ROGER SIMON: How to Be Happy in 2023—Make Saving the Republic Your New Year’s Resolution.

The way to succeed isn’t complicated if you remember that you too are media. You have a voice. You can and should pass information to people as much and as often as you can. You don’t have to have a podcast or your own Substack. Person-to-person contact is often better and more effective. Most of our country doesn’t realize what’s happening to them. Explain it. Change will come from this.

But in doing so, be as kind and generous as you can, though it can be difficult at times. Choose your interlocutor carefully. Remember these people have been brainwashed for a considerable amount of time. Some are prepared to hear things, others not. Also, choose your subject matter carefully. Some people are just beginning to seem willing to discuss COVID-19, bias in our educational system, the open border, and now gender issues, less so election integrity. That will come. It’s all about patience.

One way to approach people is to ask them questions politely, rather than to confront them with a direct argument. Let them think things through for themselves, rather than create intransigence. If you get a positive result, ask yet another question, but resist the temptation to go too far. You don’t want the snail to go back into its shell. When they are by themselves, they will have something to think about.

More importantly, resist the suggestion that some have made to employ a conservative version of the deceitful techniques of Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radical.” Do so and you will start to resemble Alinsky yourself. You don’t want that. The truth is on our side. Be honest and always be a soldier for good.

I know I’m sounding a little prescriptive here. But I feel incredibly lucky to have this growing forum through which to express my opinions, and I want others to know they have a role to play that’s in many ways equal or superior.

I also want to remind myself of how to behave because I’m as tempted as any to get into counter-productive arguments with those I have no chance of convincing. In fact, I have more than a few times.

Exit quote: “These last few years have been filled with much doom and gloom and, as Edward Ring has written eloquently on American Greatness, it’s time for a resurgence of optimism. Pessimism is a self-fulfilling prophecy employed by the globalists to engineer a future that none of us should want.”