A New Year, A New Epoch?
Forecasting the future is for madmen...
the nauseating state-of-the-nation is being driven by a cohort of our own fellow citizens lost in an evil crypto-religious salvation rapture that veils their own self-disgust, moral failure, peevish discontents, petty hatreds, willful profanations, compulsive lying, sexual depravity, fraudulence, venality, cupidity, and all-around wont of boundaries. They are wrecking the country on-purpose, led by their chosen figurehead avatar, “Joe Biden” and the horses of many different colors he rode in on. - James Howard Kunstler
James Howard Kunstler is fond of writing predictions for the year, having done it most of the 21st century. He can be rather…acerbic. It used to be a running joke among the Great Recession doomers, Dow Jones to 4000, as he said that every year for the greater part of a decade after the 2008 credit collapse. His Forecast is always a “fun” read, because it is like reading a future-telling of what you want to happen to our betters, as well as a kind of lesson in recent but mostly forgotten history; reading his 2023 forecast this week, it is a good reminder, we humans have a tendency to compress time in the framework of a single human lifetime. In the macro as in the micro; Civilization has ups and downs just like one human life, just at very different scales of time (even as quantum physics plays by rules that make scales irrelevant.) Kunstler sees the trend of things, but he got about 90% of his predictions for 2023 quite wrong. He tends to be very specific in his predictions, which is great entertainment and edifying in real time, but almost all wishful thinking in hindsight.
I do think readers of this Substack would very much appreciate his 2024 Forecast, quite a bit less specific than last year’s, but quite accurate in general I think.
Surely at some point the Dow will be reduced to 4000, or less, so I suppose he is bound to be right eventually, even if he was wrong about it year after year. I suppose 2024 is as likely as any. That’s the thing about predictions, they are best treated as the ravings of madmen present company included. There is always, or almost always, some truth in any prediction, but the timeline and scale are off, which makes the prediction technically wrong, but kind of right. Other times the prediction is dead wrong, but the sentiment is sure and bordering on zealous. Too often predictions reflect not reality but what the predictor wants to happen. There is probably a little of all that in any set of predictions for the coming year, for anyone venturing to prophecy.
That said, if you don’t want to read about increasing chaos in detail, feel free not to read it, or skip ahead to the last bit about the rise of religion. I’ve no doubt most of my readers already know, clown world is getting weirder by the day without any theoretical upper limit. (also, this post is too long for email.)
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I’m still mulling the following piece, which effected me more than any post on Substack this year probably. I’ve been trying to refute it logically, but the only thing I can come up with is that it’s too much on the side of apocalypse, which is merely the equally flawed opposite of utopia. Though what is going to feel like apocalypse to Americans with the sudden loss of empire, might not feel anything like so devastating to much of the rest of the world. Though, as the American economy goes so goes the world economy BRICS notwithstanding. I look to God but mostly God just stares back implacably, unless that refrain I keep hearing about ‘how else did you think this would end,’ is God? A bunch of synchronicities immediately after I read it did not make me think the writer is wrong, necessarily. To paraphrase Yeats, the center is not holding and the rough beast is upon us? In short, this piece is about the sense of increasing weakness, incompetence, corruption, degeneracy and simple not-up-to-the-task of the Biden Admin/Deep State/DEI Managerial Blob, actors all over the world beginning to take advantage, the kinetic nature of chaos and the potential “annihilation” of America as we have known it.
Reading it again before publishing, I think it is a lot of that “compression of time” issue, but also plausible in the main, far fetched in spots and some wishful thinking. And there is a least one prediction the writer is simply crazy for making. A real madman.
Seneca’s cliff seems appropriate to consider at this point…but then I’ve been half-expecting that since 2009 or so, just like Kunstler has. The global economy has been more resilient than I imagined it would be, after the credit collapse of 2008. The Seneca cliff model is flawed too, insofar as it makes it look like you end up back where you started. A “catabolic” arrangement is more accurate, a step down process over time. Ultimately America is it’s people and the American people are a relatively talented and hard working people still, so I have more faith in the power of hegemonic inertia than I did in 2008 and after. Though again, if America loses it’s status as the seat of empire, which it very much looks like the Biden Admin is falling out of, that would be unprecedented pain in America.
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Substack has withstood and come out stronger, after this latest attempt to put us under State control. When I was young, naive and full of ideals I assumed authoritarians know they are authoritarian. A few do, but otherwise it doesn’t work like that at all, the vast majority of authoritarians project their authoritarianism onto their enemy, they blame their enemy for every evil they themselves do, thinking themselves on the side of Righteousness and Truth. It is like the first rule of the contemporary “long march through the institutions,” embrace evil to fight who you perceive as “oppressors”, and claim all that is wrong is on the side of the people you are “upsetting”, in the immortal word of Harvard President Claudine Gay, aspiring to be and acting like the new oppressor.
The attempt to place Substack under State control had nothing to do with nazis. Excess mortality is rising even now, when covid is hardly a factor. It is rising especially among working age people. Primary factors include sudden cardiac failure and “turbo cancer”, which heretofore have never been a thing. One of the things most of these people have in common is the covid jab. But none of this can be said on Facebook, Instagram, Youtube or tiktok. I’m not sure, maybe you can say it on Xitter. I am saying this on Substack and I will continue to say it on Substack, because the founders of Substack support free speech (I also talk about it to anyone IRL who is able to hear it.) That is why they are coming after Substack. You can’t say much very critical about covid policy, Trans, Woke or Gov on Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, tiktok - or most legacy media. It truly is hard to over-state the evil of that. The useful idiots of the State abound. Who’s yer nazi,
?
Yet, Pew research has revealed, something like 40% of Republicans take the side of the “woke,” when it comes to government working with big tech to censor Americans. One might argue that if Pew phrased it that way, as censorship, and not as protecting us from “false information”, the percentage would be much less - as the State never calls what they want to censor “false information”, only ever referring to it as mis-dis-or-mal-information, because more often than not the information is true; that is what empire and modernism has done to a plurality of Americans, made them reflexively support the aggregation of power in the form of government and corporations protecting us from our enemies, unable but also unwilling to distinguish between false information and merely that which is inconvenient to government, corporations, oligarchs and currently the left.
Never mind the Dept of Homeland Security is facilitating an invasion of military aged men from countries with no history of freedom or the rule of law, the FDA/CDC is facilitating reduced life expectancy, the Dept of Agriculture facilitates systemic pollution and chronic illness, the Dept of Education facilitates illiteracy…
But government is going to protect us from false information? Government at this point in late stage empire and the decline of the West is little but false information; If Government were about censoring false information it would have next to nothing to say.
Here is the easiest of predictions, the Federal government will lie about damn near everything in 2024.
I predict too the fallout from covid policy is going to get continually worse, inverse to government and legacy media gaslighting us, with that tension continuing to increase as the year goes on. Do not be at all surprised, if it looks like Trump is bound to win the election, and or justice for covid policy appears to be reaching critical mass, media mockingbirds will sing in perfect tune a dark dirge about a new terror that cannot be seen, touched or heard…
I also predict there will not be broad and real justice for Covid in 2024, because a strong majority of Americans were and are complicit in that ongoing, murderous tyranny - see a plurality of Americans fine with gov and corp censoring “false information.” There is not a lot of broad support for metaphorically hanging the bastards, because there are so very many bastards. I really hope I am wrong about that. Covid revealed more than anything the authoritarians among us, in the majority. It also - so far - taught those authoritarians they can get away with anything.
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In 2017 I went to Senegal, West Africa to visit my ex who was there working for the Peace Corp. It took us 12hrs to travel 200 miles from Dakkar to her 500 person village. Once off the highway we traveled over sand wheel ruts through four small villages to her village, “$2 a day per family”, concrete block one room houses, dirt courtyard in the family compound, emaciated chickens, goats and cattle milling about, lots of flies and black plastic bags flying around. Forty percent of the people of Senegal at the time were under the age of 15, all of the kids were half to a third the size of American kids. And yet somehow they all had cell phones. And they all wanted to move to America. Most of the parents wanted their kids to move to America. (The women were all colorful and vocal, the men drab and silent watching from a distance.)
I predict the invasion at the southern border is about to go exponential. I suspect there are more people actively attempting to come to America than there are in America, pictures of friends and family having crossed the southern border on cell phones in all the villages of the world (and pictures of all the amenities lavished upon them by NGOs, governments and liberals.) The record-setting wave of migrants is about to turn into a tsunami, and the Federal Government, major media and Apple, Google and Meta are going to do their damnedest to hide that gross malfeasance and incompetence from the majority of Americans. Our federal government and military is exactly as helpless in defeating the Taliban in Afghanistan, Russia by proxy in Ukraine, keeping the Red Sea open for commerce as it is managing the southern border. That horde is not just going to be a predicament for America, it is going to be an existential predicament for the hemisphere, north and south America.
The rationale is the same: “we have to fix the structural problems.” We aren’t going to fix crime until we do something about poverty, therefore we can’t put people in prison because it entrenches poverty, therefore you will have to put up with unlimited crime until we fix poverty. The Feds are using the same argument, until we do something about poverty in these 3rd world countries, we are going to have to put up with unlimited migration. What are they doing to fix poverty in 3rd world countries or inner-city America? Nothing meaningful. Worse than nothing, really. Guaranteed, crime and migration are going to INCREASE, until there is a paradigm shift about crime and migration.
I predict the Feds are going to metaphorically nuke Xitter by way of a thousand different cuts against Elon Musk, and up the ante similarly against Substack, Rumble and every other Free Speech platform. But esp Xitter. In part to keep the public from seeing the invasion, and the horrific things some of these migrants are doing to Americans, (2000 Americans are killed by illegal migrants every year, before the current record increase in illegal migrants.) Never mind what this migrant influx is doing to the housing crisis. Though the Feds will not be able to hide it; sentiment against migrants is going to increase dramatically in 2024. Still, the Feds are only going to lock the border down if migrants start menacing liberal white professional women. Democrats cannot afford to alienate liberal white professional women. Migrants menacing or making life harder for minorities and the working poor generally?
That said, the one thing that will really freak out AWFLs about migration will be migrants blowing things up or getting hold of guns and shooting people in public places. Odds of that get greater by the day. Media will blame it on white men somehow, but it will be white men largely, who start protecting America from such militant migrants, if it should come to that.
Meanwhile, the culture war is going kinetic, as media and big tech distraction is about to go hyper-hysterical. Trump is Hitler!!! is going to be repeated 10,000x330million, MAGA are fascist white supremacist nazis!!!! They are going to take away abortion!!! They want to genocide Trans!!! They want to ban books!!! even as those screaming loudest about nazi’s in our midst act ever more like nazis in our midst.
The FBI is no doubt working on some new psyop like the fake attempted kidnapping of Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, and J6, so expect that to be all over the “news” late summer early fall. Probably they have multiple scenarios in play, one at least will be mature enough to go live with when they “need” it to interfere with the election.
As more and more groups around the world challenge hegemon America, expect more and more violence in the streets of American cities. It is unlikely, even if the war in Gaza comes to an end, that all those people now with a taste for protest mob intimidation and violence are going to go back to just being students or whatever. More like, we see more open street clashes between left and right activists (once they forget their generalized mutual antipathy toward Jews and focus more directly on the election,) both sides likely J6ed by federal provocateurs as an excuse to lock-down and even cancel the election, all the violence blamed on the “far-right” activists. Even as the shit show that is going to be the Democratic National Convention in Chicago will be all left-chaos, the usual media will likely report it would be peaceful but for all the MAGA white supremacists causing trouble, where no MAGA are to be found causing trouble. Some lefty will carry a nazi flag mocking conservatives, and it will be said to be MAGA. Might be just the sort of time and place for one-a those FBI psyops…
Follow the logic (hello, FBI): Palestinians are oppressed therefor it is justified to rape, torture, kidnap and kill their oppressors; in America, minorities, women, gender queer etc are oppressed, white people are oppressors (hello, liberal white women), therefore….(so then when white men become the oppressed, is it justified to….)
That is not actually logic, that is mental illness.
Guns and ammo are going to fly off the shelf. The price of gold and silver will remain stable however, as long as the stock market continues to provide record returns as it is now, so get while the gettin’ is still good.
At this point it is probably equally likely: a fair election and Trump wins in a landslide; a cancelled election (for any number of reasons, all of them psy-op); zombie Joe Biden gets 100mil votes (20mil more than 2020,); it’s a fair election and Americans are so befuddled, demoralized and delusional they vote for the geriatric, incompetent, decadent, perverted, dead end status quo formerly known as Brandon (but really it’s all about Barry behind Susan Rice), because they have utterly given up on democracy, putting all their remaining faith in the DC Blob to “save” us.
But the DC Blob is going to be an increasingly chaotic disaster, with Russia making gains in Ukraine, Israel facing increased hostility globally because of their turning Gaza into a rubble pile, the Red Sea shipping lanes remaining closed because of Houthi proxies of Iran, our bases throughout the Middle East increasingly pressured and some maybe even overrun this year, and China not waiting for another Trump presidency, taking Taiwan? While the invasion at both our southern and northern borders gets much worse.
The moral of this prophecy is, chaos is going to increase in 2024, globally, which would benefit Trump in the election, except for the fact that Trump Derangement Syndrome is going to mirror the trajectory of chaos. There are many dangers possible there, not least, a vast expansion of the war in the Middle East and globally. Some people have suggested Trump haters are giving themselves the OK to kill Trump, but that would be destabilizing to the point that it would pretty much result in the death or incarceration of most if not all of the DC blob. The odds are far greater they would simply steal the election (again.)
Oh, geez, I almost forgot. I put the odds of a “cyber attack” on the Internet next Fall at about 12%. If it were to happen I would put the odds that our own government did it at about 99.8%, as well as 50+ “former” Intelligence agents saying it “has all the hallmarks of Russian interference.” The likelihood of it happening is low because it would be hard to justify how Wall Street is still trading while regular Americans are shut out from the internet….
One last near-term prediction: If Trump is somehow kept out of the race, I put the odds well north of 50% that Robert F. Kennedy would be our next president, which frankly would feel like a sigh of relief. And with RFKjr we could absolutely count on a Covid reckoning, which America desperately needs. He would be so preoccupied about covid accountability he might even forget to keep drinking that WEF kool-aid about climate change…
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It is not really surprising then, many people are retreating into Religion. Many on the dissident right are trying to revive Christianity, which has been neutered by liberalism, most of the spirit and power driven out of it. The idea is, Christianity can be a firm foundation in a world descending into chaos. Prominent dissident voices like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Naomi Wolf, Paul Kingsnorth, have all been speaking openly about their “conversion”, Kingsnorth writing specifically, recently, about a return not to the Christianity of Constantinople and empire, but to the religion of the “desert fathers.”
Using the concept of the second religiosity of Oswald Spengler, in his theory about the cyclical nature of empire, Kingsnorth imagines a return to a simpler, more devout, orthodox Christianity. I’ve been arguing lately that we are seeing this return to religiosity even on the left among the woke, who show all the fervor of religious zealotry, despite their core Marxism and lazy atheism; I’m certainly not the only one who has noticed. They can’t help themselves in their fervor, in their madness for deconstruction/decolonization, in their god of total control - being human. But that is the West devouring itself, where Kingsnorth is talking about salvaging the best of the West and sustaining it. Kingsnorth is also an Englishman, so more “Faustian” in the Spengler conception, than we Americans, who are only partially Faustian, most representative on the east coast and among our “intelligentsia” generally, while the rest of America is going through a kind of “pseudomorphosis” becoming something all it’s own.
John Michael Greer wrote about the same process, of a general retreat into Christianity in the mounting chaos.
The Second Religiosity, as Spengler called it, is formal, ordered, tolerant, autumnal. It can hardly be anything else, because it comes into being as a refuge from chaos. Each civilization begins in an age of faith, when vivid archetypal narratives backed by potent collective emotions define the basic structures of thought and action. As the civilization matures, its version of rationalism—whatever that happens to be—dissolves the old religious narratives, replacing them with a set of secular narratives that claim to offer some form of salvation in the here and now in place of the otherworldly goals of religion. Inevitably, though, heaven on earth fails to arrive on schedule and the secular narratives break apart, leaving most people without any culturally provided narratives to give meaning and direction to their lives. The flight to religion follows promptly.
Liberalism presumed it would take over the world and usher in a liberal utopia, as if that could be the only arc of history, at once the justice of MLK and ‘their is no alternative’ of the neoliberals. In fact the arc of justice and neoliberalism is devolving into classic authoritarianism, perversion, degeneracy and democide. It has embraced evil to save a democracy they believe should be a one-world, one-party, no-elections liberal/progressive technocracy. The cognitive dissonance is deranging the left, turning it into chaos manifest and destroyer of worlds, not at all unlike Kali with her ten arms holding weapons and her garland of heads in her death aspect, trampling Shiva.
By the time this shakes out fully there will be next to nothing left of modern “neoliberalism.”
Perhaps you have noticed, but I am like one of those retreating to the “wilderness” like the desert fathers of Kingsnorth’s conception. I was raised Lutheran and then evangelical, but I am only nominally Christian as an adult, insofar as the traditions I inhabit hold Jesus to be the greatest of all the Magi, there are innumerable spirits and gods though none greater than the Creator, while this world is enchanted and divine. Kingsnorth thinks we have to die to this world to live properly, but I hold it is not until one can truly embrace the world, can one truly let it go (which is precisely what Kingsnorth did.) Kingsnorth mistakes the Great Work of knowing thy self as some backwards pagan mistake, but I know it as fundamental to the conception of the West, achieving the fullness of my being the Creator gave me, exemplifying creativity within, to exemplify the Creator.
Someday we in America will leave the West and Europe behind, and build a civilization wholly unto our own, retaining some of what is best of the West, but becoming something currently unknowable rising out of the continent, out of it’s land and waters, entirely unique to this place.
That is a long way off, not for anyone living except to be like a seed of that.
2024 looks like the expansion of a period as challenging and trying as the founding of this nation, or the Civil War.
“Let not your heart be troubled.” Here’s to you, my subscribers, riding that tsunami with aplomb, awake and alive, ready for anything. All in all, I suspect the new epoch is not going to be the dystopia the centralizers are planning for us, it is going to be the downfall of the neo-liberal, neo-con, globalist, woke trans order. What replaces it will be America returning to first principles, whatever that looks like. I’ll try to imagine that for future posts.
But then, I am just a madman at the edge of society, peering into the void…
Also, for the record, I was 100% wrong with my “forecast” last year:
Another fun read, Hunter! I look forward to your post re-visioning of The Great Republic of The United States of America.
Meanwhile, I think The Gavinator (Gavin Newsom) is pre-selected as the next President. I mean, come on! He's super-handsome (in a barfy kind of way), and he been sucking China's toes for some time now, forcing the "CCP" ways into California hard and heavy. Wokies love him! Just my thoughts.
I predict this will be your new "Top" essay ;)
Good read. Thank you for giving more food for thought.