Happy New Year: reasons for optimism
Matt’s New Year Message
MATT GOODWIN
I wanted. to write a brief note to wish you a Happy New Year and suggest a few reasons why we should all look ahead to 2025 with a sense of optimism.
This might strike you as odd.
Across the West, many people will be feeling gloomy about the direction of travel, the state of their country, and the future.
Here in Britain, for example, we live under a deeply unpopular Labour government, a stagnant economy, a disastrous experiment with mass immigration, a growing crackdown on free speech and free expression, and a visibly fraying social fabric.
Many people are looking ahead to not just the next year but the next few years with a profound sense of unease and malaise.
But you know what?
In recent weeks and months I’ve become much more optimistic than I used to be.
Why?
Because, for a start, I sense the beginning of a profound shift in our politics and wider culture —a new spirit, a new mood, a new zeitgeist, if you like.
Just look around.
In America, with the re-election of Donald Trump, we are about to see a strong pushback against left-wing radicalism, woke ideology, uncontrolled immigration, broken borders, and cultural chaos.
What we also see in Team Trump is not just a focus on these ‘second-order problems’ but also a strong desire to finally tackle the ‘first-order problem’ that lies behind many of these problems in Western states —namely, a left-leaning managerial class that controls and directs the institutions.
In America, the legacy institutions and the elite class that imposed much of the madness we have been subjected to —from teaching our children that little boys can become little girls and little girls can become little boys to the endless obsession with ‘Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion’ (DEI), from repudiating the identity, history, and heritage of Western nations to reshaping public institutions around “anti-racist” (read: anti-white) policies that are in fact racist—are about to be overturned, reformed, and challenged like never before.
And what happens in America will, one way or another, unfold elsewhere, providing ‘proof of concept’ to many other nations.
Try to imagine just how different the political debate will be five years from now.
Don’t think we can deport foreign criminals and protect our borders?
“Trump did it”, they’ll say.
Don’t think we can root out DEI policies and stop the endless politicisation of our public institutions?
Trump did it.
Don’t think we can take on the managerial overclass that is fully invested in maintaining and spreading the woke status-quo and the managed decline of our nations?
Trump did it.
Don’t think you can reform, fire, and restructure you way through the Deep State?
Trump did it.
Will I personally agree with everything President Trump does over the next five years?
Of course not.
But will his administration provide proof of concept when it comes to challenging the elite consensus in a wide range of areas?
Absolutely.
Which is why his re-election will inevitably change the zeitgeist in Western nations.
And this is why, as we enter 2025, woke ideology —including Critical Race Theory (CRT) and radical gender ideology— are now also on the back-foot.
Increasingly, the people who cling to these divisive and discredited ideas will look utterly ridiculous —like that soldier found decades after World War Two who thought the war was still going on.
And those who fail to realise this, from publishers to celebrities, will look just as out-of-touch and ridiculous, too.
Like an insular cult that is completely adrift from wider society, preaching only to the fanatics and mentally unstable.
Also on the back-foot as we head into 2025 are the legacy and elite institutions that presided over the broken status-quo, failed to challenge it, and stopped listening to or even respecting the people.
When it comes to universities, for example, across the West there is now widespread acceptance, particularly since the Islamist terrorist attacks on Israel on October 7th, that there is something fundamentally wrong on campus.
That, as some of us have been saying for years now, elite universities in the West have become rotten to the core, they’ve been hijacked by radical and extreme ideologies that have politicised these supposedly neutral institutions and shut down free speech, free expression and academic freedom.
Increasingly, in other words, the debate will shift from “do we have a problem?” to “what should we do about the problem?”
And one answer, I suspect, which we can already see forming in America, will be to root out radical political dogma like DEI and get these taxpayer funded institutions back to what they are supposed to be: meritocratic, neutral, objective, grounded in academic achievement not racist policies.
There is also a new (and in my view healthy) scepticism of legacy media, which used 2024 to continue destroying its reputation, giving voters good reasons to distrust it.
Increasingly, as we watched supposedly ‘neutral’, ‘objective’, and ‘truth-led’ media organisations lie and mislead their way through the presidential campaign, first downplaying Joe Biden’s visible ill-health and then downplaying the very visible fact that Kamala Harris was unfit to be president, the media class haemorrhaged public trust and confidence.
This wasn’t about voters being duped by “misinformation” so much as voters realising how the legacy media and its key gatekeepers have become openly corrupt, biased, and no longer interested in truth and objectivity.
We have now entered what some call a new era of ‘post-journalism’, where many so-called “journalists”, who would like us to think they are objective truth-tellers, are in fact thinly-disguised political operators, using their immense cultural power to impose a political agenda on the rest of us.
Think, for example, about how prominent journalists in Britain —from Jon Sopel and Emily Maitlis to Gavin Esler and Adam Boulton—have acted in recent years, berating “populism” and, let’s be frank, ordinary people who do not share their views while simultaneously calling for television channels that are more in tune with the public mood to be shut down, comparing the likes of Donald Trump and Brexit to Nazism, and having a moral panic when anybody from Nigel Farage to Georgia Meloni dares to suggest something “conservative”, like how we should control our borders or invest in pro-family policies.
It’s these people who have done more than most to discredit and undermine the public square. They’ve made legacy media look utterly ridiculous and now, finally, large numbers of people can see it.
Which brings me to another reason for optimism. Across the West, there is now emerging a new, serious, sustained, and credible ecosystem of television channels, long-form podcasts, YouTube shows, Substack writers, alternative publishers, new universities and more —which all have enormous reach and influence and are helping change the wider culture, swinging the pendulum back to what we might call Common Sense.
For the first time in history we now have a class of writers, intellectuals and influencers who are neither beholden to legacy media and the legacy institutions nor dependent on them. This is a very significant development and one that should also give us optimism.
In 2025, I will directly support this through my own television show on GB News, State of the Nation, but I will also do what I can to support these wider efforts, from giving talks at new research centres to joining discussions on new media.
But everybody will have to play their part. If you really want to change the culture and politics then it’s on you, too, to support and spread this new ecosystem.
And across Europe, meanwhile, we can also see this growing opposition to the broken elite consensus and status-quo.
As in America, millions of voters are saying loudly and clearly they’ve had enough —they’ve had enough of the broken borders, mass immigration, woke policies, anti-Western dogma, and continual refusal of the governing class to invest in their own people and respect their own nations.
From the Netherlands to Italy, Sweden to France, rising numbers of people, including young people, are rejecting the officially approved narrative among the elite class.
They don’t want to stand by and just watch their nations, identities, culture and heritage be cast aside; they want to, in the words that best symbolised the arrival of this new zeitgeist, “fight, fight, fight”.
And in Britain, too, while we will continue to live under a truly dismal Labour government that has consistently made the wrong decision at every turn, at the general election this year and in the months since we have also seen the beginnings of a new grassroots revolution against the political class —and one that looks set to go much further than anything we’ve seen before.
Something, in short, is happening out there. We can all sense it. We can all feel it. The people are once again restless. They are looking for a genuine alternative to the Uniparty in Westminster and a new opportunity to exert popular sovereignty against an out-of-touch, insular, and neglectful elite class.
And in 2025, from defections, by-elections, membership surges, and County Council elections we will get more evidence of this revolt and we will track it in detail right here on this Substack, in the one place that has consistently been ahead of the curve.
Which brings me to my final reason for optimism —our plans. Over the next year, with my team, I will continue to expand our fast-growing community so that we continue to evolve into a mass movement with more than 100,000 members.
Chat GPT tells me we will reach this watershed around the summer, entrenching us one of the largest and most read Substacks in the UK and Europe, and among the most read in the world.
More subscribers means more support. More support means more reach. More reach means more influence. And more influence means more power.
So, look, if you want to help us out by forwarding this email to friends and family, telling people about us, or upgrading with the 25% New Year discount (just click on the post below to get it) then now would be a good time to do just that.
But for now, I hope I have convinced you that there are a few good reasons to meet 2025 with a smile on your face and a renewed sense of optimism.
Because I do believe, for the first time in a long time, that we can now see the seeds that will grow into something truly great —a new culture, a new politics, a new country, a new era.
And I do think for what it’s worth that this community of ours has an important role to play in helping bring that change about.
Happy New Year to you all.
This article (Happy New Year: reasons for optimism) was created and published by Matt Goodwin and is republished here under “Fair Use”
••••
The Liberty Beacon Project is now expanding at a near exponential rate, and for this we are grateful and excited! But we must also be practical. For 7 years we have not asked for any donations, and have built this project with our own funds as we grew. We are now experiencing ever increasing growing pains due to the large number of websites and projects we represent. So we have just installed donation buttons on our websites and ask that you consider this when you visit them. Nothing is too small. We thank you for all your support and your considerations … (TLB)
••••
Comment Policy: As a privately owned web site, we reserve the right to remove comments that contain spam, advertising, vulgarity, threats of violence, racism, or personal/abusive attacks on other users. This also applies to trolling, the use of more than one alias, or just intentional mischief. Enforcement of this policy is at the discretion of this websites administrators. Repeat offenders may be blocked or permanently banned without prior warning.
••••
Disclaimer: TLB websites contain copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available to our readers under the provisions of “fair use” in an effort to advance a better understanding of political, health, economic and social issues. The material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving it for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material for purposes other than “fair use” you must request permission from the copyright owner.
••••
Disclaimer: The information and opinions shared are for informational purposes only including, but not limited to, text, graphics, images and other material are not intended as medical advice or instruction. Nothing mentioned is intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of The Liberty Beacon Project.
Leave a Reply