The empire of denial closes its eyes and believes.

“Professor, “a student told me,” take a chance and say who will win tomorrow.

“Trump.

I had already said it in various media, but I am not interested in partisan politics in my classes.

“According to all the polls, Kamala wins. Why would she lose?

“Because of Gaza. You can’t hide the sun with a finger.
Hours after learning the election results, the major networks, from CNN to Fox News, began to digest Donald Trump’s victory. The most well-known figures seemed to agree that three issues had hit the Democrats: 1. the economy, 2. the migration crisis, and 3. the conflict in the Middle East.
In other words, it is about pocketbooks, racism, and morality. In the three points, we see the fabrication of ideas and sensibilities of the propaganda of those same media:

1. The domestic economy is not doing well, but let’s see that this is not due to a particular government but to a much larger structural problem that goes from the legalized corruption of the corporations that have bought everything (politicians, media) to continue accumulating the wealth (surplus value) that they have been kidnapping from the middle and working class. Since 1975, the working class has transferred 50 billion dollars (twice the GDP of China) to the richest one percent.

The other economic factor is the loss of hegemony and power to dictate by Washington in the rest of the world, which has not only aggravated its natural aggressiveness but has found itself with a competition it does not accept. But if we limit ourselves to the current administrations, we will see that during the period in which Trump was president, the GDP grew less than during the Biden period. True, there was a pandemic, but the same argument applies when praising the lower fuel prices in the previous period due to the drastic reduction in road traffic.

2. There is an immigration problem on the southern border, but not a crisis. That is a media fabrication fueled by politicians who benefit from the demonization of the weakest who do not vote and do not have lobbies to pressure and buy them. As a general rule, illegal immigrants are neither criminals nor do they increase crime, but rather reduce it. They do not live off state services but pay taxes by consuming and collecting their salaries, with the payment of taxes that they never claim but go to Social Security for the benefit of someone else. They do not steal anyone’s job but do the work that citizens do not want to do and, in this way, lubricate the economy so that it continues to function.
According to Trump, “Illegal immigrants are criminals who are entering without control.” He threatened Mexico with high tariffs if it did not stop drug trafficking, without mentioning that his country is the root of the problem, not only in consumption but also in the distribution of drugs and weapons. As documented, criminals, genocidaires, and terrorists live free and legal in Florida and are influential donors to his political party.

3. Although Americans usually vote with their pocketbooks, a portion (although a minority, they number in the millions) vote with a strong moral conviction. This has been the case of the genocide in Gaza that the Democrats have tried to silence in order not to talk about the weapons and tens of thousands of dollars they sent in just one year to Israel to massacre tens of thousands of children under the rhetoric of “Israel has the right to defend itself” or, as Bill Clinton responded, “because King David was there three thousand years ago.” Or candidate Harris, silencing every question about Gaza with the same nasal arrogance: “I’m the one who speaks.” The government has ignored the numerous student protests, violently repressed the mass urban marches, the truck drivers’ marches…
Then, when the punishment vote appeared, the same media that had made the massacre in Gaza invisible wanted to explain the electoral catastrophe by resorting to the same thing: relegating the moral issue to a third position and talking about the “crisis in the Middle East,” avoiding saying Gaza, Palestine, and genocide. Not even massacre.

This genocide is becoming a metastasis in the Middle East, one more stop in the Ring of Fire (Ukraine, Syria, Palestine, Iran, Taiwan) produced by the friction of the Alpha Male of the West who tries to surround the Dragon that has already awakened.
Instead of negotiating and benefiting its people through global cooperation, Alpha Male goes after eliminating the competition. This metaphor comes from the pack led by a male wolf, now by the ideologues of the right. They forget that when the alpha male ages and faces a younger one, it ends in a deadly conflict.

In 2020, Democrats won Wisconsin and Michigan, two states with a solid Arab population. Now, Republicans won both. However, Palestinian-born Rep. Rashida Tlaib (Michigan) retained her seat with 70 percent of the vote and Ilhan Omar (Minnesota) did so with 75 percent.
More than a vote for Trump (who had lost the election four years earlier for some reason) it was a vote against Harris and the Democrats. An indignant and hopeless vote. This electoral system is a legacy of slavery and the political-media system has been bought by the technological and financial corporations, which are the ones that govern this country. Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock (a financial company that manages as much money as five times the economy of Russia), made it clear: “It doesn’t matter who wins; Harris or Trump will be good for Wall Street.”

It is a sack of force: money goes from the parties to the media for advertising and promotion. That is to say, the same dollar buys politicians and the media twice. Presidents are in charge of the circus. They are in charge of keeping passions alight, especially racial and gender. There is no better strategy to make social class problems invisible. Racism is the most effective way to make invisible the deep social class problem we have, including its global translation, imperialism.
We will finally have a president convicted of justice (34 cases), who boasted of being smart for not paying taxes. Of course, being smart is not enough. It is necessary to have the people brutalized with identity divisions, with individuals alienated by the same technologies that dominate the economy, politics, and geopolitics.
Something that is not difficult in a people accustomed to believing above the facts. People trained in churches to close their eyes and replace reality with desire until reality changes. Because of the religious mentality, narrative reality matters more than factual reality: “In the beginning was the Word…”.

From there applying the same intellectual skills and convictions when leaving one temple to enter others (banks, stock exchanges, television, political parties) is only a step. Sometimes, not even that.

Jorge Majfud, November 6, 2024.