The dumpster fire that was 2024
In the Chinese calendar, 2024 was the Year of the Wood Dragon, but in my book, it was the Year of the Lie. OTOH, it was also the year that the woke tsunami reached its crest and retreated.
First, for posterity. The Howlin’ at the Moon in ii-V-I internal year in review, which happened to be much better than the year you read about here. The world may be going to hell in a handbasket, but not Howlin’. Subscriptions tripled this year. Thank you!
The top five columns on Howlin’ in 2024:
And what may be discerned by the popularity of these pieces? Is there a theme? If there is, it’s that you, good readers, dislike antisemitism, people who don’t know their size, scientific/academic cartels, and bad government as much as I do. You weren’t crazy about someone taking a shot at a presidential candidate either (regardless of who you planned to support). Good on ya’s!
The top five videos:
The titles tell the story here. You don’t much like sanctimony, fake virtue, or bad science either.
Now onto a summary of 2024. In the Chinese calendar, 2024 was the Year of the Wood Dragon, but in my book, it was the Year of the Lie. OTOH, it was also the year that the woke tsunami reached its crest and retreated. Some good, some bad. Such is life.
First, I really wish that I could utter a line like this about 2024.
1954—you don’t get years like that anymore. It was my favorite year.
But alas and alak, I cannot. I am confident, in fact, that 2024 will be widely remembered as the year the wheels nearly fell off the great American experiment due to the insane amount of canon-cum-bullshit exposed in politics and the media. It was a remarkable year, alright, just not in line with the best connotation of remarkable.
As bad as 2024 was, it could have been a lot worse. Consider, if you will, the heart-attack-serious recent events in Korea that much of the American media can’t find the time to adequately cover for hyperventilating over Trump. One of our most important allies, stewards of the 12th largest economy on the planet, owners of the fifth strongest military in the world, and our fifth largest trading partner, South Korea, nearly suffered a successful military coup (and a return to the bad old days) earlier this month when President Yoon Suk Yeol imposed martial law to distract from allegations of and investigations into corruption involving himself, his family, and some associates.
Perhaps the most astounding thing about this failed coup is that one of the principal reasons it failed was that then South Korean Defense Minister Kim Yong-hyun was unable to bait the North Koreans into attacking the South as an excuse to impose martial law. The fact that this ruse failed enabled legislators, upon receiving the word that martial law had been declared, to storm the National Assembly, where they unanimously passed a motion to lift martial law, despite attempts by the Korean Army special forces to prevent them from doing so.
That’s incredible. It’s simply stunning. It’s as big if, say, someone in our government used their official powers to concoct a false narrative, promulgated by sympathetic media, that a virus that killed over a million Americans could not have possibly escaped from a laboratory in China that was doing research banned in the USA on the same family of viruses, paid for by American tax dollars, and use the ensuing panic to curtail civil liberties.
Right? Imagine that.
I guess that my takeaway from this story is that when your plan to take over the world fails because Kim Jong Un is more tethered to reality than you, it’s time for a New Year’s resolution involving a fresh set of aspirations. Get you some of that, Yoon Suk Yeol.
I’m reasonably sure that future historians will refer to 2024 as The Year of the Lie. From the origin of COVID to President Biden’s fitness for office to “I will not pardon him” to Harris being up by 3 points in ruby-red Iowa a week before Trump won it by 13 points, to election denailism, the bullshit was spread wide and deep and came from multiple vectors.
Unlike Politifact, which named President-elect Donald Trump and Sen. JD Vance's claim that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating pets as the 2024 lie of the year, I can, with little effort, identify a much more pernicious lie: the extent to which members of the President's inner circle, cabinet secretaries, and the media deliberately concealed Joe Biden's age-related cognitive decline. Worse, if you said anything about it, you’d be swarmed with disapprobation. The audacity of it all is simply stunning.
Not since the days of Woodrow Wilson a bit over a century ago has a scandal involving a president clearly not up to performing the duties of his office taken place. This raises the question: If Biden wasn't in charge, who was? A century ago, it was Edith Bolling Galt Wilson. This time? I don’t know. It appears to have been various members of Biden’s inner circle, none of whom were elected to anything.
Interestingly, I see almost no substantial curiosity on display among most of the media about this. I get it, I guess. What’s a little thing between friends like who’s running the country?
Then there was the steady drip, drip, drip of revelations from ongoing behind-the-scenes debates concerning the origins of COVID-19. After being told for years that anyone who questioned the zoonotic spillover theory (for which there is almost zero evidence) was a conspiracy kook at best and a racist at worst, the degree to which it’s been revealed that our own government, again with the aid of sympathetic media, attempted to stifle a legitimate and incredibly consequential scientific debate over politics, is stunning.
It’s not hard to understand why. As details of these debates have emerged from concealment, it’s sure beginning to look like America funded, through a non-profit, research for manipulating pathogens that was banned in this country in a Chinese lab with abysmal biosecurity measures. It appears that in doing so, we may have aided and abbeted the Chinese in creating Frankenstein’s monster. No wonder there’s a remarkable lack of curiosity from the top levels of our own government about the origin of COVID-19 and lots of interest in just moving on. Some rocks you don’t turn over.
The “I will not pardon him” lie by Joe Biden concerning his son Hunter is significant due to the spectacle of those who’ve stridently and vociferously advocated for lawfare against Donald Trump (and who hate the Second Amendment) tying themselves into rhetorical knots. This being achieved in explaining how this particular usurption of a conviction on a felony gun charge is somehow noble and motivated solely by the paternal love of an aging (but fit as a fiddle) father for his prodigal son.
The final big lie of 2024, one that has stubbornly persisted for over a year in academia, among leftist factions and the history-lite colonialism-obsessed set, asserts a moral parallel between Hamas and the Jews they massacred on October 7, 2023. This is complete and utter bullshit.
Is Israel beyond reproach in world affairs? I think not. Did they have it coming on October 7? Only if you believe in and yearn for the world order of a millennium ago. If you do happen to be into that, I congratulate you on at least a consistent world view. Now just wait a few hundred years for more Crusades, the bubonic plague, and the Inquisition. You’ll have a blast.
Besides the big lies, I believe 2024 will be remembered as the year when "woke" reached its peak. Postmodern bullshit and all of it’s nefarious stepchildren are, at least for now, in retreat. From 2020 until now, the wave seemed unstoppable. Now, not so much.
To paraphrase Hunter S. Thompson (in a manner I’m not sure that he’d approve):
And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”
Happy New Year! I’ll see you on the other side.
Associated Press and Idaho Press Club-winning columnist Martin Hackworth of Pocatello is a physicist, writer, and retired Idaho State University faculty member who now spends his time with family, riding bicycles and motorcycles, and arranging and playing music. Follow him on Twitter @MartinHackworth, on Facebook at facebook.com/martin.hackworth, and on Substack at martinhackworthsubstack.com
Also that pic looks like one of the times someone lost a drunken wrestling match while we were climbing in the Gorge!
Yeah the fact our media barely reported on the situation in South Korea is alarming to say the least. I read it on the BBC and was frankly concerned this was akin to someone running our government declaring marshall law. If that doesn't seem to get the attention of our media we are probably doomed!