2024: Year of the Inflection Point

The only 2024 run-down you’ll need to read this year…

Well, that was weird.

The year 2024 was among the strangest in memory. We had assassination attempts, drone infestations, a Democrat coup-d’etat, and the election of Donald Trump to a nonconsecutive second term. But even more striking is the fact that several of these major events seemed to be heralding broader cultural shifts, which we expect will continue into 2025 and beyond. We will call these shifts ‘Inflection Points’.

In calculus, an ‘Inflection Point’ is a point on a graph where the curvature changes from positive to negative, or vice versa. Outside the mathematical context, an Inflection Point is a point in time where significant, lasting change occurs. More than just a ‘big deal’ or a momentary disruptor, an Inflection Point is the distinct period when a trend changes course—where the direction or broad attitude of a society shifts suddenly with respect to a certain topic. For example, in 1941, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was the Inflection Point that marked the shift in the American attitude toward WWII, from isolationism to interventionism.

Given this definition, 2024 seems to have been the Year of the Inflection Point—a year in which several longstanding social trends appeared to change course within the space of a few months. So, rather than simply rehash the innumerable ‘big stories’ from 2024, we thought it more interesting to provide a brief reflection on four such Inflection Points from this tumultuous year.

1. The Demise of the Mainstream Media

This one has been a long time coming, as the public’s trust in mainstream news has been declining for over a decade, but 2024 might have been the year when the ‘sh** finally hit the fan’ for CNN, MSNBC and co. The first death-blow came in June, in the form of Joe Biden’s debate performance. After spending three years vociferously and synchronously attesting to the adequacy of Biden’s mental faculties, each left-wing news outlet was left with egg on its face. Biden’s demented debate performance exposed the true extent of his mental decline, thus revealing the absurd falsity of the media’s claims that 2024 Biden was “The Best Biden Ever”. In our first ever article, we argued the Mainstream Media might struggle to come back from this embarrassment and to re-earn any kind of trustworthy status in the eyes of the American people. And then… along came Kamala. After Kamala Harris replaced Biden as the Democrat nominee, not only did the media refuse to ask her questions or exert any meaningful journalistic pressure on her, they actually concocted a new public image for Kamala in record time, drumming up excitement and doling out praise in a sickening symphony of sycophancy. One minute, she was our least popular VP ever, with record-low approval ratings. Next minute she was ‘Momala’—the comforting and competent, yet joyous and BRAT, politician our country needed (but definitely not the Border Czar…)

Then, gradually, the glorious truth came out: Kamala was a terrible candidate. Donald Trump ultimately won a near-landslide victory, which felt like a referendum on the Mainstream Media as much as Kamala Harris herself. Perhaps the most palpable indicator of the media’s fatal loss of credibility was the Trump campaign’s wild success with podcasts and alternative media like Joe Rogan. This success aligns with polling data suggesting the legacy media have fallen behind podcasts in terms of perceived trustworthiness. It seems the American public found the media’s behavior during this election season rather off-putting—the corrupt debate moderators, the selective editing of Kamala’s interviews, the ‘Trump-Hitler’ monotony. I think we’re all ready for something new.

2. ‘Diversity, Equity & Inclusion’ Takes a Big Hit

2024 was also the year when it became acceptable to criticize the philosophy known as DEI. We would argue the Inflection Point for the DEI shift was, perhaps unexpectedly, the Trump Assassination attempt, after which the Secret Service drew heavy criticism from the American public for its unpreparedness and ineptitude. Such criticism was compounded after it was revealed that the Secret Service is one of many federal agencies that employs DEI policies—implementing ‘diversity training programs’ and accounting for things like race and gender in its hiring practices. Whether DEI was responsible for the incompetence of Trump’s security detail is impossible to know, but it doesn’t matter. The optics—of 5’3” female secret service agents ‘guarding’ the injured 6’3” Trump and unprofessionally fumbling for their firearms in amateur fashion—were too horrendous to ignore. In the form of the assassination attempt, the American people were finally confronted with the practicality of rejecting the meritocracy. And the effect has been noticeable. Research polls show that, compared with 2023, Americans have an increasingly negative view of DEI policies, and a growing number of American workers believe their company “pays too much attention [to DEI].”

Since the assassination attempt, relatedly or not, major companies across the nation have started abolishing DEI initiatives and diversity programs. We’re now able to have conversations about the illogic of DEI hiring, particularly for roles like the Secret Service where human safety is at issue. Boeing, after coming under heavy fire for several high-profile safety issues with its planes, recently dismantled its entire corporate DEI program—suggesting the DEI philosophy is increasingly being perceived as the enemy of efficiency and a drain on resources. A Boeing insider stated “When you start to focus on delivering value instead of preserving status, it becomes obvious what drives value, and it’s not DEI.” While DEI may not yet be totally extinct, it is certainly on its way out, which was hardly the case at the start of 2024.

3. A Potential Easing of Racial Tensions

The recent Daniel Penny trial was a symbolic Inflection Point, representing the disruption of a longstanding trend in racial politics. Ever since the 1990s, the media has racialized high-profile criminal trials, exciting the passions of the African American community and practically ensuring the most racially-divisive outcome in each such trial. From the exoneration of OJ Simpson to the conviction of Derek Chauvin, the establishment media and professional race-baiters have successfully engineered racial narratives for non-racial tragedies for several decades. Finally, this year, for perhaps the first time, it stopped working. Despite the best efforts of Al Sharpton and NBC, Daniel Penny (a white man) was found Not Guilty of murdering Jordan Neely, a black man.

Perhaps it was the nature of the case, but for whatever reason, this time around the media were unable to brew anything like the social s***storms they achieved for the OJ and George Floyd cases. The result was that Penny received something resembling a fair trial, and was ultimately acquitted in a decision that most Americans appear satisfied with. The timing of Penny’s exoneration felt significant, as it came off the back of the 2024 election in which Donald Trump won unprecedented levels of support from minority groups. The demographic data behind Trump’s electoral victory is supported by the wild success of the Daily Wire’s anti-DEI film Am I Racist?, which this Summer became the most successful documentary of the decade. Am I Racist rejects the portrayal of rural white Americans as vicious racists, arguing that the racial animus of the last decade is largely a concoction of the Mainstream Media and Democrat party—a message which clearly resonated with large percentages of Americans. While it’s far too early to assume the days of the George Floyd riots are safely behind us, it did feel as if we all took a step in the right racial direction in 2024.

4. “Trust the Science” (AKA “Trust the Establishment”) Fell Out of Fashion

This final Inflection Point had two main catalysts—the first occurred when RFK Jr. announced his endorsement of Donald Trump, revealing his and Trump’s aligned perspectives on the American Chronic Disease Epidemic and their shared skepticism of Big Pharma. Since then, it’s almost as if we’ve unlocked a cadre of formerly verboten discussion topics. Suddenly and bizarrely, ‘Seed Oils’ and ‘microplastics’ are the words on everyone’s lips, amidst new and important discussions regarding questionable additives and harmful chemicals in our food. The ‘body positivity’ movement appears to be giving way to practical concerns about the decline in Americans’ general health and reproductive abilities. Rises in autism prevalence are being examined and have become a mainstream talking point for perhaps the first time ever—which can only be a boon for public health.

The second catalyst for this Inflection Point involves the general public’s retrospective perception of COVID-19, which shifted significantly in the early part of 2024. Pew Research polls show that, as of November 2024, public concern about COVID has reached an all-time low, with more U.S. adults having received a flu shot in the last six months than the updated COVID vaccine. Even more noteworthy is the shift in how we now perceive the response to COVID-19, with fewer and fewer Democrats (and hardly any Republicans) believing the responsive COVID policies (like masking and social distancing) were a ‘good idea’. Importantly, we’ve also begun to acknowledge that COVID originated in a Wuhan laboratory, rather than a ‘wet market’. While this revelation may seem trivial, it lends itself to a broader, more important discussion about the dangers of free speech suppression. Until this year, the Wuhan lab leak theory was deemed a racist, fringe ‘conspiracy theory’, with social media platforms even censoring accounts that dared broadcast the idea. That the Lab Leak theory (and several other previously prohibited ‘conspiracy theories’) has now been proven true has prompted other uncomfortable but necessary conversations, on topics such as childhood vaccinations, water fluoridation, and autism.

COVID-19 is definitive proof that no topic of discussion should be ‘off-limits’. This attitude is consistent with the general theme suggested by all of 2024’s cultural Inflection Points—a theme of heightened skepticism of authority and a desire to reform institutions that have become disconnected from their original functions. If each of these trends is carried out to their logical conclusions, we should be moving toward a more harmonious, better informed, and healthier America in 2025. But just in case, probably best to buckle in for a wild ride…