It’s been a while since I posted anything, the main reason for which being the sheer speed of unfolding world events. History has been moving fast the last few years, but even the rate of acceleration of world events seems to have increased exponentially recently, to the point where thoughts seem to be outdated almost the moment they occur. It’s surreal that Israel’s incursion into Lebanon, the assassinations of Nasrallah and Sinwar, the exchanges of missiles between Iran and Israel, the arrest of Grayzone journalist Jeremy Loffredo in Israel, the raid on Asa Winstanley and Hurricane Helene have all happened in the last 7 weeks.

Time seems to be constantly stretching and contracting to the point where it’s hard to tell what happened when. There is a nonstop feed of horrifying images from Gaza, Lebanon and Ukraine, but somehow watching Obama perform some Eminem bars to rapturous applause at a Harris rally while all that horror goes on stands out more, and is even more sickening.

Since today is US Election Day 2024 (no doubt the most important one ever, just like all the previous ones have been) I thought I’d try and get some of those scattershot thoughts down before we know the ‘official result’. The rhetoric has become so apocalyptic on both sides (i.e. Republic and Democrat, because a third party is unthinkable in US politics) that it’s hard to imagine either side accepting defeat graciously. If a Harris/Knucklehead - sorry, Harris/Walz - ticket wins, there is bound to be some sort of Jan 6-esque controversy ginned up by the media to further demonise and intimidate Trump supporters, and if Trump wins then there will be the same passive-aggressive liberal histrionics there were in 2016. Who can say? I certainly don’t claim to have any privileged or insider knowledge of the process.

What if we assume, for the sake of argument, that the entire election is in fact rigged, and that whoever is declared winner is whoever the ruling class, or the permanent state bureaucracy, or the globalists or whatever you want to call them wants to win - what would be preferable for them? The idea of a US election being either stolen or allowed to be miscounted should not be considered controversial, as the 2000 election of Bush showed.

Yesterday Substacker Neoliberal Feudalism wrote an eye-opening note about his experience voting in California. RFK Jr was still on the list of candidates and Trump was hidden on page 2, the machine crashed when he voted for Trump, and all the staff ignored his right to privacy and saw his vote when they tried to fix it.

The obvious implication from this would be that ‘they’ want Harris to win, but in the world of wild conspiracy fantasies ‘they’ can be assumed to be devious and Machiavellian, and might want to give the impression of supporting one candidate while planning for the other to win. If Harris wins then ‘they’ would control her, but to go full tinfoil-hat mode, Harris is so thoroughly unlikeable and incompetent, and was selected so undemocratically, that ‘they’ might have put her in place explicitly to encourage people to vote against her.

If Trump wins and follows through on some of his promises to stop supporting Ukraine, this would mean the US was off the hook for continuing to support the country, at the expense of the end of the Zelensky regime in Kiev and some sort of Russian victory. This would save thousands of lives - not that the Washington war hawks care about Ukraine, Ukrainians or Zelensky - but members of the Uniparty and all those online libs who’ve invested so much of their personalities into hating Putin and ‘supporting Ukraine’ would scream that this was a grand betrayal, and insist that Ukraine had just needed a few more weeks and a few more Patriot launchers to win it. They want it to be over, but they desperately don’t want to feel responsible for losing it, and Trump could be the perfect fall guy to do that for them.

After all the money printing since 2020, and especially since 2022, there is inevitably going to be even worse inflation than there is now. The alternative payment system that the multipolar world has been forced to create to circumvent western sanctions could end the dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency eventually, after which the US will be just another country required to pay its debts, but one that is completely unable to do so. If either of those things have to happen sooner or later, why not make them happen under Trump, the guy who’s been blamed for everything despite having only been in politics since 2015? It would fit nicely with the narrative that he’s actually a very bad businessman, as well as being a convicted felon.

Even if the value of the dollar collapsed, the US still has over 700 military bases worldwide and it’s not going to give them up without a fight, which is looking more and more possible given that they have said that they no longer have enough weapons to give to Ukraine and Israel. The profit-led military industrial complex, intended to produce expensive and fancy-sounding weapons that can beat inferior foes, has been shown to be unable to deal with a peer enemy in Russia, and the production infrastructure does not exist to maintain supplies in wartime the way it does in Russia. The rest of the world knows that the US and its proxies are very good at bombing cities and terrorising civilians in open-ended conflicts - perfect for creating a steady income for the military industrialists - but not so good at fighting wars with clear political goals. Once the reality of the world catches up with the US, and it becomes apparent that it is the US and its allies that are isolated globally, there will be lots of blame to go around, which the media will be very keen to pin on Trump.

Maybe this is all just paranoid conjecture, and the election is actually Free And Fair™. Both options are so unappealing that it’s easier to think of reasons why a shadowy cabal might put one or other in power, than it is to imagine people actually liking one of them.