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It’s a point that’s been made before, but the problem with the internet is that, given its incentives for posters to react in the swiftest, most hyperbolic way, we long ago lost the ability to give things the proper historical weight and heft.
And, despite an ever increasing set of adjectives, people just wind up saying the same thing. If 2020 was a trash fire and 2021 a dumpster fire and 2022 a burning refuse heap and 2023 a toxic waste inferno it’s like … feel free to deem 2024 the Great Pacific Trash Conflagration.
We’re not gonna do that here. This was a year where bad things happened, but very, very, very funny things happened. Perhaps, one might say, it was the funniest year of all time.
And what’s more funny than failure? (Don’t argue and say lots of things, just look back and laugh at how hard many many people tried their damndest to do the right thing and fucked up so so bad).
Here are the 10 biggest political fails of 2024.
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Sorry, not sure how that got there.
It’s often very obnoxious to kick off listicles like this with “do you even remember that?” That’s the point of a listicle, to remind you of things you may have forgotten. No one writes a blog post titled “4 items of clothes you’re wearing right now.”
That said, I sure did forget this actually happened this year.
Like, a bunch of GOP wannabe big-leaguers huffed themselves up as the true lodestar of a conservatism that had been left in tatters, only to be completely hosed by a candidate whose entire campaign was built on literally not campaigning.
Trump won 48 states without leaving his house while Ron DeSantis squeezed his feet into high heels, Tim Scott faked an entire marriage, and Nikki Haley lost the state she once governed. And then they all turned around and backed Trump anyway.
Just…. losers.
On the flip side, as most GOP opponents ran vaguely to the left of Trump under the auspices that the electorate might want a slightly saner conservative (how’d that work out), the most insane of the far-righters, followers of Nick Fuentes, launched Groyper War 2, an all-out meme assault over his campaign manager, Susan Wiles, who they thought was a globalist secretly tanking Trump’s campaign.
The effort, though, an array of AI-generated frogs (just next level warfare type stuff), never really got off the ground, as most of them were swiftly deleted by mods on Truth Social (an important lesson about fighting on enemy turf). Wiles steered Trump to victory and will be his chief of staff. Marco Rubio will be Secretary of State.
And their leader, Fuentes, just got arrested for pepper-spraying a woman.
In the spring and summer of 2024, the Heritage Foundation was Public Enemy No. 1 in liberal’s minds for its (not quite) clandestine plot to remake American government as a redoubt of conservative values forever and ever.
When a group of furry hackers stumbled across an old data set from a blog site it ran, the organization could have ignored the news and moved on over a day.
Instead, one of its directors decided to engage the hackers, who then shared his embarrassingly blustery threats.
Nothing says stalwart of morality like DMing a stranger that you can’t wait for him to get "pounded in the ass."
Elected to represent Pennsylvania in 2022 as a labor leader with progressive inclines, John Fetterman is now trolling pro-Palestinian protesters, mocking climate change activists, and posting that Trump needs a pardon on Truth Social.
Well done, man, well done.
The 2024 election was the final act of slow burn of the brolteriat, a simmering pot of male resentment and backlash to the hyper woke era of 2020 that boiled over on Election Day, as ostracized dudes hopped up on Prime energy while speedrunning Trump’s podcast appearance on 2x and burning through stimulus checks on Draft Kings and crypto went to the polls.
Could it have all been stopped if the government took away their stimulants?
Probably not, but Chuck Schumer picked the worst of both worlds, choosing to announce he wanted to ban Zyn (fueling anger and resentment) while not actually banning it (allowing JD Vance’s field staff to upper deck their way through another day of canvassing).
Like what’s the opposite of 4-D chess?
Russiagate-obsessed centrists erupted in glee when the (fifth? seventh?) secret Kremlin plot to disrupt the election finally broke out into the open, revealing that Russian assets funneled money into Trump-loving digital luminaries like Dave Rubin and Benny Johnson.
While the money men were indicted (but, being in Russia, not charged), the people who willingly worked on the plot weren’t, and the actual personalities who benefitted showered with largesse from Moscow to push GOP talking points, got to keep all that cash.
Everyone involved is still doing all the same things, minus maybe the mortgage payment on a beach house.
But the Tenet Media YouTube channel… well, that’s no longer live.
Say what you want about the evils of red pilling, but it’s led to two election victories. The coconut pilling of Kamala supporters, the ironic online enthusiasm of her insta-candidacy certainly seemed to portend positives for the candidate.
Sure, the quote sounded crazy, but what if this nation needed a philosopher-wine mom? For a few short days, it felt like it did.
But alas. The red pill is pharmaceutical grade. The coconut … let’s just say, given the choice between taking a drug and eating a fruit, we should have known what Americans would pick.
Anyone entering politics at anything past the local level should prepare for a ruthless media assault on every tendril of their online life. Which the media did when it revealed that Mark Robinson had a spate of horrific, awful online posts.
Wait, that was in 2020, when he ran for North Carolina’s Lt. Gov and it was revealed he called Michelle Obama a man. And still won.
Perhaps Robinson thought "one campaign, four years in office, do your best you scurrilous bloggers. There’s nothing else out there."
Thankfully, the Black Nazi of Nude Africa had one more secret to give. Which is that he told graphic stories about peeing on his wife’s sister. On the site Nude Africa. Where he called himself a Black Nazi.
You got to call JD Vance a couch fucker for three months.
It’s the best your life will be for a long time.
If the country survives the ensuing Trump years as the world’s bastion of liberty, Biden will be remembered as the feckless, befuddled, doddering old man whose lies to the American public plunged them into four years of quasi-fascism, and whose final acts were keeping Americans entangled in two foreign wars while waving away a bevy of societal ills like immigration, crime, and inflation as the cantankerous complaining of a subset of online-addled racists and not, apparently the majority of Americans.
And that’s the best case for his legacy.
Pretty funny if you ask, uh … some folks.
The Daily Dot looks back at the year that was in our 2024 Year in Review.
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