In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

— John 1:1-5, The Holy Bible, English Standard Version

Out with the old and in with the new. Welcome to 2019, my brothers.

Before I write anything else, let me take a moment to extend my warmest regards and very best wishes to you and your families. May the Almighty bless you in the days to come, as we continue to wage our happy war to take back Western culture and civilisation and restore it to its former glory.

It will be a hard fight, to be sure. Our enemies are numerous, terrible, and ruthless. But we have one thing that they do not.

We serve Truth – and they serve lies. And the Truth will win out in the end, precisely because it is true.

It is important for us on the Hard Right to understand one thing, though. While Truth is not to be feared, it is almost always extremely painful and difficult to accept, at least at first. It gets easier to handle Truth over time, especially once you have confronted and broken down the truths about yourself.

I will get back to that shortly, but first, I want to make a few personal notes about my experiences in the past year.

Sitting here in this room on a cold and frosty January morning, it is hard to believe that I have been writing on this blog for six years.

Most blogs don’t last six months before their owners run out of interesting things to say. Very few people have the kind of discipline, mental fortitude, and – let’s face facts – time required to sit down for at least 20 minutes every day, and usually quite a bit more than that, to write up a blog post.

I will be the first to admit that I had more time to write than most this year. I was out of work for nearly 9 months. And as a result, I was able to write up more posts than I managed last year – which was a banner year for me in terms of writing. Indeed, my posts, 370 of them this year as compared to 367 last year, were more substantive this year than last, in my opinion; I started up a couple of new features, such as the Monday compilations and Sunday Scripture series, that let me compress all of the more random stuff into once-weekly posts and therefore turn my concentration to posts of greater substance the rest of the time.

It’s not all good news, though. I finished 2017 with approximately 1,020,400 pageviews. I finished 2018 with about 1,342,200. That’s a year-on-year change of 31.54%. That number is, in and of itself, meaningless, since pageviews are always cumulative. What matters is the rate of growth of the pageviews. And in this respect the fact is that this blog does not generate any sort of real growth.

My pageviews are a matter of public record – you can see them all in the sidebar. My total views changed from 2013 to 2014 by 162.5%, from 2014 to 2015 by 88%, from 2015 to 2016 by 86%, and from 2016 to 2017 by 39%.

So the trend is downward, obviously. I completely own the responsibility for this fact – and, if I were in any way interested in pageviews and the resulting ad revenue from such, I would have every reason to be worried.

But I’m not.

As I have said every single year since I started writing, I have never written on this blog for anyone other than myself. This blog is mine, and mine alone, and I use it to express thoughts and ideas that are anywhere from uncomfortable to violently offensive in “polite” society. I make no apologies for this and never will.

Yet somewhere along the line, I managed to pick up something of a following. Quite a few of my readers have been around for several years, and have taken the time to stop by, comment, and email me. I have exchanged emails with you, spoken on the phone with a couple, and even met a few in person over the years.

It is my great honour and most highly esteemed privilege to have you here. Thank you for your visits, comments – whether they be messages of support, agreement, or correction and disputation with me – and time. Your support, loyalty, and decency are humbling and uplifting, and I am deeply grateful to each and every one of you.

I do make one exception for the SJWs who like to stop by and troll once in a while. To them I say: I am your sworn enemy. I will ruthlessly dissect and mock you for your stupidity. I will take your comments and shred them with a cold and cruel delight for everyone else to see. I will humiliate you using your own words. And I will take great pleasure in subjecting you and your arguments to a metaphorical breaking wheel.

I know that is not terribly Christian of me. I have never claimed to be a particularly good or kind person – it is not for me to judge such things. I will say this: I hope and pray that you will see the Light and the Truth of the Lord. If you do, and repent of your sins and your insanity, then you are welcome to join me and my brothers. But if you continue to keep your foolish and stupid ways, then you will never get a moment’s relief from the relentless pressure and meme-warfare of the Hard Right.

As for my personal experiences this past year… well, I have documented those, at some length, especially since about early April. A number of readers have asked me since the publication of my post detailing my travails about how my “time of testing” is going.

Here, I do have some good news to share.

I recently started up a new job for a company in Southeast Asia, almost exactly a month ago, in fact. I am working as a sort of IT engineer, which is radically different – to put it very mildly – from my previous experiences in risk management consulting, investment banking, and capital markets. I have always been more of a tech-oriented person anyway – I can program with anything from passable to very good skill in something like 8 different languages, ranging from strongly typed to scripting.

But what I’m doing now is totally different from anything that I used to do, and it has been a very steep learning curve for the past month. The work is both challenging and interesting, for the most part.

However, there are downsides. Due to various issues which I will not delve into here, I am not actually in Singapore. The work visa is proving very difficult to acquire for my employers. So I have been working remotely – from a time zone five hours behind Singapore. And my salary is a fraction of what it was in the USA, again for reasons I will not go into here.

Compared to where I was a year ago, there is no question whatsoever that the events of the past 12 months or so did to me precisely what Rocky Balboa said that life would do: I was beaten down to my knees, and then I was beaten down some more for good measure. And just when I thought things would improve, I took another few good beatings.

I was faced with the brutal and terrible consequences of my failure to anticipate changes in American policy, in corporate direction at my previous employer, and in the realities of being a foreigner with a really shitty passport.

I had done much to insulate myself over the past 12 years from economic downturns. But I singularly failed to do anything much about securing my ability to live and work outside of any country other than my own, mostly because I put too much trust in “the system”. The same system that used my time and talents, chewed me up, and spat me out.

It does not matter that I supported, and still fully support, the God-Emperor’s policy of hiring Americans first over foreigners (like me) into white-collar jobs in America. It does not matter that I was exceptionally good at my job; in fact I have received emails from former colleagues telling me that things have gone very far downhill since I was kicked out, and that they do not get any support or help from my old team even though it is the precise job of that team to help them. And it does not matter that I did a really good job of stockpiling cash before I was thrown to the wolves.

Everything that happened to me was my fault.

This was a brutally hard truth to accept. I still get emotional even today, nearly 10 months after I was let go, about what happened – but my emotions do not change the fact that I failed.

I have continued to fail many times since then. Virtually every single job application that I have submitted since then – and I have sent out well over a hundred, to companies around the world – has been rejected. Almost every single attempt to find employment – even in the country of my birth, where I am actually legally allowed to work – has failed.

I own these failures. They are mine, and mine alone. Nobody else owes me anything, and I do not pretend otherwise.

On top of that, living with my parents has created its own share of problems – big ones. Part of this is natural and inevitable. I lived alone for nearly half my life, and I came to enjoy having my own time, routines, and schedule. Giving up my independence of thought, action, and movement has been extremely unpleasant. Becoming dependent on anyone else has been utterly galling and extremely humiliating.

Put into perspective, though, that is simply the price that must be paid for my lack of vision. That does not mean I like having to pay it, obviously, but the facts do not and should not care for my feelings.

Let me take a moment here to once again thank all of those who wrote in with messages of support, prayer, and help. I am deeply grateful to all of you for your help, in whatever form it takes. I hope that I am someday in a position to repay you, for I believe that a real man pays his debts to others.

I had successes in other areas, though. I started up a relationship this year – after I left the USA – because for the first time in many years I finally had the time and ability to put some real time and effort into a good relationship with a good woman, instead of seeking empty and meaningless interactions (you know what I mean) with horrid American and British women.

And, at first, things went great. Despite the long-distance nature of the thing, I was with a beautiful, intelligent, accomplished, talented, exceptionally compassionate and caring woman.

But eventually, especially after about a month of actually living with her in her own city, I came to realise that I had a hell of a lot of growing up to do. And that was an extremely unpleasant truth to face. I am reminded on an almost daily basis of the fact that, in a lot of ways, I am still basically a child.

Lately I have been re-reading the works of our good friend Adam Piggott on the subject of relationships. He is like the older brother or uncle that most of us never had, the man who teaches us all how to be real men. He has taught me many things that my own father did not – and though I respect and honour my father above all men, as I should, that is another harsh Truth that I had to face.

One could ask what right Adam has to lecture anyone about a successful marriage or relationship. His own has failed, after all. Christmas and New Year cannot have been all that much fun for him.

The answer to that is simple: he grew up, the hard way, and he admits when he is wrong.

It takes a man, not a child, to admit when he is wrong. And it takes a man to understand how to fix himself when he is wrong. A child cannot do these things.

What I realised from my six-month-long relationship – I will honestly and openly state that, as of this writing, it is an open question as to whether or not it will last any longer – is that Adam was absolutely right about the fact that most people have never grown up, and that they hide this fact very well most of the time.

I came to realise that I was afraid of conflict and drama, and that my first instinct was always to just walk away, instead of dealing with the problems immediately – which always made them worse. And while I have no problem admitting when I am wrong – just go take a look at some of my posts on free trade, libertarianism, or most especially Christianity, and you will see that I publicly and openly state when I am wrong about things – I evidently do have a problem with being flexible enough to adapt to someone else’s needs and wants.

I believe that the problem has quite a lot to do with much of the game literature that I have absorbed over the years. Game is an invaluable tool, without question. You absolutely need it in a relationship and in marriage. You CANNOT survive the modern world without it. But far too much of the game literature focuses on being “the alpha male”, on getting the man’s way entirely in a relationship.

This does not work in real life. Real relationships absolutely depend on give and take. You have to be able to adjust to each other. If one party spends all of his or her time adjusting to her or him, misery follows.

But if both parties can adjust to each other – if some kind of balance can be achieved – the result is happiness all around.

And if a man is going to be successful in pursuing relationships – not merely sex, but relationships – then he must get his own house in order, and must always maintain his frame. That is why relationships are genuinely hard work – not only do you have to work on yourself before you get into one, as I did (but didn’t do enough of), but you have to continue to work on yourself during and even after one.

You cannot make your wife or girlfriend happy. All you can do is create the conditions in which she can be happy – and you can only do this by being a real man, yourself.

No wonder so many overgrown boys these days are failing in their attempts to make relationships work. They have no concept of real work anymore.

It is also this realisation about the need to work on myself that made me realise, especially toward the tail end of 2018, that faith in Christ really is the only way forward that makes sense. One can be a committed but decent atheist, or a compassionate and just agnostic, or even a virtuous pagan, and live a good life. It is with good reason that the early fathers of the Church treated the virtuous pagans of Rome with great respect.

But ultimately, we all have to face one simple question: do you or do you not accept Truth?

If you do, there is really only one path that makes any kind of sense, because it is the only path that addresses the fundamental Problem of Evil.

All religions and philosophies recognise evil. All of them explain the problems presented by the existence of evil. Most of them disagree on how to address it.

With precisely one exception, not a single one of them can solve the problem.

That exception is Christianity, and there is simply no getting away from this fact. It is the only way that offers a complete explanation of evil and a way to defeat it.

So that is why I have decided, after literally years of study, to convert – just as soon as I get back to an English-speaking country with actual churches where I can do the full drunk-and-dunk routine. (Yes, I know, I’m being horribly uncharitable toward the rite of baptism – I never claimed to be good at this Christian stuff, after all.)

I don’t pretend to know anything useful about Christianity. I have studied the arguments about its validity for years. I have come to understand, intellectually at least, that it just makes sense, overall – though certain practical aspects of the Christian faith evidently stand as serious anachronisms in the modern day.

But ultimately, faith is beyond reason. And when it comes to being a Christian… you have to put your trust in something that you cannot see, feel, or control, and hope and pray that He Upstairs will catch you.

Turns out, of course, that He always does. It’s just hard to imagine that when you are standing on the edge of a cliff, trying to gather the courage to jump.

And that brings me to my message to you, the readers, for 2019:

Life is brutal and the evil of this world will drag you to your knees, beat you senseless, flay you alive, roll you in salt, and kick you out onto the streets to freeze and starve – and will laugh uproariously at your screams of torment all the while.

But there is always hope. You have a choice. You can remain where you are, curled up in pain in the darkness and the cold and accepting your dreadful fate. Or you can reach for that slim hope – no matter where it is – and try to pull yourself forward into the light again.

You have to understand that you will pay a price, sooner or later, for all the gifts that you were given in this world. Nothing comes for free, and growth is never possible without pain. But if you can face down your own inner daemons, if you can take your soul out and turn it over and examine it, and if you can accept your own flaws and resolve to fix them, then you will discover – perhaps to your considerable surprise – that there are plenty of people willing and able to help you.

And you might just discover that there is a Power, far beyond the comprehension of men, that stands with you and above you, that will help you to your feet – but will never give you anything for free.

Hope lives, my brothers. It burns brightly in all of us of the Hard Right. Turn your faces toward the light that shines in the darkness, and always remember that the darkness will never overcome it.