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What's going to be the big apocalyptic struggle this election?
I wrote a piece over at my blog about how at this time in 2020 we were already in "2 Weeks to slow the spread", were about 1 month out from the first anti-lockdown protests, and 2 months out from the Summer of Floyd.
It seems obvious to me that all the chaos in the wider American empire concentrates around election years and seems to have the oxygen sucked out of it on off years.. 2020 is obvious, 2016 was only slightly less history changing, and even the 2008 financial crisis was an election year event.
There's a lot of really obvious candidates: Ukraine could go south really catastrophically really quick; the middle-east is speculated to kick-off with a potential Israeli invasion of Lebanon; and going shearly off the numbers the US southern border is one of the largest population transfers in human history with few precedents since WW2 or the even the 4th and 5th century.
But I don't know, maybe it's my mind trying to fit things too neatly to the 2020 framework... it feels like the election hasn't started yet, it feels like there's some shoe to drop or issue I'm missing, something as far from public consciousness as Immunology in Jan 2020, or racial politics in March 2020...
I can feel this massive issue just behind my peripheral vision that's about to draw all my attention and require its own Motte containment thread, and that will devour the media and twitter, for months on end.
I feel like there's this huge world shattering issue that's about to explode and within the next few months I'll be lamenting that I only have 24 hours in the day to read enough about it, convinced that it DEMANDS every second of my attention.... And I have no idea what it is?
-Is Trump going to die?
-Will a Nuke Launch?
-Is China about to take Taiwan?
-Are all those Chinese and foreign nationals on the southern border about to start targeting power infrastructure?
-Is there about to be a financial crisis?
-An "Internet Lockdown"?
-Hot ethnic cleansing in Europe?
-Global food chain collapse? .
Give me your best guess.
What will be the major containment thread at the Motte between now and election day?
I sincerely doubt anything is going to happen in 2024. The powers that be (TPTB — the PMC elites) simply don’t want anything to disrupt Biden’s chances of winning a comfy re-election. So nothing will happen. “It’s the economy, stupid” all the way down. Don’t be surprised to see the DOW approach 45000 and the S&P 500 approach 6000 this year. As long as Number Go Up, the typical voter will allow any demented meat puppet (Biden) to remain in office.
You point out 2008 and 2020. Those were the last two election years involving a Republican presidential incumbent. TPTB wanted to change to a PMC Democrat, as part of the long-term, Davos-approved plan for managed decline in the West. So, lo and behold, we got the Great Financial Crisis in 2008 (talk about a September/October surprise!) and we got COVID Floyd in 2020. TPTB overestimated its chances against Trump (as well as Brexit) in 2016, and 2012 was a rare election when TPTB would have been satisfied with Romney as much as Obama.
The idea that "TPTB" can control literally everything, including wars, social unrest, pandemics, the stock market, and inflation, in order to ensure that the person they want gets elected, is an Illuminati theory. And somehow the same people who also believe that TPTB are incompetent idiots mismanaging literally everything manage to believe both these things.
That's not everything. The last 2 are the same thing (the economy). All of these things can be (crudely) controlled.
It's kind of the paradox. Not that mind-boggling of a belief tho. There are very smart people out there who think that a computer program answering cues can 'become intelligent' and take over the world as well.
Why would not-very-competent people who have a lot of power not use the technology of the day that actually works decently at modelling complicated phenomena to push for certain outcomes?
Do you genuinely believe the covid psy-op was organic? That the blm reversal 'actually you can go outside for police brutality protests' was genuine? That the pivot to Ukraine when the covid thing became too embarrassing was pure coincidence? That the pivot to Israel was also pure coincidence?
Or do you wonder why all these powerful people lied so much? With lies growing larger as time goes?
I don't know what it is to be honest. Were they trying to take out Trump because he really was threatening their system despite their mostly-successful blocking of his policies? Was it a way to cover up the last 30-50 years of failed foreign policy in the Middle-East, or just some kind of test, to see if people were ready to accept 'government says you can't enter this building at this time, thank you for your obedience'?
There is a paradox of competency. Clearly letting in millions of Central and South-Americans is not going to improve the general competency of the country. Planes are gonna start falling off the sky, bridges collapsing, trains derailing, towers getting smashed into...
Who could have predicted that sending gender studies majors to teach Afghans not to be sexist would not work? To be fair, with a few billion dollars and another couple decades I think it would have worked. In the mean time that's a nice way to secure employment for party-loyalists.
If The Powers that Be had this much control over human affairs and don't want Trump in office, it invites the obvious question of how he was able to secure even one term.
Well that was a mistake. I believe the ideas that Trump support are generally pretty popular.
Most people want their country to keep looking the way it did when they were children and not have 10% new different faces injected + a constant rhetoric that the way they've been living so far is abjectly immoral and they need to change NOW or they're EVIL. It should be a walk in the park for a generally well-presenting, competent-looking man to get ~60% of votes if he signals support toward a program that would support that worldview.
Usually the Republicans end up fielding the least-reptilian-looking investment firm manager who was able to curry enough favors from all the lobbyists to be eligible.
Then the voters say 'Well he probably laughs at plebs like me with his billionaire buddies but at least the country is going to descend into hell 20% slower than the other guy who outright laughs at me and blame me on TV for the country's problems'.
So the Democrats for whatever reason picked Hillary Clinton as replacement for golden goose Obama, and perhaps they had the idea that she was an utterly unlikable candidate so they had to go the extra mile to 'save the election'.
Here there's one measure of incompetency, picking HRC, and then there's one measure of competency, still trying to salvage it. They decided that in order to crush the Republicans, they would throw their entire media machine's support behind the goofiest, least-competent, most ridiculous showbusiness candidate this side of the Atlantic.
Plus they had to let the frustrated voters fantasize a little bit about getting what they want. Isn't that what democracy is for? You field some kooky guy who claims he wants to get you what you want, but he ends up losing to a more 'serious' candidate who has to compromise into getting you nothing that you want or the adults in the media or at the UN - or wherever people think adults are- will get you in trouble.
Then of course you use the worst possible version of the presentation of these ideas to discredit them 'oh yes we tried this in 2016 but that guy was just too goofy, serious people don't believe these things'.
That sounded like a good idea at the time, and the media kept laughing and scoffing that 'nobody is voting for Trump'. That was the plan. Who in their right mind would vote for a clown over serious girlboss HRC?
Then when it didn't work out they cooked up increasingly desperate counter-measures from the media to intelligence agencies, to the Science and health agencies... for a hot fix.
I wonder what the future is even going to look like. Because if you let people like Trump run the trouble is that they can get elected. We want to keep the song and dance of democracy going. And it's been going on pretty nicely with a nice continuity. Nobody's ever using the President's powers for anything that could disturb the general plan. Trump was ultimately the product of that small window in time in which the Internet was still letting unfiltered opinions through and the majority of voters started using the Internet. I'd say the Internet died in 2020 when governments found a reason to swing their weight around.
I think American democracy is going to get harder to maintain and the measures will get even more desperate than now - attempting to lock up top political opponents right before elections - like in these African countries where people vote along tribal lines, and voters risk machete attacks to cast their votes.
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