Year of the Slack

2022 in review

This year ought to be remembered as the year in which the West slackened. Not just because inflation spiked or the danger of total American statism worsened. Not merely because multi-trillion dollar debt rose and economic, fiscal and monetary policy also worsened amid bad laws and practices and looming collapse and disorder. The impending, unfolding debacle of Joe Biden’s presidency, which seeds irrationalism in foreign, domestic, and, imminently, energy policy, is also not the most essential reason the West went limp. However, each of these are leading indicators.

Three main events caused by the refusal to think prove the West went soft in 2022. The first is a breakdown in civil discourse and accelerating disunity. As the midterm elections demonstrate, the nation’s never been more philosophically bankrupt or politically and socially divided, on issues ranging from the right to abortion to the right to free speech. The Democrats want abortion to be sponsored, promoted and subsidized by the state. Conservatives want abortion banned, criminalized and discouraged by the state. Both are wrong. Free speech remains under siege.

The year’s second most essential news is the Biden presidency’s crusade for war with Russia over Ukraine, an unprecedented and undeserving multi-billion dollar attempt to wage altruistic war or proxy war. This week, Democrats, the political party which controls U.S. government, passed a $1.7 trillion bill changing America’s election law—Democrats made election fraud easier while making any challenge to election results more difficult or nearly impossible—with $45 billion in additional war aid and materiel to Time’s designated man of the year, Ukraine leader Zelensky. The third and most alarming event is the assassination attempt—and subsequent U.S. appeasement—on one who deserves to be named 2022’s Man of the Year, The Satanic Verses’ 75 year-old author Salman Rushdie. The barbaric attempted murder happened in one of America’s first states during a lecture on America as a haven for the freethinker; it’s an act of war originally ordered by Iran in 1989. Each story was suppressed, dodged or distorted in the press. Each story, I’m proud to write, was covered with in-depth, factual reporting, in Autonomia.

There were other important stories, news and events this year, some of which Autonomia may have missed. Elon Musk, who bought one of the West’s most influential sources for social discourse, Twitter, demonstrated heroism. So did outspoken artists such as J.K. Rowling, who explicitly defied transsexualism dogma.

Pandemic lockdown shaped millions of Americans’ lives, livelihoods and fortunes in ways and by means that are just beginning to become known. Mass shootings, judicial rulings, such as the Supreme Court decision striking down the flawed 1972 Roe versus Wade abortion case, and the deaths of Olivia Newton-John, David McCullough and Vin Scully made people in the West dumber and dimmer. There’s reason to be optimistic, though optimism begins with a reality check. For this reason, Autonomia began 2022 with a somber travelogue profiling one of America’s best museums about Nazi atrocities. Past is prelude, a famous saying goes. This year, it’s evident that we’re well into a history that’s going dark.