If you sometimes wake up feeling as if you’re playing the part of a member of the unwashed masses in a dystopian novel about America and the world at large, you’re not alone. Check headlines on any given day and you are bombarded with doom on many fronts. Our president is a liar, the headlines say; our legislature does nothing except obstruct or pass bad laws; our country is a racist, misogynistic place where people of color and women cannot get fair treatment. Rampant corruption is all around us — this, at least, is true.

Oh and, by the way, our planet is warming at an alarming rate, sea levels are rising, and extreme weather events are increasing. And it’s all our fault because of our gluttony for fossil fuels.

Since scary topics usually bring top ratings to media — as well as cause Americans to vote for big government-lauding global socialists who promise to fix the problems, hence bringing about global governance — the major networks sell negativity. Instead of informing, they editorialize. Instead of teaching, they propagandize. Instead of presenting all sides in a reasoned way, they seek to foment anger. Instead of seeking truth, they seek ratings.

But while it’s true that mainstream media are blatantly dishonest and are, in fact, trying to get Americans to accept globalist laws and regulations — though doing so would mean giving up many of the freedoms and opportunities we have enjoyed for centuries — all is not bad. There is much evidence that Americans increasingly don’t accept media globalist pronouncements at face value.

Though we are fed a steady diet of noxious propaganda instead of news, a little digging reveals hope. There are reasons for optimism. If there were not, why keep up the fight? Here at Christmastime are some of those reasons to remain hopeful in the face of the seemingly endless parade of doom.

Politics

When President Trump was elected in 2016, many of the issues he ran on, such as stopping illegal immigration, anti-globalism, and “America First,” seemed as if they were pulled straight from The John Birch Society (JBS) playbook. In fact, some in the mainstream media gave the Society credit for Trump’s victory. Of course, those leftists didn’t see the relationship between Trump and the JBS as a good thing.

In the Huffington Post, so-called historian Robert McElvaine complained, “The Trump Campaign is the culmination of the long campaign begun by McCarthyism and the John Birch Society in the 1950s and aimed at discrediting virtually every institution in the United States.”

If by “virtually every institution” McElvaine meant the Deep Staters, globalists, and bureaucratic dead weight in Washington, D.C., then kudos to him; he’s right. Trump called it the swamp and said it needed to be drained.

And the midterm elections turned out better than experts had predicted based on past history. Midterm elections are typically rough for the party with the presidency. In 1938, FDR lost 81 seats to the GOP. In 1986, the Reagan Revolution stalled when the Republicans lost nine Senate seats. And in 1994, Bill Clinton watched in horror as Republicans gained 54 House seats, giving the GOP its first majority in the House of Representatives in four decades.

The results of the 2018 midterm elections were a mixed bag for both Republicans and Democrats. The Democrats regained the House of Representatives for the first time in eight years, while the Republicans kept control of and expanded their majority in the Senate. While the GOP is far from perfect, it’s better that they have control of the Senate than Democrats, who seem to have no middle-of-the-road members anymore.

“If there was one house that we could preserve and increase in a constitutional way, it’s the Senate of the United States, which happened in this election,” said Art Thompson, the CEO of The John Birch Society. “The very idea that the majority of what we would consider, at least nominally, to be constitutionalists has increased in the Senate, bodes well for any appointments for the Supreme Court down the road.”

“And it also means that it will increase the likelihood of confirmation of hundreds of people who are standing in line waiting to confirmed in their positions as federal court judges or members of the administration. So, that’s a plus.”

With the Senate’s advise-and-consent role, enumerated in Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution, the GOP majority is significant, especially in the current polarized political climate. The GOP even picked up a couple seats, as the Democrats were unsuccessful in their bid to steal the Florida senate election from outgoing Governor Rick Scott (R), in favor of current senator Bill Nelson (D). In Mississippi, Cindy Hyde-Smith (R) won a run-off election over Mike Espy (D).

The Senate majority also insulates the president from impeachment action that House Democrats might take against him. Although, at this point, no “high crimes or misdemeanors” appear imminent, that doesn’t mean Democrats won’t be meticulously combing through the president’s past for something they can construe as a crime.

Even the loss of the House of Representatives to Democrats had bright spots to it. The GOP and constitutionalists may have actually become more formidable, despite the losses. “On the surface, we did lose the Republican majority in the House,” said Thompson. “But many of those individuals in the House were not very good…. The more solid individuals, with [David] Brat of Virginia being the exception, got through by and large. So it’s a stronger constituency of conservatives and constitutionalists in the House.”

Though it’s not a direct result of the midterm election, the House GOP is also getting rid of the spineless Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), who is retiring. “That guy [Ryan] was an absolute disaster,” said Thompson. “And I think that you can lay at his feet, if you’re going to focus in on any one individual, what happened in the House.”

In addition, President Trump can tout this election as a victory for his coalition, which, as stated earlier, has its roots in the JBS. “It also means that Trump has solidified his leadership over the party because of the support percentage-wise within the Republicans in the House now.”

Besides keeping the senate in GOP hands, President Trump has a lot of reasons to crow about his first two years in office, reasons Americans as a whole can rejoice over. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) grew by an astounding 4.2 percent during the second quarter. Third-quarter growth was down but still reached 3.5 percent. By comparison, during the Obama years, GDP growth never reached 3 percent. In three years, growth didn’t reach 2 percent, and in Obama’s first year in office, GDP actually shrank by 2.8 percent.

Unemployment, which had been as high as 10.2 percent during the Obama administration has fallen to levels not seen in five decades. The October unemployment rate was 3.7 percent. Black unemployment is at a historic low, currently 6.3 percent after reaching an all-time low of 5.9 percent in May of this year. The Trump tax cuts seem to have had the desired effect on the economy as businesses are hiring and consumers are spending.

And the immigration issue, which many believe swept Trump into the White House, seems to be resonating with average Americans. The migrant caravans that wended their way through Mexico have fizzled for the time being, possibly due to the president calling upon federal troops to reinforce border-control efforts.

If the economy remains in wonderful shape and no major world-changing events occur, a 2020 reelection of the president should be a breeze, provided he can fend off the rabid attacks from Democrats and the mainstream media. People tend to vote with their pocketbooks in presidential elections, and at least for now, that bodes well for Trump.

Identity Politics

Moreover, evidence shows that much of the leftist base is being disillusioned by the lies, violence, and oppressiveness of the socialist Left.

For the past several decades, Democrats have been extremely successful in divide-and-conquer politics. They, with media assistance, have attempted to erase their own past of racial discrimination (i.e., support for slavery and the founding of the Ku Klux Klan and Jim Crow laws) and set themselves up as the party of the downtrodden. They have also done an effective job of framing the GOP as the party of bigotry and intolerance.

But this is beginning to change. In late June of 2018, a “gay” hairstylist and actor from New York, Brandon Straka, posted a video to YouTube entitled “Why I left the Democrat Party.” As of mid-November, the video had been viewed nearly 750,000 times. In the video, Straka lists many reasons why he decided to leave the Left and the Democrat Party.

“I reject tyrannical group think. I reject a system which allows an ambitious, misinformed and dogmatic mob to suppress free speech, create false narratives and apathetically steamroll over the truth,” Straka said in his video. “I reject the acceptance of junk science and superstition to advance ideological agendas. I reject hate. These are the reasons I became a liberal and these are the same reasons why I am now walking away.”

Though Straka still has a long way to go — he obviously still rejects traditional cultural mores that are a prerequisite for having a culture of true tolerance and high ideological ideals — he makes good points.

The things that leftists always accused conservatives of doing have become their own modus operandi. As the Left becomes even more authoritarian, restricting speech and using violence to intimidate dissenters into passivity, people are beginning to see what their ultimate goals are, and they don’t like it.

Straka’s video was the precursor of a movement that has seen thousands of people realize that the agenda of the political Left in America no longer aligns with their core values. Straka further nails today’s leftist when he says, “For years now, I have watched as the Left has devolved into intolerant, inflexible, illogical, hateful, misguided, ill-informed, un-American, hypocritical, menacing, callous, ignorant, narrow-minded and, at times, blatantly fascistic behavior and rhetoric.”

Straka’s words echo the sentiment of many classical liberals, who have found that today’s Democrat Party, and the Left in general, has left them behind in a push toward total control. There is a growing realization among classical liberals that today’s Left has become anti-free speech and, as Straka says, “anti-American.”

Another movement sprang up late in the midterm cycle, perhaps too late to influence this year’s election much but boding well for the future. Though it comes 50 years too late, the “Blexit” movement encourages black Americans to think for themselves, rather than blindly vote Democrat as many have been doing since the 1960s.

Fronted by 29-year-old conservative firebrand Candace Owens, Blexit — presumably named after the British vote for Brexit, or British exit from the EU — is confronting the completely made-up narrative that the Democrats are the party that cares about black Americans. Blexit challenges blacks to reject the historically backward notion that it is automatically better for them to vote Democrat instead of Republican. It also disputes the concept that if black Americans stray from any orthodoxy of today’s Left, then they are not “black enough.”

“The reason we’re seeing so many people leave the Left — I like to call them liberal refugees, like myself — is because they do not allow you to think freely. If you agree with them 95 percent and disagree on 5 percent, you are essentially excommunicated,” Owens has said. “You’re not allowed to be a liberal anymore. You’re not allowed to be a Democrat anymore.”

The Blexit website, Blexit.com, contains many informational stories about Democrat and leftist heroes such as President Lyndon Baines Johnson and Planned Parenthood’s Margaret Sanger. People such as these, held up as heroes to black Americans, were actually very racist individuals, with Sanger having even called for the extermination of the black race.

Besides education, Owens believes that her fellow black Americans need to shed the mantle of victimhood. “If you are born black, and you don’t accept your natural status as a victim, then the validity of your blackness is immediately called into question.”

For decades now, the Left in America has been treating black Americans as nothing more than a reliable voting bloc, without the capability of independent thought.

Movements such as Blexit are encouraging those deceived by the Left to, if not convert to conservatism, at least study the issues as individuals and not as a member of a group. The Walk Away Campaign and Blexit are both challenging the notion of simply voting with your assigned identity group. They are encouraging people to actually study issues in order to find out what they believe as individuals, not just as members of a faction.

Early on, Robert Welch and the JBS knew that individualism and collectivism were at war. This breaking away from identity groups shows that people yearn to be treated as individuals, not just as a part of whatever identity or victim group they are assigned. And when people study issues as individuals instead of as a part of an identity group, conservatism and constitutionalism tend to win the battles of ideas.

Science and Climate Change

Not only is the Left getting heat for its bigotry and lies having to do with race, it is facing ridicule for its pronouncements on global warming.

In October of this year, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a report with the dire warning that we must completely change the way in which we live in the next 12 years in order to halt the coming of catastrophic climate change. The mainstream media and carbon-credit salesman Al Gore were quick to scream in alarm.

In the wake of the new IPCC report, Gore breathlessly said, “Today the world’s leading scientific experts collectively reinforced what Mother Nature has made clear — that we need to undergo an urgent and rapid transformation to a global clean energy economy.”

Among other things, the IPCC report suggests raising taxes on all carbon emissions. Incredibly, the report suggests a tax that would, by 2030, make the price of a gallon of gas in the United States somewhere around $49.

Ironically, the report was released at about the same time as Australian climate researcher Dr. John McLean released the results of a first-ever audit of the IPCC’s data. The audit showed that data used by the IPCC to create models and, by extension, the October report, are not just flawed but incredibly flawed. One example from the erroneous data showed a Colombian town that reported an average temperature of 176 degrees Fahrenheit for three months. Another example showed a Romanian city reporting a September average temperature of -49 degrees Fahrenheit.

Many scientists — including some who used to consult with the IPCC — have already refuted the study. Former IPCC editor and retired chairman of the geophysics department at Stockholm University Dr. Nils-Axel Mörner said: “All this talk about a disastrous sea-level by 2100 is nothing but scaremongering and deliberate harassment of the public by the IPCC and its media proponents.”

Mörner, an acknowledged expert in measuring sea level, explains that, yes, sea level is rising, but almost imperceptibly. The fearmongering about it is beyond ridiculous. “This poses no threat whatsoever. In New York City, sea-level is rising at a rate of +2.84 millimeters per year, which would imply an additional rise in sea-level by 23.3 centimeters [just over 9 inches] by 2100, a modest rise that can be handled without problems.”

To put it mildly, the climate models used by the IPCC to predict future climate conditions are seriously flawed. All of them give carbon dioxide far too much credit as a control mechanism for global temperatures. A Canadian non profit, Friends of Science, put it this way: “After reviewing the literature and evidence, the group concluded that the sun is the main driver of climate change, not CO2 as claimed by the U.N.”

That conclusion by the Friends of Science may seem obvious, but it needs to be repeated again and again. The sun controls our climate far more than humans could ever hope to. Also, the simple fact is that carbon dioxide is plant food. More CO2 is a good thing, not a bad thing. Plants thrive in a CO2-rich atmosphere. As Princeton physicist William Happer says, “Benefits that more [carbon dioxide] brings from increased agricultural yields and modest warming far outweigh any harm.”

So even on the off-chance that CO2 does contribute significantly to global warming, that would actually be a good thing for the most part. More warmth equals longer growing seasons and increased agricultural production. As the world population continues to grow, more food will be needed. As one NASA study shows, more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is already leading to a greener Earth, perhaps just as God intended.

Despite claims to the contrary, the environment in the United States is actually in much better shape than it has been for decades. Despite what we are told in the media, the fact is that the more developed a nation is, the cleaner it tends to be. Our water and air are much cleaner than they were decades ago. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) reports that, “levels of particle pollution and ground level ozone pollution are substantially lower than in the past.” As far as our water is concerned, a study by the University of California at Berkeley and Iowa State concludes there have been “significant improvements in U.S. water quality” that, not surprisingly, the federal agency attributes to the Clean Water Act. Our forests, despite all the wildfires we hear about, are more than a third more vast than they were a century ago, according to the U.S. Food and Agriculture Organization.

Worldwide, there are several examples of good news concerning the Earth and the climate:

• In January of this year, NASA’s Aura satellite showed that even the once-ballyhooed hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica is shrinking. If this “hole” was ever a problem, the new study shows that the levels of chlorine, which supposedly led to the hole in the first place, have dropped significantly. Measurements from this year show 20-percent-less depletion of the ozone layer than when measurements first began in 2005.

• Island nations in the Pacific such as Tuvalu, thought by climate alarmists to be among the first casualties of sea-level rise owing to global warming, seem to be doing all right. In fact, far from disappearing under the ocean, a study by the University of Auckland shows the tiny island nation has actually grown by 180 acres, roughly the size of California’s Disneyland.

Climate alarmists are so ready to report doom to the masses that they sometimes rush to publish as soon as they think they’ve found news of warming anywhere. A recent study published in the science journal Nature claimed that the warming of the oceans was 60-percent higher than originally predicted. (Warm oceans have been a big subject this year, as the severity of Hurricanes Florence and Michael was blamed on warmer ocean water.)

But the authors of the study, from the Scripps Institute of Oceanography at UC-San Diego and Princeton, were so eager to publish their work showing a quickening of ocean warming that they failed to properly check their math. Multiple errors were quickly pointed out by mathematician Nic Lewis. Researchers were forced to issue a major correction to their report and conclude that the oceans were not warming up all that fast. As usual, the correction was not pointed out in the same breathless tone that the original study was.

Climate alarmism — that pseudo-scientific effort to frighten us all into accepting the UN’s globalist agenda — is dying the slow and steady death it deserves to die.

Environmentally speaking, the Earth is just not in that bad of a shape. Are there problems? Of course there are — some pretty serious ones too, such as the Texas-sized flotilla of plastic and other garbage in the Pacific Ocean. The stunning fact is that just five Asian nations — China, Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam — dump more plastic into the oceans than the rest of the world combined. But even on this front there is good news.

In September of this year, a collection of engineers, researchers, and scientists known as Ocean Clean Up began testing a system to skim the trash currently in the ocean. While the collection system is still in the testing phase, the group is confident that it will be able to clean up 50 percent of the current garbage patch in five years. As international pressure is brought to bear on polluting countries, there remains hope that our oceans will cease to be garbage dumps.

Truth Is the Ultimate Weapon

We live in a world of technology unimagined when The John Birch Society began in 1958. While we may have imagined flying cars, which still elude us, who would have thought you could watch television and movies on wireless devices that could also be used as telephones? And who imagined that the government could spy on you with those same wireless devices? Orwell and Huxley perhaps, but few others. While a dark side to these new technologies exists, it’s also true that the same technologies give the common man a weapon to fight against the darkness.

Information is no longer disseminated by just a few television and radio stations and daily newspapers. With the advent of the Internet, new media have arisen which give us more opportunities to obtain truth, not just a prescribed narrative that we are meant to ingest with no questions asked. One citizen journalist with a video recorder on his or her phone is more likely to get at the truth than any vast, agenda-driven network is.

The truth, after all, is the ultimate weapon.

God has gifted us with a nation whose Founders had the foresight to create the document that we call the Constitution of the United States of America.

“We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union…”

No, we aren’t perfect; we cannot be. We can only strive to be more perfect. The Constitution gives us the room to grow, but to grow based upon the principles laid out in it. The onset of new technologies and new problems, unimagined in the late 17th century, are not an excuse for a new or reimagined Constitution, as some on both sides of the political spectrum would have us believe. Rather, these new challenges call for a renewed scrutiny of the original words our Founders gave us. We need to dust off the principles contained in the Constitution and move forward accordingly.

Of course, for those of us who believe in God, He is the ultimate reason for optimism. As we make our way through this sometimes troubling world, we can take comfort in God’s promises. God is sovereign; God is truth. Once we discern that, we can rest assured, knowing that this verse from the Bible is true: “And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.”

— Romans 8:28

Photo: Rawpixel/iStock/GettyImagesPlus

This article originally appeared in the December 24, 2018 print edition of The New American. The New American publishes a print magazine twice a month, covering issues such as politics, money, foreign policy, environment, culture, and technology. To subscribe, click here.