This isn’t the last column of the year. It is the last one before Christmas. But you’ll have me to kick around a couple more times before 2023 finally goes away.

As it’s the last column before Christmas, though, I’m going to do less scribbling and more provoking — maybe.

I say that because I’ve had a few conversations of late with some very smart people about the fact that, in case after case, we know that what we’re doing, not just policy-wise but on a bigger scale than that, simply doesn’t work. Too much of our national thinking is stuck in the 1990s, or worse, when reality was completely different than what it is now.

And there are some ideas that have come out of those discussions that are, at least in my mind, intriguing. And I’m going to offer up five of them below, but then what I’m hoping is that some of our readers might send up a few of your own.

I have an ulterior motive for some of this, I should confess. One project I’ve got on my to-do list for 2024 is to write The Revivalist Agenda, a sequel of sorts to the “racist, homophobic, conspiracy-theory-laden” Revivalist Manifesto — at least as CNN called it while helping to make it a bestseller earlier this month — and what The Revivalist Agenda would focus on is a collection of ideas for how the Right can break out of the defensive-conservative mindset and begin dominating the national discussion with new ideas that actually solve problems rather than turn them into political stalemates. (RELATED from Scott McKay: CNN Is Useful After All)

There are things out there that would do that. How many of them currently lie within the Overton Window, I don’t know. But there isn’t much harm in talking about them.

So anyway, I’m using this column to hopefully kick-start some thinking and discussion.

1. Illegal Immigration?

Here’s an idea I’ve been toying with for a while. With where we are right now, the Right wants to deport the millions of illegals before they become an unbearable drag on our economy on their way to amnesty, citizenship, and permanent residency on the Democrat voting plantation. The Left, obviously, wants to use either them or their kids to permanently alter the demographics of the country in a way it thinks will make for a permanent socialist majority.

Deporting millions of people to their home countries, when most of them are (fraudulently, in more cases than not) claiming they’re political refugees, is a bloody, ugly fight. You need something better to offer.

So circumvent the problem by doing something we’ve already seen work successfully — namely, set up an American colony in Central America that’s essentially a Singapore or Hong Kong and make the migrants earn their way into America by living there for five to ten years, learning English and building up a stake they can pay as an entry fee into the U.S.

You can pay for this adventure by hammering China with some massive tariffs on its manufactured goods but then having completely free trade with your Central American colony, which then eats into the Chinese share of our supply chain. The ready-made supply of labor from those migrants currently flocking to our southern border will see to it that your colony staffs up factories and manufacturing plants very quickly, and a quick boat ride from there to the posts of Houston, Tampa, or New Orleans can make for a fairly prosperous commercial operation.

Let American business use the cheap labor from Central American countries to directly compete with China for those manufacturing sectors that depend on cheaper labor than our domestic workforce is willing to provide. And once we have a place to put these migrants, we can throw up that wall and say, “That’s it, no more,” without anybody telling us we’re bad people.

Not that we should care about that anymore.

2. Abortion?

I don’t know about you, but I’m really tired of the country-club Republican crowd — and Donald Trump is bad about this as well, which is disheartening — lecturing pro-lifers that abortion is a loser of an issue. Abortion is murder. If you’re a political party worth supporting, you have to at least try to save those kids who the Left is busy attempting to exterminate for convenience’s sake.

But just like illegal immigration, this is a stalemate you’re simply not going to break out of unless the underlying environment changes. And the Left has the upper hand in the culture, particularly in the stranglehold they have on young, single women for whom abortion is increasingly a sacrament (young, single men who like the idea that they can hook up with any number of females they want without ever being burdened with fatherhood find a pro-abortion stance pretty convenient as well).

So you really need to resolve the issue rather than try to win it, which will take decades. This solution, on the other hand, might just take a few years.

Namely, invest in medical research aimed at reducing the fetal age at which science can incubate a baby outside of the womb. If you can get that down to 15 weeks (now, it’s generally around 22 weeks), then an abolitionist stance toward abortion becomes pretty viable politically. Why? If you can deliver and incubate a fetus at 15 weeks without any harm to the baby with more or less the same “user experience” that someone would have with a mid-term abortion, then why would anyone have an abortion?

You go into the clinic, they knock you out, and, when you wake up the pregnancy is over. The difference is that, with this approach, you haven’t killed anybody. That baby is going to incubate for four or five more months, and then adoptive parents will swoop in and take over. It’s entirely likely that they’ll be lining up to do that from the point of delivery — including picking up the cost.

Yes, this has some implications that aren’t awesome. What happens if all the girls want to deliver at 15 weeks and let technology take over, and this becomes a lifestyle choice? I won’t pretend that won’t be a problem. But it’s better than losing millions of kids who get sacrificed on the altar of convenience, isn’t it? And would you rather be arguing over different social problems than abortion? I know I would.

3. Gaza?

This one is pretty simple, and pretty brutal. And it might not be all that realistic, but, on the other hand, it smells a lot like “social justice” to me.

Now that the Houthis in Yemen are shooting missiles at ships in the Red Sea and largely shutting down commerce through the Suez Canal, it’s time to do something not just about them but about the underlying cause of this situation, which is Gaza. It seems to me that we can treat the Houthis — who are the Iranians’ stooges just like Hamas is — as having expressed a desire to host the couple of million Palestinian Arabs who declared a never-ending war on Israel in their territory.

So let’s send in the U.N. or NATO and establish a beachhead in Yemen, and start evacuating Palestinians there.

Look, we know that you will never actually have a “two-state solution” like the idiots in our State Department and the White House say they want. If that was ever going to happen, it went up in smoke on Oct. 7. The Israelis won’t tolerate any discussion of that idea anymore, and you can’t blame them. And the Palestinians? All they want to do is die trying to exterminate the Israelis. That’s obvious. They can’t live next door, or else it’ll be one war after another, and things will never improve.

And money can’t fix this, because anything you spend on the Palestinians simply gets stolen by Hamas or Fatah and used for weapons, or for building 500 miles of tunnels under Gaza.

So, enough.

Much of Yemen is uninhabited. A lot of the land there is as or more fertile as the places in which the Palestinians currently live. Yemen has 34 million people, and it’s essentially a failed state; the Houthis control the capital at Sana’a, but nobody controls the whole thing. Let the Palestinians set up a colony somewhere in Yemen, and let those billions of dollars in humanitarian aid flow to a place where it’s useless to build tunnels.

4. Abusive Weaponization From the Left?

This one might be my favorite idea because it would produce some immediate results. Have the red states set up a multistate investigatory commission — perhaps led by attorneys general, state treasurers, and secretaries of state — to probe the threat that the radical Left poses to American freedom and security. The commission could dig into activism (like Antifa and Black Lives Matter, among other “activist” groups whose activities are unsavory, to say the least), finance (BlackRock and ESG/DEI, the Democracy Alliance, Arabella Advisors), election interference, censorship, and lots of other areas in which an unelected coalition of money and miscreants are changing the country in ways we don’t want. And let’s force the bigwigs in those sectors to testify in front of hostile hearings that look a little like the Church Committee.

They might not want to participate, and Washington, D.C., will lose its ever-loving mind, but here’s the thing — if this commission generates the same kind of participation as all these multistate lawsuits the attorneys general have been filing, somebody like Larry Fink or George Soros is going to have to accept being dragged in. You can’t just ignore a subpoena from 25 states, including Texas, Florida, Georgia, and Tennessee.

Not to mention that this would be enormously popular among the voters of the states where elected officials will join, which means it’ll be impossible to dissolve.

They’ll call it the second coming of McCarthy, but who gives a damn? These people are sending the FBI out to harass Catholics who go to Latin Mass, for crying out loud, when they’re not trying to steal Trump’s companies away from him because they disagree with asset valuations he listed on bank loans that he paid off. Give them a taste of their own medicine.

5. Shutdown Politics?

This one is a bit of a modification on what I’m pretty sure is Mike Johnson’s current plan for Congress. Johnson has said over and over again that his quest is to achieve “regular order” with respect to the federal budget, which means that, rather than trying to pass a continuing resolution to fund the government, the House would pass 12 different appropriations bills.

That’s a great start. What needs to happen is fracturing that process even further.

Namely, Johnson and his leadership team need to work on a plan to institute not just regular order on the budget but a two-stage appropriations process for those appropriations bills. The first stage would be the core appropriations bills, which would include the basic core functions of those agencies and none of the fluff the Left likes. Pay salaries of essential workers, pay core, bare-bones expenses, and so on. Then the rest of the funding would be executed through the supplemental appropriations bills.

And those would be where the real fights would come.

Which is OK, because the core bills have already been passed.

If there is no supplemental appropriation for the EPA or the Department of Education, which would almost certainly include a host of things most Americans would actually rather the federal government not do anyway, then who cares?

My guess is that if you’re ever going to actually cut that budget and bring the red ink to a minimum or even an end, it’s going to have to be a result of something like this. The Democrats won’t accept anything other than the mountain of waste they currently live on, but if you’re sending the Senate core appropriations bills with the promise of swag to come in the supplementals, they’re going to have a hard time voting them down without at least passing their own version and attempting to taking the bills to conference.

It’s about leverage. Currently, Republicans have none. That has to change. Maybe we’ll get some good discussions going about how to shift the paradigm and the Overton Window next year.