The Awful Year We Just Lived Through - Dennis Prager

[Geee]

Heritage Foundation

As this is my last column of 2021, I thought it would be worthwhile to review some of the most important observations I made over the course of an awful year. I hope you agree, and wish you—and our country—a happier New Year.

JAN. 5: These past few years have taught me not to so quickly judge the quiet Germans, Russians, etc. Of course, I still judge Germans who helped the Nazis and Germans who in any way hurt Jews. But the Germans who did nothing? Not so fast.

What has changed my thinking has been watching what is happening in America (and Canada and Australia and elsewhere, for that matter). The ease with which tens of millions of Americans have accepted irrational, unconstitutional, and unprecedented police state-type restrictions on their freedoms, including even the freedom to make a living, has been, to understate the case, sobering.

JAN. 12: We are faced with a lockdown on speech the likes of which have never been seen in America. And the parallels with Germany are even more stark. What the left is doing is announcing—and enforcing—that conservatives “do not belong” in our society.

 

The parallels to 1933 are precise. And most good Americans are keeping silent, just as did most Germans. Though they do not risk being beaten up, are Americans in 2021 as afraid of the American left as Germans in 1933 were of the German fascists? We’re about to find out.

JAN. 19: Why does the left need to crush all dissent? This is a question made all the more stark because there is no parallel on the right: Conservatives do not shut down dissent or debate.

The answer is the left fears dissent. And it does so for good reason. Leftism is essentially a giant balloon filled with nothing but hot air. Therefore, no matter how big the balloon—the Democratic Party, The New York Times, Yale University—all it takes is a mere pin to burst it.

FEB. 9: The American medical profession as a whole and many individual doctors are responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans—very possibly, more than that. Along with the media—from The New York Times to Google/YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter—Americans have been denied both lifesaving information and lifesaving drugs.

FEB. 23: If you don’t hate communism, you don’t care about, much less love, people.

MARCH 2: The great tragedy of our time is that liberals vote left. Virtually every value liberals have held for a century is now held by conservatives and scorned by leftists.