Recap of Top Libertarian Jew Blog Entries for 2021

This time of the year is a time of reflection on what has transpired during the current calendar year. Last year, I was hoping for less craziness than there was in 2020. Between the pandemic, economic downturn, and social unrest, last year was unhinged. While 2021 was not as bad as 2020, 2021 still had more than its fair share of insanity. 

As the pandemic continued into its second year, it remained a major topic in the media and among political pundits. On my blog, the pandemic was a topic that accounted for over a third of my blog entries for the 2021 calendar year. I was hoping that it would have been less considering that safe and effective vaccines were made available (see April 2021 analysis here). There was a brief moment in which the CDC said that the unvaccinated could go around doing normal activities unmasked. My response to that CDC recommendation in May was that the CDC has botched messaging throughout the pandemic and that going back to normal means ignoring what the CDC has to say by enjoying life regardless. Maybe now, we could stop people telling us to "follow the science" while ignoring the science. That was wishful thinking on my part. 

We went from "two weeks to flatten the curve" to "wait a little longer to help hospitals" to "wait until we have a vaccine" to "get enough people vaccinated." But along came the Delta variant, and with that, the goalposts moved once more. To keep Delta in check, President Biden called for vaccine mandates. I covered the topic no less than four times this past year in which I pointed out the problems with vaccine mandates (see here, here, here, and here). 2021 was also a year in which we procured enough data to conclude that the lockdowns were both ineffective and harmful from a public health standpoint. And let's not even get into the unhelpful travel bans or mask mandates (see here and here). All of this lunacy made me realize that the pandemic will not come to an end when COVID-related hospitalizations or deaths get low enough, but when we as a society get used to accepting risk once more. 

But don't you worry. There was enough craziness to go around that the pandemic did not need to hog all the spotlight. 

• Cancel culture was another major news item. Take the Dr. Seuss controversy in which the Dr. Seuss Foundation cancelled the publication of six of Seuss' less-known works. I came to multiple conclusions on that debacle, most notably that the woke Left are the moral prudes of our time and that a small group of emotionally fragile and intellectually weak individuals should not have their sense of being offended determine what is acceptable for the rest of us. 
• In a similar vein, there was cancel culture controversy surrounding comedian Dave Chapelle's Netflix special The Closer. He made jokes offending all sorts of people, but the jokes that got the most ire were those on the theme of transgender individuals. You can read my analysis here, but I was reminded of the value of comedy, the importance of free speech, and that the fragility of the woke Left is both at odds with learning to agree with those disagree with you and the essential pillars that make up a free, democratic society. 
• In terms of economic disarray, I offered my takes on the supply chain crisis and the shortages in the labor market. 
• And let's not forget the debacle with the Kyle Rittenhouse trial. While the woke Left tried to make it about race (which is odd considering the case was about a white guy shooting four other white guys in self-defense), it showed how little many on the Left believe that there is a such thing as a "good guy with a gun." The spoiler here is that defensive gun usage (DGU) is way more prevalent than the Left would care to admit. 
• But if we do want to get into the topic of race, I tackled the topic of critical race theory (CRT). Contrary to what the Left would like to believe, CRT is not about simply about having a dialogue about race or making sure we are not ignoring the nastier parts of history. CRT is a simplistic, fatalistic worldview that believes that U.S. institutions are inherently racist and [one of] the only attributes of a human being that matters is the color of one's skin. 
• On the brighter side of race relations, Juneteenth became a federal holiday. I wrote a piece on why we should all celebrate Juneteenth in the United States.

I wish you all a Happy New Year! May it be less out of whack than 2020 and 2021 were.