In a sign of the times, 2024 whizzed by in the instant it took for a bullet to travel 150 yards from a rooftop through a man’s ear.
One can condense the year into that moment. Put it in a time capsule for 2524, and they will more or less know what they need to know about the year past.
For the preceding months, blue states sought to remove Donald Trump’s name from ballots, various jurisdictions brought hectoring civil and criminal cases against him of dubious validity, and his scared political opponents likened him to Adolf Hitler (whether to make Trump look bad or Hitler look good, one can only speculate). Then, in Butler, Penn., on July 13, all that passive-aggressive energy yielded to aggressive-aggressive violence. And with a shift of his body that seemed more an act of providence than his own doing, Donald Trump became a man of destiny.
Yes, other important events in American politics occurred: the banana-republic cases against Trump suffered a number of embarrassing courtroom defeats, another nutter tried to murder the Republican presidential nominee, Joe Biden announced beating Medicare in a moment that beat down hopes of continuing his candidacy, and Kamala Harris sizzled and then fizzled as a pop-up presidential candidate.
And outside of our borders, Syrians overthrew Bashar al-Assad, Russians and Ukrainians continued to fight to a bloody stalemate, and a James Bond-type gambit nicknamed Operation Grim Beeper used explosive pagers and walkie-talkies to terrorize Hezbollah terrorists.
But 2024 went by in an instant in Butler, which assured the greatest comeback in American political history and bequeathed the greatest image in political history. Trump won the presidency when that kid missed his mark by a few centimeters.
A great year for Donald Trump coincided with a bad year for just about every black actor from the 1970s and 1980s: We lost John Amos, Carl Weathers, Louis Gossett Jr., and James Earl Jones (Billy Dee Williams lives!). The world also grew poorer in the loss of Shelley Duval, who moviegoers lost so long ago; Bob Newhart, who deadpanned his way to more laughs on the small screen than perhaps anyone; Dr. Ruth, who killed the mood whenever she started talking about sex; and Richard Simmons, who coaxed the unfit into fitness in a way Jack LaLanne never could. We also lost Alexei Navalny and Jimmy Carter this year, but they seem too weighty to waste time on in 2024. It’s much more 2024 to reflect on Pete Rose, Terri Garr, Chuck Woolery, and Rickey Henderson. They made life fun. (READ MORE: Pete Rose in Repose)
Motorists wished that they could have shielded their catalytic converters behind plexiglass the way Walgreens does for Tide. The FBI, which told us in 2023 of falling violent crime, quietly revised those numbers in 2024 to show it rising. More than statistics upset the narrative. After progressives put a former Marine (rather than their own policies) on trial for choking a disturbed troublemaker on New York City’s subway, another disturbed individual let loose by liberalism lit a woman on fire on those same trains. Voters wished for a wall (like the Tide plexiglass but for a country rather than a drugstore), on Election Day the way creepy people, and foreign governments, asked for drones for Christmas. (RELATED: FBI Caught Gaslighting the Public With Bogus Crime Stats)
Walmart, the University of Iowa, and various other institutions walked a few steps backward from woke. The real Thermidor moment came when comedian Shane Gillis, fired from Saturday Night Live days after his hiring in 2019, hosted Saturday Night Live to monster ratings. (RELATED: The High-Water Mark of Woke Corporate Activism)
Though wokeness took a nap, creativity continued on its Rip Van Winkle slumber. Inside Out 2, Deadpool & Wolverine, Wicked, and the seven other top-10 movies at the box office consisted entirely of sequels and spinoffs, which made 2024 feel like a sequel or a spinoff to 2023, 2022, and every other year in recent memory in which sequels and spinoffs sold the most tickets.
In keeping with this theme of repetition, the year’s most streamed song, Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso,” sounded to 50-year-old ears much like any committee-written Taylor Swift number, and Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy),” which topped the Billboard Hot 100 longer than any song in the chart’s history, drew from the formula created by Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road.”
The most 2024 digital personages of 2024 include, in ascending order: Luigi Mangione, whose back hurt so bad he murdered the CEO of a health insurance company and became a Tiger Beat-style heartthrob à la Leif Garrett, Shaun Cassidy, and Scott Baio; Raygun, whose unintentionally humorous breakdancing moves at the Summer Olympics catalyzed thoughts about whether memes should abuse her, the Olympics for showcasing the “sport” of breakdancing, or the rest of us for watching; and sweetness and filth amalgam Hawk Tuah Girl, a drunk Southern belle seemingly on leave from a doublewide she calls “Tara,” who further coarsened a coarse culture with an impromptu how-to on a sexual gimmick best shared between consenting adults. (RELATED: Luigi Mangione’s Cognitive Dissonance)
The Oxford English Dictionary, of all things, continued the dumb trend by naming “brain rot” the word of the year.
The year ends in a few short hours. But it happened in a split second in Butler. Blink, and you missed 2024.
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