It finally happened. 2016 ended. For a while there, I wasn’t sure it would. Groundhog Year. It’s a real concern.

But no, the year has finally been put out of its (and our) misery and we’re on to the bright and shiny promise of brand new, just out of the box 2017. Brush away the Styrofoam peanuts, peel that little plastic off the screen, breathe that new year smell, and buckle up, baby. It’s going to be another wild ride.

2017 is going to be a whole new ballgame around the world. Populations have shifted, both demographically and geographically. Brexit’s two-year process will officially “trigger”. Syria is aflame, Democrats are in the doghouse, and, louder than all of this, Donald Trump will be the President of the United States. This new year won’t have time to grow up. It will be thrust into adulthood on day one.

There will be war. There will be terror. Uncertainty in markets, a lack of faith not just in our own public institutions, but in the global order of things. The United Nations is a joke and everyone knows it, now. Russia is an active opponent. China still has that island. North Korea is still testing nukes. There will be blood and death and destruction aplenty in 2017.

There will be good. Every day there are incredible scientific and medical advances. Twelve months from now there will something commonplace that today you haven’t even dreamed of. There will be massive charitable giving, fundraising, and efforts to raise the standard of living around the world.

There will be hard truths to face too. There is a religious sect in this world bent on subjugating all, and they bring mayhem and destruction. We must face this religious sect. We must name it. Not you and I, but the leaders. They must say it and know it and mean it and face it. But it’s not the only hard truth.

Our global environment is changing. It will change more. Change doesn’t mean disaster, but we have to face and name that thing that is changing, because it has been changing constantly, never static or at rest, since the dawn of this planet. It rhymes with plimate, and there may now be an opportunity, thanks to Trump, for more objective and critical research into understanding how it is changing. We should seek the hard truth about it.

It’s time for truth to be the first order of business, not the last. Whether we like that truth, whether it’s from our “side” or not. This is new ground. But it’s time.

At RedState, we are in new territory, too. The masthead has changed. We have several new writers, and some long-time writers are now at new sites. Many of us remain in opposition to the Republican President-elect. Others do not. We don’t force an editorial position here. Diversity of opinion is something the right used to brag about (though in this new age it seems to be generally spat upon).

Still, Trump’s Cabinet has several wins, although it’s fairly wealthy and elite and not at all what he promised his base. Tax cuts will probably be coming. Changes to Obamacare will be immediate, whether they be good, bad, weak, strong, or other. Changes to immigration policy may be coming. The GOP congress should be ready to work, and we have a giant, overbearing nanny-state drunk with regulations and redistribution and over-criminalization and government healthcare and spending, spending, spending, spending to deal with. It’s time that happened.

Sadly, it looks like one of the first things our republican leaders are going to do is join the trend, with massive spending already promised and presumably on the way. Not spending cuts, increases. Such big spending used to be a pretty obvious thing to oppose for a Republican and conservative blog. Looking around the web, it’s not so obvious anymore. But it’s still one of our top priorities here at RedState and we’ll continue to accurately report on it and offer our opinion and analysis with care and respect and, sometimes, snark and a bit of sarcasm.

That, friends, is what blogs do. And we are that. It takes critics to make the things that should happen actually happen. And we got critics, yo.

You’ll see some new features here at the site. We have seen in the last two months or so the return of our secretive friend the RedState Insider. Soon you will meet a few other feature writers, including some specializing in media criticism and in the tracking and explanation of bills before congress. We’re going to be launching a new fact-checker as well. Keep an eye out (and your facts straight.)

The bottom line is, 2017 is going to be one heck of a year. In political terms, it’s hard to see how it will be anything but the Year of Trump. We don’t know what the future holds, but we do know that at RedState we will do what we have always done. We will call bad things bad, good things good, helpful things helpful, and harmful things we’ll just call [curse words here]. That will be true no matter who is doing those things. It’s more important to be on America’s side than to be on some particular political team.

We are a conservative website. In the primary. In the general. And in the non-election years. That may be a bit different from how we used to say it, but things are a bit different here in 2017. It’s a new year. It’s a new you. It’s a new us. Let’s all try to make it a good one.