This YEAR in the New Normal – 2023 Edition

Our first This Week of 2022 was dedicated not to reviewing the past but considering the future, and this year will begin just the same.

What will the major narratives of 2023 be? What minor stories will be brought into the limelight while previously major plot lines are shunted backstage?

Much of 2022 was spent explaining heart attacks that hadn’t happened yet, as we guessed they would. But you didn’t need to be a pre-cog to see that coming.

Likewise, last year we predicted the massive increase in the discussion of central bank digital currencies…however we didn’t see the “war” in Ukraine coming.

Predicting the future is a hit-and-miss game.

That said, what will 2023 bring?

1. More war and a nuclear near miss

The biggest narrative shift of 2022 was “the war” knocking “the pandemic” off the front pages. However the Russian invasion of Ukraine hit the same stumbling block as Covid in the end – people stopped listening. Why exactly that is – if they lacked a “sense of personal threat” or some other aspect of the narrative – is for another at another time.

For whatever reason, the narrative’s energy burned out fairly fast. It has gone stale, which means a good portion of 2023 will be about bringing it back to life.

That could mean a couple of different things – wars getting wider or hotter.

The war getting wider would mean involving other countries – probably not directly in Ukraine. But some other conflict that NATO troops can get teeth into.

Writing in the Guardian just this morning, Simon Tisdall – the man with the itchiest trigger finger in Western journalism – gleefully rattles off all the many places NATO could start having a little bomb-related fun of its own, including the old favourites: Iran, Syria and Afghanistan.

His broader warning is about China, most especially the possibility it may seize Taiwan by force. China engaging in its own personal Ukraine would certainly reinvigorate the flagging war cheerleaders – on both sides.

That’s the war getting wider, the war getting hotter would mean a direct threat of nuclear conflict, a risk the press was routinely talking up in the closing stages of 2022. Not just from Russia, but now from North Korea too.

There won’t be a nuclear strike (almost certainly), but any near miss will be followed by a chorus of “that was too close” and “we need to change before it’s too late” from the media.

Whichever way the war “problem” evolves, the war “solution” is going one of two ways: Either the “new cold war” will divide us entirely into a false “multipolar world”, or we’ll start seeing journalists and pundits decrying the “old fashioned” conflicts which put “nationalism ahead of the global good”, and calling for an “empowered international organization” to “put an end to war”.

Pick your poison essentially, two near-identical hemispherical governments, or one global government.

2. Encouraging state dependence

Writing on Politics Home a few days ago, Baroness Bennett of the UK’s House of Lords headlined:

My New Year’s Wish….Universal Basic Income

It’s far from the only pro-UBI article doing the rounds recently. Mostly confined to slightly smaller outlets, but nevertheless, the current is there.

Many countries – including Germany, Finland and some US states – have either run UBI trials or plan on running them soon.

A universal basic income would essentially be a long-term replacement for the “lockdown subsidies” – The payments made to the self-employed and small business owners after “the pandemic” killed their businesses.

It’s another WEF-backed initiative, with the forum’s website hosting articles claiming “Covid means we need UBI” since as early as April 2020.

It’s not hard to see the appeal of UBI from a tyrant’s point of view, in that it’s a system where every single citizen is entirely dependent on the state for their livelihood.

The destruction of the self-employed and small business owners, combined with UBI would essentially create a system where you either work for a mega-corporation or you’re paid for by the state, completely wiping out the ability (and perhaps the desire) to be independent.

Combine a nationwide UBI scheme with programmable digital currency, “personal carbon footprints” and social credit systems, and you have a recipe for a truly dystopian society.

3. Pushing “meat alternatives” to kids

It’s no secret that replacing meat with *ahem* “alternative proteins” is a major part of the Great Reset agenda. There’s a reason “you vill eat ze bugs” has become a meme, after all it’s right there on the World Economic Forum’s to-do list for 2023:

6. Shift to healthier, more sustainable diets five times faster by lowering per capita consumption of ruminant meat to the equivalent of two burgers per week across Europe, the Americas and Oceania. Governments and businesses need to promote low-carbon diet shifts.

But how will they do this? The resistance to the idea in adults is both understandable and widespread, so they will probably focus on getting kids into the idea (they actually already started).

With that in mind, the first signs of this rollout will not be about insects or lab-grown meat (which the FDA approved last month) or yeast sludge…but about free school meals.

As the economy crumbles and parents struggle, politicians will start campaigning for   free school meals for all children.

Once that policy is in place, columns will appear screaming about school meals needing to “teach children about climate change”, or “feed our children responsibly”. Then they will quietly change the rules about what schools should put in their food, and the parents will probably never know.

There are early signs of this coming over the horizon.

BONUS: Renting Christmas

We are all dully familiar with the line “you will own nothing and be happy”, probably to the point the powers-that-shouldn’t-be wish they’d never used it.

Well, now it’s getting a facelift – the same sentiment in happier-sounding words: You will rent everything and be happy.

There are plenty of articles about the benefits of renting clothes, making money renting out your clothes to other people, and fighting climate change by renting clothes (guess which one of these links is to The Guardian).

The Princess of Wales did her part by (supposedly) renting the dress she wore to the Earthshot Prize in Boston.

Personally, I love that one of the richest women in the world can fly a private jet halfway around the world just to sit in an audience and clap for two hours, and get praised for “sustainability” because she’s only going to wear her dress once. [Note: having your servants buy a dress, wearing it once and then throwing it out is not “renting”.]

If you really think dear old Kate has any intention of “owning nothing”, well, then I have a bridge you can…rent.

It’s not just clothing though, in other articles we’re told it’s possible to rent an entire Christmas, from decorations to trees…and even the gifts you give to your children.

After all, who doesn’t look forward to the post-Christmas tradition of prising a teddy bear out of a crying child’s hands and taking it back to the shop?

Expect this campaign to pick up pace through 2023, and to be routine by the time next Christmas rolls around.

Oh, and buy solid media.

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All told, it looks like OffG is in for a busy year, and we didn’t even mention Pfizer’s planned “universal flu vaccine” (another mRNA shot), another wave of “domestic terror” crackdowns or the ever-present climate change agenda.

Good times ahead. Happy New Year everyone.

Our next edition of This Week in the New Normal will be a return to the regular weekly round-up, if you have a headline or story you think should be mentioned, post in the comments below or email it to your submissions under the subject line “this week in the new normal”.