5 trends for libertarians to celebrate in 2022

First, a happy and healthy New Year’s to you all.

As I write this newsletter from the cold, dreary, and re-locked down (third time’s the charm, eh!?) province of Quebec, my ol’ knoggin got to thinkin’ about how the freedom seeds that were sown in 2021 and 20 will bloom in 2022.

Here they are:

1.The complete medical, political, and moral collapse of the Lockdown ideology and its personality cults.

With the vastly more mild Omnicron variants surging through every corner of the globe, it’s become clear to nearly everyone with a pulse and IQ above 17 that every draconian policy has been a catastrophic failure, and that the virus doesn’t care about your lockdowns.

Instead, more and more people are flocking away from the Lockdown Un-Intellegensia (Fauci, Biden, the WHO, etc.) and toward the realization that we can either have a civilization, or we can have brutal lockdowns, but we can’t have both.

And now that it’s clear that security blank (re: “‘mask”) mandates, medical apartheid certificates, border closures, vaccine mandates (as well as the vaccines themselves!) do nothing to stop the spread, mass, if quiet, civil disobedience will end this global lockdown nightmare.

2.Parental school choice goes from fringe, to mainstream, to only-stream.

After Bill Clinton’s errand boy Terry McCaullife got his tuckus handed to him in the November 2021 Virginia governor’s race, everyone knew it was because he condemned parents who don’t think that teaching kids they should judge themselves and others by race.

A lesser known 2021 story, however, as well as the vastly more important one, is the mass mobilization of parents in favor of radical school choice.

Parent voters ousted more incumbent school board members than any year in American history.

Now is the chance to seize on our gains and work to, as famed school choice analyst and activist Corey DiAngelis says, “fund students, not systems.”

We should be working to defund the educational bureaucracy via dismantling direct funding of government schools and using the money to fund education savings accounts and radically deregulating the education marketplace.

3.Rise of the foreign policy non-interventionists

It was hard for me to believe what I thought were my lying eyes when I saw the last US troops (albeit chaotically) flying out of Afghanistan.

It was the end of one of the biggest foreign policy disasters in American history—one that not only left several thousand Americans dead, and tens of thousands of innocent Afghans, but it was also the death of liberal regime change wars.

Americans across the board have rejected a foreign policy that commits the US to be the policeman of the world—which is more often than not merely a cover for corporate and statist ideological interests.

And in recent years, a new infrastructure of institutions has risen up to challenge the war mongering neoconservatives and progressive imperialists in DC, like the Quincy Institute and the foreign policy team at the Cato Institute.

But the big “tell” that happened that makes you know that we “‘made it” was a debate between uber hawk Bill Kristol and passionate anti-warrior Scott Horton.

Horton laid into Kristol with blistering detail, while Kristol relied on stale and morally bankrupt DC talking points about “US interests” and the “liberal world order.”

When the voting was all in for the debate, Horton won in a landslide. 

This debate simply wouldn’t have happened 20 years ago, 10 years ago, or even 5 years ago.

Non-interventionism has arrived. 

4. A federalist renaissance

Political scientists can point to long term trends of Americans sorting according to politics and lifestyle via which states and communities they seek to live in.

Republican red states have been getting redder, and Democratic blue states have been getting bluer.

Accordingly, these new politically solidified states have pursued the political goals of the party that has unified control.

Republicans have been deregulating guns and re-regulating abortion, passing school choice laws, restrictioning illegal immigration.

Democratic states have increased the minimum wage, banned fracking, hiked taxes, expanded Medicaid, and passed polarizing transgender legislation.

Then COVID came.

And states and localities aren’t just different. They might as well be from different countries.

And while I highly doubt the hyped “National divorce” (re: state separatism) that’s on everyone’s minds and keyboards is going to happen…there is no doubt that states are moving farther and farther apart from each other…with Governor Gavin Newsome calling California its own “nation state” and Florida’s Ron DeSantis calling his state the “free state of Florida”

All of this suggests people are getting more and more comfortable with the idea of becoming partisans for their state and community more than the “USA”

5. The triumph of free speech, un-cancelable independent media, and Web3 world-building

And finally, my favorite trend of all.

The long slide toward the death of the culture of free speech began somewhere around the publishing of anti-Islamist cartoons in Denmark…and reached rock bottom in the COVID era where doctors were losing their licenses for daring to speak out against their patients getting the jab because it wasn’t in their personal medical interest to do so.

However, necessity is the baby mama of invention, and if mass censorship by our wise corporate and political overlords has taught us anything…it’s that unless you own your own media, you don’t have any platform that’s worth a damn. 

That’s why it’s been so amazing to see so many writers, academics, podcasters, video show hosts, marketers, and entrepreneurs strike out on their own…not only with a new blog or something that can be snatched away from them, but with a new…

Media Empire!

Whether it’s people creating their own apps, social media, video streaming sites, email lists, and email broadcasting systems…the voices of freedom are getting stronger, faster, smarter, and better than ever before.

Contrast this with legacy media losers like the New York Times, talking head cable news harpies, and those 6 figure universities that shut down if there’s so much of a whiff of a COVID fart in the wind (while still charging full price, of course).

Fact is, all of these places are disintegrating faster than Anthony Fauci’s Wuhan flu lab leak cover up!

So there you have it—my 5 trends for libertarians to celebrate in 2022.

With that, I wish you a happy and healthy new year and keep your eyes peeled on this ‘here newsletter because I’ve got lot’s of great products and content coming your way.

-David