Dec. 23: What Happened This Year

The Scroll's year in review

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The Big Story

Today’s edition of The Scroll will be our last before we break for Hanukkah, Christmas, and the New Year. We’ll be off for the next week and change—from Dec. 24 to Jan. 1—to recuperate, unplug from the news cycle, spend time with family, eat and drink to excess, and enjoy some general holiday merriment. We encourage all of our readers to do the same.

For our holiday special edition, we’re providing a roundup of some of our favorite items from what has been a very, very long year (remember Claudine Gay?). We’ll be lightly monitoring the news cycle over the break, and if anything genuinely momentous happens (war, meteor strike, alien contact, etc.), we’ll be back here with a special edition to fill you in.

Otherwise, we recommend you take the opportunity to get away from your computer and phone screens while you have the chance. We’ll see everybody back here in 2025.

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The Rest

→Jan. 3 — The following item was part of The Scroll’s running commentary on the Jan. 2 resignation of Harvard President Claudine Gay following a wave of negative publicity over her handling of campus antisemitism, her disastrous testimony to Congress, and her plagiarism of elements of her academic work—stories that Gay’s defenders, including Atlantic writer Jemele Hill and New York Congressman Jamaal Bowman, dismissed as a “fascist” psyop meant to “bully” a “brilliant & historic Black woman into submission.”

So, is Harvard capitulating to a racist mob? For some analysis on the dynamics at play, let’s turn to Timur Kuran, the eminent Duke University political scientist who coined the term preference falsification to describe how people hide their own views due to social pressure. Kuran wrote the following in a Wednesday X post, presented here as a quote for readability:

Preference falsification has been central to the trajectory of DEI. People who abhor DEI principles and methods came to favor these publicly through a preference cascade. Every instance of preference falsification induced others to pretend they consider DEI just, efficient, beneficial to marginalized groups, etc. In time, a false consensus effectively displaced the search for truth as the university’s core mission, replacing it with DEI. Most professors watched in concealed horror the transfer of enormous powers from themselves to rapidly growing DEI bureaucracies. In countless contexts, they endorsed policies they considered harmful, participated in the defamation of scholars they admired, and sheepishly submitted to DEI training—all to be left alone, to avoid being called racist, to advance their careers.

But the resulting equilibrium was self-undermining. In emboldening DEI officials, it increased privately felt anger and resentment. The stage was set for a preference cascade in reverse. The shock that unleashed the ongoing cascade in reverse was the Hamas massacres of October 7. The chain of events that they triggered in the U.S.—anti-Jewish demonstrations, the Congressional hearings, the plagiarism revelations—brought to the surface outrage that had been building up quietly for years. As public criticism of DEI grew, and as it became clear that broad segments of the left share the outrage, the DEI-favoring false consensus disintegrated. The process is by no means over. As preference falsification on DEI continues to diminish, more scholars and administrators will find in themselves the courage to stand up for values that they truly believe in. Though the DEI complex will fight back, it won’t be easy to quash the honest discourse finally underway. Public critics of DEI know they aren’t alone.

→Jan. 8 — The Biden administration is quietly doling out hundreds of billions in federal spending on the basis of race, thanks to a little-known “environmental justice” initiative and with the help of an army of nonprofits. The Washington Free Beacon’s Joseph Simonson reports that Justice40, a program created by a January 2021 Biden executive order on “tackling the climate crisis,” requires that 40% of federal spending on climate, environmental, workforce development, and other programs must flow to “disadvantaged communities.” What counts as a disadvantaged community? Well, according to recommendations for defining that term published in May 2021 by the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council, created by the same executive order that launched Justice40, the first criterion is that a community is “majority minority,” while other criteria—including “formerly redlined,” “high rate of health disparities,” and “low high-school graduation rates”—are clear proxies for race. The Free Beacon further reports that the White House is “leaning on a cottage industry of nonprofits to assist communities applying for grants,” including Arabella Advisors outfits like the New Venture Fund, which explicitly present the program in “racial justice and equity” terms.

→Jan. 30 — The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday ran a long feature on Iran’s Axis of Resistance, most of which will be familiar to regular readers of The Scroll. But we thought the following passage worth emphasizing:

The Journal reported that Iranian security officials had given the green light for the [Oct. 7] assault at a meeting in Beirut the week before, on Oct. 2, citing senior Hamas and Hezbollah officials, who also said officers of the Revolutionary Guard had worked with Hamas since August to devise the attack. Those officials and an additional high-ranking Hamas member continue to stand by those assertions.

Other officials quoted in the piece repeated the U.S.-Axis line: Not only was the Axis of Resistance surprised by Hamas’ attack, but also Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah was “angered” by it. Sure, why not? In other news, The Scroll can exclusively report that Benjamin Netanyahu was “outraged” and “saddened” by the death of Qasem Soleimani in 2020 and that O.J. Simpson remains “angered” by the shocking murder of his ex-wife.

→Feb. 26 — The following is an excerpt from our Big Story on the Feb. 25 self-immolation of U.S. Airman Aaron Bushnell outside the Israeli consulate in Washington, D.C., to protest the “U.S.-sponsored genocide” in Gaza.

A great deal of social media commentary has turned on the question of whether or not Bushnell was “mentally ill,” as if one needs a DSM diagnosis to commit violent or extreme acts in the name of ideology. But whatever his mental state, Bushnell was suffering from a deep misapprehension about reality, one cultivated by the same propaganda machine that brought you the “trans genocide” and, before that, the “epidemics” of science denial, racist police murders, and campus rapes.

Like the false narrative of the Gaza genocide, these were also media pseudo-events designed to incite the gullible and unbalanced in hatred of designated enemies of the people (straight men, whites, Jews/“Zionists”), who were held responsible, within the terms of the regime’s politico-religious mythology, for lurid atrocities against various categories of sacred victims. The righteous anger thus generated can in turn be instrumentalized by the oligarchs, spooks, and politicians at the top of the party-state pyramid for their own ends (mobilizing clients, punishing enemies, and astroturfing popular support for regime priorities). As in the classic blood libel, or the Soviet massacres of the kulaks, redemptive violence against the “oppressor”—or, in Bushnell’s case, against the self, with the implicit message that the “oppressors” were his real murderers—becomes an instrument of divine justice. It is the logic of the pogrom, the antifa street action, and the suicide bombing. In a stroke of grim genius, Bushnell tied all three together in one spectacular gesture.

→March 26 — An internal DEI newsletter at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), dated “Winter 23/24,” warned the intelligence community and U.S. government employees not to use “problematic phrases” such as jihadist, Salafi-jihadist, and Islamic extremist when discussing counterterrorism, describing them as “offensive and inaccurate,” according to a report in The Daily Wire. The ODNI newsletter, which was sent to employees of all the main U.S. intelligence agencies, the Department of Justice, and the intelligence divisions within each branch of the military, said that these phrases are “hurtful to Muslim-Americans” and fail to serve the goal of “disentangling Islam from words and phrases used to discuss terrorism and extremist violence.” Instead of calling jihadists jihadists, the newsletter recommends referring to them as Homegrown Violent Extremists, if they are based in the United States (thus helpfully conjuring an image of right-wing Timothy McVeigh types), or as Khawarij, the word that “Islamic scholars” use to “accurately identify extremists.” According to the newsletter:

The term Khawarij means “outsiders” and references a group of individuals in Islamic history who rebelled against Ali ibn Abi Talib—one of the rightly guided caliphs after the Prophet Muhammad’s passing—during the Battle of Siffin in 657. The Khawarij assassinated Ali; they branded Muslims as disbelievers if they did not adhere to the Khawarij’s extremists [sic] views; and committed heinous atrocities against men, women, and children …

This is not only completely insane, but wrong. Khawarij is an alternate spelling of Kharijite, which is indeed used by Muslims to polemicize against other Muslims for perceived extremism. But it cannot be used to “accurately identify extremists” since it is simply a term of abuse; there is no consensus as to what makes someone a Kharijite, and no jihadist groups identify themselves as Kharijites. Scholar of Wahhābism Cole Bunzel, for instance, points out that infighting between and among Salafi-jihadist groups is often characterized by indiscriminate accusations of Kharijism against those who have fallen afoul of the group’s leadership. As the emir of the Islamic State in Iraq, the forerunner to ISIS, put it in a 2007 ideological declaration titled “Some of Our Principles,” “Our position on faith is a middle way between the extremist Kharijites and the lax Murji’ites.”

→April 11 — Jackson Hinkle, the 24-year-old anti-Israel social media influencer who recently spoke to a gathering of the Houthi leadership in Yemen, appears to be getting a boost from a Chinese botnet, according to a Thursday profile in The New York Times. A former teenage racial justice and climate activist who now regularly posts Russian, Chinese, and Iranian propaganda (plus a healthy dose of Jew-baiting), Hinkle saw his follower count on X rise from 417,000 on Oct. 6 to more than 2.5 million today. But that growth does not appear to be organic. Here’s the Times:

Several organized networks of inauthentic accounts amplified his posts, according to Next Dim, an Israeli company that studies inauthentic activity online and that previously found evidence of an effort to amplify pro-Beijing messages on X.

One of the organized networks had previously boosted unrelated content—in Chinese—that criticized the Japanese government for releasing radioactive wastewater from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in August, the researchers found. Once the fighting began in Gaza, the same network, which had at least 20,000 accounts, began reposting Mr. Hinkle’s content.

Another research company in Israel, Cyabra, found that Mr. Hinkle’s account gained 1.2 million followers over the first 19 days of the war. A sample of 12,510 of them suggested that roughly 40 percent were fakes.

Hinkle has also, the profile notes, visited Russia and China this year “at the invitation of organizations close to the governments.”

We’d observe that despite the nearly decade-long panic about “foreign disinformation” undermining Americans’ “cognitive infrastructure,” and the Department of Justice’s successful prosecution of Douglass Mackey for posting pro-Trump memes, the American power structure seems relatively unbothered about a transparent Chinese information op to discredit an American ally. We wonder why that is.

→April 26 — This is an excerpt from our Big Story on the funding behind the anti-Israel encampments that sprung up across elite college campuses over the spring, later expanded into a magazine article.

One curious element of all this is that many, though not all, of the oligarchs funding anti-Israel radicalism are Jewish. We mention that to frame some thoughts on the campus protests sent to us by Tablet’s geopolitical analyst, who began with the observation that these protests, unlike the 1968 Columbia occupation, involve only a few hundred students, plus outside supporters. So why can’t Columbia administrators simply tell them to shove it? Here’s our analyst:

This is what push-button activism looks like. The problem, for the Columbia administration, is that the protesters and their funders are ultimately a Democratic Party constituency. In theory, if you push hard enough, the entire constituency has its “rights” endangered.

Mau-mauing the Jew is their job. It’s an organizing tool and proof of authenticity. Constituencies don’t exist in nature; they have to be organized. The new Democratic Party is a creation of head organizer Barack Obama and the billionaire foundationland that sponsored his rise. The constituencies of the old Democratic Party needed to therefore be replaced by new constituencies loyal to the new party. Especially since the old constituencies were old—reflecting social constructs from a century ago.

So, in the new dispensation, Jews = Palestinians, Gays = Trans, Auto workers = grad students, Italians/Irish = undocumented migrants, etc. What’s new is that these groups are all top-down constructions paid for by new oligarchs. But this also reflects the change in society. Jewish oligarchs pay to replace the Jews with Palestinians because, in their minds, both groups are fictions. They’re just sectarian-labeled vote containers. The point is who controls them. It’s an antisemitic conspiracy of Jews against Jews, backed by the party.

The post-Obama Democratic Party has a different operating system with different functional categories. That operating system is identity politics and symbolic sectarian representation, which makes it a perfect fit for an oligarchical surveillance state. The party can give out any title or credential it wants. Here’s Harvard. Here’s a Pulitzer Prize. Here’s Hollywood. Here’s a Ph.D in astrophysics. Meanwhile, we set the rules and we own the machines, which produce infinite amounts of money, which we also keep. The key word here is equity—a classic banker word, repurposed to also mean “justice,” which means “sectarian representation.”

→May 15 – And here’s an excerpt from our Big Story on Neville Roy Singham, the wallet behind The People’s Forum, the ANSWER Coalition, the Party for Socialism and Liberation, and other major players on the radical left rent-a-mob circuit:

We’ve previously reported at The Scroll on Neville Roy Singham, the Chinese Communist Party-connected tech entrepreneur who is the sole funder of The People’s Forum, the hard-left “movement incubator” that has been playing a lead role in New York City’s anti-Israel protest movement. In a new report, the Princeton-based Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI)—which previously authored a report on the CCP’s manipulation of the TikTok algorithm in favor of anti-Israel content—takes a deeper dive into what it calls the “Singham network” of overlapping nonprofits and media ventures, and into its role in the “Shut It Down for Palestine” (SID4P) protest movement.

We’ll start with NCRI’s conclusion:

The NCRI finds that the increase in direct action, targeting infrastructure and public spaces, is in part driven by organizations connected to CCP foreign influence efforts. While nominally focused on Israel, the current protests can be better understood as a well-funded initiative driving a revolutionary, anti-government, and anti-capitalist agenda, with the leading organizations serving as versatile tools for foreign entities hostile to the U.S. The methods of these organizations exacerbate societal tensions, polarize the younger generation, and appear to seek the destabilization of American institutions. NCRI assesses that these organizations will persist in inciting unrest throughout the summer of 2024 and in the lead-up to the U.S. presidential election.

… The report also includes extensive background on Singham, his Chinese connections, and his web of nonprofits and media ventures. A longtime radical—he was the subject of an FBI investigation in 1974—who is now based in Shanghai, Singham served as a consultant to Huawei from 2001 to 2008 and shares office space with Shanghai Maku Cultural Communications Ltd., a “Chinese propaganda firm focused on presenting a positive image of [China] to the global south.” In July 2023, he was photographed at a strategic communications workshop hosted by the CCP in Shanghai, and in November he was summoned for questioning by India’s Enforcement Directorate regarding an Indian news website he owns, which Indian police raided in 2021 on suspicion of taking illegal Chinese funds to promote CCP propaganda. Singham’s wife, Jodie Evans, the head of Codepink, is set to release a book in January called China Is Not Our Enemy, coauthored with a researcher at the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research. Tricontinental, helmed by Indian Marxist academic Vijay Prashad, is funded by Singham, employs Singham’s son, and generally pushes a pro-Chinese and pro-Russian “Marxist” line.

→Aug. 23 — In August, The Scroll traveled to Chicago to take in the Democratic National Convention. Here’s an excerpt from our review of Vice President Kamala Harris’ speech accepting the Democratic nomination, which we, at the time, thought might be a preview of the next four-to-eight years:

Kamala Harris is for the people. Kamala Harris loves America with all her heart. Kamala Harris will lead with joy, but also strength, and perhaps strength through joy, which you definitely shouldn’t translate into German and then Google. Kamala Harris knows that Israeli women were raped, but also that what has happened in Gaza is devastating, which is why she will secure a deal to end the fighting and bring the hostages home. Kamala Harris will always stand up to Iran, unlike Donald Trump, who cozies up to tyrants and dictators. Kamala Harris will create opportunities for the middle class, because she knows what it means to be middle class. Kamala Harris will be a president for all Americans, not just for the rich. Kamala Harris holds predators accountable. It’s personal for Kamala Harris.

At some point in the third or fourth hour that your humble Scroll correspondent spent sitting on an empty ABC News camera box wedged in a far corner in the upper deck of Chicago’s United Center (logistics were, again, a disaster, attendance having been boosted beyond capacity by false rumors that Taylor Swift or Beyonce would make an appearance) it struck us, like a diamond bullet through the forehead: None of it matters. None of what Kamala Harris says matters. None of what Leon Panetta says matters. None of what any of the other speakers on Thursday night—P!nk, Ella Emhoff, Mark Kelly—matters. The “policies” don’t matter. The “pivot to the center” doesn’t matter. Kamala Harris doesn’t matter. None of it matters. It isn’t real.

The conventions of American politics dictate that a party must have a nominee—a living, breathing, “natural-born citizen” of a certain age—and so the party has Kamala. A nominee, also by convention, must have policies, and so Kamala “outlined” her “policies” on Thursday night. Americans are unhappy with four years of high inflation, anemic economic growth, uncontrolled illegal immigration, and a string of foreign policy disasters, brought to you by the administration in which Kamala currently serves as vice president. No problem; the Democrats will simply pretend that Trump is the incumbent and run against that. Joe Biden was, until June, the greatest American president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt, with a mind so sharp he routinely flummoxed experts, and a well of energy so boundless that he left much younger aides struggling to keep up. Then, overnight, Biden was a walking corpse, and then he was gone. Joe who?

The words are just messaging, or what Tablet News Editor Tony Badran likes to call “lol words”—they have no relation to reality. The party faithful understand that they’re not voting for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, they’re voting for the party, and whatever the party decides will be all right with them, whether or not that has any relation to what is being “promised” today. As Michelle Obama put it Tuesday night, “This is not just on them. This is up to us.” The Democrats’ big gamble is that their near-total monopoly on America’s messaging and communications apparatus will be enough to create a new reality, completely independent of the one we live in, that convinces just enough people to drag Kamala over the finish line. Then we can revert to what we had before Biden died on stage: party rule behind a ceremonial figurehead, whose job is to sell decisions made by others to the public.

→Sept. 30 – On Sept. 27, the Israelis assassinated Hezbollah General Secretary Hassan Nasrallah in a massive airstrike on the terror group’s leadership bunker in the Beirut suburb of Dahiyeh. Here’s what our geopolitical analyst had to say in The Scroll’s roundtable discussion of the killing:

For the geopolitical analyst, the Nasrallah strike was important not merely for its strategic significance, but as an indication of Israel’s willingness to act on its own:

Nasrallah has been going in and out of his bunkers for nearly 20 years. The fact that Israel chose to kill him now therefore represents a break—a healthy one—with past assumptions. It would be interesting for a future disinterested scholar to weigh the evidence of how and when these assumptions were made and what kept them in place and to what extent they were hallucinated by the Israelis or foisted on them by a succession of delusional U.S. presidents, from George Bush to Barack Obama to Joe Biden.

Being able to think and act on its own seems like a minimum requirement for Israel’s survival as a nation. I’ve been saying for months that the minimal baseline for asserting that Israel has achieved that capacity after a year of grueling, painful war would be killing Nasrallah. For me, that’s the most meaningful thing about Nasrallah’s death—the break with U.S.-backed assumptions and strategies that amounted to a form of slow-drop euthanasia accompanied by pious falsehoods about “deals” with Iran and establishing a “Palestinian state.”

By killing Nasrallah, Israel has very publicly told the euthanizers to fuck off. It has also established itself as potentially the only country on earth with the technological capacity, the military power, and the political will to actually win a war.

→Sept. 30 — A weekend article in the Financial Times, which offered a fascinating window into the world-class intelligence capabilities that the Israelis built to monitor and ultimately destroy Hezbollah, confirmed Tablet’s theory of the case: Nasrallah, up until Friday, had been operating under U.S. protection. Citing Israeli officials, the paper wrote:

In the days after October 7, Israeli warplanes took off with instructions to bomb a location where Nasrallah had been located by Israel’s intelligence directorate Aman. The raid was called off after the White House demanded Netanyahu do so, according to one of the Israeli officials.

The Israelis, to their credit, did not make the same mistake twice. On Friday, they “tracked Nasrallah to a bunker built deep below an apartment complex in south Beirut, and dropped as many as 80 bombs to make sure he was killed.” The Americans were not informed until it was too late for them to intervene.

→Nov. 6 — And here’s an excerpt of our coverage of the election:

On Tuesday night, Donald John Trump recaptured the presidency in what may be the greatest second act in American political history. While some states are still counting votes, it seems likely, as of our writing, that he will sweep all seven battleground states and become the first Republican since George W. Bush in 2004 to win the popular vote. The Republicans have already recaptured the Senate and are favored (92.4% chance, according to Decision Desk HQ) to retain their majority in the House of Representatives, though many of the competitive races won’t be called until later this week. But we know enough now to say that last night’s election delivered a decisive popular mandate for Trump and a decisive repudiation of the Democratic Party machine built by Barack Obama …

How did Trump do it? We’ve seen some suggestive exit polls showing, for instance, Trump winning more than 40% of the Jewish vote in New York City; that sounds right, but we’d caution that exit polls are notoriously unreliable. County data, on the other hand, is rock-solid. So consider the following map from The New York Times, which shows virtually the entire country shifting massively toward Trump and the Republican Party since 2020:

And consider this chart, also from the Times, which breaks down vote shifts by county type:

To put that in simple terms: Pretty much the entire country shifted toward Trump. That includes deep-blue strongholds. The New York Post reported Wednesday morning that Harris was leading New York by a little more than 11% with 95% of votes counted—the worst performance by a Democrat in the Empire State since Michael Dukakis in 1988. Trump cracked 30% in New York City—also the best performance by a Republican since 1988, driven by a 35% improvement in the Bronx relative to 2020 and improvements of 20% and 16.5% in Manhattan and Queens, respectively. Finally, Trump blew the doors off of several heavily minority counties across the country, flipping Florida’s Osceola County (home to a large Puerto Rican population) and Texas’s 97% Hispanic Starr County. He won the latter by nearly 16% after losing it by 5% to Biden—a 21-point swing in four years. It was, as Ryan Girdusky observed on X, the first time Starr County had voted for a Republican since 1892.

We’ve seen some talk of a “realignment election,” with the Republicans broadening their appeal among the multiracial working class while the Democrats become more entrenched in affluent white suburbs. We’ll have to wait for more detailed demographic breakdowns to say for sure, but what the above table suggests to us is something different: a “whole of society” (to borrow a term) rejection of Kamala Harris and her party. Punchbowl’s congressional reporter, Max Cohen, cited a Democratic House source this morning who summed up the result nicely: “This was a total and complete repudiation of the Democratic Party. People are not buying what we’re selling. Period.”