Predictions for 2024

 

My predictions are always wrong—like everyone else’s. We humans have a lousy track record on predicting the future. Something to remember when you hear alarms raised about global warming. And things have gotten especially unpredictable recently. Aliens? The pope not Catholic? Turning the frogs gay?

So I might as well go ahead and be optimistic—without being unrealistic. After all, God’s in his heaven.

I predict that, in 2024, Trump will win back the US presidency. The Economist gives him a one in three chance. I think it is better than that. He looks to have a lock on the Republican nomination, and the polls show him ahead of Biden in the general. The Democrats seem all in on Biden, and Biden may be impeached for his corruption and possibly treasonous activities, may be too obviously senile by election day, or may, at his age, suddenly die of natural causes. He is also historically unpopular. 

Perhaps they think they can fix the election, but can they? If so, why are they trying to get Trump off the ballot? That’s too blatant, and looks like desperation. I think they are overreaching.

It seems to me the NDP must officially pull the plug in Canada on their coalition with the Liberals before 2025. Otherwise, they will be too closely associated with the Liberals to mount a plausible campaign  when the election comes—and it must come no later than 2025. To make this dissociation real in the public mind, they must also start voting aggressively against the Liberals on confidence votes. So there is a decent chance the Conservatives can craft a confidence motion to bring down the government; especially considering all the incipient scandals under investigation. So I predict a Canadian election in 2024, and a win by Pierre Poilievre.

I predict the Liberals will not switch leaders to forestall this. The have no plausible star in the wings, history suggests it would not help them, and Trudeau does not want to go.

And Poilievre is just too good as a politician; he is not going to lose.

Pope Francis has ratcheted up his “reforms” in the church recently; as if something has been triggered. It might be that he felt constrained so long as Benedict was alive—had he gone this far, Benedict was an obvious rallying point for opposition. But it might also be because Francis hears the beating wings of the angel of death. There are rumours that he intends to fix the election of the next pope; this too suggests he expects to die soon, but his haste to get things done suggests also he has no confidence in his ability to do that. Historically, conclaves have tended to elect candidates contrasting with the previous pontiff, as if to keep things on a steady course. And the worldwide church seems now on the verge of schism in response to Francis’s innovations. The next conclave has a strong motive, then, to try a different tack. God, too, must not be discounted; he will protect his church. So I predict Francis will either die or resign in 2024, and a new pope will be named who is traditionalist.

I am not the only one to notice that wokery is past its high water mark, and is becoming an object of ridicule. When they begin to laugh at you… Bud Light is deservedly toast; Disney is in desperate traits; and when such big fish can be taken out, the little fish too must take heed, and tremble. Now Harvard is losing its reputation and its endowment. I expect this trend to rapidly accelerate, as a bandwagon effect kicks in.

Might as well predict the fall of Xi, Putin, and the Iranian regime as well. All are hanging by a thread, and might collapse at any time. So why not this year? The fall of any of the three makes the fall of the other two more likely, and the fall of any one is likely. Xi is facing economic disaster; Putin is facing military disaster; the Iranian regime is wildly unpopular. So let’s call it as a set.

If Iran falls, to a more liberal regime, that in turn will have profound repercussions throughout the Middle East, where Iran is funding Islamist movements. Like Hamas. Or the Houthis in Yemen.

If either the CPC or the mullah in Iran fall to a liberal regime, we should also see mass conversions to Christianity in those two countries. Which will in turn have world-wide effects. China, for example, could become the centre of the Christian world.

I hear predictions that inflation, and interest rates, should ease by summer. Why not believe them? There may or my not be a terrible recession; so let’s believe there won’t be. It is just possible that the productivity gains being brought on by AI, and computerization generally, will be enough to cancel out all the reckless spending and government financial mismanagement.

Speaking of AI, new technologies are always overhyped in the beginning. As Arthur C. Clarke observed, any really new technology is always indistinguishable in the popular mind from magic. So I’m wagering that all the concerns about AI making us all obsolete, and being a threat to mankind, are hysterical. Instead, it will be a boon to productivity—especially for computer coding.

I see signs of a genuine religious revival in the US at least. God may not have given up on them yet. Back in 1992, Leonard Cohen saw two possible futures, good and bad. The dark option is what we have been getting lately: 

Destroy another fetus now
We don't like children anyhow
I've seen the future, baby
It is murder
Things are going to slide, slide in all directions
Won't be nothing
Nothing you can measure anymore
The blizzard, the blizzard of the world
Has crossed the threshold and it has overturned the order of the soul

But Cohen saw another option. Having explored the dark side, and discovering where it leads, we may pull back and choose instead the vision seen in “Democracy is coming to the USA.” Of, specifically, the principles in the Sermon on the Mount. If it comes, Cohen sees it as coming to the USA first. And coming first to the “holy places where the races meet”: to the Christian churches.

The New Atheism is dead, and there seems to be an earthquake in the sciences, forcing God back into the picture as necessary hypothesis. Theism is becoming fashionable again, at least in the highest intellectual circles. Every week we hear of some new convert.

Financial considerations still argue strongly for mass immigration, even if unpopular—and there are other arguments for it as well. But multiculturalism is rapidly becoming unfashionable. Affirmative action, “equity,” is rapidly becoming unfashionable. We may be back to valuing and respecting “Western civilization.” And expecting immigrants to assimilate, as most immigrants want to do in the first place. There is a reason why they come to Canada, or America, and it is usually not because they loved things back where they came from so much. Trapping them in multiculturalism is trapping them in exile and alienation.

The influence of Elon Musk’s new Twitter has not yet been fully felt, but the emergence of a widely-used platform that is not enforcing a political agenda makes it untenable for other platforms and media to enforce such an agenda. So that house of cards should now come tumbling down. Once people can choose, they will choose open discussion, simply out of natural human curiosity. I expect the immanent demise of the “legacy media,” the TV networks, the newspapers, and the practice of big tech “gatekeeping.”

The war in Gaza will end with Hamas wiped out, and will trigger no wider war.

People are losing confidence in the experts; the experts discredited themselves on Covid. And so the public is losing confidence in all the predictions of global warming and all the draconian measures governments are imposing in its name. Chicken Little will soon be called out. Climate change is losing its marketability. If global warming is real, the only solution is improved technology, and the best way to achieve improved technology is for governments to get out of the way. Political parties will soon no longer be able to jerk this chain.

And so 2024 may be the year of the great turning. The world could look very different in twelve months.

And then there’s aliens.