10 Predictions for 2023

A little bit better for us than 2022?

2022 has been a banner year for America’s elites, and there’s no way to spin it otherwise. The midterms not only failed to deliver a red wave rebuke of elite overreach, but “sensible centrism” made a big comeback with the American public growing bored with the increasingly unhinged fringes that had been dominating the public conversation for several years.

The Ukraine conflict affirmed that the Atlanticist empire isn’t as derelict as had been hoped and presumed. Washington is betting big on Zelensky and he’s playing the part to perfection. The Federal Reserve is patting itself on the back for having defeated inflation by surgically targeting the worst bubbles in the economy without crashing the market.

Personally, I believe the iconic event that summarizes the political moment this year was Nancy Pelosi flying to Taiwan and extending her arthritic middle finger in the general direction of Mainland China. There was no geopolitical reason for this. Analysts and even the Biden Administration regarded it as a foolish and reckless blunder. She didn’t care. The previously indecisive and ineffective western oligarchs could get away with anything and everything in 2022. Unstoppable.

Hunter Wallace has placed his cards on the table for 2023, and honor compels me to do what no political commentator with any sense should ever do: make very specific predictions about the future again. I doubt these will perform as well as my last set, but I shall do my best.

1. Ukraine Pain

I believe the Ukraine Conflict is steadily becoming a frozen conflict, and neither side will be willing to diplomatically deescalate or able to militarily shake up the map. Zelensky’s job of keeping the American public interested in and supportive of his struggle will only get harder. As he transitions from asking for money to do cool military stuff to asking for money to help Ukraine recover economically and institutionally, the GOP leadership will not be able to stave off a grassroots revolt against dumping hundreds of billions more into the boring post-soviet border skirmish.

2. End of Trump

There will be no “Don vs. Ron” showdown, as there is no Don. Donald Trump is not a legitimate or relevant political candidate. This is confusing and counter-intuitive for many, as he remains culturally relevant and he was obviously politically relevant enough rather recently to be elected President of the United States. Furthermore, a sort of collective trauma over underestimating him in 2016 compels everybody to overestimate him for 2024.

Ron is Don. There is no Don. Ron DeSantis has completely triangulated Trump out of Trump’s own “Trumpy” lane in the upcoming primaries.

3. End of Trumpism

It’s easy to forget just how completely Ted Cruz had the 2016 primaries in the bag relative to conventional wisdom at the time. Ted owned the Tea Party and Evangelical lanes. But a funny thing happened on the way to the convention; the tea party movement mysteriously evaporated. Tens of millions of rock ribbed conservatives who despised big government and loved Jesus dropped their pocket constitutions and scofield bibles in favor of the least principled and religious man in American history.

The Trump Lane is dead and DeSantis will die with it because Trumpism no longer owns the libtards. The contard coalition is an integrally reactionary movement that exists only to rage against the machine of establishment liberal hegemony. Trump’s obnoxiously transgressive style was a miracle. For decades from now, libtards will continue gnashing their teeth and rending their garments at the thought of him. But the shtick has run its course.

Seeing a wealthy and powerful establishment insider go rogue against his colleagues was electrifying. The right half of American politics lived vicariously through Trump’s irreverent refusal to accord the establishment the deference it had come to expect. While Ted and the Tea Party wanted to debate the elites, Trump wanted to beat them up, beat them down, and humiliate them the way they’ve been humiliating us for generations.

But they had the last laugh, not only in Trump’s 2020 defeat, but in successfully stopping him from accomplishing absolutely anything but roasting them on Twitter. And in an egregious overreach, they even managed to stop him from doing that. He set out to humiliate and found himself humiliated. I believe the midterms demonstrated that contards are losing faith in the waning power of aggressive transgression in achieving their sole aim: owning the libtards.

4. Surfing with Tulsi

It would be a bit of a stretch to predict Tulsi will win the primaries given that she hasn’t even announced and hasn’t even been a Republican for a full year yet. Besides, the primaries won’t actually be decided until 2024.

But I do believe that her style and manner of messaging will be the next surprise lane to open up in the republican primaries. It certainly works on her podcast and in her Fox News appearances, where she (like trump, originally) presents herself as a disaffected democrat who has had it with her former party’s corruption, degeneracy, and hypocrisy.

The problem with DeSantis, Pence, and others who are stacking up credibility as loyal Republicans is that Republicans don’t actually like the Republican party. They don’t even like other Republicans. They just hate the left and wish to see it defeated. They understand that they’ve lost the moral high ground with Trump’s bitter brand and are looking to perhaps over-correct with a moralizing karen.

Adjusted for demographics, even Trump’s unlikely 2016 coalition wouldn’t win the general election in 2024. It wouldn’t even be close. The rapid disappearance of the Baby Boomer generation will be as demographically disruptive as its appearance was. Tulsi can bring back a lot of middle-aged suburban white women who’ve been alienated by Trump’s vulgarity. Tulsi can fight the culture war battles without seeming like an out of touch old man. Tulsi can put the libtards on the defensive in a way that no currently discussed candidate can.

Parenthetically, I would rather support a non-White who’s explicitly pro-White than yet another White man who cynically panders to White Resentment while not actually challenging the anti-White status quo. But this isn’t about who I hope will win, it’s about who I think will capture the energy and imagination of the grassroots, cable news, and talk radio during the first few months of the primaries.

I’ll deserve partial credit if there’s some other dark horse candidate who gains momentum by moralizing against the new left from the old left.

5. Crashing Oil Prices

Biden was on board with all of the responsible globalist elites in trying to reduce fuel consumption and crash the global economy to save the penguins. The Ukraine conflict put a (temporary?) end to that nonsense. The United States is frantically pulling every lever possible to try to crash the Russian economy by crashing global fuel prices. Drill, baby, drill!

There’s a bit of a delay with these sorts of things, as production facilities and global supply chains take a few months to get rolling. But rolling they are. Europe will be up to its eyeballs in cheap natural gas. Prices at the pump will manage to go even lower than they are now. The impending global economic crash will be on hold for a couple years as the global economy is juiced by this swift policy reversal.

6. The Bullshit Recession

This economic boom that’s been happening for at least a decade has always been a Bullshit Bubble, with vast piles of cash landing absolutely everywhere but the pockets and purses of working class Americans who actually build and do shit for a living. A lot of tech companies and sectors where cash has been speculatively gambled on meme stocks and fantastical schemes will continue bleeding out. Technically, the economy will be on the rocks. But only technically.

The retreat from globalism, maturation of the Chinese labor pool, retirement of the boomers, and occupational fickleness of the zoomers necessarily entails that employment and wages will continue to be strong. This cohort was not only left behind by the Bullshit Bubble, but actively harmed by it, with many of the largest bullshit bubble corporations achieving their absurd valuations by replacing workers with gig economy contractors working below minimum wage without benefits.

In the eighties you had “stagflation,” where inflation coincided with broader stagnation. I think we’re going to enjoy a couple years of the opposite, turbocharged by absurdly cheap fossil fuels. It’s anybody’s guess when the bond market will finally and truly bust, but I’m hoping it won’t be 2023.

7. Trans Fatigue

Each new wave of leftist bullshit has been so “inevitable” that nobody has the courage to declare that they’ve finally gone too far and will walk some of it back. I’ll be that guy. I believe that’s the case with the transgender fad, which will not follow gay rights, gay marriage, and similar degeneracy into mainstream acceptance.

Sometimes the elites do indeed walk things back. We all saw this with Covid Mandates. For years, the elites were trying to push vaccine mandates and were going to extraordinary lengths to insist that everybody must be intimidated, blackmailed, and worse into getting vaxxed and boosted. And then they all kinda awkwardly and nervously changed their minds.

Now when you turn on NPR or listen to an Economist podcast, these very same people are smugly chortling about how ridiculous China’s Zero Covid policy was compared to the West’s less authoritarian approach. If you try to bring it up that they got carried away, they’ll try to change the subject, insist that we all need to forgive and move on, or frantically delete their tweets and insist that you’re crazy for thinking they said that.

In 2023, you’re going to have the “experts” on gender admit that this propaganda is dangerous for youth. Gender-affirming surgery will be downgraded from a social fad with popup clinics to a last resort for some truly persistent adults, with de-trans voices and terf opponents of the trans agenda achieving platforms they wouldn’t have received in previous years. Ideally, perhaps, regretful decepticons who did not receive sufficient counseling before being disfigured will sue the clinics and drive up the costs and counseling required.

8. Fuentes Continues Winning

Hunter sees Nick’s pivot to Ye24 as some kind of grave blunder. I want to be a hater and I have every right to be, but Nick managed to pull off the unthinkable: unplug himself from Trump’s dying brand without losing any credibility. The story is so absurd, compelling, entertaining, and unlikely that it wouldn’t be acceptable fiction.

The biggest rap celebrity on earth falls from the sky into the America First coalition and asks Nick to choose him over Trump at the perfect moment? If I were running a creative writing workshop, I would tell the author to find a different hobby. Unbelievable. Too convenient. Deus ex machina.

Ye doesn’t have a conventional lane or path to the White House, of course. But protest candidates are an important American tradition, and they impact the conversation. Whether it was Ron Paul’s doomed 2008 run that kicked off the tea party or Tulsi’s doomed 2020 campaign that destroyed Kamala as a standalone candidate, we should never let a foolish focus on who will technically win distract us from all the important social, cultural, and political wins that can be achieved along the way.

I am skeptical that Ye will even file. But he’s already driven record attention to corrupt jewish oligarchs, centered on demographics that people like me and Hunter could never reach. He has already made Jewish Power the subject of a classic SNL opening monologue. Even if there are no more opportunities created for us by Ye, he, like the early altright once did, confirms that our ideas and ideals will continue to find expression in unlikely, unexpected, and future-facing corners of American society.

Broadly speaking, White identity and opposition to Jewish oligarchs will keep steadily growing. Though, as long as Biden remains president, we’ll remain somewhat muffled. He is the very last of the Dinosaur Democrats, and things will get rolling again when the libtards are out from under the very conservative and moderate messaging and tone of the Biden Administration.

9. Crypto Ice Age

Forget “crypto winter.” Calling it an “ice age” is charitable. This will be more like that “snowball earth” period where the atmosphere fell out of balance and the planet was frozen solid for a few million years. 2023 will feature increasing regulation, more advanced chainalytics, terrible press, and the continued “cash famine” impacting every speculative bubble as the fed continues raising or at least holding rates.

Ultimately, crypto can’t and won’t recover unless and until homomorphically encrypted smart contracts capable of facilitating single- and double-blind real world financial contracts are mature and market ready. The dog that hasn’t barked in crypto is tokenized lending with black market recovery mechanisms, and the reason for this is technical limitations. Once this is achieved, there will be an even greater bubble in this space. But it won’t be in 2023.

10. The Great Deflation

The greatest deflationary event in human history is coming, and I’m not just talking about money. In 2023, the supply chain issues with semaglutide and related pharmaceuticals will be resolved, with these weight loss miracle drugs causing a dramatic reduction in the American appetite. This will be a positive development for American health and quality of life. People will look back on our current era as a depressing period where everybody was really fat and rude.