How Do You Respond to Something Like This?

 

The Democrats assume the average American voter is a gullible idiot. What if they are right?

https://twitter.com/i/status/1743635357160145330

Reading the Entrails by Gaslight

 

Many commentators on the right are optimistic about 2024. They do not give reasons; just an instinct that the tide has turned. I have that same feeling.

Perhaps it is telling that friend Xerxes, commentator on the left, has the opposite feeling, and is warning against facing the new year with optimism.

His first argument is that it is pure chance, and the fact that the last three years have been awful in just about everyone’s opinion makes it no more likely the next year will be good. His second argument is that, if we think things are terrible, we need to change our attitude. He uses that old saw, about a couple who asked their real estate agent if their new neighbours were friendly.

            “What were they like at the last place you lived?” asks the real estate agent.
            Whatever the answer, the agent can safely say, “Then they’ll be the same here.”

His argument that experiencing a bad year makes it no more likely that the next year will be good is necessarily based on the assumption that there is no God. Given that the universe is just, it is fair to hope that good will come to balance present evil. This is the theological virtue of hope, and lacking it, assuming fate is merely random, is the deadly vice of acedia.

His next argument, that you are yourself the deciding factor, and responsible for your own good or bad luck, is similarly anti-christian. It is plausible only for Eastern religions who believe in reincarnation. As to the specific example, your new neighbours inevitably being no better nor worse than your old neighbours, that is easily disproven by crime statistics. There are good and bad neighbourhoods. Or ask the Jews who escaped the Nazis whether their new neighbours in Canada were just as bad as their old ones in Germany. Ask the Jews of Israel about their neighbours in Gaza. Ask, indeed, the many of us who came to North America to escape oppression and have a better life whether their new life is no better than their old. And if better, is it really because they changed their sullen attitude?

The Bible could not more clearly oppose this idea, that those who are suffering are responsible for their own suffering, and those who are materially fortunate are morally deserving. Read the Book of Job. Read the story of Dives and Lazarus. Read the Beatitudes. Read about that just man they crucified.

The left is hearing footsteps. They have long been in power, actually since the early 20th century in North America, and they are coming to realize there is widespread unrest. And they are trying to gaslight us.

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.

A Path for DeSantis

 

 I see a path for Ron DeSantis to the Republican nomination. 

Donald Trump has begun attacking him. A day or two ago, in a speech, Trump referred to DeSantis as “DeSanctimonious.”

Trump is being roundly criticized for this by conservative commentators. First, because he was attacking a fellow Republican and conservative on the eve of an election. Second, because it was a lame insult. Not up to Trump’s standard.

I smell blood in the water.

The commentariat is implying that Trump is past it. They are implying also that he is disloyal. These are deadly criticisms if they stick.

The same people who like Trump like DeSantis. The same people who like DeSantis like Trump. I think this means that, whoever atttacks first, loses. They immediately become the bad guy.

Trump has already started firing.

Maybe all DeSantis needs to do is keep his powder dry, keep smiling, and refuse to attack Trump in kind, and he wins. He is showing respect for the old duffer; while implying he is no longer really relevant. In fact, the base for the two is so similar that, if DeSantis can hold his tongue for just a short time, Trump’s support may crumble and move over en masse.

People want to support Trump because they feel he got a raw deal in having only one term, and one term crippled by the “Russia hoax.” His advantage over DeSantis is this call on his followers’ sympathies and sense of loyalty. Without it, DeSantis looks like the better candidate. He is younger, and so contrasts better with the doddering Biden. Even if Biden does not run again, people will fear electing another dodderer. He lacks a lot of Trump’s baggage. After the turmoil of the Biden presidency, people will crave a sense of normalcy; not a return to the prior turmoil of the Trump presidency. It will not help to be reminded of Trump’s chippiness.

By going after DeSantis without being fired upon, Trump surrenders his moral claim to sympathy and loyalty. He is being unsympathetic and disloyal himself.

There will probably be other candidates for the nomination. They will probably do enough to keep Trump’s feet to the fire. 

DeSantis’s best play is to stay above the fray and look presidential. It even looks then like an easy win.

Not Trump in 2024

 

I don’t think the Republicans should run Donald Trump next time for president.

I think it is a great shame he did not get his second term. But now the calculation has changed.

The Trump years were tumultuous. Many people voted again
st Trump, not for Biden, simply because they were exhausted and craved a return to normalcy.

It turned out that Biden was not normalcy at all. Things have gotten more tumultuous--not in the White House, but in American and the world. The thirst for normalcy and a return to sanity is greater than ever, and Trump is not the obvious standard-bearer for normalcy and sanity.

Add to that, the obvious problems with Biden’s age. Trump is almost as old. There will be a thirst for youth and vigour.

The Republican Party has to be careful. Any alternative to Trump must not look like an anti-Trump move, or the party loses its new base. What is needed is a new advocate for the Trump populism. That excludes Nikki Haley, Mike Pence, Ted Cruz, or Rand Paul, otherwise impressive candidates.

The best option for now looks like Ron DeSantis. Things can go awry quickly for a sitting governor; and running against Trump may tarnish him. 

Here’s a dream ticket: Ron DeSantis and Tulsi Gabbard. That could appeal beyond the Trump base, without rejecting it, looks youthful, and would look like a return to sanity.

More likely: Trump gets nominated. VP will be someone relatively obscure.