AMAC Exclusive
Over the past year, AMAC Newsline has endeavored to bring our readers engaging and insightful content on the most important issues facing our country and the world. While we always seek to inform and base our analysis on the facts, we have also sought to provide our perspective on what storylines to follow and how current events might shape the future direction of our country. Here are ten big stories that we gave AMAC readers an early heads-up on in 2021. If you were reading AMAC, you weren’t caught by surprise.
- The economic policies pursued by Joe Biden and Congressional Democrats would lead to runaway inflation and a prolonged economic crisis.
As 2021 draws to a close, inflation, an ongoing supply chain crisis, and a worsening labor shortage are the dominant economic narratives surrounding the country’s slowing economic recovery from the pandemic-induced downturn.
But none of this should come as a surprise to our readers. Soon after Biden’s first address before Congress, AMAC Newsline warned that the policies he outlined would “likely risk cutting short the post-pandemic economic recovery now underway.” In a separate article all the way back in May, Daniel Roman predicted that “America’s economy is in serious danger of inflation fueled disaster, driven by the misguided, Keynesian policies of the Biden Administration.”
Unfortunately, both of those economic forecasts have turned out to be accurate. And unless Democrats cease their reckless spending, they are likely to remain so for the near future.
- Education would become the defining issue of the Virginia Governor’s race.
Early on in the contest for Virginia Governor, it looked as if Glenn Youngkin would run a campaign focused on traditional Republican issues like the economy. While those issues remained important in the race, they were ultimately overshadowed by the education fight, particularly as Loudoun County, one of the largest in Virginia, became ground zero in the national battle over Critical Race Theory and other left-wing ideologies in school classrooms.
As AMAC Newsline reported in May, every major Republican candidate in the race signed a pledge promising to rid schools of anti-American and woke indoctrination, foreshadowing just how important the issue would become in the general election. We also highlighted in July how Democrat Terry McAuliffe’s association with pro-CRT groups could cost him the race, and why Youngkin embraced education as his defining issue in the final months of the campaign.
By election day, education had overtaken the economy as the most important issue for most voters (a phenomenon almost unheard of in politics), and Youngkin’s pivot to focusing on schools and parental rights played a big role in landing him in the governor’s mansion.
- The gubernatorial contests in Virginia and New Jersey would be far closer than the media predicted.
After double-digit victories for Joe Biden in Virginia and New Jersey in 2020, the national media landscape and D.C. political class were skeptical, to say the least, that Republicans stood any chance in the statewide elections in those two states in 2021. However, as AMAC Newsline suggested in a Labor Day update, there were signs that the contests in those two states could be much closer than the media – or the polls – were predicting, in part thanks to the disastrous year Joe Biden and Congressional Democrats were having.
That turned out to be exactly right, with Republican Jack Ciattarelli far outperforming polls against Democrat Phil Murphy in deep blue New Jersey’s gubernatorial election, coming within a few thousand votes of unseating the incumbent governor. Republicans also fared better than expected down-ballot, including defeating New Jersey State Senate President Stephen Sweeney.
In Virginia, Republican Glenn Youngkin became the first Republican to win statewide in the Old Dominion since 2009 – just 12 months after Joe Biden carried the state by 10 points. Republicans also retook control of the state legislature, a major win for the GOP.
- Joe Biden’s exit from Afghanistan would be an unmitigated disaster.
The horrific defeat that unfolded in Afghanistan this August and Sepetmber was undoubtedly the low point of the year for the United States, both from the standpoint of national security and national morale. Despite the Biden administration’s repeated assurances that the evacuation of Afghanistan would be “nothing like” the fall of Saigon in 1975, Dan Roman alerted AMAC readers to the signs of an impending catastrophe in the early weeks of July.
Dan wrote then that just as “the tragedy in Vietnam in 1975 was fully avoidable… Biden has followed a similar path in Afghanistan.” Unfortunately for the 13 American service members who were needlessly killed, the Afghan population, and global security, he was right, and everything he worried about came to pass weeks later– right down to the images of helicopters evacuating personnel from the American embassy.
- Democrats’ radical progressive social policies would accelerate Hispanic voters’ turn to the GOP.
After Cuban voters in South Florida were key to President Trump’s decisive victory in the state in 2020, Democrat pundits tried to explain away the phenomenon as a one-off, insisting that Democratic losses with Hispanics were largely confined to Cuban voters who were uneasy about socialist economic policies being pushed by the likes of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and that Donald Trump’s unique appeal to Hispanics would not permanently covert them to the party.
However, in numerous pieces earlier this year, AMAC highlighted data and trends that suggested it was not just Cubans or socialism, but also radical social agendas like Defund the Police and attacks on the nuclear family that would drive Hispanics of all backgrounds to support GOP candidates at every level.
As it turns out, just as predicted, the trends seen in 2020 have continued to play out in Hispanic communities throughout the country in 2021. In June, McAllen, Texas, an 85% Hispanic city, elected a Republican mayor. Recent polling also shows that only 2% of Hispanics refer to themselves as “Latinx,” the favorite term of white liberals for referring to individuals from Hispanic countries (40% even said they were offended by the term). Perhaps that partially explains why Joe Biden’s approval rating with Hispanic-Americans, at just 33%, is lower than it is with white Americans.
- Kamala Harris’s vice presidency would be a disaster for her, for Biden, and for America.
As soon as Joe Biden tapped Kamala Harris to be his running mate, the mainstream media immediately began fawning over her, fixating on her “historic” candidacy as the first woman and person of color to be Vice President.
However, all the positive coverage in the world couldn’t paper over the obvious flaws of Kamala Harris forever. As Dan Roman observed for Newsline readers all the way back in June, Harris’s actions were those of a “weak, paranoid Vice President” that would be a “source of instability for the administration, the party, and the country.” He also predicted that instability would ultimately lead to a rift with President Biden, who viewed her with “suspicion” after her vicious accusations of racism in the Democratic primary.
In the months since, that has undoubtedly proven to be the case. In November, the New York Post reported that Harris had been “sidelined” amid growing tensions with Biden, while some Harris aides said that the Vice President was “frustrated” that Biden had tasked her with handling the border crisis. To top it all off, as a slew of Harris’s senior staff head for the exits, multiple reports have alleged a “toxic work environment” and “dysfunction inside the VP’s office.”
- Individuals charged with crimes related to the events of January 6 were receiving unusually harsh treatment.
There’s no doubt that the events of January 6 were a calamity, and those who broke the law should be held responsible. However, that does not mean that individuals charged with crimes for their actions aren’t entitled to the same rights and protections as any other American. We highlighted back in April that many of the more than 600 people charged in connection with January 6 were “alleging psychological abuse and even physical beatings at the hands of prison guards in D.C. jails.” Those allegations included the hurling of racist slurs by guards and 23 hours of solitary confinement – usually reserved for only the most hardened criminals. In fact, as we pointed out, evidence of such wrongdoing was credible enough that even liberal senators Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Dick Durbin (D-IL) publicly objected to the prolonged detention and mistreatment of the inmates.
Nonetheless, we warned that “the mainstream media have largely ignored the treatment of January 6 defendants.” That pattern has continued, with coverage of the treatment of inmates largely driven by press conferences held by several Republican lawmakers trying to call attention to the issue. Unlike Warren and Durbin, most Democrats have not had the courage to speak up, even as they push to end pretrial detention for hardened criminals.
Now, as sentences have been handed out in the months that followed, many January 6 defendants have found themselves on the receiving end of some unusually harsh penalties. Troy Smocks, who was not even at the Capitol on January 6, was sentenced to 14 months in prison for threatening lawmakers and tech executives online – even as liberal states and cities declined to prosecute actual participants in the riots that shook the nation in the summer of 2020 and continue to allow murderers and rapists to roam the streets.
- Abortion would become a key issue heading into the midterm year.
As Shane Harris reported back in the first week of October, while Republicans’ prospects for 2022 looked better by the day, a major Supreme Court decision on abortion had the potential to “energize the Democratic base, providing an issue to rally around as the Biden administration and Democrat leaders in Congress botch one crisis after another.” (It could also rally the Republican base as well—and with the electorate’s views on abortion shifting against Democrats’ extremism, the dynamics of abortion politics are by no means clear-cut.)
Yet following the widespread outcry from the liberal media and left-wing politicians over just the oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, in which the Court may revisit Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, abortion increasingly looks as if it may be a major issue heading into next year—just as AMAC reported.
- The Biden administration’s war on American energy would drive gas prices through the roof.
Back in May, in the wake of the Colonial Pipeline hack and gas prices inching up, the Biden administration assured Americans that small price increases were the result of a “supply crunch” and wouldn’t be a long-term problem.
But as AMAC Newsline cautioned then, Biden’s war on American energy through actions like canceling the Keystone XL Pipeline and ending oil and gas exploration on federal lands, along with “Green New Deal” provisions hidden in the Democrats’ spending bills, would almost assuredly lead to even higher prices that would have ripple effects across the entire economy.
Fast forward six months, and gas prices are at the highest levels seen in years, with some experts predicting the average price for a gallon of gas could rise to $4 by Memorial Day.
- The GOP capitulated on Biden’s not-so-bipartisan infrastructure plan and needed to more forcefully oppose Biden’s massive spending spree.
Back in July, Seamus Brennan criticized Republicans who voted with Democrats to pass the so-called “bipartisan” infrastructure bill that in reality had few bipartisan programs and a lot of unnecessary left-wing spending. He said then that passing the bill would give Democrats political cover for the radical agenda that would inevitably follow, and the GOP would get nothing in return. (They haven’t.) AMAC Newsline also commended Senator Bill Hagerty for being the only Republican who did everything he could to block passage of the bill.
When it came time for the debate over Biden’s massive spending package, the so-called “Build Back Better Act,” AMAC Newsline again warned that the GOP wasn’t doing enough to stop the bill. We said then that Republicans in Congress needed to follow the same no-holds-barred approach against the bill being modeled by President Trump. The next month, a united Republican opposition finally swung into action, and combined with an all-out messaging effort to educate Americans on the bill, Joe Manchin announced earlier this month that he was pulling his all-important support, putting the legislation on life support, at least for now.
As the calendar flips over to 2022, many other stories will undoubtedly continue to emerge along with those mentioned above, particularly as the midterm elections approach. When they do, AMAC will be ready, waiting to give you the information and insights that the mainstream media can’t – or won’t – provide.