On the Left as Scorpion

by Charles Haywood

Charles Haywood presents a dramatic vision of America’s future, where a predicted Trump victory triggers a powerful response from the political Left, setting the stage for sweeping conflict and upheaval reminiscent of historical episodes of leftist-driven turmoil and revolution.

This article first appeared in MAN’S WORLD and is republished with permission.

Anyone who predicts the future risks beclowning and humiliating himself, usually for little return. Better to offer Nostradamus-like pronouncements, susceptible to many interpretations, so you can later retcon the predictions you make. Nonetheless, the outline of the immediate future for America is clearer than most futures, because we are repeating a pattern that has occurred more than once in modern times. Yes, much is unprecedented in our current situation. Still, the general form of our coming catastrophe is plain enough. I would like to be proven wrong. But I will not be.

In November, Donald Trump will win the election. This will happen despite the best efforts of the Regime to prevent it. True, they successfully cheated Trump of reelection in 2020, and will try again. The problem they face now, however, is that all their tools for fixing a Presidential election now offer diminishing or negative returns. First, their ability to set the narrative and thereby control and channel public opinion has substantially eroded. Fewer people every day are fooled by the propaganda churned out by Regime organs. The Left has made America a low-trust society, which is a great tragedy, but the silver lining is that we not only mistrust our neighbors, but even more the government, the news media, and “experts,” all of whom are wholly tools of the Left. Visible and invisible forms of manipulation by Big Tech, also essential to dictating the narrative in 2020, no longer have the impact they did. In part this is the same lack of trust; in part it is because Elon Musk has made X a neutral platform, which makes setting the narrative far more difficult, because truth is much easier to find and distribute through a central, transparent location. These factors create a feedback loop, where more and more people refuse to believe what they are told to believe.

Second, point-of-sale fraud, the manufacture of fake votes, is now mostly only possible in areas already dominated by the Left, whose electoral votes are already in the bag. Many states have cracked down on fraud conducted under cover of fighting the Wuhan Plague. Ballot harvesting, while still unfortunately legal in too many places, has begun to be used by Republicans as well. We will still see quite a bit of direct fraud in Left-dominated cities in swing states, and whether Trump can react adequately remains to be seen. I suspect that despite quite a bit of such fraud still occurring, it will not be enough to overcome Trump’s legitimate votes.

Third, more extreme moves, the resort to which shows the Left sense erosion of their dominance, have all fallen flat. Attempting to turn Trump into a political prisoner, to add to the thousands already held by the Regime, appears to have backfired. Whipping up anti-white hatred again, trying to coerce white people to vote against their interests by guilting them, as they did in the Summer of Floyd, won’t work. It probably won’t be tried, but if it were, the result would be the opposite of the intent. It would accelerate white people continuing the arc they are already on, of realizing they must act as a group, just as every other group in America has been vigorously encouraged to do for decades.

The Regime has no good moves to prevent Trump’s election. What, then, when Trump wins? Crucially, the Regime is not a unitary thing, centrally coordinated, but a set of emergent properties from competing groups. All these groups are driven to a greater or lesser degree by Left ideology, obeisance to which gives them meaning, the core human need. A common ideology often gives the appearance of coordination, but that coordination is the coordination of a school of fish. Most importantly, no action can ever be taken if action would require defying Left dogma; it would be like the fish exiting the sea onto dry land, impossible in their nature. And because the backbone of Left dogma is the wholesale denial of reality, the Left always lacks any internal correction mechanism short of total failure of the Left system. As a result, no Left regime in history has successfully reformed itself, and what will result after Trump’s victory will therefore be dictated by insane paths of thought inherent to the Left far more than by good tactics or good sense. It will be visceral and inevitable, wholly in keeping with the eternal Left project of permanent revolution.

When Trump wins, the country will explode in violence, dwarfing the Floyd Riots. The violence is already planned, organized, and lavishly funded by myriad people and groups. This is no secret. The intention to unleash it in 2020 if other methods of cheating Trump failed was admitted, with specific details, in an infamous Time article in 2021. The amount of money and organization behind this carefully-planned violence, whose leaders never need fear exposure, or punishment for “seditious conspiracy” or “insurrection,” at least not yet, is immense. It will be executed by the Regime’s paramilitaries, filthy Antifa freaks and their hangers-on. We can also expect targeted political killings, of those on the Right seen as a threat to Left dominance — historically always a signature move of the cornered Left.

But it will all be meaningless, except for unfortunates caught up in it. Such violence can only ever take place in Left-dominated areas. It will not be permitted elsewhere, and this time it will be met with live fire in any place dominated by the Right, even by the moderate Right. This pushback will be catastrophic for the Left, which has always relied on Americans passively accepting any violence they choose to impose and buckling to any threat of violence with displays of meek submission (hence their hatred for Kyle Rittenhouse, who refused to comply, and was seen to refuse). Any practical demonstration that a handful of hard young men can put down scores or hundreds of Antifa thugs will likely result in a thousand Rittenhouses blooming (a consummation, in this circumstance, devoutly to be wished). Still, this violence will burn hot, and be sustained, only in areas already lost to decent Americans. (If you haven’t left those areas, which you should, buy more than one gun, along with unidentifiable clothing and facial coverings, and learn to use the guns — you will likely need those tools to defend yourself and your family, and you do not want to end up like Daniel Penny.) All of this is a sideshow, however, because this violence will be wholly inadequate, of itself, to prevent Trump from taking office in January.

Why, though? Why will this, and the further violence I outline below, be the reaction of the Regime to Trump’s victory? To answer this, we must understand history and the Left mindset. In its nature, the Left perceives that history marches ever-onward to inevitable victory. Thus, they can never accept even the perception of a rolling back of their ill-gotten gains, and therefore always resort to violence if successfully challenged in any material way. The most extreme members of the Left coalition are allowed to dictate this turn to violence, because more “moderate” members can point to no limiting principle in the permanent revolution required by Left ideology, and therefore are pulled along the greased path to violence. Almost always, however, their reach exceeds their grasp, as long as resistance arises. This suicidal tendency is the Achilles’ heel of the Left.

The irony is that none of what I outline today seems necessary to achieve Left goals. The smart Regime play would be simply to allow Trump to take office, and then hobble him as they did in his first term, only more aggressively. Certainly, there is some small chance such containment would fail, and result in an existential conflict, if Trump fought back this time, in a disciplined fashion. In fact, however, the Left is more right than wrong that the actions I predict are necessary for them. The Left project, being anti-reality, always crumbles into dust, its soaring hopes of heaven on earth crashing to the ground, as the ash of the promised utopia sifts through the fingers of horrified Left acolytes. The only cures for a failing ideological project are folding one’s cards, as late-stage Communism did, or ratcheting up the revolutionary rhetoric and actions, as Maximilien Robespierre did. Either path ultimately leads to Left defeat, but this is incomprehensible to the Left view of the world, which disregards history and views Left victory as both preordained and certain to bring happiness to mankind. If not in Trump’s second term, soon enough afterwards the Left would have to take action to prevent the masses from throwing them onto the dust heap of history. It is only timing that is variable; this path was set in stone as soon as the Left fully seized America by the throat in the 1960s.

You may roll your eyes, and think this is all Haywood’s wish-fulfillment fantasy. It’s not my wish, certainly; any sane man wishes for peace, because when a society sinks into chaos, catastrophe is visited upon the just and unjust without distinction. But it is also not a fantasy, because history instructs us that something similar to what I describe is likely. It has happened again and again ever since the poison of the Left entered the West in the so-called Enlightenment. The Left, like the scorpion in the fable with the turtle, always plays the same role. It is in its nature. Your mileage, and our mileage, will not vary.

Still, even though insane and stupid freaks increasingly dominate the Regime, there remain some Regime members who are both immensely powerful and reasonably smart. Certainly, all are members of the Left in good standing; they could not retain their positions otherwise. They burn incense to the Left’s twin core goals of unlimited emancipation combined with forced egalitarianism, both in service of achieving utopia. This is the glue of the Regime, and for the vast majority of those within the Regime, it tells them why they exist. “We are good people, we are on the right side of history, we are making a better world.” What will these final bosses do, when street violence fails to stop Trump’s march to inauguration?

It is in late November and through December that the most crucial decisions will be made, and only by the mightiest segments of the Regime — the military and intelligence hydras, and their allies in the private sector. They can see what is likely to happen if Trump becomes President. He will destroy their power, beginning with pulling the plug on NATO’s war against Russia, which they have made the sine qua non of their desired global order.

Why is the war against Russia so important? The Regime’s aim is to ensure continued Left ideological dominance over the globe, what they call the “rules-based international order” in service of “liberal democracy,” but which is merely the sclerotic iron hand of those who wear America as a skin suit enforcing Left doctrine everywhere by armed force. This is obvious from the two key international demands of the Regime — global celebration of perverts, and the destruction of every Western nation’s identity through the forced mass acceptance of alien peoples. Russia rejects Left dominance; therefore its mere existence, and its growing strength, give the lie to the inevitability of the Regime’s program and the necessity of its acceptance by smaller powers (as do smaller examples, notably Hungary, which are likewise viciously attacked). But as with any manifestation of the Emperor’s New Clothes, even the smallest undermining of the illusion of global dominance destroys the mirage entirely. The Russo-Ukraine War, designed and implemented to fragment Russia by proxy, shows most clearly the Regime’s desperate need to control all other countries to advance Left ideology. It also shows what the Regime is willing to do to achieve its ideological aims, which is why they are frantic to expand the war, an extremely risky gamble, but one necessary given their slow losing of the war. The war is a condensed symbol for the Regime; they cannot afford to lose it.

Trump says he will end the war immediately; this necessarily implies a Russian victory. It is also highly likely that even the undisciplined and changeable Trump will clean the Augean stables of the military and the intelligence services on his first day in office, knowing they are his most effective enemies, something he has the undisputed power to do. Both these actions would permanently cripple the Regime, and ending the war would also harm the financial position of many Regime members, although that is much less important than the ideological angle. Yes, Trump is unpredictable, and might not, in the end, destroy their power and wealth, but they probably will not take the chance that Trump will fail to follow through on ending the war. For reasons that are not totally clear, perhaps because all his skeletons are not in the closet but rather on full display, Trump is not subject to the type of blackmail successfully used against, for example, Mike Johnson, coercing him to reverse his positions and wholly commit to slavish service of the Regime the instant he acquired actual power. Therefore, we should expect dramatic action by these powerful elements of the Regime to prevent Trump taking office.

What will that look like? I am less confident here than in my prediction about Antifa shenanigans. It might be assassination (a danger even before the election). Certainly, these people are capable of killing inconvenient men, and have done so before (ask the shade of Jeffrey Epstein, if you can summon him). More likely, it would be a straightforward coup by military force, claiming that the election was illegitimate, stolen by “MAGA fascists and Russians,” and that the coup is necessary “to preserve democracy.” They will justify this with a combination of claiming they need to restore order because of the violence they themselves have caused, and forging “evidence” of Trump’s supposed evil plans to make himself dictator. As Edward Luttwak discussed in his classic work, Coup d’État: A Practical Handbook, a coup is not a civil war. It is “a form of politics that requires guns as an aid to persuasion,” a swift and complete seizure of the mechanism of state power. A successful coup “uses parts of the state apparatus to seize the controlling levers over the rest.”

This coup attempt would be simply use of military forces to try to rapidly occupy key nodes of power. (A classic recent, though failed, attempt was the attempt to overthrow Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991, as he was similarly strangling a dying regime, even though he did not mean to.) It would be given a veneer of legality by compromised, overawed, or intimidated judges issuing supportive decrees holding the old American forms, which if rejected by Trump would be used as further evidence of his “attack on democracy.” Such a coup would take place in a narrow window of time; it cannot stretch on more than a few days if it is to succeed. Much would also depend on whether they could seize Trump at the inception of the coup. If such a coup fails, as it likely will because of resistance outside of Left geographic centers of power, along with resistance inside the military, we will get some form of civil war, as elements of the military split their loyalties, and wildfire violence spreads. Such a war would start with sporadic violence, but would likely expand as ambitious men see their chance, score-settlers settle scores, and foreign powers, especially the Chinese, see a chance to further cripple America. Once such violence starts, it naturally tends to grow, and is very hard to stop.

It is not to the contrary that the average American seems comfortable enough and has no interest in such an outcome (leaving aside that huge swathes of America are not comfortable at all, but in dire straits, but their suffering is hidden by our ruling class). What the average American wants has nothing to do with what will happen. We will all be sucked in — but when we are, the Regime’s plans will go further awry. As José Ortega y Gasset said, force follows public opinion, and public opinion is not behind the Regime, if they can no longer manufacture and control the narrative.

A wildcard is the current wars of Israel. Trump will not end American support for Israel, despite growing demands for that among both Right and Left, and will likely be far more reliable in supporting the Israeli desire for, if not a final victory, a decisive victory that will lay their enemies flat for a decade or more. This means that many American Jews, extremely powerful and influential on the Left, are unlikely to support an attempt to overthrow Trump, and may instead throw their support to Trump. In one of the interesting twists of fate that characterize history, it appears many powerful American Jews have belatedly realized that the Left is not their friend, despite their consistent decades-long support for the Left. This should have been obvious to them a long time ago, but was masked by the deliberate choice to foreclose debate on Jewish interests by using Hitler analogies for short-term political gain. How this will play out is very difficult to predict; there is no historical precedent.

None of this is set in stone. Trump cannot be relied upon to respond with adequate firmness to any attack on him and his office, no matter how unprecedented in America. For every action, a reaction, but not necessarily an equal and opposite reaction, and Trump is a Boomer, not a Caesar. He might just strike his tents, unable to stomach the violence of his enemies. If none of what I predict were to happen, the sad fact is that Trump would be unlikely to try to halt the Left’s gains. He did little in his first term, after all. Maybe he has learned his lesson, and maybe he will not surround himself, this time, with evil counsellors. But we will likely never find out, because Trump will not be given the chance to govern under the old system. Even if Trump were to fold, the Regime would not achieve its goals, or not for long. You cannot stuff a genie back into his bottle, and new, unexpected men will rise to overtly challenge the Regime, when the guardrails have been formally removed by shortsighted Left action.

Left violence is rarely well-thought out or calibrated. It is chaotic, shock and awe done without any real coherency. It is always a throw of the dice, and often initiated when most of their weapons have already lost their power, the drawing of phantom swords. Many have seen parallels to the Spanish Left of the 1930s, who kept ratcheting up the killing in an attempt to gain final, irrevocable power until elements of the Spanish military (ultimately led by the heroic Francisco Franco) concluded they had no choice but to crush their evil. Another, now more obscure, parallel is 1970 Chile. But I think the best parallel to our own situation (though far from a precise parallel) is the little-known Finnish Civil War, which lasted for only a few months, from January to April, 1918.

In September, 1917, after some years of increasing Left violence, including riots in the cities and endless mendacious propaganda aimed at whipping up the lower classes, the main Left party lost a parliamentary election they expected to win. The Left immediately started threatening violent revolution. They denied the legitimacy of the election, demanding an immediate new election, with new rules. They falsely claimed, with zero evidence, that the results of the election were fraudulent and “the product of conspiracy between the bourgeoisie and reactionaries.” They simply could not stomach a loss when utopia was just over the horizon. And, after fomenting violence for a few weeks and making ready, they declared war on the rest of Finnish society. If you dig into the detail, the many similarities are eerie, but the most notable one is the denial of legitimacy. Always and everywhere throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the Left denies the legitimacy of any election it loses under conditions where it expects a revolution. Given what we have seen in America from 2016 through 2024, we shouldn’t be surprised at this course of events.

In Finland, the Left was defeated, but one percent of the Finnish population died in only a few months. At this cost, Finland was saved from the exterminatory Left terror that inevitably results when the Left gets untrammeled power, which it always seeks. How and why Finland was saved is a fascinating story (which I have written about in detail elsewhere). True, history does not repeat. We will see, and my predictions end here. May God bless you and keep you, in the days to come.