In her Substack today, Bari Weiss surveys a few different folks to ask them what they changed their mind on this year. There are some good answers. I’ll share a couple:

Balaji Srinivasan says he thought we were headed towards some kind of tyranny, but this year changed his mind. Excerpt:

In the territory governed by this inept bureaucracy, you see power outages, supply chain shortages, rampant flooding, and uncontrolled fires. You see riots, arsons, shootings, stabbings, robberies, and murders. You see digital mobs that become physical mobs. You see a complete loss of trust in institutions from the state to the media. You see anti-capitalism and anti-vaxxism. You see states breaking away from the U.S. federal government, at home and abroad. And you see the End of Power, the Revolt of the Public, the defeat of the military, the inflation of the dollar, and—looming ahead—an American anarchy.

What’s coming isn’t fascism or communism, like the left-wing and right-wing pundits will have you believe, even though they don’t believe it themselves. What’s coming is the exact opposite of that, a world where the civilized concepts of freedom and equity are extrapolated to their decivilizational limit, where you ain’t the boss of me and we are all equal, where all hierarchy is illegitimate and with it all authority, where no one is in charge and everything is in chaos.

Ross Douthat had a glimmer of optimism, but 2021 snuffed it. Excerpt:

At the start of 2021, I believed that for all of our fumbles and disasters, the success of our vaccine efforts meant that the United States was actually going to come out ahead of many of our developed-world peers when it came to handling the pandemic. This seemed especially plausible as winter gave way to spring and our vaccination rates were racing ahead of most European countries, even as our case rates were collapsing.

As the year turns, however, looking at the American death toll I don’t believe this anymore.

Read it all. Nellie Bowles’s bit is the most interesting of all, but I’m going to make you go to the site to read it.

I’m trying to think of anything I changed my mind on this year. The best thing I can come up with is that I went from being vaguely favorable towards the Viktor Orban government to being an enthusiastic backer. It took living in Hungary for three months, and recognizing two things: 1) that Western media coverage of the Orban government is hysterically biased, and 2) that Viktor Orban understands better than most of us in the West what the West is up against.

But that’s not news to readers of this blog.

The parents’ revolt in Loudoun County, Virginia, challenged my general belief that Americans are too demoralized to fight the woke machine — but it did not change my mind. I’ll need more data. Let’s see what happens in 2022, an election year.

How about you? What did you change your mind about in 2021? What data or experience turned you around?