News and Analysis

5 Stories The Media Tried To Ignore In 2021

DailyWire.com

With the legacy media poised to begin their second year of January 6 coverage, vitally important news stories continue to slip down the memory hole. The media spent too much of the past year obsessing over such non-stories as the president’s favorite ice cream and the vice president’s favorite tennis shoes  while ignoring the truly important events affecting most Americans who are not part of the bicoastal elite. Here are a few such stories:

5) The number of U.S. police shot to death breaks an all-time record

Policemen are often tasked with doing things no one else wants to do, sometimes even after they retire. The president of the Fraternal Order of Police, Patrick Yoes, made an unwelcome announcement in early December: “We’ve already had more officers killed in the line of duty by gunfire this year than any other — and there is still one month left,” he said. As this author reported at The Daily Wire:

In another historic Biden first, the number of police shot and killed in the line of duty reached record-breaking levels in 2021. According to the 2021 tally from the Fraternal Order of Police, as of midnight on November 30:

  • 314 police officers were shot in the line of duty;

  • 58 officers who were shot died from their wounds, a 16% increase from 2019;

  • Shooters ambushed police officers 95 times, a 126% increase from 2020; and

  • 119 officers were ambushed with gunfire, and 28 died.

Three additional officers were gunned down in December, according to the Officer Down Memorial Page, including female officer Keona Holley of Baltimore, who “succumbed to gunshot wounds sustained on December 16th, 2021, when she was ambushed in the 4400 block of Pennington Avenue.”

Neither the police nor the U.S. government have any doubt that the media’s hyperpolarized, hyperracialized criticism of police officers’ actions is driving the ambushes. “Overall disrespect for law and order, for law enforcement unlike anything we’ve ever seen in this country is part of the reason, and a huge reason why the finest among us — brothers and sisters, men and women who put on that uniform — are being attacked for no reason other than simply standing for law and order,” Mark Nelson, president of the Oklahoma chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police, told Fox News.

A 2017 FBI study found that 28% of shooters who ambushed police “had a hatred of law enforcement” based on “what they heard and read in the media about other incidents involving law enforcement shootings.” These cop-killers “believed attacking police officers was their way to ‘get justice’ for those who had been, in their view, unjustly killed by law enforcement.” Thus is the outcome when the media rush to judgment.

That was almost five years ago. Americans’ trust in police hit its lowest point last August and, while it has improved, a USA Today poll in July found that only 1 in 5 Americans believes police officers treat suspects equally.

“What we need … is our elected leaders, from the local level all the way up to Congress, to speak out and condemn these ambush-style attacks,” said Nelson. It seems like a modest request for politicians to forthrightly condemn the murder of policemen and for the media to “say their names.”

4) Inflation reaches the highest level in nearly 40 years

Other than unemployment, perhaps no economic principle is easier to understand than inflation. Rising prices affect everyone who buys any product — reducing families’ real wealth, eroding earnings, and silently eating away healthy saving accounts. This year, the United States saw greater inflation than in any time in almost four decades. As this author reported at The Daily Wire:

In 2021, the United States is tied for the highest level of inflation suffered by any of the world’s 35 developed economies, according to statistics released from the International Monetary Fund.

The U.S. and Iceland are for the fastest rate of rising prices among 35 advanced economies. The IMF’s “Inflation rate, average consumer prices” rated both nations’ inflation at 4.3%. …

The IMF figure is significantly lower than the 6.8% year-on-year increase in the Consumer Price Index that the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported [on December 10].

Economic issues and discussions of percentages may cause people’s eyes to glaze over — but inflation hits every American in the wallet. Gasoline prices rose by $1.29 a gallon between November 2020 and November 2021 costs, a 59% rise, according to the Energy Information Administration (EIA). The cost of the most basic necessity, groceries, rose by 6.4%. This year’s Thanksgiving meal cost more than any time since figures had been kept: $53.31 in 2021, up from $46.90 last year. The U.S. Energy Information Administration announced that people who use natural gas to heat their homes will see a 30% increase in home heating costs compared to last winter. Even the Dollar Tree increased its prices to $1.25.

All told, “the average U.S. household [had] to spend around $3,500 more in 2021 to achieve the same level of consumption of goods and services as in recent previous years,” according to the Penn-Wharton Budget Model. “Moreover, we estimate that lower-income households spend more of their budget on goods and services that have been more impacted by inflation. Lower-income households will have to spend about 7 percent more while higher-income households will have to spend about 6 percent more.”

Yet the media have repeatedly downplayed the severity of the economic crisis, possibly because the price increases have fallen hardest on red states and had less of an impact on areas frequented by media elites.

The White House, too, has minimized the across-the-board price hikes. White House spokesperson Jen Psaki protested that Thanksgiving turkeys cost only “about one dollar more” than last year — a remarkably callous response from a White House that bragged on Twitter that this year’s Fourth of July cookout cost 16 cents less than in 2020 and that thumped its chest when gasoline prices fell by two cents.

 

3) Drug overdose deaths reach an historic high

America broke another historic record in 2021: The number of Americans who died from drug overdoses topped 100,000 for the first time in U.S. history. From May 2020 to May 2021, America reached a deadly milestone: 100,255 Americans died of drug overdoses. Specifically, Fentanyl or other synthetic opioids were involved in 64% of all overdoses.

“This isn’t a figure of speech; this is reality: Fentanyl overdoses have replaced car accidents as the leading cause of death for people 19 and younger in Pima County,” Arizona, said Arizona’s governor, Doug Ducey (R), during a press conference alongside other Republican governors in Mission, Texas, on October 6.

Since that time, fentanyl has emerged as the nation’s leading killer of young people between the ages of 18 and 45, according to an analysis of CDC data performed by the nonprofit group Families Against Fentanyl. A total of 78,795 people died from fentanyl overdoses in 2020 and 2021.

Over the same period, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) seized twice as much fentanyl — which is between 80 and 100 times stronger than morphine — than it did last year. “Mexican criminal drug networks are harnessing the perfect drug trafficking tool: social media applications that are available on every smartphone,” said DEA Administrator Anne Milgram. They’re not merely trafficking drugs via the internet; they’re also sending drugs across the border amid enormous groups of illegal immigrants crossing America’s border (about which, see below).

This outbreak elicits little media coverage — possibly less than White House aides feeling miffed that they were not invited to staff Christmas parties — perhaps because it affects a demographic the media couldn’t care less about: blue-collar families from middle America.

2) 2021 sees the highest level of illegal immigration in U.S. history

America experienced yet another historic Biden first in 2021: More illegal immigrants entered the United States than at any time in U.S. history. Border Patrol agents encountered a total of 1,734,686 illegal immigrants at the southern border during FY 2021. This year’s record breaks the previous all-time high set in 1986 (1,692,544) and its close second in 2001 (1,676,438).

As illegal crossings rose, border enforcement fell. Between January 21 to July 9, the number of deportations fell by 90% over pre-pandemic levels, even as the number of illegal border crossings skyrocketed month after month. The lack of deportations flowed naturally from Biden’s lax immigration policies. As a candidate, he and Kamala Harris promised “free” health care services and vowed to push for amnesty. He ended construction of the border wall, oversaw a new plan of “prioritization” that let most illegal aliens escape, and even tried to shoehorn amnesty for 6.5 million illegal immigrants into his gargantuan “Build Back Better” act. On the other hand, illegal crossings at the southern border fell to a 46-year low in 2017 (310,531), when President Donald Trump promised to enforce U.S. immigration law for the first time in decades.

Border security is a choice; so is border chaos, and the crime and drugs it brings in its wake.

1) Parents fight back against CRT and sexually explicit materials in the public schools — and win

After their triumphs in 2020, many on the Left saw 2021 as a mop-up operation. In 2020, they stoked racial resentment until it exploded into mass looting and arson, distributed controversial curricula derived from The 1619 Project presenting U.S. history as concomitant with black chattel slavery, and elected the husband of a teachers’ union member as president. They even fortified the 2020 election. In 2021, they planned to watch as teachers indoctrinated children as young as five in quasi-Marxist gibberish called Critical Race Theory and set America on the road to socialism.

Their plans ran into a brick wall of taxpaying citizens motivated by the strongest force in the world: a parent’s love for their child.

At first, when parents attended school board meetings, they were insulted and silenced. They had their microphones cut. They were accused of undermining “our democracy”™ and likened to domestic terrorists. They even saw school board officials lie about sexual assaults that took place in public school restrooms. But soon the media had to respond to their concerns.

The legacy news media rushed out a shotgun-style blast of conflicting and discordant claims about CRT: That CRT “isn’t real” and doesn’t exist; that CRT simply means teaching slavery in schools; that CRT only exists in law schools, not K-12 schools; and that CRT exists, is real, and is absolutely necessary to uproot “systemic racism” from the evil heart of the Amerikkkan empire. Gaslighting reached new heights, as CNN interviewed Keziah Ridgeway, “who teaches Critical Race Theory in public high school,” as proof that public schools do not teach CRT.

At the same time, parents took note of the pornographic materials infesting school libraries, some of which glorified pedophilia. As Luke Rosiak reported at The Daily Wire in September, one Loudoun County, Virginia, mother read aloud from the books:

“I can’t wait to have your c*** in my mouth. I am going to give you the blowjob of your life, and then I want you inside me.”

“What if I told you I touched another guy’s d***? What if I told you I sucked it? I was ten years old, but it’s true. I sucked Doug Goble’s d***, the real estate guy, and he sucked mine too.”

Some of the books’ illustrations are so graphic that, if an adult gave them to a teenager, he could conceivably be charged with contributing to the delinquency of a minor.

Soon, parents rose up against the entrenched power of teachers unions and the administrators who foist their liberal views on America’s children. Parents began to realize “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” They elected an anti-CRT ticket in the state of Virginia, ran for office, and initiated recalls of school board members that even attracted the support of far-Left San Francisco Mayor London Breeds.

The battle is far from won, but at least it has been joined.

Whatever happens around the world, the most important story is what happens within America’s families. Around their dinner tables, inside their living rooms, and in the stories they tell their children, each family secretly crafts America’s destiny. The values parents instill determine the nation’s character, potential, prosperity, gentleness, and goodness. Nothing is more important — or deserves more media coverage — than the strength of America’s families.

The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

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