Phil Orenstein

Giving Thanks to the Heroes and Heroines Surrounding Us

By Joseph Concannon

Thank you to the members of the Queens Village Republican Club and Happy Thanksgiving.  We live in the most generous, caring and forgiving nation on earth and there is no end to the examples of this.  Today, President Trump issued seven prestigious American Freedom Medals.  It is a ceremony repeated annually to acknowledge outstanding civilians in our American society. You too would have been very proud of your fellow citizens and nation.  We can share this moment with each other via computer.  Please see: https://tinyurl.com/y8hr8ry3 for all the details.  We are an exceptional people and have much to be proud of and thankful for and it is only fitting that we pause to examine these things. In thinking about what to write for this month’s December newsletter, I thought I might make up the Concannon American Freedom Awards.   If you are proud of someone share it with me on my Facebook page.  So here we go:

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Steve Hilton:  England’s Horatio Alger Comes To America    

By Robert Golomb

Steve Hilton, the host of the weekly political Fox News Show, “The Next Revolution with Steve Hilton” (which first aired on June 4, 2017), would seem to be anything but an outsider. However, that is exactly how he described himself to me in a recent thirty -minute telephone interview.  “I have felt like an outsider since I was a young child and continue to feel that way today,” he told me.

That, I thought, was a disarmingly humble self -description from a man who has achieved as much in his forty-nine years on earth as had the English born and raised Hilton, whose life   reads like the British version of the American Horatio Alger classic rags to riches stories.  

Born in 1969 to parents who had immigrated to England after fleeing the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, the “rags” part of Hilton’s story, as I discussed with him and as he describes in his recently published best-selling auto- biographical, economics and political centered book,  “Positive Populism”, began in 1974, shortly after his mother (who later remarried) and father divorced. “I was only five, and the divorce resulted in great financial hardship for my mother and me”, he stated.  “We lived in a cold, damp basement apartment. My mom worked in a shoe store to earn the little money we had. It was a struggle. I think my feelings of being an outsider began then. And quite honestly despite some success that I enjoyed in my life that feeling of being something of an interloper has never left me.” 

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