You made it to the end of 2024 alive and with your sanity intact
Hello and welcome to a New Year’s Eve edition of the Carnival of Fools! Allow me to start by wishing a very happy New Year to all my readers, for serious congratulations are in order: You made it to the end of 2024 alive and with your sanity intact. (I’m only guessing on the latter, admittedly, but certain at least as to the former. I exhort you, the living, to subscribe!)
Don’t dismiss this lightly. Every single one of us who made it through this year — one of the most insane years in the entire history of American politics — without collapsing into an apoplectic fit of madness should consider themselves a cynical, brutality hardened veteran by now. I’m strutting around like I just survived Squid Games, myself. But not without sustaining a bit of damage. You can only stare into this political madness for so long — and write about it — before it begins to warp and coarsen your sensibilities.
Who Was Paying Attention, and to What?
To wit: Art historians — as well as, frankly, anyone who has ever viewed his art — have long sought an explanation for the ghastly, psychedelically surreal depictions of hellish torment in the paintings of late 15th century Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch. One amusing theory — entirely spurious, I hasten to add — for the visions of satanic madness found in The Garden of Earthly Delights or the Temptation of St. Anthony triptych is that Bosch had more or less been tripping on bad acid — the poisonously psychoactive fly agaric mushrooms native to his region of the Low Countries.
It’s a bit silly as a theory, in all honesty, because it’s unnecessary: Nobody needs drugs to begin wondering whether devils and angels surround us in the real world — after 2024 my new theory is that maybe Bosch was just really into politics. Because I myself have been painting phantasmagorically surreal political visions with my columns all year long, and the most alarming thing to discover upon reviewing my back catalogue is how most of that only began in the second half of the year.
What becomes clear to me is how frivolous the entire first half of this year inadvertently felt. Almost none of the narratives from this period — not even the massive student unrest on campuses across America, which disappeared over the summer and never properly returned — seem to have mattered at all in retrospect. Everything up through the fateful night on June 27 when Joe Biden stepped onto a debate stage and into the annals of political self-destruction — when his senility was unveiled for the entire planet beyond any capacity to spin — feels like a naggingly irrelevant prelude to 2024’s real domestic political tale.
This nags at me because I feel like our attentions were intentionally misdirected. All along, there was really only one important political story the media should have been focused on: the mental decay of President Joe Biden as he sought another four years in office. Throughout that period the story was consistently ignored by everyone except conservatives, until it was far too late for excuses.
I could write a Dave Barry–like “Year in Review” daybook-style piece reviewing, with a light comedic touch, all of the inane and ridiculous political nonsense of this year. The problem with that approach, alas, is that Dave Barry is funny and I am not. (I am also lazy, abhor research, and would not be caught dead referring to myself as a “journalist.”) But a review of the year feels necessary, if only to chronicle how the narrative changed with such head-snapping instant force halfway through. So, with apologies to the master of the form, I present to you instead . . .
Notes on Some Stuff I Wrote about This Year, Pt. 1: January–June 2024
IN JANUARY . . . Republican primary candidates lock arms together with the mainstream media in a folie à deux, foolishly pretending there is actually a Republican primary to run at all. (The rest of us are unpersuaded.) Donald Trump wins every primary debate of the season simply by declining to attend them. Florida governor Ron DeSantis bets the farm on Iowa, loses to Donald Trump by 30 points, and then proudly declares his “ticket” punched out of Iowa, as opposed to his lights. (He recovers from the daze and departs the race a week later.) Trump’s thumping of Nikki Haley in New Hampshire later that month puts the race for the nomination to bed in all but name, and every sane person immediately tunes out at this point.
Every insane person promptly moves on to debating a matter of grave national security: Is Taylor Swift actually a pro-Biden psyop? In the run-up to Super Bowl LVIII, the MAGA Right’s Top Minds (including such luminaries as Jack Posobiec, Laura Loomer, and Vivek Ramaswamy) furiously insist that Swift’s romance with Kansas City Chiefs player Travis Kelce is actually a nefarious NFL/Democratic Party joint operation, designed to feminize football and lure beer-drinking working class American males into voting for Biden. (America shrugs its shoulders at all of this and resumes grumbling about how much it hates the Kansas City Chiefs.)
IN FEBRUARY . . . the month opens with Special Counsel Robert Hur revealing that, during an interview with President Biden (concerning classified documents Biden retained after leaving office in 2016), Biden displayed all the mental sharpness of an overripe eggplant. Nearly every columnist at National Review uses the occasion to write much the same thing they have been writing since 2021: Joe Biden is too old to be president and should step down immediately. Such fears are dismissed by the mainstream media in the face of a push by the Biden communications team to discredit Hur. (Ezra Klein of the New York Times is alone willing to rock the boat by publishing an op-ed calling on Biden to leave the race while there is still time for a primary.)
In news of the depraved, Tucker Carlson announces his permanent departure from sanity and/or decency with a junket to Russia for a sympathetic interview with Vladimir Putin and a series of increasingly hysterical propaganda short videos praising the grocery stores and knockoff fast-food of Moscow. (“I’ve gotta say it was McAwesome — the non-GMO version!” is an endorsement that I am not making up.) He concludes his trip with a stopover in Dubai for a panel discussion on which he talks down Americans as morally comparable to, if not worse than, violent authoritarian dictatorships. A day later Vladimir Putin, in a persuasive counterargument, has opposition leader Alexei Navalny murdered in prison.
IN MARCH . . . Joe Biden is wheeled out of his sepulcher, pumped full of every stimulant in stock at the White House pharmacy, and sent to Congress by his minders to read an angry, hectoringly wheezy State of the Union address from a teleprompter. The media label this demonstration of wakefulness a tour de force, declaring “Biden Is Back” with nervous, sweaty-browed relief. Everyone chants from the same psalter, and former doubters are called out for public disgrace. Ezra Klein ritually recants his earlier plea for Biden to leave the race in the New York Times, in a move that makes the cruel gods of irony smile imperceptibly from afar.
In a touchingly futile gesture of defiance, Super Tuesday also takes place despite the race for the Republican nomination having been decided long ago. Lost amidst the romp for Trump is the vote of Chicago’s Democratic residents, who show up to an uncontested race in one of the bluest cities in the nation not out of any interest in the primary, but rather out of an abiding hatred for wildly unpopular mayor Brandon Johnson, whom they narrowly elected only the year before. The city votes down his proposed tax increases, permanently crippling his administration’s wild spending plans. Johnson vows to get his money one way or another and turns his incompetent attentions elsewhere. He will return to this narrative later in the year.
IN APRIL . . . left-wing activists monomaniacally focused on Supreme Court politics start a media groundswell to pressure Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in ill health, to retire and be replaced before the November election. Instead, the strong and wise Latina, doubtless informed by my eloquent advocacy, concludes she is fine right where she is. (There she remains.) In secretly related news, it is also revealed to the world via dissident — and soon to be ex- — employee Uri Berliner that NPR is an institution filled top-to-bottom with monomaniacally focused left-wing activists. The revelation leads listeners and non-listeners alike to respond with a hollow, thousand-yard stare of boredom with NPR.
Later that month, in the first of an escalating series of alarming stories about past Republican misadventures with dead animals, Kristi Noem regales America in her second autobiography No Going Back with the tale of shotgunning her pet puppy to death in a gravel pit for failing to obey instructions. In her telling, it isn’t this that proves her to be tough enough to lead. It is her ability to do it a second time — with a hapless goat — that demonstrates true killer instinct.
IN MAY . . . left-wing activists monomaniacally focused on Supreme Court politics discover that the most important threat currently facing America is the problematic vexillology of Martha-Ann Alito, caught engaging in a symbolic dispute with an unpleasant neighbor via the rarely employed rhetorical language of flag. The good-faith assessment from the media is that Justice Alito should immediately retire and be replaced before the November election. Instead, the strong and wise Italian, doubtless informed by my eloquent advocacy, concludes he is fine right where he is. (There he remains.) In secretly related news, a mixture of student and professional protesters flying Hamas flags and wearing keffiyehs swarms elite university campuses across America to protest the existence of the Jewish State, vandalize property, and get high in brand-new Soros-bought tents from REI.
Later that month, a Manhattan jury convicts Donald Trump of 34 felonies for a single misdemeanor — concealing hush-money payments made by Trump to adult film star Stormy Daniels during the 2016 campaign. America holds its breath and wonders what on earth could possibly be weirder in the 2024 campaign than a presidential candidate running for office as a convicted felon. America — good-natured, fundamentally honest suckers that we are — never sees it coming.
IN JUNE . . . the month begins on a hopeful note. Israeli commandos free four hostages abducted by Hamas during the October 7 terror attacks, only to be criticized for killing an innocent Palestinian journalist during the raid, shot for no better reason than that he was holding the hostages in his home at gunpoint at the time. At home the nation celebrates a new Golden Age of police tackles and thrills to viral videos of pro-Palestinian and environmental protesters being creamed, wiped out, and ejected from college campuses and sporting events across America.
Environmental protesters spray-paint Stonehenge and disappointingly are arrested rather than immediately being ritually dismembered in a savage druidic expiatory sacrifice. By way of karmic compensation, New York congressman Jamaal Bowman is ritually dismembered by his own voters in a savage Democratic expiatory sacrifice as he loses his June 25 primary election by 17 points to a man whose key selling point is not being an antisemitic lunatic. Donald Trump narrows his vice presidential picks to four candidates: Marco Rubio, Doug Burgum, Tim Scott, and J. D. Vance. It is agreed by all that of the four, Vance brings the least to the table either demographically or charismatically, and can therefore easily be ruled out as Trump’s eventual pick.
All the while, Joe Biden is aging invisibly, out of sight but not out of mind. Hidden from public view throughout the spring after his State of the Union address in March, he suffers a bad news cycle when he is videotaped at a G7 gathering in mid June acting erratic and distracted, wandering away from a group photograph inattentively only to be rescued from embarrassment by Giorgia Meloni. When he freezes up yet again a few days later at a Hollywood fundraiser hosted by George Clooney, the media leapfrog even the Biden administration’s communications efforts and declare circulating clips of both events to be “cheap fake videos.” White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre eagerly runs with this narrative and denounces the right-wing fever swamps for spreading disinformation and lies about the president’s mental fitness.
Finally, on the night of June 27, Joe Biden debates Donald Trump for the first and only time of his presidential campaign. It does not go well. But that is a story that properly belongs to Part 2 of this disgusted trawl through the human barnyard of 2024. Next time, when we discuss the second half of 2024, we leave sanity behind and journey beyond the threshold. Perhaps that piece will arrive sooner than you think.
Or perhaps you will have to wait . . . until next week.