Sonya Blanck writings

We must first understand that time moves differently for G-d. It doesn’t move forwards or backwards but is rather an extended, still landscape. Day One.

We can’t make time move any way other than ‘forwards’ because to do so would violate the second law of thermodynamics – ‘all tends to entropy’. But also because time doesn’t actually move. And even if it did, it wouldn’t make any difference whether it ran ‘backwards’ or not – time running backwards just looks like an electric screwdriver twisting the opposite way. Metabolism would still exist, it would just look like the Earth giving you your skin cells and hair back until you diminish enough to rejoin your mother.

No, time doesn’t work as we think it does. Time is held as the exclusive domain of G-d – an endless Now in which G-d resides. And that is why Moshiach isn’t coming.

Wait, why? you ask, Did I miss something? It’s simple really: the idea of a ‘returning Messiah’ is contingent upon the illusion of the forward movement of time. If time doesn’t actually move, there can be no possibility of return.

Moshiach isn’t coming, because Moshiach already came. That’s why every subsequent prophet has acted as a pointer variable to Moses.

Now stop waiting for Moshiach and go sort your life out.

i'm not your covenantal cow—
i was a young girl never put to plow
before you cut me down

strung my guts between earth and sky
and passed right by on your way to meet God
you passed right through me

in place of your crippled thigh you offered mine
offered my stretched red hide to live inside
offered me, a hyssop child

plucked from the ground
before crowned
the Queen of Hell—

—and now you're dragged before me bound
strung up by your pride
so taut i can pluck you

i'll raise up all your dead girls to eat you
my covenant with God
on your meat

and you will pass
right
through me

for Virginia

The Jewish relationship with worldly power goes something like this: we’re invited to settle in a territory at the pleasure of its ruler, likely because we offer skilled labour not represented in the subjugated population and we can fulfil important bureaucratic roles such as tax collecting whilst being expendable when the unwashed masses begin murmuring against their leaders. Periodic violence against us is tolerated as a stress valve until such point when it no longer makes sense, culturally, financially, to even marginally protect our community, at which point we’re expulsed, enslaved, or wholesale murdered. It happened in Egypt, Persia, Poland… and I’m reminded of Trump’s recent offer to ‘invite’ British Jews to come settle in the quite evident safety of ICE-brownshirt America. (No thank you.)

I think on this as antisemitic hysteria surrounding the posthumously-published emails of one certain psychopath, who so happens to have been Jewish, reaches fever pitch. The other day my friend and I discussed who we may wish to place in our list of top three shandas of all time – I dissuaded them from including Ben Shapiro, who though a massive douche at no point ever played directly into the globalist-cabal-of-eugenicist-paedophiles conspiracy, and instead suggested Epstein be listed at least twice, possibly followed by Noam Chomsky just by association.

Having declared that I find the man and his associates, whether in death or in life, utterly morally repugnant, I can’t help but notice that almost everyone facing any sort of meaningful consequence for a human trafficking ring operating with impunity in broad daylight is Jewish.

Epstein himself is dead – whether by suicide, murder, or something more complicated involving a body swap. Either way he’s out of the picture. His accomplice girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell, is in prison – she actually seems to be the only person serving serious time, with other prosecutions ending in minor convictions or mysterious suicides.

But Ghislaine Maxwell didn’t peddle children to nobody. Why aren’t any johns serving time? Many, many billionaires appear to have partied on Paedophile Island (or attempted to party – how can you be the richest man in the world yet still so pathetic you can’t get an invite to a literal kompromat party on an island full of paedos?). Why aren’t they in prison, or at least facing asset confiscation?

Funnily enough, even the scant few people facing serious career consequences appear to be Jewish, like Chomsky and Peter Mandelson. The notable exception is the Grand Old Duke of York, who had 12 million quid, and gave it to someone he never met for a thing he never did. (Rest in power, Virginia.)

It’s striking to me that this whole sordid affair appears to follow the Jewish relationship with power to a tee. Jews have done the dirty work of these elites, and they’re also taking the fall for it. Trump appears hundreds – nay, thousands – of times in the Epstein files, and only half have been released as yet. A veritable who’s-who of power brokers the world over make an appearance in the files, and you’re telling me that none of these people are currently facing any jail time?

Meanwhile Epstein’s joking use of the word ‘goyim’ has predictably riled up proponents of the Palestinian omnicause, who insist that he must have been linked to Mossad and therefore implicated in genocide taking place after his ostensible death. Antisemitism truly is the socialism of fools.

All this to say that we once again must unfortunately brace ourselves for whatever collective punishment is due to be meted out for not just Epstein’s heinous crimes, but also for the crimes of many, many men of varying religions and ethnicities who will slink back into their shadowy castles and pull up the drawbridge while we burn.

One pill makes you larger
And one pill makes you small
And the ones that Mother gives you
Don't do anything at all...

Taking a break from current affairs, I thought I’d briefly share my pet theory on the psychedelic mechanism, which is that these molecules are doorways to perceive both lower and higher realms at the same size as yourself.

This is of course premised on the alchemical doctrine of ‘As Above, So Below’ – that we can broadly derive the state of both bigger and smaller domains from that of our own. Thinking about this on a day-to-day basis, this not only applies to celestial spheres and such, but also to bacteria and cells.

I mean, do we really know the social mechanism of cells? There are trillions of them in our bodies, only half of which we really consider ‘ours’ – the gut is its own biome, its own realm, a world unto itself. We take for granted these cells without considering that they have lives of their own, however brief compared to ours, living and dying in service to, and within the confines of, our larger body.

So when someone interacts with, say, a DMT molecule, and meets all manner of machine elves and other entities, who’s to say they’re not just speaking with a denizen of their own intestines, and perhaps a sized-down angel thrown in for good measure?

Imagine the landscape of your own guts when sized down appropriately. Sure, you could argue that there’s a quantum limit as to how small you can get, but do you know that really? There are apparently 10^80 atoms in the entire Universe, so presumably you could only get so big, but again, these are size limits within our realm, and we don’t actually know what happens when we exceed either limit. Except when we drop acid, man.

(Interestingly, the number 1080 is associated with Semele, the Fount of Wisdom, and the Abyss, according to the Greek gematria proposed by John Michell in City of Revelation, but that’s neither here nor there. Just like the exploring psychonaut.)

Anyway, something to think about next time you’re tripping on the toilet.

This is a moment in the timeline when many people are throwing around fairly lazy comparisons with various other historical moments, particularly 1930s Germany. Each person you ask will assign the chief villain roles – namely Hitler, the Nazis generally, and the enabling bystanders who looked away – to members of factions opposite to the speaker’s deeply-held ideology.

But to truly cultivate nuance, a different approach is called for. Namely, rather than attempting to draw comparisons to history in order to simplify and predict the outcome of the present, we must instead use the present moment to recognise history’s complexity.

The overly-corporate phrase ‘lessons learned’ gets bandied about glibly within the context of the Holocaust. ‘Why haven’t X learned from this past moment in history?’ The assumption is that the lessons from that war are set and straightforward, that they’re simple, universally applicable and easily learned.

This is a particularly egregious assumption when applied to modern Jewry, and Israel in particular. As though Israel is perpetrating something on anything touching the sides of the scale of the Shoah, when cattle-cars full of Jews were shunted to concentration camps, tattooed with identifying numbers devised by IBM, and were summarily executed in horrifically cruel gas chambers formulated by Bayer or else literally worked to death in factories for German companies which are still household names today, such as Volkswagen (who admitted to using 15,000 slaves sourced from concentration camps during the war).

It becomes worse when drilling down to the factional infighting of diaspora Jews. In my town it at times feels very much like the Judean People’s Front versus the People’s Front of Judea.

I am a leftwing zionist Jew, and my WhatsApp chats are getting ridiculous. On the one hand I support Jewish-Arab Israeli solidarity movements attempting to win hearts and minds within the PSC, and many people in those chats hold pro-Palestine views I find hard to engage with. Yet on the other hand I have, on the back of some ribbon-tying efforts, been added to various regional chats in which some Jewish people are questioning whether Tommy Robinson is really that bad (yes, he is, ffs) and spouting off about the latest Muslim Immigration Panic.

Naturally, the more extreme members of each group would accuse each other of being bystanders at best and Nazis at worst. ‘Why haven’t you learned the lessons of the Holocaust?!’

But what if we took a different approach. What if we could acknowledge the complicated truths from that time, in a level-headed and non-judgemental way. That the landscape, the moment, was complex. That many people were just trying to keep their heads down and get by. That people didn’t know, or didn’t want to know, or else didn’t know what to do. That young idealists like Hans and Sophie Scholl got murdered. That Germans or Poles thought it sensible to relocate Jews to ghettoes ‘for their safety’. That this occurred on the back of centuries of oppression at the hands of the Catholic Church, who maintained that Jews were responsible for the death of Jesus until 1965 – two decades after the end of the war.

Acknowledging the complexity of history is the only real counter to presentism because it makes us humble in the face of uncertainty. We can see ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ from our vantage point today, but those living through such times did not have the benefit of our hindsight.

This is, incidentally, also a counter to those arguments disparaging the character and methods of early zionists such as Theodor Herzl, who was doubtless problematic as a person and political theorist but was working within the confines of his time with the information available to him. Many zionists spent the Second World War attempting to convince Jews to immigrate to British Mandate Palestine rather than fight their condition in Europe, not because they wanted European Jews dead but because they were convinced that establishing a homeland in the Levant was the only sustainable guarantee of Jewish safety in the longer term. Whether their actions were right or wrong, they acted in full belief that history would bear them out.

Many people in our time also feel they are acting rightly, and have thrown the entire weight of their convictions behind one camp or another. Palestine has become the omnicause of the Left, which has adopted it with the zeal of the Crusades. Israel has the questionable support of the likes of Tommy Robinson and the Christian zionists who largely sit on the Right. Such binary thinking helps no-one, and belies the immense complexity of this moment in the unfolding of the World.

The above I Ching hexagram is called Po – Splitting Apart. It is a visual representation of oppressors violently seizing power by overthrowing the final top line. When you receive this hexagram, you’re about to be blindsided.

I’m giving it to you to heed.

It’s the final day of Elul; in the evening it will be Rosh HaShanah 5786. The immediate impetus for this post is the recognition of Palestine, without condition, of several European countries, including the one I live in whose prime minister I voted for. But I’m hoping, in this brief missive, to go a bit wider.

The UN General Assembly kicks off five days of debate tomorrow – Rosh HaShanah – with a scheduled briefing on the Middle East, on a day wherein Jews cannot participate. Regardless of whether conservative outlets are correct in their assessment that the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation lobbied for this timing, the UNGA has still opted to hold a briefing on the region containing the only Jewish state, whose actions in Gaza will undoubtedly feature in said briefing, on a day when Israel’s representatives are meant to be celebrating one of the holiest days of our calendar.

I think back over the history of Israel’s wars with its neighbours, many of which were initiated – not by Israel – over the High Holy Days. This extends to the 7 October terrorist attacks, which happened not just on Simchat Torah (the conclusion of Sukkot), but also on Shabbat. I think about the synagogue shootings on Yom Kippurs of years past. A new front, once again opened at a time when we’ve made ourselves vulnerable to G-d.

I think about faeces smeared on the door of a Jewish nursery. I think about bullets fired at a Jewish school. I think about the fact that any Jew reading the preceding two sentences will know when and where these events occurred, whereas a Gentile will shake their head and wonder whether it’s really that bad.

I of course think about the dead and living hostages remaining in Gaza. I think about Evyatar David forced to dig his own grave. To give Hamas anything resembling a PR victory at this time seems to me to be the height of stupidity, the height of arrogance. And yet I voted for the man who did – what does that make me?

Let’s go even wider, to the country in which I was born. A memorial service was recently held for a murdered man. He held repugnant views, but it’s widely agreed that having despicable opinions isn’t a good reason to murder someone. Although some initial evidence points to the call coming from inside the house, MAGA Republicans have thundered about Antifa and weaponised this murder to legislate against them, even using the memorial service to run a Republican registration drive in a truly stomach-churning exercise in propaganda.

The far Left, in response, has doubled down on this murder, memeing about the many repugnant things this man said and even chastising the ‘Liberals’ pointing out that freedom of speech should mean both freedom to hold offensive views and freedom from being murdered for them. Faced with the adoption of cancel culture by the Right, the Left reinforces its neo-Maoist thinking with classes of undesirables to be targeted – billionaires, landlords, CEOs, ‘fascists’ (does that term even hold meaning anymore? ‘Fascism’ used to have a static definition).

Jews have to pick which poison to kill ourselves with. The Maoist Left counts support of Israel among Charlie Kirk’s many supposed sins, and the MAGA Right spreads conspiracy theories that Mossad bumped him off for being insufficiently supportive. We always unite the horseshoe, evidently.

Watch carefully what happens now in 5786, over the next few months, weeks… even days.

Things will happen faster than you think.

The global body politic is splitting apart, and our oppressors will swoop down to feast on its corpse. Now is the time of monsters.

That’s it, that’s the post.

But I’ll elaborate.

I’m reading a feminist scholar for some of my research. I’m not especially far in, but given my research interests, I really can’t get away with not reading this book. However, as I read the acknowledgements in the frontmatter, I became increasingly irked.

Writing workshops in exotic locales? Leisurely evenings cosying up with intellectuals over wine? Prestigious conferences in far-flung places? Hang on – does this person have kids?

So I googled. No, this person does not have kids.

They’re very adamant about enabling the safe and community-led rearing of children, but also that child-rearing is not the be-all end-all of a woman’s existence. It’s not that I disagree, but my focus is radically different.

Let’s start with a different foundational premise: Humans have developed – nay, inherited – a mammalian social contract surrounding the bearing and raising of children. This contract is millions of years old. It’s in place precisely because raising children to adulthood without them dying is hard, actually.

The labour within this social contract predominantly falls to women. This is because women not only grow the child and undertake the labour of bringing the child into the world, but they also – at least until the advent of reliable formula alternatives – sustain the child with their body. So no, whilst motherhood isn’t the sole reason for a woman’s existence, any woman choosing to have a child will by default be burdened with the lion’s share of the labour mandated by this social contract.

So it literally doesn’t matter whether or not an individual woman chooses to have her own biological children. This mode of motherhood of course isn’t for everyone. By all means make the most of the time and money you gain by not having children.

But what are you doing to ease the burden of women parenting children?

Don’t you think these women also have interesting things to say? Don’t you think these women would also appreciate the opportunities you have? Don’t you think these women also deserve their own money and time? How are you helping them?

Really this extends to any woman in a caring profession, which are consistently undervalued compared to more male-dominated professions. Why is the emphasis on getting more women into traditionally male professions, instead of properly valuing women’s work? Why isn’t there a mass drive to get men into female-dominated professions?

Who’s going to pick up all the slack caused by women abandoning the caring professions in favour of better-remunerated work? Women are. Specifically, mothers. Often the poorest, most oppressed, most vulnerable mothers.

Who’s going to liberate them? Are you, with your ethnographic fieldwork in Tahiti or whatever? No, you are not.

As PJ O’Rourke said, ‘Everybody wants to save the earth; nobody wants to help Mom do the dishes.’

If you’re not explicitly and vocally liberating mothers, your feminism is utterly, utterly worthless. Go suck on that while you down wine with other intellectuals privileged enough to have shirked any meaningful burden surrounding the propagation of our species.

Although I personally identify as a zionist Jew, because I believe that Israel has the right to exist as a state, I try to keep broad community with other Jews with different opinions to mine.

One friend, who has worked hard over the past year to build up our small local community of Jews who support Israel’s right to defend itself, responded forcefully to my assertion that war is inherently immoral and there are no ‘good guys’ in the current conflict in Gaza: ‘Of course there are, Israel is the good guy!’ My friend may be more zionist than me, but she also has friends and family in Israel and hasn’t come to her opinion in ignorance.

Another friend in London is married to an Israeli and lived in Israel for a decade. Her two children were born there. She’s been demonstrating for a ceasefire every weekend for the past year. I would normally be alarmed, but I know that my friend is a Jew in community with other Jews in contexts other than advocating for Palestine, and more knowledgeable about Israel than most – just because her opinion differs from mine, doesn’t make her less Jewish.

A friend recently came out as a sort of religious antizionist – harking to the Talmudic injunction not to enter the Holy Land ‘as a wall’. I knew he was at minimum nonzionist, but his considered opinion based on our holy texts surprised me. My opinion differs but I respect his. (But not the Neturei Karta, who went and begged Daddy Ayatollah not to slaughter them when he nukes Israel because they’re the ‘good Jews’. They can get bent.)

I in fact don’t have many red lines in terms of which Jews I keep community with – but I do have two which are non-negotiable.

The first is that they must be Jewish in contexts other than advocating for Palestine. There is unfortunately a local group which claims to represent Jews but is full of people who weren’t raised Jewish, haven’t come to Judaism in adulthood, and only associate with other Jews when they’re waving Palestinian flags in town – and not, say, during a Friday night dinner or a Lag B’Omer barbecue.

The second is that they shouldn’t advocate for actions or policies which would demonstrably harm other Jews. This is where the Neturei Karta, and many antizionists of Jewish heritage, fall down – they seem incapable of acknowledging that many of the things for which they advocate would lead to the ethnic cleansing of 7 million Jews from the Middle East. I can’t accept that a Jew in community with other Jews could ever call for their harm. It’s simply unacceptable.

I unfortunately fell out with a new friend on both those red lines, made more egregious because he invoked his grandparents who died in the Holocaust whilst in the same breath comparing Israel to the Third Reich. Perhaps the friendship could have been salvaged if he spouted less Iranian propaganda and held any sort of Jewish identity other than his weaponised heritage, but there again perhaps not.

I suppose the point of my rambling is to not only encourage other Jews to be in respectful community with Jews who hold many different opinions about Israel – as is our tradition, pre-dating but exemplified by the Talmud – but to also admonish my non-Jewish readers: we are not ‘good Jews’ and ‘bad Jews’ to be classified according to whether or not we agree with you.

We hold varied and nuanced opinions about Israel, the current conflict in Gaza, and the wider Middle East. Some of us, with the exact same information, will draw opposite conclusions. It is our tradition to foster vigorous debate within our community – ‘two Jews, three opinions’. You don’t get to dictate the ‘correct’ opinion, nor do you get to bludgeon wider Jewry with it.

You want to be an ally to your Jewish friends experiencing a surge in antisemitism whilst also advocating for Palestinian self-determination and rights? Have basic respect for our culture and traditions. Period, full-stop.

This is one reason why I so respect the work of Jewish-Palestinian solidarity movement Standing Together. They have consistently advocated for a cessation of hostilities without using language which criminalises either Israeli or Palestinian citizens, and without litigating the question of who has the ‘right’ to live in the Levant. They simply focus on building a shared, equitable, and peaceful future in the Land, together.

One of the last in-depth conversations I got to have with my father before he passed was about Gaza. I wasn’t sure what he would say about it – his parents were assimilationist to the point where he didn’t learn he was Jewish until he was 13, when he discovered that his grandmother wasn’t speaking French as his parents claimed, but Yiddish. He never declared opinions ‘as a Jew’. But his later work supporting victims of torture frequently took him to Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories. When he spoke about Israel, he didn’t speak in ignorance.

‘It’s hard not to describe the situation in the West Bank as apartheid,’ he told me as he sat up in his hospital bed, the first lucid conversation we’d managed to have that day. ‘I mean, they use separate roads. But,’ he added, ‘I’m not an Islamist – I don’t want Israel to stop existing.’ It was gratifying to agree, where so many Jews disagree, and – although he didn’t consistently identify as one – to be in respectful community as Jews. Considering that I’m the only one in my family who is a religious Jew, being able to have this discussion with him was a gift.

All this to say that these conversations between Jews are precious – the lifeblood of our community, to dissent without rancour. There are no ‘good’ or ‘bad’ Jews. Within a broad, healthy community which knows how to hold space for nuance, there are merely Jews.

Like many galaxy-brained people whose parents over-inflated their perception of their own intelligence, I have regrettably ended up with a day job in academia.

It makes sense that academics are enthused about AI – both the Academy and AI systems are in the business of knowledge production. We chase the grants that rich people issue for research that backs up their worldview; hence why I’m so cynical when I’m told to Trust The Science(TM). We publish this newly-produced knowledge in peer-reviewed conferences and journals, and are encouraged to cite other researchers in our fields to further wring out some fresh knowledge from the synthesis. Like a complex AI system, we churn out content – often with hallucinations.

But like AI, the Academy is also an artefact of its time and place. Its mode of knowledge production solidified as an agent of Western empire-building, extolled in contrast to the folk knowledge ways of the ‘savages’ slated for wholesale erasure. No knowledge is out of bounds to The Science(TM) – everything one can know is a mountain to climb up and plant a flag on.

Contrast this with the knowledge systems of those on the other end of the colonial encounter. For many Indigenous communities, their knowledge is something to be safeguarded – passed through generations to the right people, and not to the wrong people. The aim isn’t to drastically change what is known, but rather to ensure accurate transmission, in some cases across tens of thousands of years.

When an Aboriginal Australian studies a rock painting at a sacred site, knowledge has been encoded and expressed within that painting. If you were to train a generative AI on thousands of Aboriginal rock paintings, it might produce something that resembles an Aboriginal rock painting – but it wouldn’t contain any of the knowledge inherent in the original paintings, and might well interfere with these knowledge systems if mistaken for an actual rock painting.

This is, as you may guess, a research interest of mine. The contrast between knowledge production and safeguarding struck me quite recently when looking at AI-generated images of hanukkiahs.

As the reader may know, a hanukkiah is lit by Jews every year during Hanukkah, our Festival of Lights. Hanukkiahs come in many different shapes and sizes, but must contain holders for nine candles – one for each of the eight nights of Hanukkah, plus the shamash which lights the other candles. Like any Jewish holiday, there are many Talmudic opinions about how to light the candles, but Rabbi Hillel proposed the most popular method: one candle plus the shamash lit on the first night, then one candle added for each successive night until the final night, when eight candles plus the shamash are lit. In total, 44 candles are burned over the course of Hanukkah.

But a generative AI system doesn’t know all that, which is why its hanukkiahs range in size from seven to over 20 candles – like those on a geriatric’s birthday cake. When asked to produce a scene of a family lighting a hanukkiah, the important thing for the AI is evidently to produce a profusion of candles; their symbology is less important. Imagine what would happen if an alien species came across these images and mistook them for a genuine celebration of the holiday. What other mistakes about Hanukkah would they take for fact?

This is a quandary faced by many researchers hoping to benefit from a synthesis between AI and Indigenous knowledge systems. First of all, their perspective is often wrong, trying to shoehorn the latter into the former rather than adapting AI systems to suit Indigenous use cases. Second of all, they don’t understand that their default mode of knowledge production itself contrasts with the aim of most Indigenous knowledge systems.

In other words, what good is an AI that can’t even draw a decent hanukkiah?

I wasn’t born when Reagan was first elected, but if the punk music of the era is anything to go by, the American leftwing thought the country had been handed to the Devil Himself.

A risible character whose pre-gubernatorial film credentials included such gems as Bedtime for Bonzo, the man jumped into bed with the anti-gay agenda of the Moral Majority set and then developed Alzheimer’s in his second term, which was widely known but concealed in a sort of ‘Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?’ campaign. By many accounts those eight years sucked, and it behoves me to mention that many, many gay men met with death prematurely due to a paucity of HIV/AIDS research and a lack of access to timely and non-judgemental medical care. The Cold War started to thaw though, so it wasn’t all bad. It could have been better, but also it could have been worse.

My first election I voted for John Kerry, and when Dubya won I made panicked plans to flee the country. Somehow I ended up in DC instead, at a feeder school for the State Department, so it didn’t work out at that time – but I went to some great hardcore shows. Anyways when Dubya got in he was widely lambasted for being a low-IQ recovering cocaine addict riding on the coattails of his establishment dad, and he dragged us into a brutal and unnecessary war of attrition that millions of people took to the streets to protest (and were summarily ignored).

People seem to forget that Bush II expanded the use of executive orders, notably to create the Department of Homeland Security, which drew a lot of outcry at the time but has now fizzled into nothing – infrastructure is only noticeable when it’s either being built or not working. And perhaps DHS works, though I much prefer not to think about it.

All this to say that most Republican presidents in the past fifty years have been labelled as fascist, and like Democrat presidents have even done fascist things, but ultimately the moment passes and the country moves onto a different political season.

Not to excuse Trump for crimes previously committed or crimes he will now undoubtedly perpetuate whilst in office a second time. It’s true that this moment feels more dangerous, what with the persecution of undocumented immigrants including the ‘misplacing’ of thousands of migrant children, the potential outlawing of abortion thanks to the kangaroos in the Supreme Court, the increased rhetoric against trans people… but if you were to parachute into another Republican-dominated political era over the past fifty years, you might still recognise the pervading feeling.

I have two big worries. The first is that the Democrats will fail to do the tough self-introspection required to right the ship and will instead continue to label everyone who disagrees with them as ‘fascist’, which, I promise you, helps absolutely nothing. The second perhaps requires more explaining.

Zoom out, and the vote for Trump means two things which are potentially contradictory. It firstly means a vote for a multipolar world order – specifically, one where the United States cedes power to the Sino-Russian alliance. Trump voters might not articulate it this way, but the clear rejection of the traditional Western rules-based order, exemplified by such conspiracy-theory-attracting stalwarts as the World Economic Forum and the World Health Organisation, necessarily brings the US closer to Putin’s orbit. Given Musk’s mooted involvement in finding ‘efficiencies’ in government, one wouldn’t be surprised to see military aid to Ukraine or Taiwan classified as such.

But the vote is also for Trump as a strongman who will ‘make America great again’. He’s already talked about using tactical nuclear weapons and, in case you haven’t noticed, all the nuclear powers and their dogs have just conducted tests on nuclear warheads. What with Silicon Valley tech bros suddenly discovering nuclear power, increased investment in generation may also lead to another nuclear arms race. Talk about mixed messages.

Well Uranus is about to enter Gemini, which in the past has coincided with a) the Revolutionary War; b) the Civil War; and c) the rise to global hegemony following World War 2. So start digging your bunkers now, and check in on your trans mates. I’m seeing a lot of talk about becoming ‘ungovernable’ to ‘fascists’, which is an invitation to get murdered – you can either end up like Hans and Sophie Scholl, or you can use whatever privilege you have to hide people in plain sight until the evil wind blows itself out. But losing your head helps no one, especially not the vulnerable people who will need protecting.

We’re about to enter a decade of nuclear chicken helmed by a demented president, again. For goodness’s sake, keep out of the way.