Comey anyway.

You may ask: What does all of this mean for America? What the hell is Trump actually trying to do?

The clear answer is that Trump is trying to create a permanent military dictatorship in America where he can wield the levers of power—including the Armed Forces—however he wants and against whomever he chooses.

Will he succeed? I’m not sure.

Red Caesar

“Red Caesar” is a popular media term for autocracy-promoter Curtis Yarvin’s concept of a “benevolent dictator” who would, in his accounting, bring back prosperity to America through the sheer force of his will, under a vestigial version of the Constitution. As Yarvin said, in March 2024:

Until this “unitary executive” is so much “more powerful” than the present office that the President considers both the judicial and legislative branches purely ceremonial and advisory—with the same level of actual sovereignty as Charles III today—the “unitary executive” will not work.

This concept is nothing new to Donald Trump, of course. He has wanted to be a dictator for a long time, and the theocratic cult on the Supreme Court deliberately gave him “presidential immunity” to enable it.

“I have an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president”—Donald Trump, 2019

Here are the core concepts behind Red Caesar:

The Cathedral: A meta-institution composed of the media, academia, and bureaucratic elites that operates as a de facto theocracy which enforces the religion of liberalism. Yarvin believes The Cathedral represents the secret source of liberal democracy’s power over the population, and represents the ultimate target for Red Caesar’s fury. Example: Network television, Jimmy Kimmel

State-Corporate Merger: Yarvin sees the United States as a failing company that needs a CEO willing to tear it down and restructure it completely. Citizens can be either be shareholders or customers. This idea merges with Peter Thiel’s “Network State” cult which plans on chopping the U.S. up into little fiefdoms run by laws created by billionaires. Example: Government ownership of Intel, Tariffs

Accelerationism: An ideology which prescribes deliberate acceleration of cracks in the foundations of society in order to bring about a final violent rupture in civilization followed by a utopian future. Yarvin co-created the pseudo-philosophy Dark Enlightenment with Nick Land, often described as one of the founding fathers of accelerationism.

Genocidal Racism: Yarvin and Land are not just racists, they believe in mass eugenics and feudalist economic policies of the kind which can only be instituted by a dictator—because they are so abhorrent to most people.

Land and Moldbug [Yarvin]’s uncanny racism resurrects a notion of race as an interface for gathering and sorting global populations first deployed by late Victorian eugenics. Like the eugenicists, Land and Moldbug [Yarvin] rely on race as a means of categorizing humans based on their biologically determined aptitude.

Robert Topinka (2019) — The Alt-Right and the uncanny form of racism

One of Yarvin’s favorite rhetorical tactics is to sugarcoat his destructive goals with historical parallels that don’t sound so bad. For example, he likes to explain to liberals that FDR was a powerful president, who seized dictatorial power and ran the U.S. like a start up company—a kind of Blue Caesar. So, Yarvin argues, a Red Caesar shouldn’t be so bad, right?

Paleo-conservative Michael Anton, currently director of policy planning for Donald Trump and a contender to be National Security Advisor, wrote in his 2020 book The Stakes:

“Caesarism is not tyranny, which, strictly understood, is a regime that usurps a legitimate and functioning government”, whereas Caesarism implements “authoritarian one-man rule partially legitimized by necessity” – that is, “the breakdown of republican, constitutional rule”, adding that “a nation no longer capable of ruling itself must yet be ruled”.

These ideas have pervaded the Trump regime. In 2021, JD Vance said to far-right podcaster Jack Murphy:

“There’s this guy Curtis Yarvin who’s written about some of these things. One has to basically accept that the whole thing is going to fall in on itself…

The task of conservatives right now is to preserve as much as can be preserved and then when the inevitable collapse comes you build back the country in a way that’s actually better.”

What JD Vance is describing as “inevitable” is a collapse of liberal democracy. “Build[ing] back the country actually better” means something very different than the current America; this is the core argument for accelerationism.

The “Inevitable” Collapse

The idea of a pre-ordained apocalypse is pervasive across belief systems from evangelical Christianity to Hinduism to QAnon to Heaven’s Gate. It is also the nihilistic eschatology of oligarchs like Peter Thiel—who is currently doing a private 4-part lecture series about the Antichrist—and Elon Musk who fancies himself as the future “Doge” of America.

Of course, the “collapse” they see as inevitable is not. When Joe Biden left office, the United States was the “envy of the world.” But in just nine months, the Red Caesar they tried to frankenstein from a degenerating Donald Trump to thrust into the White House, has transformed into a monster—and the “envy of the world” is now a global joke.

Red Frankenstein

The FDR-like vision of a benevolent Red Caesar promoted by propagandists like Curtis Yarvin and Michael Anton is a deliberately constructed fantasy. The aphorism “absolute power corrupts absolutely” has been proven over and over through history—and Donald Trump is already one of its prime examples.

Curtis Yarvin, Michael Anton

There is no such thing as a “benevolent dictator” or a Red Caesar. The kind of men who want unlimited power are always motivated by the kind of action that requires unlimited power—action like domestic tyranny, imperialism, and genocide.

The Thiels, Yarvins, Antons and Vances of the world are motivated by the same core amorality as the white men who committed each recent act of “political violence”—nihilism. The movement they participate in is not devoted to a constructive vision for America promoted through the political system. It is devoted to a fundamentally destructive vision—the intentional conversion of the United States into a chaotic, lawless wasteland from which they can build a utopian white-dominated future.

Fundamental Flaw

Trump and his co-conspirators are clearly making a final move toward permanent autocracy. They think the conditions are as favorable as they will ever be for enforcing their vision on 330 million Americans. They believe that the power they have collected through infiltration, cheating, and psychological warfare is enough to cement themselves as the permanent elite.

I disagree.

The problem with their plan is both strategic and tactical. Strategically, they have vastly underestimated the still largely dormant power of the American people, and they have vastly overestimated the ability of the shambolic group of clowns they installed in the government to effectuate a full takedown of democracy.

Tactically, they did not take into account how deeply damaging the coverup of the Epstein files would be, the strength of Zelenskyy and Europe in thwarting their attempt to unite with Putin, and the resilience of the American people in the face of constant attacks on truth and sanity. And they did not take into account that Donald Trump would be spiraling into full-blown narcissistic collapse.

I think Red Frankenstein is out of their control, smashing everything around him, desperately trying to remake the world as his personal alternate reality—in which the entire planet jumps to his every command, and everyone believes that “Epstein is a Democrat hoax.”

Red Caesar has met his Brutus—and it is himself.

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