Daniel Greenfield: reasons for optimism

 

Daniel Greenfield at FrontPageMag has real reasons for optimism.  Here’s an extract:

. . . Few people across the country are feeling optimistic about 2023. The old jokes about 2021 and 2022 have long since worn thin. Inflation is draining incomes, insecurity is growing and the lack of confidence in a better future has hit numbers that we may have never seen before among Americans in modern times.

Times are hard.

But hope paradoxically comes from hard times. Comfort breeds complacency. The seeds of the tragedy we’re living through were sown when most people decided that they could take a vacation from history, from thinking about what their leaders were doing, what was being taught in their schools, and from politics.

No answer was ever going to emerge from the false hopes of a comfortable society.

The pain that’s being experienced is something that no one should welcome, but it will get worse. And the only hope will come from that. As we’ve seen in the midterms, people are worried, angry and afraid. But the lessons still haven’t been learned. Life can get worse than the price of staples going up by the double digits.

If things go on at this rate, it will. And economics are the least of it.

The hard times we’re living through are nothing compared to what some previous generations experienced. And while I hope that things won’t have to get worse, wake-up calls are painful miserable things.

Mr Greenfield concludes:

We are living through history. And we’re not passive actors in it. We can seize the moment. We can fight for change. The guard rails are off. The system is coming apart. But we’re not doomed to be passive actors in it. Unlike so much of the last generation, what we do can actually make a difference if we make the right choices.

2023 is ours to win or lose.

It’s a very good read.  Click here.

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Neil Oliver on the New Year

 

Here’s part of Neil Oliver’s weekend monologue to ring in the New Year:

In a few hours, we welcome 2023, but as far as our leaders and their lackeys are concerned it might as well be Groundhog Day.

I look at the headlines on this last day of 2022 and what do I see? Covid, Ukraine and Climate Change. Folks nuttier than anything found in a selection box are talking about bringing back face masks. God help us. Let’s remind everyone for the umpteenth time that Covid is now no more dangerous to most than the common cold. But still, the talk is of the pandemic, same old, same old.

. . .

I honestly feel the relentless push to keep us down, with fear of pestilence, fear of war, fear of the ending of the world, is the equivalent of a sustained beating designed, once and for all, to knock the last of the spirit out of us so that finally we shut up and do as we’re told.

But here’s the thing: that spirit is not vanquished. Instead, and on the contrary, in the hearts and minds of enough of us, that spirit has been ignited into flame.

. . .

The more each of us speaks to out in the world, the better. The more we share, the more reassurance we provide one another, and the stronger we are. That’s where the hope lies, and the promise of brighter days sooner or later.

. . .

The Hobbit Frodo Baggins feels all but overwhelmed by the enormity of the task ahead of him and tells the wizard Gandalf,

“I wish it need not have happened in my time.”

“So do I,” replies Gandalf. “And so do all who live to see such times. But it is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

Happy New Year, to all dear friends and fellow travelers.

Read the rest of the transcript here.

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New World Order or Freedom?

 

In his America First column, J B Shurk gives us reasons for optimism.  Here’s an extract:

Has the Great Reset Reminded Us
Why Freedom’s Worth the Fight?

. . .

Only when the U.S. government accused half the American population of being “domestic terrorists” for their political beliefs did many finally understand how dangerous the national security surveillance state had become.  Only when it became clear that Big Tech and Big Government were actively working together to censor Americans’ free speech and punish certain points of view did many finally grasp how serious the threats to liberty now are.  Like some weary beast waking up from a deep slumber, the American people have begun stretching, looking around, and rejecting a lot of what they see.  A growing contingent even realizes that the freedoms they hold most dear have been under attack for quite some time.

Now, I wish that none of this discomfort were necessary in the struggle for human liberty.  I wish most people would permit history to be such a stinging reminder of how difficult it is to achieve and maintain freedom that they would never carelessly let it slip from their grasp.  I wish that humans were impervious to smooth-talking politicians who promise gifts in exchange for servitude.  I wish that Memorial Day, Veterans’ Day, and Independence Day were sufficient to remind those who have benefited from the comforts of freedom without risking anything for its blessings not to throw away carelessly what they have yet to defend.  Alas, it does seem as if human nature demands a little self-inflicted misery from time to time so that those who have not suffered can learn the costs of ensuring that liberty lasts.

The battles taking shape today, after all, involve nothing less than what it means to be human.  On one side sit the oligarchs, communists, and New World Order globalist types who think of human beings as nothing more than cogs or inputs to be used, manipulated, and discarded.  On the other side are those of us who understand life and liberty as precious, sacred gifts that deserve enduring respect.  The Great Resetters and Build Back Better enthusiasts see people as digital ones and zeroes that can be made to obey society’s programming codes.  Friends of freedom, on the other hand, understand both free will and moral intuition as the hallmarks of human existence.  Communism and its global government derivatives seek to deny individual choice.  Liberty-lovers know that without individual choice, there can be no real life. . . .

Read the rest here.  I just hope Mr Shurk is correct -- that there are now enough Americans who see what's happening in Biden's Build Back Better administration. 

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Memorial Day weekend: reasons to be optimistic

Neil Oliver observes the goings-on in Davos -- watching the World Economic Forum and World Health Organization billionaires plotting and planning their New World Order. And he is of the opinion that things are not going their way.  His weekly monologue is up at Conservative Treehouse.  If you prefer a written transcript, it’s also at the link here.  And it begins:

The usual suspects have been in Davos again, at the World Economic Forum overseen by Klaus Schwab – the few hundred of the most unimaginably rich gathered in one place to fantasize together about what the several billions of us ought to be forced to do in order to make those billionaires’ lives better.

Those poor billionaires – for whom everything on Earth might finally be perfect, if only someone would invent the vacuum cleaner big enough to suck every last one of us peasants, inconsequential specks of dust that we are, into outer space once and for all.

While listening to whichever one on stage is pontificating about this or that technological advance, or about how better to structure civilization itself, I find it best to imagine they have the high pitched, excitable voices of children – like in those TV adverts for chewy, jelly sweeties.

When I do that, I am reassured by their evident ridiculousness, their patent lack of a grasp on the reality of what this human species of ours is all about.

Read the rest (or watch) here.  Many reasons to be optimistic.  Enjoy the Memorial Day weekend. 

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