Significant financial, economic, political, cultural, and geopolitical developments occurred in 2023.

On the cultural front, 2023 may be the year that the tide started to shift against the woke insanity.

BlackRock's Fink dropped ESG. Woke movies continue to bomb at theaters. Bud Light, Target, and Disney continue to feel the pain of deliberately alienating their customer base.

What's your take on the cultural developments in 2023?

Doug Casey: There are always reactions to major trends. These things are worth noting, but considering the virulence of the woke movement, the reaction has been tepid. There's always a rearguard fighting for things as they are. And that's wonderful because the Wokesters want to overturn the entire culture much the same way as the Jacobins overturned it in revolutionary France, the Bolsheviks overturned the culture in Russia, the Red Guards in China, or Pol Pot did in Cambodia.

The Wokesters are potentially just as dangerous because their way of thinking is everywhere in the West. They're similar to the movements I've just mentioned in that they're stridently against free speech, free thought, free markets, tradition, and limited government—nothing new there. But they've weaponized gender and race as well. They're virulent, humorless, and puritanical. They see themselves as the wave of the future, but they've only repackaged the notions of Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler.