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The one sure way to look like a genius when making predictions is to say the upcoming year will make the closing year look relatively calm. The reason is that recency bias works in favor of such a prediction. Everyone thinks now is crazier than the past, because they mostly forgot about how they felt in the past. The other reason it works in this age is things are getting increasingly weird.

That is one I can put in the win column. The theme to last year’s predictions was that things would get crazier and that is objectively true. While I did not specifically call Kanye West becoming America’s leading white nationalist, the mere fact that it happened confirms that we have reached a new level of crazy. We do not live in interesting times. We live in an age of general lunacy.

This cuts both ways. In an age of lunacy, you feel free to make bold improbable predictions about what comes next, because why not? My call on Biden was crazy but having a dementia patient in the White House is crazier still. Why not have a palace coup to remove him and the DMV lady? That turned out to be all wrong as Biden and DMV lady seem to be permanent fixtures now.

I got the international scene wrong as well, mostly because I did not go anywhere near bold enough in my predictions. I always underestimate the lunacy of the neocons, mostly because normal people never fully grasp evil. It turns out to have been a wackier year internationally than I thought was possible. In this regard, 2022 will be remembered as a momentous year for the world.

I also got the midterms wrong, at least partially wrong. I thought I was going out on a limb with that one, but it turned out to be too cautious. I thought demographics and disgust would begin to catch up with the Republicans, but not as quickly as it seems to be happening. Turnout took a hit in 2022 compared to previous midterms and it was almost all on the Republican side of things.

With regards to elections, 2022 may go down as the year when people internalized the wholesale corruption in the system. Among normal people it is now assumed that our elections are rigged. Some take it too far and there are the grifters like Dinesh D’Souza trying to monetize the cynicism, but most normal people now accept that our elections are no longer on the level. That is not a small thing.

Probably the biggest miss for the year was my predictions for myself. I did not escape Lagos and I did not finish my book. It was a year of big changes and those changes threw a wrench in my plans. When you have a tight schedule, change almost always means a deleterious disruption in the work schedule. My early prediction for next year is that I will remain behind on everything.

On the positive side of things, I did get the economics right. I hit the Bitcoin and equities markets calls pretty much on the nose, so to speak. I said Bitcoin would lose 50% of its value and it lost a bit more than that over the year. I was a little aggressive on the stock market, but that was due to de-dollarization globally. Those dollars have to go somewhere so they went into stocks late in the year.

Probably the best call of the year was the continued decline of Conservative Inc. and its media organs. This is something not getting a ton of attention, but official conservatism is on its way to the dustbin of history. When Claremont grandees are referencing dissident writers, you know that behind the scenes there is a great deal of handwringing about what is happening among the Dirt People.

The same can be said for the media as a whole. It is looking like Donald Trump was to the media what the compact disc was for music. People repurchased their music inventory on the new format, which masked the real decline in the market. The same was true of Trump. People paid attention to the media because he was at war with the media, but now that he is gone, interest in mass media has collapsed.

Every year, the biggest misses in the prediction game are the things that happened which no one imagined happening. No one saw Ukraine becoming a global struggle to keep the American empire alive well past its expiry date. Some predicted war in Ukraine and some even thought it would carry on for a while, but no one saw the great proxy war for the survival of the American empire as a result.

Similarly, no one saw the Twitter fiasco coming. Even now, no one is noting the elite war on Elon Musk for his apostacy. They have been attacking the value of his companies in an effort to punish him for his Twitter takeover. Of course, no one thought that an advocate for child molestation would turn out to be their chief censor. No one thought the FBI was integrated into Twitter either.

That may be the biggest miss of 2022. Most American have now learned that there is a secret police in America and they spend most of their time spying on Americans and manipulating what they see and hear. When establishment figures like Victor Davis Hanson are shocked by what has been revealed about the FBI, you know we have turned some important corner in the life of the country.

In the end, it was a strange year. Maybe it will be viewed as a pivotal year or simply part of a pivotal moment that started in 2015 when Trump came down the escalator. The one thing we can be sure about is 2023 will be even stranger than 2022. The trick is in imagining something that seems impossible today, and then think about how it could become normalized by this time next year.

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