When you consider the literal and figurative bullets the world dodged on the way to December 31, things could have been much, much worse, almost unimaginably so, but don’t tell our so-called betters that. They are mired in misery and think you should be too.
Even in conservative circles, 2024 is getting a bad wrap, being deemed yet another year that needed to send sooner rather than later, presumably before the same cycle is repeated next January 1, but there are at least three things that could’ve happened that didn’t, any of which would have instantly changed last year into a truly terrible one. If you think things were bad as history actually unfolded, just imagine what they’d have looked like if President Donald Trump’s head was blown off in Butler, PA on July 13, when we came less than an inch away from the first assassination of former President in history and the first assassination of a candidate for President since Robert F. Kennedy in 1968. Rather than continuing the campaign festivities and ceremonies as if nothing had happened, the country would have been plunged into crisis if not catastrophe. The fallout is hard to imagine, doubly so when you consider that to this day we know next to nothing about the shooter, Mathew Crooks, and most of what we know about events leading up to the shooting is nothing short of disastrous. To say the Secret Service performed less than optimally, is to give them far too much credit when they deserve none. Their long litany of their failures include a lead agent who “failed a key examination” to become an agent in the first place, an intelligence unit that coordinates with law enforcement about suspicious persons that wasn’t on site as it was supposed to be, another counter surveillance team that was inexplicably absent as well and didn’t perform the required assessment before the rally, Department of Homeland Security agents who knew little about event security and whose only training was a two hour webinar on Microsoft Teams. The lead agent in particular was described as being “known to lack competence and experience in the role” and personally making decisions that “likely compromised the overall security of the event.” Incredibly, the roof from which the would-be assassin opened fire was supposed to have been guarded by law enforcement, but it was simply “too hot,” and when local law enforcement recommended using drones to secure the rally, their requests were denied. Even the security after the shots were fired was lax. The hospital where President Trump received treatment was described as “poorly secured” and the agent on-site “could not answer basic questions about site security.” Even more incredibly, when confronted by these failures then and now, the Secret Service asserted outright that President Trump’s life is less valuable than President Biden or Vice President Harris. As a report found, officials “preemptively informed the Pittsburgh field office that the Butler rally was not going to receive additional security resources because Trump is a former president,” “not the incumbent President or Vice President.” To date, no answer for any of these lapses has been provided and they have gotten away with failing to explain themselves primarily because President Trump survived.
In an era rife with conspiracy theories, many of which are more true than they ever should be, what do you think the President’s legions of supporters might have done if their standard bearer lay dead and the powers that be, which are currently controlled by their opposition, adamantly refused to come to grips with their own failures? Given the assassination attempt occurred less than 48 hours before the opening of the Republican National Convention, the electoral process would also have been plunged into crisis. President Trump had not yet named his Vice Presidential choice, Senator JD Vance, and the convention itself would have become a pitched battle between different factions of the party for the new candidate. Rather than unity, optimism, and confidence, there would have been chaos, confusion, and bickering. Further, whatever new candidate emerged would likely be viewed with skepticism by the losing faction, leaving a major political party adrift without a true candidate barely three months before the election. Undoubtedly, this would be perceived as a fundamentally corrupted election whoever emerged and combined with the lack of any answers as to how the candidate leading in the polls could be killed in broad daylight from an open rooftop in clear view of the podium, the level of unrest among Republicans would make the fall out from the 2020 election seem quaint in comparison. That all of this would be presided over by a man who’s own party suddenly decided was no longer fit to serve after a disastrous debate performance a month earlier, a man who has totally failed to unite the country and has proven completely incapable of providing anything resembling steady leadership in times of crisis would only add to the potential for a true powder keg scenario, which segways nicely into a second disaster that could have happened: The country has not had a Commander in Chief with all of his mental faculties for the past four years. While the reality of this might have been at least somewhat obscured by a conspiracy between the Biden Administration and the media to hide the decline, there was no pretending something wasn’t horribly wrong after the debate in June, but instead of demanding his immediate resignation to safeguard the country, the same conspiracists acted like it was totally normal for the sitting President to suddenly withdraw from his re-election campaign the following month, putting American politics above national security. In a world that even Biden-friendly media outlets like CNN describe as “on fire,” it’s another near miracle that there wasn’t a major international incident or at least a significant provocation from our adversaries. Though a diminished President Biden was unable to stop the bleeding in the Middle East or Ukraine, and he failed to secure the release of our hostages in Gaza, the situation could’ve been much, much worse if China took the opportunity to escalate her fraudulent claim to Taiwan, or Russia opted to escalate their already heinous assaults on Ukraine with something even more barbaric. There were certainly signs this might be the case when a doddering President appeared before the UN and made it clear that no one, from our friends to our foes, listens to him anymore, rendering the Presidency the equivalent of a drunken uncle babbling at a family gathering. While we cannot say for sure why nothing horrible occurred as a result of having an absentee president, clearly there was the potential for something truly catastrophic and indeed, there was the surprising fall of Syria’s Bashar al Assad, a tyrant who shouldn’t have been in power in the first place, though one who was replaced by former members of Al Qaeda, for better or worse remaining to be seen, and shortly after the new year dawned, fourteen people were killed in a terror attack in New Orleans by a man radicalized by ISIS.
At the same time, President Biden’s obvious mental decline did threaten to pitch the country into chaos when he withdrew from the presidential race, effectively coronating of one of the least popular Vice Presidents in modern history, Kamala Harris. Though the Democrats miraculously fell in line behind their new candidate, the disconnect between a sitting President unable to fulfill his duties and a Vice President pretending to be a sitting President was startling at times, despite the media’s attempts to claim the vibes and the joy were all good and healthy. Republicans, needless to say, were less than enthused, with President Trump personally describing himself as angry the Democrats had completely thwarted the democratic process they claimed to be championing, completely upsetting a race that was already heated. As a result, experts warned repeatedly of the potential for violence. A week before the election, The Guardian summarized the fear, “There could be a potential surge in political violence following the upcoming US election, and pro-Trump rightwing vigilante ‘poll watcher’ might surveil ballot drop boxes as Americans cast their votes, experts warned this week. A new report from the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (GPAHE) highlighted alarming trends in online chatter, mirroring patterns observed in the lead-up to the 2020 election and the January 6 Capitol insurrection. Meanwhile, Princeton’s Bridging Divides Initiative (BDI), issued a fact sheet with recommendations for dealing with conspiracy-minded monitoring groups like True the Vote, which spread false narratives in 2020 alleging that Democrats had sent paid ‘mules’ to drop boxes with thousands of illegal votes in order to steal the election from Donald Trump. The twin reports highlighted risks to the elections and strategies for mitigating them, at a time when one man has been charged over armed attacks on a Democratic party office, and police in Oregon and Washington are investigating suspected arson attacks on ballot boxes in which some ballots were destroyed.” In response, most major cities instituted tight security, boarding up ground level windows, and taking other precautions for potential demonstrations, protests, and even riots on election night and afterwards. At the same time, many also believed the presidential winner would not be known for days or even weeks. The popular 538 website noted, “Election Day is Tuesday, Nov. 5 — but that doesn’t mean we’ll know who won the election on that date. With each passing election, more and more Americans are casting mail-in ballots, which take longer to count than in-person votes because they need to be opened and verified. That means that finding out the winner on election night may be a thing of the past. In 2020, it took until the Saturday after Election Day for the networks to project a winner in the presidential race. In 2022, control of the Senate also took until Saturday to be projected, and control of the House wasn’t decided until eight days after Election Day. So when will we know the winners this year?” While they didn’t say for sure, they at least insinuated that it could take some time, “Even in states that count their ballots quickly, it can take days or even weeks to project a winner if an election is close enough.” This implied that any demonstrations after the election could be prolonged which would increase the opportunity for the feared political violence, but ultimately a winner was declared later that same evening and none of the violence materialized. Instead, it appeared that a certain weariness of our pitched political battles set in and an acknowledgement that whether you love President Trump or hate President Trump, he’s accomplished something truly extraordinary, leading to something awfully close to optimism about the future, perhaps for the first time since 2016.
If nothing else, this should be a cause for hope and should lend itself to the idea that perhaps 2024 was a better year than it’s currently being given credit for – especially when you consider the literal and figurative bullets the world dodged on the way to December 31, things could have been much, much worse, almost unimaginably so, but don’t tell our so-called betters that. Somehow, they have forgotten all this because they are mired in misery and think you should be too. As Charles Dickens once wrote, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way–in short, the period was so far like the present period that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 