In all the thoughtful - and less thoughtful - analysis and punditry following the US election, I haven’t seen anyone contemplate what it might actually have meant for the country, its people and their place in the world, if Kamala Harris’s forces of “joy” had somehow overcome Donald Trump’s forces of “darkness”.

Let’s stop, just for a minute, and consider the implications. Registering joy at a Harris win would have meant - what, exactly?

No matter the kind of mental, intellectual, emotional or political acrobatics involved, at least part of that joy would also have meant explicit support for the US participation in, and enabling of, the Israeli genocide still being perpetrated against Palestinians.

Would such a result not have also fully validated and presented, in a completely unadulterated fashion, the utter rot at the core of US policies and so many of its institutions?

Would it not, then, have dug an even deeper hole out of which an expiring US empire must finally find ways to climb out of? And lamenting her loss, as so many are now doing, has precisely the same meaning. There can be no other logical possibility.

While president-elect Trump might very well have the political will to reach a negotiated settlement to end the war in Ukraine, his initial cabinet appointments point to a fervent Israel first, rather than America first, agenda - solidifying the immovable uni-party’s bedrock policy of absolute Israeli impunity, no matter what it does.

In the background, the response of western mainstream media and politicians to the Israeli footballers’ rampage in Amsterdam - presented as a “pogrom” in which the perpetrators were portrayed as victims - points to a future of oncoming psy-ops and the production of “antisemitism” at an industrial scale, in an attempt to raise from the dead the idea of Israel as a “safe haven” for “persecuted” Jews.

These manoeuvres will be met on the ground with further acquiescence and invention from the media, as well as new laws equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism; new campaigns to ban various kinds of speech; and further violence directed at anyone standing up in protest, not to mention new forms of military coercion and destruction, aided by technologies field-tested by Israeli occupation forces, who will go down in historical infamy.