Happy Last Year
Why 2024 was a good year for America
Looking back on 2024 with the benefit of hindsight now that we’re in 2025, I think last year was a good one. I say that as someone who reports on a lot of ugliness because despite all the bad stuff — our dogshit healthcare system, endless wars, etc. — the tsunami of propaganda designed to justify these things has almost totally failed. On issue after issue, the public not only refused to accept the elite consensus but loudly rejected it. Here are three of the most significant examples.
CEO-cide
When UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was gunned down in Manhattan, every self-appointed moral arbiter from politicians to major media outlets conspired to forbid the public from engaging in debate about how inhumane our healthcare system is. To do so, they said, would be to politicize the tragedy — something they were so ever happy to do with their ridiculous perp walk photo op of Luigi Mangione and their endless succession of op-eds and TV segments.
The American people saw through the ruse, recognizing the larger significance. Huge numbers of ordinary people posted publicly under their own names about their experiences of mistreatment by the health insurance industry. The public outpouring was in direct defiance of the clear order that they all shut up and stick to the approved script that Thompson was a beloved father and a “visionary” business leader doing his best to get Americans healthcare. That order even came with an implied threat from the national security state. The NYPD warned of “extremists” online who sympathize with Mangione’s “disdain for corporate greed,” as I reported. In Florida, local police charged a 42-year-old Florida mother of three with an act of terrorism for an alleged threat to her health insurer that legal experts have said is pretty clearly constitutionally-protected speech, as I also reported.
The extraordinary public display of defiance reminded me of John Hancock, who during the American revolution signed his name on the Declaration of Independence — constituting an act of treason — in ostentatiously large letters.
Could America be getting her mojo back?
Gaza
On the Gaza war, college students all over the country turned out in defiance of not just the ghastly war, but also accusations of extremism, anti-semitism and the oft-repeated line that they were going to help put Trump into the White House. Democratic party functionaries were particularly adept at the latter ploy, the idea that young people’s opposition to Trump somehow nullified their right to express disagreement with the Democratic nominee.
Lost in the shuffle was activism, the largest set of student protests since the Vietnam war. Something was happening.
As with the Mangione case, threats against the protestors were not just rhetorical. Students were suspended for protesting U.S. support for the war as college administrators responded to pressure from wealthy trustees. Students were arrested. Protestors were mocked and vilified. Congress tried to smear the protesters and the national security state created the specter of extremism, with the Director of National Intelligence vaguely alluding to foreign funding of the protests. But still the activism continued.
When Kamala Harris became the nominee, many of these same young people had the integrity to sustain their critique of the war despite being hectored about how this might hurt her in Michigan, how Trump would be worse for the Palestinians, blah blah. But when Harris was not willing to say anything on Gaza, adhering to the same old Biden (and Washington) habit of saying nothing, the students heard.
Gerontocracy
It may not seem like it, but the gerontocracy is teetering on the verge of collapse. The majority of Americans, including even Democrats, did not want Biden to run for reelection over concerns about his age. Contrary to the self-serving major media narrative that Biden’s cognitive decline only became apparent during the presidential debate, for at least a year prior, the majority of the public thought Biden was too old to run. And we now know that Biden’s aides, and the news media that is supposed to inform the public, kept their knowledge to themselves.
In the end, the public got its way, winning an extraordinary concession: a sitting president who had even won the vast majority of primary elections was denied the nomination. Had the Democrats listened to the public sooner, maybe there would have been time for an actual primary and a different candidate. Whatever you think about Trump, his victory over Harris was the public asserting its outrage at how Democratic Party had handled the election.
When in 2023 I put then-Senator Dianne Feinstein’s staffers on blast for concealing her dementia, the backlash from elite quarters was one of the nastiest I’d ever experienced in my time as a reporter. The New York Times declared that I had been “condemned by many on the left and right,” Fox News reported that I had gone on a “deranged” rant. A congressional official repeatedly contacted my employer trying to get me in trouble. At the time I remember wondering if the media just was not ready to deal with this problem.
In 2024, however, the dam broke. The exact same aggressive reporting I’d been doing on the gerontocracy suddenly drew astonishingly little pushback even from Washington.
Because the public can see through the self-interest of the politics class, and because independent media was relentless in its truth-telling, even the major media now writes about “the problem” as if they invented it.
There are starting to be some changes, too. 79 year old congressman David Scott, whose senility was on full display when he cursed out a journalist for merely taking his photo in a public place, was recently denied the position he sought as top Democrat on the agriculture committee.
I can’t tell you how many paying subscribers I got in 2024 who sent me notes explaining that they had just canceled their subscriptions to the New York Times, the Washington Post, even my former employer The Intercept, preferring to give their hard earned money to what they considered truly independent media. You can see the upheaval in the major media’s staggering audience losses since the presidential election in particular. Both MSNBC and CNN, for example, have lost about half of their audiences.
2024 was an ideological mass extinction event for the major media. What remains to be seen is what will replace it. Please help me build a better media by becoming a paid subscriber.
— Edited by William M. Arkin
As a Palestinian, as someone whose entire lived existence and experiences are constantly called into question, this time feels different. I don’t know how to articulate it but I feel it. People see the manufactured world for what it is and are no longer buying the b.s. Understandably, there’s a long way to go and things seemingly get worse especially for Gaza. But this time feels different.
We appreciate you and your efforts. Please cover the fight for open primaries. This is such a key way to break the stranglehold of the moribund two party system.