New Year’s Predictions — What to Look for in 2020
Before I get to my annual predictions for the new year (here from my long-weekend perch in the crisp Colorado high country), I wanted to take a second to thank you all for your readership (well, maybe not those of you who typically just read the first paragraph of my columns, then angrily scroll down to the comment section. 😉) It means a lot that you take the time for my work, and I hope you're having a great holiday season with family and friends.
There were few dull moments in 2019, and I expect 2020 to be even more needlessly dramatic (because that's how we roll in America these days). With lots of topics to cover, I've gone through the painstaking task of keeping my number of predictions to just four (because five would have been too predictable).
See what I did there? Anyway, enjoy!
Know your audience
In May, as part of a sweeps-month effort, Fox News will debut an 8-part weekend mini-series entitled “Trumped by an Angel.” The show will star the popular social-media duo of Diamond and Silk as angels tasked from Heaven to bring pro-Trump messages and guidance to anti-Trump liberals and dispirited conservatives who have yet to accept our president as their one true god and savior.
Each episode will end with a Trump detractor of the week recognizing the error of his or her ways, reversing long-held positions and personal standards of decency, pledging holy servitude to the president, and receiving a complimentary Trumpy Bear (the show’s sponsor) from Diamond and Silk.
Special guest stars will include Sean Hannity (playing Slobert De Niro, a brash Hollywood A-lister), Jesse Watters (playing Grim Acosta, a chief White House correspondent for a left-leaning, low-rated cable news network), and Greg Gutfeld (playing Choke Romney, a former Republican presidential candidate and current U.S. Senator, who repeatedly commits the cardinal sin of directing honest, principled criticism at our president).
The ratings success of Trumped by an Angel (especially in the coveted 75+ age demographic) will compel other networks to add modern political themes to their fall lineups. The surprise hit of the season will be an all-male CBS television adaptation of the 2000 film, Coyote Ugly, starring former presidential hopeful Beto O'Rourke as a failed politician who parlays his trademark campaign maneuver of negotiating the tops of bars and tables into a successful career as a pub dancer.
The devil is in the details
In early fall, contract-renewal negotiations between CNN and Brian Stelter will stall when Stelter inquires about the network seemingly changing his job title.
“So…they want me to be a Media Analyst now?” Stelter will confusedly ask an unnamed CNN producer.
Baffled by Stelter’s question, the producer will pull up the commentator’s previous multi-year contract and identify an unfortunate spellcheck mishap, in which the intended word “Analyst” had inadvertently been replaced with the word “Apologist.”
Believing that he had been working for the network as a Media Apologist since 2013 (and performing that job with distinction), Stelter will ask his CNN colleagues why they let him defend and blow off the abundant mistakes and biases of the mainstream media for “7 freakin’ years” without ever saying a word to him about it.
An internal probe will be launched to determine the answer to that question, and later reveal that no one at the network actually watches Stelter’s show, Reliable Sources. Furthermore, it will be discovered that the only people who actually do watch the program are Fox News producers and conservative bloggers looking for content to fill up their “Liberals Gone Crazy!” segments.
Stelter will leave CNN in late November, after reading up on the role of Media Analyst and deciding "it sounds like a lot of work."
“I need your clothes, your boots, and your motorcycle”
With curiosity piqued by the below observation about the tweeting habits of millennial political activist Charlie Kirk, an anonymous Twitter employee will run a series of diagnostic tests on Kirk’s account and make a shocking discovery.
It will turn out that Kirk’s tweets are not the result of manual entry, but rather a simple algorithm keying off of Breitbart.com headlines (using an RSS feed). The revelation will explain the complete absence of irony and self-awareness in each Kirk tweet, and also advance speculation that Kirk himself is an artificial life-form sent from the future by George Soros’s technologically preserved brain to assist in a diabolical effort to replace core principles of conservatism with nothing more than lame memes, glaring double standards, and incessant "lib owning."
Back to the intergalactic well
Following the extraordinary popularity of the super cute “Baby Yoda” character from season one of The Mandalorian, Disney+ will decide to up the ante in season two by introducing another toddler version of a notable Star Wars character: Jabba the Hutt.
“Baby Jabba,” as fans will creatively name him, will show up in episode #3 when bounty hunter Din Djarin returns to the desert planet of Tatooine in search of fellow Mandalorian, Boba Fett, who was last seen there.
Upon discovering that Mr. Fett was devoured by a giant sarlacc as part of an outlandish action sequence five years earlier, Djarin will leave Tatoonie with an unexpected stowaway who had waddled aboard his ship following the scent of a pot of three-day-old Gungan stew in the ship's galley.
Now finding himself the surrogate father of two unexpected kids — one dealing with serious child obesity issues (including limited mobility), Djarin will be forced to make some tough choices between his family and career. He’ll ultimately elect to scale his bounty hunting profession down to part-time, while establishing a successful work-from-home business around the knitting and sale of unique clothing accessories for wookie youths and protocol droids.
Lastly…
In all seriousness, I wish you all a happy and healthy new year. Whatever disagreements we may have in 2020 (and as in recent years, I predict there will be many), I’m hoping we can approach them with relative civility and — at times — a good laugh.