Nailing My Colours To The Mast
AKA predictions about stuff in the USA, UK and France
I have some predictions. I could be wrong and one will likely happen in less than two months so it will be easy to see if I’m wrong. I’m going to start with the USA. HollyMathNerd1 bets that in a few days the spin is going to be this:
I predict that we will see the following narrative develop, and further, that it will develop whether Biden stays in the office and on the ticket, or not. The narrative will be: that Kamala Harris has been acting as President all along, so it doesn’t really matter what kind of shape Joe Biden is in. If he stays in, nothing changes by re-electing him. If he leaves, we should elevate Harris to ensure that nothing changes by electing her to her own term.
She’s far from alone in expecting that we are about to see an attempt to get Commie La Whoreish (s)elected as the next president.2 There are various good reasons why the Dims will try to do so. First (shockingly) it’s actually the easy, correct and legal step. Declare Biden unfit under the 25th Ammendment and she slips right in. Second it avoids the self-inflicted wound of kicking the DEI candidate off the ticket by replacing her with someone with fewer victim points. Third, and relatedly, all sorts of deadlines and campaign financing rules can be easily adhered to - though possibly not all.
So despite the fact that she got her start in politics the old fashioned way - on her knees and back - and is therefore destined to be (dis)respected by all the world leaders she meets. And moreover, despite the fact that everyone, who has ever worked for her, hates her and not forgetting the word salad speaking and all the other negatives (such as her apparent IQ), I agree she’s going to be the Dims Plan B now that Biden has been shown to have the brain of a particularly rotten zucchini.
But I have an additional prediction, which I wrote as a comment on Holly’s substack.
Joe Biden is going to die before election day
Why do I think Slow Joe is about to die?
Because his minders, aka Dr Jill, and his few remaining braincells are refusing to retire gracefully and swiftly. This is actually a problem because various state election laws have deadlines as I noted in a previous substack3. Those deadlines come thick and fast and may have already passed in some states. If the Dims can’t put Harris (or someone else) in as candidate in key states they effectively cede the election to Trump because a write-in candidate is highly unlikely to prevail so they are highly motivated to find a way to get their candidate on the ballot everywhere as the real Dim candidate.
However those deadlines do not apply and/or are different if the candidate is dead. I’m not totally up on the nitty gritty of state election laws but my understanding is that the deadline to replace a dead candidate with another one is on the order of 30-60 days (i.e. September sometime, possibly as early as Sep 6) wheras the deadline to nominate a candidate or change one is early August for Ohio and, as noted in the link, may already have passed in Wisconsin. If I’m right then President Biden has a life expectancy of no more than a couple of months.
It’s not just the legal issue, there’s also the PR aspect. There are all kinds of ways that a sudden death of a president can be spun to extract maximum sympathy for new President Whoreish, to pause campaigning and halt coverage of Trump rallies etc.
In addition the Dim convention in Chicago at the end of August appears to be destined to be an utter shitshow, making the 1968 Chicago convention look like an orderly event with a few minor peaceful protests. The Dims really need to avoid that, and having their candidate pop his cloggs a day or two before hand would be a great excuse for cancelling it and moving to some hurried virtual convention that swiftly anoints Whoreish as the candidate without any embarrassing protests from the Queers for Palestine crowd.
This also potentially allows Harris to avoid the second presidential debate using the excuse that she’s busy taking over as president, needs time to mourn and so on. Given how poorly she fared in the 2020 primary debates, any excuse for her to avoid debating Trump is a good one for her chances of success.
If I were Joe I’d be very cautious about windows, swimming pools, balconies and other places where accidents can happen. I’d also be really nervous about medicines and unexpected replacement nurses. But Joe probably can’t remember enough of anything to be concerned.
Prediction 2 France
President Le Pen after the next presidential election and an RP absolute majority in the National Assembly.
Unlike the previous one, this is not a very bold prediction. In fact probably quite a few other people are making the same prediction.
The left and center deliberately collaborated to ensure that the RN failed to win a majority in this weekend’s second round election. They are however the single largest party because the center and left groups were already coalitions of various parties.
The way it works is like this: the left are going to insist on being the dominant voice in some coalition to form a government for the next few years and that’s going to be a total disaster. To the extent that legislation is passed it will be divisive and probably economically disastrous. There will be strikes and protests as a result. There will probably be Islamist terror attacks that the (left wing part of the) government will fail to condemn, which may lead to more protests. The disconnect between the Parisiens /urban elite and everyone else will become ever clearer as will the contempt the former have for the latter.
At the next presidential election Mme Le Pen is going to be able to point to clear concrete examples of how screwed up they are and how Macron Le Con’s idea for a snap election let them in.
She’ll win the presidency. Aside from anything else Macron is probably not going to stand for a third term and there are basically no credible centrist candidates with any wide support so the presidential election will be Le Pen vs the antisemitic commie Jean-Luc Mélenchon. And the latter will have had a couple of years in the spotlight to show just how odious he is.
The once she wins either she calls elections or those elections are mandatory (I forget whether they changed the law or not, it was debated). Then the RN and a few assorted allies will use the same arguments to gain a majority in the Assembly too. Depending on how much of a mess the left make of governing (my guess is a lot) and the fact that almost every other political party (maybe not Les Republicans) will be in government the choice to toss the idiots out leaves the RN as more or less the only option so they’ll win by a landslide and may possibly get as many as a hundred seats by winning more than 50% in the first round which is pretty much unheard of. The establishment will bleat about how they are the fascist threat and the voters are going to think that if the idiots who wrecked the country think they are that bad then maybe there’s something good about them.
Having said that, I don’t expect the RN to fix France. France is probably not fixable and the RN’s policies (presuming they remain similar to what they campaigned on this time) if anything seem destined to make things worse rather than better. But on the positive site they will be less bad than the left wing policies that will get them elected.
Prediction 3 the UK
Various related ones.
The first is that Reform will win just about every by-election south of Scotland. The second is that Reform will become the actual effective opposition despite only having 5 seats in parliament (which BTW is a lot fewer than I expected/hoped for). The third is that at the next general election it will be Reform vs everyone else.
As has been noted by various people (e.g. this substack4) Labour didn’t exactly win the election last week as much as the Tories lost it big time.
So why isn’t this the huge victory that Labour claims it to be? After all they have just won 412 seats, up 211 from the previous election.
In fact, fewer people actually voted for Labour than they did in the last disastrous (‘worst result since the ‘30s’) 2019 election where the Conservatives won a huge majority. Five years ago, under Jeremy Corbyn, Labour received 10,269,051 votes, winning only 202 seats, whilst this time, under Keir Starmer, they only received 9,698,409 votes.
This was both because of voter apathy (possibly the lowest turnout for a century) and due to the two main parties only receiving 58% of the votes cast (again, the worst result for a century).
Farage’s Reform party got the upper end of my expectations for vote share (14%) but got fewer seats (5) than I expected/hoped for (~20). Some of this was due to some dirty tricks that appear to have been played on Reform but it was also, undoubtedly, due to the short notice of the election meaning that Reform were not properly prepared.
With 5 seats and a seventh of the vote share Reform have proven themselves to be a legitimate party and they will be able to make the case, as I suggested in prior substacks, that they are the only party willing to stand up for the interests of the (generally white) working classes.
That’s going to be a good base to build on and for by-elections that is likely to lead to wins. What Reform will need to do is run a solid Get Out The Vote campaign to convince the apathetic non-voters that it is better to vote Reform rather than not vote. If it does this successfully then a very large number of constituencies are going to be in play because voter turn out in this election was a pathetic 60% and turn out in many by-elections is lower (e.g. all the “red wall” ones that the Tories won in 2019 spring to mind).
In seats where Reform came second or third, if it can get even half the apathetic non-voters to vote for them then even if the voters for the other parties remain the same Reform will likely win by a good margin.
This leads to the opposition prediction (Update: Konstantin Kisin makes similar arguments5). The policy differences between Labour, the Lib Dims, the Conservatives and even the Greens are more like putting a different emphasis on the same policy list than trying anything actually different. The word Uniparty is becoming common in descriptions of the UK’s major political parties. The only party to actually have clearly different policies is Reform. Now there is no doubt that the BBC and significant other chunks of the UK’s MSM will do their best to ignore Reform but Reform has shown a grasp of Social Media that the other parties lack and it will undoubtedly get some coverage from elements of the press such as the Daily Mail, the Torygraph and probably the Sun. The result will be that it will be able to get its message out and quite likely the disdain of the MSM for Reform will be seen as a positive rather than a negative by likely Reform voters. In fact Farage is likely to be able to get additional news coverage by calling out the snubs and insults he will get from the BBC and the like.
This leads to the third UK prediction, that when Labour calls the next election (which could be five years from now, but might well be sooner depending), Reform UK will be the one party all the others dump on, and as a result it will be the one party the haters of the Uniparty glom on to. I make no prediction as to whether Reform will win in that next election, what I do expect is that the various Uniparty candidates (and voters) in many constituencies will do the same thing the centrists and lefties did in France and attempt to coalesce around a single non-Reform candidate. Some of these tactical voting plans will work, others will fail. Meanwhile, presuming Reform is able to attract the apathetic as well as the non-Uniparty supporters it will likely have (like the RN in France) a solid chunk of support that is much higher than the 14% it got this year. How high? About double (i.e. ~30%) seems quite plausible nationwide with significantly higher support in certain constuencies. Indeed it already got 30% in some of the seats it came second in this time around and in many constituencies 30% of the vote - particularly if it includes voters who did not vote this time - will be enough to come first assuming the various uniparty voters fail to correctly vote tactically.
Reform getting the roughly 300 seats it needs to form a government will be a challenge. Reform getting enough that it and the Tories can form a coalition is entirely feasible.
Elder Abuse
A couple of weeks ago, on June 14th, Joe Biden issued a presidential proclamation warning about the dangers of “Elder Abuse”. At the time that seemed amusing, particularly juxtaposed with his antics in Italy the same day when he head butted the pope and then wandered off to chat to a random paratrooper.
France, your last paragraph concerning her; I'd apply to the rest of the West, probably not fixable. The positive as you noted, perhaps things will be less bad west wide and world wide.
& no, Buck Fiden didn't mercy kill himself.
Interesting and chilling, these predictions. If Joe were to get another covid-vax 'booster', that would probably do the trick too. Here is Kamala Harris, in her own words during a 2020 campaign rally: 'And once he's [Trump] and we have regained our rightful place at the White House, look out if you supported him and endorsed his actions, because we'll be coming for you next. You will feel the vengeance of a nation. No stone will be left unturned as we seek you out in every corner of this great nation. For it is you who have betrayed us.' https://darkfutura.substack.com/p/fracturing-identity-at-the-altar