The Top Six News Stories Of 2021
In this installment of our weekly Sunday Six conversation, PF Whalen and Parker Beauregard of The Blue State Conservative loom back on six major news stories from 2021.
#6: The gubernatorial elections in Virginia and New Jersey.
PF: When it comes to news stories for this year, it seems to me there was a lot more bad than good; and I’m generally an optimistic person. It also marks the second year in a row that I’m making such an assessment. We’re in a rut. Yet while there wasn’t much to smile about this year, what happened in Virginia and New Jersey in early-November certainly qualifies.
Every four years, in the year directly following the presidential election, Election Day tends to be uneventful. Barring a special election there are no Congressional seats at stake, and only Virginia and New Jersey cast their gubernatorial votes. As a result, these election cycles tend to be humdrum and un-noteworthy. But not 2021.
Virginia has been a solid blue state for several years now, and one in which Joe Biden beat Donald Trump last year by twelve points. Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe was expected to cruise to an easy victory over Republican Glenn Youngkin, but he didn’t. Youngkin won comfortably and shocked the country as a result. In New Jersey, a state in which Biden beat Trump by sixteen points, Republican challenger Jack Ciattarelli came close enough to defeating Democratic incumbent Phil Murphy that it took over a week before he conceded. Additionally, in one of the biggest political upsets in decades, a truck driver named Ed Durr, who’d only spent a few hundred dollars on his campaign, defeated the state’s sitting Senate President, Democrat Steve Sweeney.
The elections in both states were a clear rejection of Democratic policies, and of President Biden himself. Voters turned away from Critical Race Theory and woke school boards. They ignored the left’s attempts at identity politics and the labeling of everything they don’t like as racist. And they openly challenged the wisdom of dictatorial government control regarding Covid. In short, voters in Virginia and New Jersey sent a message of optimism to conservatives and signaled to Democrats that they need to pump the brakes on their leftward shift.
#5: The introduction, roll out, mandates, and failures of vaccines.
Parker: For all the misplaced optimism about just needing to get through 2020, its successor year has been anything but alleviating in the realm of Covid. In a real pandemic, any and every treatment would have been made available at the signs of the first case. In our version of a pandemic, medical professionals mostly told sick people to stay home until their symptoms got bad enough to be admitted and crossed their fingers that machine ventilation would save lives. (It didn’t; instead, this practice was often stopped because it had the opposite effect). Only a vaccine would save us, they said, and so we waited for a full year to find out.
In 2021, then, we were introduced to several rushed and unproven vaccines in the government’s effort to allegedly slow the spread and stop the virus. Americans, largely susceptible to believe anything after relentless campaigns of fear porn and anxiety-producing propaganda, willingly enrolled in the largest study in the history of the pharmaceutical industry. Despite being told by Anthony Fauci and others that HCQ and IVM were untested and therefore unfit to be suitable preventative or therapeutic options, they nevertheless rolled up their sleeves for even more untested solutions. If that logic doesn’t seem porous, then reason itself ceases to exist.
In the course of the year, society went from not having any vaccines, to needing the initial dose requirements for full coverage, to no longer needing a mask if vaccinated, to changing definitions around immunity and vaccines, to requiring masks again if vaccinated, to acknowledging conspiracy theories such as vaccine passports and boosters were quite real, to bifurcating society around vaccination status, to recommending and requiring boosters to be considered fully vaccinated, to compelling vaccination upon threat of job loss, and so much more. It has been a freedom-crushing and absolutely unscientific year. To drive home the point, this has all happened in under a year.
For readers that are curious about a more complete timeline, I found this synopsis compelling. Interestingly, I had forgotten just how soon Anthony Fauci was calling for the need for boosters – January 25th, to be precise. In other words, vaccines had been deployed for less than two months nationwide and the goalposts were already moving. It’s almost as if the typical FDA timeline of 3-5 years should have been heeded to learn more about the vaccine and its long-term utility and safety. In a statement made as far back as January 1st of 2021, Fauci even alluded to vaccine requirements for domestic air travel and participation in school.
In hindsight, other than a year’s worth of additional empirical and clinical data, our knowledge of the virus and the vaccination effort itself have not changed all that much. Viruses mutate, and while they might not irrevocably mutate along the lines of greater transmissibility and less virulence, evidence would suggest that this is the case at least for SARS-CoV-2. The hyped Delta and Delta+ variants were more infectious and less deadly, and the attempted Christmas-killer, Omicron, certainly substantiates this pattern. There are strong arguments to be made that the vaccination efforts accelerated the rise of so many variants. Amazingly, the American medical establishment predicted as much about this particular virus as far back as February 2020.
If there is any optimism for 2022, it is that we know the solution to Covid won’t be five or six boosters when we know that the first four didn’t achieve the desired results. Will enough people realize this and make a difference in the tyrannical policies? We will see.
#4: The rise of Bidenflation.
PF: Through President Joe Biden’s first 100 days in office, he had either proposed or implemented over $6 trillion in new, federal spending. Joe was spending like his son Hunter during a Vegas coke binge. The problem is, of course, Biden was spending money that doesn’t even exist. We were spending more than ever before and putting the country into more debt. Additionally, in late-January when Biden was inaugurated, the economy was already heating up as lockdowns and other Covid measures were being lifted, so we didn’t need more government spending. But that didn’t matter to Joe.
We handed out ‘free’ $1,400 checks to everyone whose income was low enough to qualify, and then extended their unemployment benefits. We gave money to blue states in the name of Covid which gave those states the green light to ramp up their own spending. And then Biden signed an Infrastructure Bill – that had nothing to do with infrastructure – for trillions of more dollars. Biden and his comrades claimed that none of this spending would create inflation, and they even had the gall to tell us it would alleviate inflation. It didn’t. They were lying.
Now we find ourselves with out-of-control inflation as a result. Make no mistake, what we’re experiencing isn’t just ordinary inflation, it’s hyper-inflation. It’s Bidenflation.
With the extra money in their pockets and extended unemployment benefits, Americans could afford to stay out of work but still buy stuff, driving up demand. Former transportation employees stayed home leading to the current supply chain crisis, driving down supply. Put it altogether and we get 9.6% inflation in November, the highest such number ever recorded in the U.S.
Those same folks who were singing Biden’s praises after their ‘free’ checks are now paying the price. Inflation doesn’t hurt the wealthy, but it’s devastating to the poor and middle class. Fortunately, as much as Democrats try to evade accountability, they own these results. They own inflation. And the horrendous polling numbers for both Biden and Congressional Democrats reflect this reality.
#3: The inescapable threat of Big Tech’s censorship and mechanisms of social control.
Parker: As much as the entire Trump policy didn’t create social divisions in America or lead the media to becoming fraudulent curators of reality – he merely exposed them – so too could the same thing be said about Covid. Covid provided a sandbox for elitist overlords in which to play, and the opportunities merely allowed them to finally expose their latent tendencies and ambitions.
Among other powerful people and entities, the amalgamation of Big Tech (Google, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and the rest of most social media and technology-based media) ran amok with censorship, shadow banning, de-platforming, and reality curation. Disappointingly, each company likely began innocently enough and with noble intentions. Who could forget that a young and intelligent geek named Mark Zuckerberg developed early Facebook sites to rank women on his college campus? From there, it took off as a virtual social connection site, first among just institutions of higher ed and eventually anyone with a pulse. In one of the first tweets in the ether, founder Jack Dorsey proudly exclaimed that Twitter could serve as an open forum to ideas; only later did it devolve into the digital version of Mao’s Red China.
The most obvious example of Big Tech censorship came in the aftermath of January 6th; Donald Trump was removed from Twitter and eventually every other platform. Even before that, the suppression of the Hunter Biden story alone likely changed the outcome of the election and months of Covid “misinformation” was prevented from being circulated online among believers in truth and science. Indeed, Big Tech creates our reality as much from lying about some stories as it does from hiding the truth about others. Other examples almost seem endless – probably because they are. Facebook refuses to engage with any content questioning the 2020 election or ivermectin. YouTube removed the “dislike”counter so that videos promoting Joe Biden, Democrats, and leftist ideas in general could not be ratioed. Yahoo! Had previously banned the comment section because it was a forum of rational human beings calling out the fake news industry. In the broadest sense, every company mandates that its users abide by “community guidelines.” In other words, it means nothing and everything at the same time. Walk the party line or face banishment.
The most frightening aspect of Big Tech’s endless reach into our communication, personal information, and its ability to both monitor and suggest certain consumption of content, as well as manufacture entire worldviews, is that these new technologies grant almost limitless powers for evildoers. Social credit scores, digital vaccine passports, and every other tool can be thrust onto the public like never before. A technocracy is more than worrisome; it spells the end of human liberty if implemented.
#2: The catastrophic Afghanistan withdrawal.
PF: A quick review of American foreign policy and military actions over the past century reveal many blunders. JFK’s Bay of Pigs fiasco stands out, as do several aspects of the Vietnam War, and Jimmy Carter’s calamity in Iran, including his attempted helicopter rescue. We, America, have screwed up royally over the years. But none of those incidents’ level of failure exceed last summer’s nightmare in Afghanistan, and it’s not particularly close.
The first feature of Biden’s botchery to recognize was his decision to withdraw in the first place. Prior to Biden making the call to pull out of Afghanistan, we’d gone a full eighteen months without a single casualty in-country. Yes, we’d been there for two decades, but the situation was stable, Afghans and Americans were safe, and we were spending less tax dollars in Afghanistan than we do in over ten other countries. We didn’t need to leave, but Biden apparently thought it would help him politically. He was wrong; very wrong.
We lost thirteen Americans during the withdrawal and left behind hundreds of others – not to mention thousands of green card holders. We deserted loyal allies who’d helped us battle our common enemy. We abandoned over $80 billion of military equipment and ammunition to our foe. We left 30 million Afghan women to the whims of the Taliban and their perverted version of Islam. And worst of all, we handed the country back to the same monsters who had enabled Usama Bin Laden and his accomplices to kill 3,000 innocent Americans on September 11, 2001.
There are facets of the Afghanistan debacle that we can quantify, but in reality, it will most likely be years before we understand its full magnitude. We must pray we don’t have a repeat of 9/11, and that the human toll in Afghanistan itself is minimized. But that’s our only remedy for this situation: hope and prayers. And we have Joe Biden to thank.
#1: The events and politicization of January 6th.
Parker: In a year of big stories, I don’t think there was a bigger story in 2021 than the American Reichstag Fire that occurred in the U.S. Capitol building. From the moment it happened, everything just seemed out of place. Trump rallies just didn’t devolve into anarchy. And insurrections certainly aren’t led by unarmed grandmothers. There was never a threat on democracy, and anyone that says so is either lying, stupid, or both. And they are definitely stupid.
The fallout of 1/6 is still felt today, and none of it is for the better. The then-sitting president, and now former president, Donald Trump remains banned from nearly every social media program and a ridiculous kangaroo commission is currently underway, kept from appearing partisan with the participation of two of the largest sellout Republicans Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger. Worst of all, scores of Americans are being confined in unconstitutional and unethical prisons, locked away by people who hate them and hate this country.
As we went to print on this article, I noticed that American Thinker also ran a piece on some of the latest developments of these political prisoners. It begs the obvious question: Where are our elected officials? Where is decency? Where is the law? Nearly everyone in D.C., save for a few courageous representatives like MTG and Louis Gohmert, have flat out ignored the obvious scandal of illegal and partisan detentions of people who merely walked into the building upon police invitation and most certainly FBI influence. To read about the conditions in which these political prisoners endure, on top of the fact that they have yet to have access to the legal system, is an abomination.
Everything from January 6th day smacks of rife partisan chicanery and nefarious shenanigans. Ashli Babbitt was murdered and her kjiller wasn’t even identified until he elected to do a national television interview; can you imagine Derek Chauvin getting that treatment? Officer Brian Sicknick died of a stroke and yet his death was announced as a bludgeoning and led to his resting in honor at the Capitol Rotunda. It is impossible that Joe Biden and the rest, who attended the service, did not know the truth. Why has not more attention been focused on four Capitol Police officers have since committed suicide? The FBI announced months ago that there was no organized plan to incite an insurrection. No one carried a weapon. The few released videos show most milling around and acting as tourists. On that note, where is the rest of the footage?
All of this is meant to send a loud message: Don’t mess with the Establishment. Regardless, one fact remains here. There is only one insurrection against America, and it wasn’t by Americans loyal to Donald Trump last January – it is by the Democrat and political establishment that projects their true motives and intentions onto the rest of us.
Content syndicated from TheBlueStateConservative.com with permission.
