>Did they inject Biden with a dementia drug to force a withdrawal and engineer the timing such that the current Vice President was pretty much the only viable option for the US Democrats to rally behind?
It's not a one-way relation to power. Intelligence agencies are nothing if not opportunistic, they can influence elections but if one of the candidates is clearly incompetent there isn't much they can do unless he drops out. You're forgetting that Jill Stein would've never been endorsed by Biden; what appears to be chaotic and contingent actually has a strong set of boundary conditions of possibility that all the contingency is contained within, and intelligence agencies, including even the state department for foreign affairs, try to control that. Not individual actions, but the ability to perform them, the rationality of it. The fact that you can't even imagine a candidate besides Donald Trump who poses a serious threat to the state intelligence apparatus shows you that they've already won, or at least nearly so.
> The fact that you can't even imagine a candidate besides Donald Trump who poses a serious threat to the state intelligence
?
How'd you get this incorrect insight into what I think ... and what makes you think that Trump is a serious threat to the US state intelligence apparatus?
He encouraged a group of his supporters to overthrow the government to allow him to stay in elected office, and his political advisors have developed a plan for him to wipe out the executive branch in its current form if he gets re-elected? There won't be a security state under Trump, at least as it exists now.
I think you claimed that Harris was somehow not an ideal candidate for the current hegemonic forces in the US, or at least those forces of power wouldn't do what they could to make sure she gets elected. One of Chomsky's points was precisely this, they goad you with progressive political candidates who don't actually threaten power. The two main forces of power in the US are capitalist industry and the state, but the truth is that both have an interest in maintaining power relations such as they are, and so what we are witnessing in most elections is just a sort of balancing act between direct and indirect means of control. With Trump you have someone who is so insanely narcissistic that he is completely unreliable and there is essentially no way of using him to maintain state control as such.
Overthrowing an elected government doesn't threaten the longevity of security agencies or "the security state" and having read Project 2025 I see no threat to "the security state" .. if anything he'd be bringing more work their way.
Trump is a threat to democracy, not to TLA's.
> I think you claimed that Harris was somehow not an ideal candidate for the current hegemonic forces in the US,
I made no such claim. Perhaps you might like to scroll back and identify where I did, I suspect you've confused me for another.
It's not a one-way relation to power. Intelligence agencies are nothing if not opportunistic, they can influence elections but if one of the candidates is clearly incompetent there isn't much they can do unless he drops out. You're forgetting that Jill Stein would've never been endorsed by Biden; what appears to be chaotic and contingent actually has a strong set of boundary conditions of possibility that all the contingency is contained within, and intelligence agencies, including even the state department for foreign affairs, try to control that. Not individual actions, but the ability to perform them, the rationality of it. The fact that you can't even imagine a candidate besides Donald Trump who poses a serious threat to the state intelligence apparatus shows you that they've already won, or at least nearly so.