On January 1, 2024, I published an article in this space predicting the mother of all turbulent years.
Twenty-twenty-four, I opined, was probably going to make 2016 and 2020 put together feel like a leisurely stroll through a mellow, soothing dreamscape filed with licorice trees and cotton candy clouds. The best way to keep one’s sanity was to refuse to be drawn into the madness, by blocking out the media, keeping “custody” of one’s senses, and going about one’s business in blissful disregard of “the news.”
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We are now nearly halfway through the current year, and so far, I’ve got to say, things have been pretty uneventual so far.
Even supposedly major stories, like Donald Trump’s guilty verdict, have mostly failed to register as significant in the minds of most. In fact, the whole “Trump bogeyman” thing seems largely to have run out of steam.
Granted, I am mostly attempting to ignore “breaking news” events (in accord with my New Year’s resolution), but my sense is that people aren’t being riled up or driven to fervorous states of outrage (whether pro- or anti-Trump) at nearly the same intensity as in the recent past. Trump is still a divisive figure, to be sure (at least the hyper-partisan “Trump” which emerged in 2015, as opposed to the mostly apolitical “loveable New York real estate mogul/reality TV star” who had been in the public eye from the mid-80s through 2014) , but in general people seem far less inclined to get driven into a tizzy over the doings of Orange Man.
Moreover, even as we come to the final week of “Pride Month,” rainbow-themed corporate campaigns seem to be nowhere near as conspicuous as they have been in years past. I began noticing the scaling back in the flaunting of those formerly ubiquitous manifestations of “Pride” paraphernalia a year ago, and this year the scaleback only seems to have grown more pronounced. Granted, my observations here are anecdotal, and I am sure that others could share entirely divergent anecdotes of having their faces rubbed in rainbow-colored vomit in various obnoxious and infuriating ways all throughout the current month.
On balance, however, I reckon that most will agree that things have been relatively subdued lately on this front, perhaps strategically so. I suspect that our self-appointed opinion-shapers and moral guardians can sense that people are getting a bit weary of wokery, and that it may be prudent to soft-pedal things, or else risk provoking a serious backlash.
Interestingly, the one issue that has galvanized leftist activists so far in 2024— namely, the decimation of Gaza by Israeli forces, resulting in thousands of Palestinian civilian casualties— appears to have thrown a wrench into the works, in that it has divided the pro-Hamas SJW-antifa types from the pro-Israel neoliberal establishment. (In 2020, by contrast, when George Floyd and BLM were all the rage, the SJW-antifa and neolibs worked in tandem; or rather, the latter successfully manipulated the former into extended spasms of “mostly peaceful” rioting.)
Even more fascinatingly, this conflict has caused an abrupt rise in “noticing” that the ethnic composition of much of the Western power bloc resembles that of the “Zionist entity” in the Middle East, a most inconvenient, and potentially calamitous, turn of events for our ruling claque.
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Still, though the Gaza siege has been vituperatively denounced in certain sectors— mainly college campuses— it is worth noting that, unlike in 2020, cities are not currently burning. In fact, one senses that the broad swath of people are quite exhausted with the orgy of outrage porn that has prevailed in the mainstream media over the last few years.
People are no longer obeying the summons to be angry in all the prescribed ways, at all of the prescribed and approved targets. They are declining to denounce those who don’t share the prescribed, approved, and “acceptable” views as deplorable bigots, as they have been asked to do— quite relentlessly— over and over, year after year, election season after election season. They are worn out. They don’t want to be righteously indignant anymore; they just want to live their lives.
Maybe as the 2024 election draws nigh, things will get ratcheted up again, and the final months of the year will see a return of those all-too-familiar hostilities.
At this point, however, it seems at least as likely a scenario that this most feared of years will manage to end “not with a bang, but a whimper.”
Andy Nowicki is the author of several books, most recently The Insurrectionist, Muze, and Love and Hidden Agendas, as well as the just-published The Rule of Wrath. Visit his YouTube channel.