Part 1, for January-July, is here.
AUGUST
Democrats had their convention in Chicago. They took the grotesque, unprecedented step of having a mobile unit parked right outside the convention where they aborted unborn children, adding credence to the sense that the (D) stands for “Death Cult.”
It was Biden’s 12th Democrat Convention over 48 years, and one might expect as the sitting president, he would be given top billing, but he was not. In fact, he was slated to speak only once, on the first night of the meeting, at 10:50 PM Eastern. The consensus was, top Democrats wanted him to speak once, late when few people watch it, so they could “get him out of the way” and direct focus to the new candidate Kamala Harris.
Dave Barry: “The focus then shifts to the nomination of Kamala Harris, who is running on a platform of joy, and being joyful, and a general vibe of joyfulness, as well as a set of policies to be specified later that will take America in a new, completely different direction, in stark contrast to the policies of whoever is running the country now.”
A political earthquake hit when Robert F. Kennedy Jr., from the nation’s leading Democrat family and nephew of President John Kennedy, announced he was suspending his independent bid for the presidency and urged all his supporters to vote for Trump.
Kennedy called his movement MAHA: Make America Healthy Again. He has been unfairly branded as “anti-vax,” but he actually insists people be allowed to chose the shots they take, especially the new and controversial Covid vax. This created the MAGA/MAHA “Unity” coalition that ultimately won the White House.
Kennedy’s running mate, Nicole Shanahan, is an Asian-American from California who explains she has learned a loathing of communism from what her grandmother suffered under Mao in China.
Shanahan and her creative team aided the MAGA/MAHA coalition by producing some high-quality ads, such as:
SEPTEMBER
After Labor Day, the campaigning cranked up into full swing, and Virginia was the first to start early voting, in late September.
On Sept. 17 and 18, there was a series of explosions of pagers and walkie-talkies held by Hezbollah leaders. Israeli had managed to insert timers and explosives in the devices, then sent message prompts to the Hezbollah leaders. After a few seconds’ delay for the victims to put the devices near their faces to read what they thought was an incoming message, they exploded. Dozens were killed and thousands wounded in the revenge attack for the Oct. 7, 2023 terror attacks against Israel.
In the only Trump-Harris debate, Trump claimed “they’re eating the dogs and cats” in Springfield, Ohio. That set off a national outcry. Some claimed Trump was fueling anti-Haitian bias. Others defended him, saying it brought attention to the issues of mass immigration and lack of assimilation. Although most of the claims were later debunked, there were reports of ducks missing from the town’s pond and a women, who is not an immigrant and lived elsewhere in Ohio, did indeed eat a cat.
On a Sunday afternoon, Trump was in a second assassination attempt. Controversy surrounded this case too, coming just two months after the Butler, PA shooting. It’s reported the gunman was in hiding about 12 hours, waiting for Trump on the golf course. Plus, Trump’s schedule was supposed to be secret, so it’s unknown how the assailant knew where to be. A Good Samaritan resident saw the gunman and reported him and the car to police. Had it not been for that sighting, it’s unclear if the assailant would have ever been caught. He was eventually nabbed miles away after his car had been spotted on I-95.
September ended with tragedy when Hurricane Helen made landfall in the Big Bend part of west Florida and headed north. The storm eventually stalled over the Southern Appalachians, dumping historic amounts of rain in a few hours, unleashing horrific devastation in western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee.
Parts of Southwest Virginia, including Grundy, Damascus, and the Virginia Creeper Trail, were heavily damaged from the flooding too. Around the Roanoke area, high winds toppled many trees and some went without electricity for days.
Long-term damage to SWVA from Helene could be as big as $630 million.
OCTOBER
Trump displayed his showmanship again when he donned a McDonald’s apron and worked a drive-thru at a Pennsylvania Golden Arches.
Dave Barry: “On the Democratic side, the Kamala Harris campaign, which has spent more than a billion dollars but is still struggling to clearly define the candidate’s vision for the presidency, settles on an upbeat closing message: “Whoever She Is, She’s Not Donald Trump.” At exactly the same time Harris is making her big final pitch to voters, Joe Biden, who is still technically the president, somehow gains access to Zoom and lends the Harris campaign a helping hand by declaring, in response to the Trump-rally Puerto Rico joke, that roughly half of the U.S. electorate is garbage. Thanks, Joe!”
This month marks the one-year anniversary of the sneak terrorist attacks on Israel, which included many victims attending a music festival. It also marks the one-year anniversary of Del. Salam “Sam” Rasoul (D-Roanoke City) refusing to apologize for or retract his anti-Semitic post accusing Israel of bombing a hospital in Gaza.
NOVEMBER
On Nov. 2, former President and current candidate Donald Trump held a packed-house rally in the Salem Civic Center. An estimated 20,000-30,000 who came too late to get in were in the overflow crowd outside, watching on huge screens.
Lt. Governor Winsome Sears, now running for governor, included this line in her warm-up speech, for those who were lukewarm to support Trump. We are not voting for the lesser of two evils. No! We are voting for the lessening of evil!”
A timeline for the event can be found here.
Some rally attendees shared their thoughts and observations here.
Roanoke Star columnist Serwan Zangana had some of his reflections from the day here.
In the runup to the election on Nov. 5 election, officials in Pennsylvania and some other states plus some media talking-heads were intoning, “with all the time it takes to count all the votes, we may not know the outcome on the evening of the election. It may take several days.”
Some moaned, “here come the shenanigans,” but at the end, it wasn’t even close. Trump won each of the seven Battleground States, starting with North Carolina and Georgia, and when he carried Pennsylvania shortly after midnight, it was clear he was going to win. His 2:00 am win of Wisconsin got him to 270 Electoral votes and the White House…again.
It ended up as not only an Electoral vote landslide, but Trump won the popular vote as well – the first Republican to do that since George W. Bush in 2004. Early in the evening the GOP flipped the Senate, and after California dragged their feet for weeks in some House races, the GOP kept the House by a margin of one.
Trump in 2016 was in many naïve and unaware of the DC swamp. Some now claim, Biden’s 2020 win was a blessing in disguise, because it let Trump and much of the world get a more clear-eyed picture of what goes on there.
In addition to Trump’s win, there were some who lost huge too. Here’s a partial list. Some claim the biggest loser of the whole election didn’t even had his name on any ballot, but lost huge prestige and sway anyway: Barack Obama.
The election spurred big calls to “drain the swamp” and reduce or relocate much of the US bureaucracy, as mentioned here.
Roanoke City had a dramatic race for mayor. On election night, former Mayor David Bowers held a mere 19-vote margin. After provisional ballots were counted, Joe Cobb was ahead by 59 votes. Bowers requested a recount but Cobb still won by the narrowest margin in Roanoke history.
DECEMBER
Some of the biggest news items here were Pres. Biden pardoning his son Hunter, after months of denials that he would ever do so.
Swarms of mysterious drones appeared much of the Eastern US, especially New Jersey. A young man from a prominent Baltimore family killed the CEO of United HealthCare, believed to be the first assassination of a CEO in US history.
As a kind of bookend of the year and an era, former Pres. Jimmy Carter died at 100 on Dec. 29.
Like the tide going out, it gradually became clear that public opinion was turning against “wokeness” and DEI. On Dec. 31, a Twitter/X user “End Wokeness” posted this:
A short list of the major corporations that cancelled their DEI programs in 2024:
• Ford
• Coors
• Lowe’s
• Nissan
• Boeing
• Toyota
• Walmart
• Caterpillar
• Craftsman
• John Deere
• Jack Daniels
• Tractor Supply
• Black & Decker
• Harley Davidson
• Indian Motorcycle
It was a remarkable year, and it also marked the end of the first quarter of the 21st Century.
–Scott Dreyer
