What Lies Ahead

There’s a little bit of wordplay in the title of this post. That’s all I’m going to say about that.

It’s the first day of a new year. Having failed to get my act together in time to do the Year-in-Review / Året-der-gik post with which I’d hope to close out the annus horribilis 2020, I can still redeem myself with a 2021 Year-in-Preview / Året-der-kommer post.

Laying out my predictions for the next twelve months is also a down payment on next December: it gives me an easy out with a year-end post where I can look back at these predictions and assess my clairvoyance. (The title of that post will be “I told you so.”)

Let’s go.

In just a few days (next Tuesday), Republican senatorial candidates David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler will both win in the Georgia runoff elections. Because that allows Republicans to keep their Senate majority, there will be big think pieces from virtually every establishment media outlet explaining how the Senate is an outdated relic of the patriarchy and must be dissolved.

Joe Biden‘s inauguration on January 20th will make history as the nation’s first drive-in inauguration: CNN will taunt outgoing President Trump by highlighting the fact that it is the most cars ever to have attended an inauguration. The traditional inaugural balls and dinners will also be car-only affairs, leading to predictable tragedy on the dance floors.

There will be reports from an impoverished province in southern China of peculiar side effects to one of their own covid-19 vaccines; the World Health Organization will assure the world that these are isolated cases of no real significance.

On his first day in office, Joe Biden will sign an executive order conferring statehood on Puerto Rico, the District of Columbia, and Baltimore’s 33rd Street YMCA, opening the door to a possible Democrat majority in the Senate. While Congressional Republicans immediately request a court injunction against the unconstitutional move, 17 conservative counties in New York and California will declare themselves independent states and demand conservative Senators be appointed immediately. In retaliation, 23 progressive counties in Texas and Florida will declare independent statehood and demand progressive Senators be appointed immediately. By mid-February, there will be a total of 176 new states demanding recognition.

Having extended Denmark’s covid lockdowns first through January and then February, Mette Frederiksen will announce that lockdowns will have to continue until April 15. With the Danish economy close to total collapse, the government will attempt to save the country by selling Greenland to the United States.

In a surprising reprise of his performance at the 2020 Emmy Awards, Andrew Cuomo will sweep the Golden Globes in February.

In late March, Greenland’s capital Nuuk will be swarmed with American political activists, lobbyists, and special interests urging the new territory to declare itself a state, or several states. American media outlets will establish permanent operations in Nuuk; American fast food franchises, retailers, and other businesses will quickly establish themselves to service them.

The murder trial of George Floyd that begins in March will end in early April: because prosecutors insisted on a charge of murder instead of manslaughter, the jury will find the primary defendant not guilty. Peaceful demonstrations will break out across the country, resulting in several hundred deaths and more than ten billion dollars of damage in the month of April alone.

Vice President Kamala-Harris will announce that President Joe Biden has authorized her to sign an executive order banning civilian ownership of firearms. The order calls for an expansion of Health and Human Services division, headed by the “Save Our Children” Czar Beto O’Rourke, to begin confiscating all 350 million firearms owned by civilians. Court challenges are filed immediately, but the program rolls out anyway with the enthusiastic support of the media.

Also in April, Andrew Cuomo will sweep the Oscars.

In early May, the CCP will announce that Guizhou and Guangxi provinces are being closed for renovations and that there’s nothing to worry about. The World Health Organization will issue a tweet stating that there is actually no evidence of anything to worry about anywhere, and that it’s racist to suggest there is.

A YouTube video from Guangxi province that appears to show a group of staggering zombies descend upon and ultimately devour the brains of a gas station attendant will generate over a hundred million views in just 48 hours, but YouTube will then block the video at the request of the CCP. Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram also block the video on their own platforms. In a joint appearance before an emergency session of the U.S. Senate intelligence committee, Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg are pressed for an explanation by Ted Cruz: Dorsey responds succinctly: “就是这样.”

Vice President Kamala Harris will announce on April 23rd that the Harris-Biden administration will combat the xenophobia being directed against China by welcoming all flights from Guangxi province.

Having finally migrated all of his business operations from California to Texas, on April 24th Elon Musk will immediately begin migrating all of his operations from Texas to Greenland.

All zombie-themed books, movies, and television shows will be removed from sales and circulation and dropped from all streaming content providers in most western nations to prevent zombie shaming; and sharing them on the internet will be made impossible by Google. Both Apple and Microsoft will modify their OS auto-correct features to replace every instance of the word “zombie” with the phrase “alternatively vaccinated person.”

While accepting his surprising first place award from Eurovision, Andrew Cuomo will announce that he is declaring New York a sanctuary state for the Guangxi refugees, explaining that the Statue of Liberty demands no less of him. The Swedish and Norwegian delegations at Eurovision spontaneously award him a Nobel Prize.

Because Denmark is by then almost fully vaccinated, the annual music event Distortion is permitted in Copenhagen in June. This is bad timing, given the arrival at Langelinie one week earlier of a cruise ship from China.

It will be at about this time that China announces that the renovations to Guangxi and Guizhou provinces have been successfully completed and that they will therefore now be reset by means of a series of controlled nuclear blasts.

The International Atomic Energy Agency will issue a tweet observing that the CCP’s nuking of the two provinces was “by the book” and “commendable.”

In preparation for the rescheduled 2020 Olympics, Japan will have vaccinated its entire population, staffed all hotels and venues with robots, and blocked all travel from China, but in early July the opening ceremony in Tokyo will be disrupted anyway—by Godzilla.

The World Health Organization will issue a tweet stressing that Godzilla is not and has never been a zombie, and should in fact be referred to by his Japanese name Gojira.

Also in July, Swedish high school dropout Greta Thunberg will begin to mobilize an army for the invasion of an increasingly Americanized Greenland.

The Roskilde festival will be canceled for the second year in a row, this time due to the zombie apocalypse.

Fresh off his 13-gold-medal Olympic performance in Tokyo, Andrew Cuomo will be interviewed by his brother, CNN host Chris Cuomo. The live interview will take a terrible turn, however, as it will eventually be revealed that Chris had secretly violated his zombie quarantine back in June. The sight of him taking a bite out of his brother’s face on live television, viewed by every single one of CNN’s 612 viewers, will be named the “Iconic Image of the Year” by the American Press Association.

In August, Vice President Kamala Harris will announce that although there is no apparent medical or scientific solution to the zombie apocalypse, studies have revealed that a shotgun blast to the head appears to neutralize zombies immediately. This announcement will come just days after Beto O’Rourke‘s announcement that over 100 million shotguns have already been confiscated and melted down for a massive “Saving Our Children” monument that will take the place of the Washington Monument: a 230-foot statue of David Hogg.

Still smarting from the fallout of the 2020 Mink scandal, Mette Frederiksen will announce in September that the government will not entertain the prospect of liquidating zombies, of whom there are by then over 25,000 across Denmark. The very next day, Inger Støjberg will announce the formation of a new party: Dræb Alle Zombier, or “Kill All Zombies” With the kommunal elections scheduled for November, the Zombie Question becomes the focus of Danish political discourse.

(The Zombie Question will by now have become the focus of political discourse everywhere that political discourse is permitted.)

In mid-September, the cities of San Francisco, Seattle, Baltimore (excepting the 33rd Street YMCA), and Portland declare themselves Zombie Sanctuary Cities.

Sensing an advantage, and eager to defeat the new and rapidly growing DAZ party before it gets too powerful, Mette Frederiksen calls for a Folketing election to accompany the forthcoming kommunal and regional elections. Enhedslisten declares it will not support a Red Bloc government unless it guarantees the implementation of a “12-point Zombie Compassion Plan” that the party has adapted from the “30-point Zombie Compassion Deal” being promoted by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

By the middle of October, all communication will cease between the four American Zombie Sanctuary Cities and the outside world, and movement into and out of the cities will no longer be possible. Mayor Bill de Blasio will therefore declare New York a Zombie Sanctuary city.

On October 14, Greta Thunberg’s Sacred Healing Army of Gaia will set sail from Gothenburg toward Greenland in a massive flotilla of pleasure boats converted for the purpose of an “Environmentally Corrective Invasion.” The flotilla includes the private yachts of numerous American and European celebrities. George Soros and Bill Gates purchase hundreds of millions of dollars worth of carbon credits to offset the environmental impact of the expedition.

In early November, Godzilla will disappear from Japan, only to appear several days later in North Korea. He will never be heard from again. It will later be learned from defectors that Godzilla’s carcass provided the hungry North Koreans over 200,000 kilos of meat.

In the first week of November, the boats of Greta Thunberg’s Sacred Healing Army of Gaia come close enough to Nuuk that Elon Musk will be called upon to provide a defense. In an epic battle lasting approximately seven minutes and eighteen seconds, Musk’s aerial and maritime drone-based seacoast defense system will sink every vessel in the flotilla. Ironically, the sinking of so much tonnage so close to shore will make the “Battle of Tyskernæsset Cape” the single worst environmental disaster in Greenland’s history. Happily, Musk’s aerial and maritime drone-based seacoast salvage and recovery system is able to remediate the area in a matter of weeks.

On the third Tuesday in November, the Blue Bloc will sweep the Danish kommunal, regional, and folketing elections thanks largely to the phenomenal growth of the DAZ party (which owes much to Danes’ exhaustion with the growing zombie problem). Prime Minister Inger Støjberg orders the immediate liquidation of all zombies, and Denmark enters December in something close to pre-2020 normalcy.

Back in America, Vice President Kamala Harris will announce that President Joe Biden has been exposed to zombies and will therefore need to be quarantined in isolation. This is only newsworthy in that the general public will by then have forgotten there was a President Biden.

In December, I will with great pride review the accuracy of these predictions.

Happy New Year.

UPDATE: I originally wrote Pete Buttigieg where it now says Beto O’Rourke; it was always supposed to have been Beto, but I got my gun grabbers mixed up. I also realize there are more than 450 million privately owned firearms in the U.S., but I’ll leave the error because I suspect in the face of an imminent confiscation program at least 100 million would suddenly be reported as discarded anyway.