Bestselling sci-fi author Orson Scott Card is no stranger to controversy. The man behind Ender’s Game is also a passionately outspoken opponent of gay rights; his views have led LGBT readers and allies to call for boycotts of his work and to urge entertainment companies to sever ties with Card. Lionsgate, which will release a film based on Ender’s Game this fall, has also distanced itself from Card, assuring the public that the company does not agree with his personal views and promising to host an LGBT benefit premiere for the film.

But Card isn’t just an anti-same-sex-marriage activist; he’s also a vocal critic of the U.S.’s current administration who predicts that Barack Obama’s presidency will lead to the end of American democracy.

In an essay published in May — but only recently discovered by the mainstream media — Card indulges in a “thought experiment” that paints Obama as “a president whose faith in the good will of Muslim leaders is touching but groundless, whose threats and promises mean nothing, and whose ignorance of history is terrifying.”

He goes on to call Obama “the dumbest president in American history” and a “dictator” who “demonizes his critics and despises even his own toadies in the liberal press.” Later, he tries to “spin a plausible scenario” about how Obama could become the United States’ lifetime dictator, along the lines of Augustus Caesar, Napoleon Bonaparte — and Adolph Hitler.

Card then imagines a future in which the president’s wife is herself elected president, then amends the constitution to abolish term limits. In this hypothetical situation, he writes, “Obama will win by 98 percent every time. That’s how it works in Nigeria and Zimbabwe; that’s how it worked in Hitler’s Germany.”

At the end of the essay, Card dismisses the idea that he actually believes that anything he’s written will come to pass. “Will these things happen? Of course not,” he says. “This was an experiment in fictional thinking.”