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How to sum up 2023? Pondering the year gone by, I’m aware of having frequently experienced a sense that America, and to some extent the world, was approaching a day of reckoning – a sense that events on a wide variety of fronts were advancing toward a decisive climax of a yet indeterminate nature. Another way to put this is to say that it was the year in which the enemies of freedom began to practice their perfidy with unprecedented aggressiveness and to purvey their preposterous narrative with a new degree of reckless abandon – even as that perfidy became more transparent to the average American citizen and the narrative seemed to take significant steps toward collapsing.
In 2023, millions of Americans finally recognized that Donald Trump hadn’t been lying or exaggerating about the dangers at the southern border, and that only a bigot could believe in the wisdom of a border wall. The Biden Administration’s frequent claims to the contrary, the southern border is wide open and the Department of Homeland Security and other government agencies are helping armies of illegal aliens to enter the U.S. unvetted and, without asking for proof of identity or putting them through ordinarily security procedures, are flying them to cities around the country to be resettled. Many of these illegals are minors, which means that their federal facilitators are, in effect, child traffickers; others are members of Latin American drug cartels who are responsible for America’s fentanyl crisis – another horror that the Biden administration, far from addressing responsibly, seems incomprehensibly eager to exacerbate. Still other illegals are members of criminal and terrorist organizations who have found their way to the southern border from all over the Eastern Hemisphere.
The authorities at the Department of Homeland Security – whose very name can now be seen as nothing other than a sick joke – have tried to carry out all this human smuggling in secret, but in 2023 the facts began to be reported a good deal more widely than before. Americans who have been subjected for over two decades to absurd procedures at airports, being forced to discard toothpaste and fingernail clippers before getting on a plane, now know that the same people who ordered them to be put through these paces in the name of national security are violating national security every day in a way that you’d think had been devised by America’s most dedicated enemies. As a result, Americans are only beginning to recognize that they’ve been played for dupes, that their trust in their leaders has been outrageously exploited, and that in the years to come they and their posterity will be paying an unimaginable price for those leaders’ traitorous duplicity.
It’s now almost two years since Russia invaded Ukraine, an event that almost certainly wouldn’t have taken place if Trump had still been president. America and its allies have poured billions of dollars into Zelensky’s pockets and have taken in tremendous numbers of Ukrainian refugees, leaving hardly a corner of the Western world where those refugees haven’t strained public services such as housing, schools, and health care. As 2023 wore on, it became increasingly clear to many Americans that the Russian-Ukrainian conflict was not one of pure evil versus pure good. It emerged that opportunities for a brokered peace had been squandered for reasons that remained unclear but smelled nefarious. Increasingly, informed observers acknowledged that aid to Ukraine couldn’t continue indefinitely. And it became more and more obvious that, far from humbling Putin, the West’s continuing support for Ukraine seemed only to have intensified his saber-rattling and made NATO seem less formidable than in years.
Which brings us to China, whose leaders – taking in our manifest military decline under Biden (as illustrated by the Afghanistan debacle and the flagrant wokeness of our recent armed-forces PR) and mindful as they are of their own substantial financial investment in our beloved head of state – may well decide that our entanglement in Ukraine provides the perfect opportunity for an invasion of Taiwan. On both the Russian and Chinese fronts, indeed, there’s a growing awareness among Americans that the world would be a considerably safer and stabler place, and America a stronger actor, with Biden out and Trump back in.
Then there’s the Middle East. During his term, Trump brought an unprecedented degree of peace to the region with the Abraham Accords, which were built on the insight that a Palestinian settlement was not necessarily a precondition for an accord between Israel and its Muslim neighbors. On October 7, 2023 – with the White House again under the control of feckless people who hate Israel, sentimentalize the Palestinians, and feel obliged to send “humanitarian aid” to a terrorist government that redirects that money to nefarious ends – Hamas invaded Israel with a brutality that shocked civilized people around the world. Millions of leftists, including leftist Jews, who previously had championed a two-state solution, had expressed belief in the existence and pervasiveness of a cruel and unfounded form of bigotry known as “Islamophobia,” and had even viewed terrorist groups like Hamas with a degree of sympathy, quickly snapped out of their delusions and recognized the existential danger posed to Western civilization by populations raised on barbaric, seventh-century notions of violent Islamic conquest.
This awakening represents a sea change of historic dimensions – and with potential consequences that at the present moment can only be guessed at. Over the last half century, the steady growth of Islam in Western Europe, and to a lesser extent in North America, has been an increasingly contentious issue. Consistently, leftist elites have defended the Islamization of the West as a virtuous humanitarian project and a source of cultural enrichment; when skeptics have dared to point out the disastrous current consequences and long-term existential menace of mass Islamic immigration, the left has routinely smeared them as hysterical, know-nothing racists. The exact degree to which Western attitudes toward Islam have changed as a result of October 7 has yet to be clearly determined, but the Dutch electorate’s shock and horror over that even seems to have been very largely responsible for the surprisingly impressive victory of Geert Wilders’s Freedom Party in the Dutch elections of November 22.
The Hamas invasion of Israel has had another major consequence. When, in the wake of the invasion, Israel acted to defend itself in the only way that made sense – that is, by crushing Gaza and eliminating Hamas and its war apparatus – Muslims and privileged young left-wingers around the Western world protested en masse. The scale of the anti-Semitism revealed by these demonstrations stunned many observers, as did the depth of ignorance about the Middle East on the part of so many supposedly well-educated Western youth. For the first time, many Western liberals who’d dismissed complaints about far-left ideological brainwashing in schools and colleges as hyperbolic recognized that millions of young people have been convinced by mischievous so-called educators that all whites (including Jews) are oppressors, and hence always in the wrong, whereas all “people of color” (including Arab Muslims) are victims of oppression, and hence always in the right.
The breathtaking comments made by the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania at that historic House committee hearing on December 5 underscored the magnitude of the current crisis in higher education, and the response to their self-damning testimony by many rich donors suggests that in 2024 major action will be taken to begin to rid our institutions of higher education of the reality-defying ideas about race that, going by the name Critical Race Theory, dominate the humanities and social-sciences faculties. Also on the chopping block should be the hiring policies that are rooted in these ideas about race, and that made it possible for an utter mediocrity like Claudia Gay – who on her merits and accomplishments alone would have been lucky to secure an adjunct teaching job at a bottom-rung community college – to be named president of America’s oldest and most respected university. It should be added, of course, that young Americans don’t need to wait until they get to college to be exposed to appalling views on race: millions of young minds in primary and secondary schools, for example, are being shaped by the manifold mendacities of Nikole Hannah-Jones’s 1619 Project (first introduced in the New York Times in 2019) and are being told that, if they’re white, they’ve been white supremacists from birth, or, if they’re black, that they’re lifelong victims of white racism.
But these twisted teachings that center everything in life on racial identity aren’t the only problems afflicting America’s schools and universities. It was while their kids were attending school via Zoom during the COVID lockdown that many American parents first became aware of the takeover of countless schools by teachers and administrators who, in addition to serving up a host of racist and anti-American inanities, were routinely encouraging their young charges to reject their biological identities. In 2021, Rachel Levine, a self-declared trans woman and Navy admiral, no less, was sworn in as the U.S. Assistant Secretary for Health – exposing all of America to the grotesque spectacle of an obviously disturbed individual being given responsibility for the country’s psychiatric well-being. And in June 2022, the media reported widely on the appointment of Sam Brinton, a bald young man who wears bright red lipstick and calls himself non-binary, to a high position in the Office of Nuclear Energy. (Later that year, Brinton was fired after being filmed at several airports stealing baggage containing high-end women’s apparel.)
Few ordinary Americans believe that a man can literally become a woman or vice-versa, but this ludicrous truth claim has become an orthodoxy throughout almost all of the establishment institutions in the English-speaking world. To challenge it can mean losing one’s home and livelihood – and being treated as a moral outcast by local clergy, media, doctors, and politicians. A parent who tries to keep his minor child from being pushed by self-styled experts onto the transgender assembly line – receiving first puberty blockers, then sex hormones, and finally surgery – risks being denied his parental rights in a court of law. In 2023, this madness advanced in many jurisdictions, with several states declaring themselves “sanctuary states” for those wishing to mutilate minors, but the pushback against this madness also intensified, with several states banning “gender-affirming care” for children and more and more parents speaking up against transgender ideology (as well as against Critical Race Theory) at school- board meetings. Also in 2023, an increasing number of detransitioners – people who were subjected to sex-change “treatments” in their youth only to realize later that they’d been talked into undergoing unnecessarily irreversible surgical voodoo – began to speak up publicly and file lawsuits against their psychologists, endocrinologists, surgeons, and hospitals.
In 2023, more and more Americans came to realize just how much they’d been lied to by the Biden Administration and the mainstream media. An increasing number of voters recognized that Donald Trump had been right about a great many things and that their own highly negative views of him had been shaped not by facts but by leftist propaganda. During his presidency, Trump had faced a breathtakingly comprehensive coordinated effort to use a concocted (albeit ridiculous) tale of Russian collaboration to bring him down; this particular scheme failed, but Trump’s establishment enemies proceeded to impeach him, on the flimsiest of grounds, not once but twice, and then began battering him with lawsuits around the country with the goal of destroying his businesses and denying him another White House run.
It was in 2023 that the full dimensions of this illicit campaign became frighteningly clear: Lilliputians in the state and federal legislatures, in prosecutors’ offices and courthouses, in government and party bureaucracies, in intelligence services, and in the mainstream media had worked together feverishly – and were still working together feverishly – to lash Donald Trump, like Gulliver, to the earth and thereby keep him from regaining the presidency. If it was an all-out effort that at times appeared to take on cartoonish dimensions and that, if properly prosecuted, would land a good many famous and powerful people behind bars, it was worth the risk to the participants because, if Trump were to return to office, they would end up behind bars, and their attempt to dismantle our constitutional liberties would go down in flames. In 2023, as the flagrant dishonesty and breathtaking scale of this campaign of destruction became increasingly clear to ordinary Americans, most of whom never imagined that the three-letter agencies for which they’d always rooted – from the CIA to the FBI – could be so thoroughly corrupted, many of those Americans found themselves prepared, for the first time, to hear out hypotheses about the JFK and RFK assassinations (among other historical events) that had previously been considered conspiracy theories.
What else? It was in 2023 that the “defund the police” movement fell apart, its sheer recklessness proven by skyrocketing crime in cities around the country. It was in 2023 that the “insurrection” lie took a major hit from reality. So did the climate-change hoax. So did the colossally ruinous George Floyd narrative. (As recently as last Wednesday, as if to signal at least the beginning of the end of the BLM delusion, the city of Seattle dismantled the Black Lives Matter garden that had been planted in the wake of Floyd’s death.) In 2023, many Americans learned far more than they had ever suspected about the nefarious designs of Bill Gates, George Soros, the World Economic Forum’s Klaus Schwab, and other would-be masters of the universe who seek to replace individual liberty with an updated version of feudalism. In 2023, TV and movie projects drenched in woke propaganda brought unprecedented financial losses to the entertainment industry, suggesting that in 2024 Hollywood and Netflix execs will have to break out of their ideological bubble if they want to stay in business.
It was in 2023 – just a week ago, in fact – that the New York Times, which in 2020 had undergone extensive institutional convulsions over a relatively commonsensical op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton urging a military response to Antifa and BLM riots, ran an op-ed by the Hamas-appointed mayor of Gaza – a perfect illustration of the fact that our corporate media’s determination to censor dissent from its doctrines is rivaled only, perhaps, by its eagerness to proffer propaganda by bloodthirsty, conscienceless enemies of freedom and decapitators of infants.
It was in 2023 that the heroic Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter and conversion of it into a free-speech platform helped expose the involvement of other Silicon Valley superstars in the establishment plans to undermine our constitutional republic. It was in 2023 that another hero, Tucker Carlson, left the mainstream media to start his own series on X (formerly Twitter), on which he, too, shed light on the blatant lies and wicked schemes by which our progressive betters have sought to steal our country from us. In a time when the legacy media have been almost entirely co-opted by the powers that be, other brave independent-media heroes, such as James O’Keefe, Andy Ngo, and Douglas Murray, have been crucially important truth-tellers. Also, you don’t have to want to see Vivek Ramaswamy, instead of Trump, succeed Biden as president to appreciate Ramaswamy’s Trump-like readiness to speak hard truths about our tyranny-minded elites – and, in doing so, to take on not just the Democrats but also the swamp-dwelling Republicans.
In the past, many a New Year’s Day has seemed like just another opportunity to decouple for a few hours, party to excess, and toast the arrival of the midnight hour. This time around, those of us who are keeping at least remotely abreast of international developments are entering the New Year with an intense awareness that there will be a great many changes in the twelve months ahead. The only question is whether they will involve our further enslavement by our elitist masters or the beginning of our liberation from their globalist, totalitarian clutches.
Well said, thank you.
A Voice of Reason. Thank you.
A Voice of reason
Thank you.
Excellent account of what has led Americans to a great awakening in 2023
of how our freedoms are being taken from us by the Left. What indeed will
be the outcome of such a dire realization?
We already know what happens to Americans who get a little carried away
during a peaceful protest (especially when egged on by the powers that be).
J6 has shown us that you can be falsely labeled an insurrectionist and spend
years in unconstitutional solitary confinement without indictment, trial or
conviction. What else would they be willing to do to us – if Americans’ great
awakening propels them into even more massive peaceful protests?
And speaking of egging on, it’s very likely that the global Communists couldn’t
care less if we’re awakened to their tyrannical agenda for us. Because maybe
they are setting us up to take us down. In high crime, high cost housing America,
the millions of military age illegals pouring in will eventually have nowhere to
live and little to eat. Would forming gangs and home invasions be far behind?
If Americans fight back, they might find themselves under the permanent
jackboot of martial law.
I don’t want other people doing my thinking for me. Elites are just ordinary
human beings when you come right down to it. Just like the Founding Fathers
said. God save America. Long live the U.S.A.
I predict further enslavement by our elitist masters. They haven’t come this far to back down now, and the American majority hasn’t risen to counter a single one of their assaults on our liberties and standard of living. I bet 2024 will be much worse than the last three horrible years of tyranny, punishment, failure and all things “woke.” The last three years have been worse than any since the Great Depression, and that’s an irrefutable fact. Imagine if 2024 is even worse? It isn’t hard to do. In fact, it seems to be a foregone conclusion.
In dubious defense of Zelkenskyy and the Ukraine, he said from day one he wanted weapons and not money but Alzheimer Joe Beijing Biden’s handlers are just as corrupt as he is and have trained him to demand payment after payment because he knows he won’t get weapons. All America got from that is omnibus pork bills in the trillions of dollars, fake budgets in the trillions, unpayable debt and a standard of living that verges on Third World. The Dirtbagocrats and RINOs who run Congress, and the illegitimate presidential administration got all manner of kickbacks of course, both financial and political.
And Pedo Joe’s photo-op dogs got to maul at least 13 people, and he got to take 147 vacation days or however much it’s been away from being a meat puppet who can’t finish a sentence, gets lost in crowded rooms and falls down regularly – when he isn’t sniffing and groping pre-pubescent girls.
I predict 2024 will be a steaming pile of wokeriffic tyranny and vote fraud. My advice is to load up on emergency rations and ammunition. The January 6th gulags, CRT, DIE and anti-American indoctrination in our schools and tranny strip shows for kiddies prove that nobody is paranoid to plan ahead.
Got in yet another shipment of 12 gauge Remington #4 buckshot “shorties”
I first got my 12 gauge bullpup in case Biden supporters tried to approach my truck/house to vent that Trump won again in 2020 (which he did.)
Now I have it for any NKVD that comes knocking on my door.
There’s been very Little to celebrate about 2020-2023 but Ricky Gervais’ new Netflix show, Armageddon was released and gives a little hope.
WE will make 2024 better and no government, no ngo, no global corporation, no WEF, no UN official or diplomat will stop us.
Here’s to a free 2024
Netflix isn’t all bad. I think it has all three of Gervais’s recent stand-up routines available.
It still hasn’t learned its financial lesson, though. Its “masterminds” eased back on the “woke” content after it lost a huge amount of money and subscribers but it didn’t purge it and it’s been easing it back in. If I want to watch something worth watching, I have to scroll past endless anti-white and black supremacist dog shit, chick flicks, action flicks with 110 lb girls kicking the asses of multiple grown men and striking poses as they blow them away and global climate warming change bullshit. And the anti-white, anti-American, pro-Hamas and talentless Obamas are still there, polluting things.
A 2024 liberated from left-wing tyranny and the failed societies they impose would be nice but I’m not exactly sanguine about that.
I expect more turmoil in America for 2024. So pull up a chair, have a drink, its going to be a hell of a ride for 2024.
Also, it was a great article and a Happy New Year everyone.
‘they’ are working on it;
https://geostrategy.rs/rs/ekonomija/1558-dr-g-s-vuc-vic-r-nsf-r-ci-sv-s-n-i
John Bolton always looks like he belongs in a comedy film or any earlier era, perhaps alongside Laurel and Hardy or – better – in the silent movies of Buster Keaton et al.
Try to picture him attempting to free his foot from a wastepaper basket or wrestling with a fold-down Murphy bed.
For once, Bolton is right. Alzheimer Joe and his handlers won’t stop blowing the mullahs though, much less take them out in a service to humanity.
Happy New Year!
I quit drinking awhile back but 2024 may make me imbibe a bit and I’m definitely put seat belts on my chairs.
EXCELLENT COLUMN AND CORRECT ON EVERYTHING
Unfortunately, I see 2024 as the ”Year of the Apocalypse” when everything falls apart as it’s been threatening t for some time as the West are in the fatal grip and spinning vortex of the TYTLER CIRCLE , or as Hemmingway once wrote ” There are two ways to go bankrupt ; slowly, then suddenly … and we are now clearly in the suddenly phase
“The Tytler Cycle.” It’s very interesting and quite clever. It’s so clever that it inspired plagiarism in “The Wheel of Freedom.”
Based on Tytler’s Cycle, I’d say America and the UK are in the apathy stage and entering the dependency one, with the bondage one coming slowly then suddenly.
Yay.
Here in the UK, I would argue that it is already I at the tail end of the Dependency cycle teetering into the Bondage cycle with evermore draconian legislation and government surveillance technologies being introduced to monitor, control and curtail individual freedoms.
EXCELLENT COLUMN AND CORRECT ON EVERYTHING
Unfortunately, I see 2024 as the ”Year of the Apocalypse” when everything falls apart as it’s been threatening to for some time as the West are in the fatal grip and spinning vortex of the TYTLER CIRCLE , or as Hemmingway once wrote ” There are two ways to go bankrupt ; slowly, then suddenly … and we are now clearly in the suddenly phase
It’s going to be a white knuckle ride ahead and wish all conservatives best luck for an ominous future
There is no awakening taking place. Joe Biden will be re-elected in 2024, his demonic party will retake the House, and they’ll likely hold onto the Senate. And all those “awakened” ameriCONs will simply bend over and surrender more liberty without blinking an eye. The overwhelming majority of our “fellow Americans” don’t know and/or give a rat’s backside about Israel, J6 political prisoners, the border, etc. They simply don’t care! And they won’t begin to care about anything outside their immediate sphere of existence until they find themselves standing in a bread line.
If you listen to people like this. We are indeed lost. Pacos: Put your head back into your bum
And remain real quiet while the rest of try and save you.
Basement Biden wasn’t elected in 2020, he was the recipient of massive vote rigging and cheating. You’re probably right about everything else, though. I expect acceptance although not apathy. Just pusillanimous weakness.
Generations of males raised by single women usually become grown boys.
Good times produce weak men. We’re going to find out what weak men produce pretty quickly.
Thank you sir for the New Years morning dose of optimism and refreshing awareness that all is not yet lost. It was also a call for increased watchfulness on the part of those who value and desire to protect our freedom. The destructive left is like rust, it never sleeps. I’m committed to watching our leaders locally. My skepticism radar is pinned when it comes to the political class. Even out here in red west.
Clay Travis summed it up nicely today in his podcast: the Democrat fraud machine is primed and ready to make 2024 an even bigger steal than 2020. Biden will be the nominee unless he unexpectedly passes. The shameless Biden re-election narrative is that he has done more for the country in one term than any other president in history (courtesy of the puppet KJP). That is partially true: he has done more to undermine the country than any other president, period. The (un)justice system will have Trump tied up in court and fake hearings well into 2024 at the least, and behind bars if they can pull it off. Clay presciently calls 2024 “The Year of Insanity.” It will be more insane than anyone can imagine…
And the people are as woefully unprepared as is our government. Banks are failing and the dollar is under pressure from BRICS which just expanded by six countries if I’m remembering correctly. If the petrodollar fails, so does our economy.
Bruce Bawer remains a national treasure. Even as he lives in Norway. 🙂
Bruce continues to produce excellent content that’s more relevant than ever.
OTOH … my raison d’etat for posting is gone …
Pardon me, but I only have a few things left to say …
1. You have to convince the donors. Esp. at this point, you need money and very high level security to organize any non-violent resistance to the criminals in charge.
2. The situation is still worse than you think. The criminals in charge have been there for decades. And the meat puppets like Biden are just there to keep us playing whack a pol and fighting among each other.
3. We’re a majority. Yes, we are SUPPOSED to be a Republic, but we’re not. ANY honest election would terminate the Demokkkrats/RINO political establishment.
4. Politics is too little and too late. And alternative economies can slow the Left’s progress, and save a few lives, but they use our taxes, our central bank, and our institutions against us. The longer we survive with alternative economies … the more golden eggs they can steal.
5. Which is to say, we’ve got to up our game because the Left’s crimes are not becoming obvious to Normies because we’re at the beginning. It’s becoming obvious because we’re nearing the end. Despite their failure with the plandemic, and the jab, and starting WW3, and stopping Trump, and EVs, and climate change based famines … the damage is terrible to us and costs them nothing. The only damage they’ve taken is some embarrassing videos and some memes. … While we literally bury our friends, relatives, and neighbors, shutter our businesses, deplete our savings, and lose our homes …
Happy New Year!
As Prices go up Bidens Polls Come Down
And mail-in ballot printing goes up to compensate.
The two lying/cheating bitches caught on tape got a $148 judgment. Everyone that stayed to count in that building should be on trial.
As stupid people wake up, Basement Biden’t record low polls get even lower.
A thorough reminder that we are wandering hopelessly in the real Twilight Zone that was America.
Nothing is more valuable to the enemy than to MAKE YOU LOSE HOPE.
Don’t give it to them!
Mr Bawer,
Part of the perpetuation of the problem is you, and most writers, are not naming names other than maybe Biden. We need to know names of these evil doers that are causing all this grief and crimes against our constitution and our way of life.
Americans (and the West) are taking too long to wake up to their imminent peril as a result of open slather immigration policies most of which qualifies as the Islamic Immigration Jihad called Hijra. Proverbs 6:9-11 sums up the Wests somniferous plight: Proverbs 6:9-11 (ESV)
How long will you lie there, O sluggard?
When will you arise from your sleep?
A little sleep, a little slumber,
a little folding of the hands to rest,
and poverty will come upon you like a robber,
and want like an armed man.
There is of course also the possibility that we are going to address the consequences of our disembodied language which occurs everywhere 24/7. Although nobody wants to talk with me, I can point out the difference between disembodied language and embodied language. Let’s see who is courageous enough to explore the quintessential issue of our time.
I’m curious to know more.
On a happier note, Eddie Bernice Johnson finally died. She was such acidic trash that 7 people in her own party ran against her.
She siphoned off school fund for her relatives, sold favors, and displayed perpetual ignorance and thankless anger.
As such, it’s no surprise that Grifter Joe praised her.
Also enjoyable to note Liz Cheney’s book is not selling. (Hillary’s books didn’t bomb that bad.)
Actually, Lez Cheney’s screed (just a collection of her insipid speeches) is a best seller. On the fraudulent NYT best sellers list, anyway. I guess libraries, schools and bookstores bought copies. I seriously doubt many consumers did. Left-wing books are always over ordered by book stores and anti-Trump books most of all. Libraries and schools love that shit that nobody else reads even more than commercial bookstores.
“Only a bigot could believe in the wisdom of a border wall?” I think you mean “Only an idiot could doubt th wisdom of a border wall.”
“All over the eastern hemisphere?” They’re also coming from the westetn hemisphere
They’re creeping in from every sewer conceivable.
Great article.
The only thing one knows for sure about 2024 is that no one knows just how dark it will get. As the border invasion continues to spin out of control the future doesn’t look too bright — the border being the main ingredient in the toxic brew we’re being forced to drink. .
What happens when, and I mean when, the illegal immigrant terrorist unleash their plans? Do we allow Joe Biden to protect the American citizens?