It’s “year in review” time for most political columnists, so here’s my opinion on 2024, along with a recommendation for 2025.

Opinion: Zero out of ten, would not recommend. If you’re reading this in the year 2525 as you’re preparing to test a time machine and trying to decide what past year to visit, avoid this one.

At the societal level, I can’t think of any major positive events — political or cultural — worth your energy. No Armistice Day, Beatles on Ed Sullivan, or man on the moon moments come to mind (maybe the Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown, will help with that — it comes out on Christmas Day, after this column goes to press).

The year was equal parts anger, outrage, violence, and boredom.

The US presidential campaign was weird in certain ways, but not in ways that make it uniquely interesting unless dementia, opportunistic ladder-climbing, and the Truth Social equivalent of “mean tweets” happen to be hobbies of yours.

Wars in Ukraine and the Middle East continued, but they were more “major downer” than “major development” in character. A lot of bodies, not very many moves toward peace or even closure.

And so on, and so forth. It just really hasn’t been a very good year.

I’m not complaining on a PERSONAL level, mind you. I’m happy that my family made it through 2024 without major medical or financial setbacks, and that I started getting a little more adventurous as my golden (grayen?) years approach (to wit, with my nuclear birth family all dead and unable to worry about, or scold, me, I started riding a motorcycle). I hope your year was good as well and suspect it probably went better in inverse relation to the attention you paid to politics and world affairs.

I also wish you and yours a happy, healthy, prosperous holiday season and new year.

Which brings me to my recommendation for helping bring that result about NEXT year.

There oughta be a law.

If you know me at all, you know I don’t say that very often.

But I really think this one could be important. In faux legalese, here’s my proposal:

“No government employee, elected or appointed government official, or candidate for election or appointment to government office, shall make, utter, or issue any public statement relating to those positions between midnight on December 18 of the current year and midnight on January 1 of the next year.”

No speeches. No press conferences. No press releases. No social media posts on “official” accounts. If you want to tell family members “Merry Christmas,” etc., in person, by phone, or on your personal social media accounts, fine. But none of this “my fellow Americans” stuff. When you’re not annoying or enraging your fellow Americans, you’re just boring us. So shut your yappers for a couple of weeks and leave us alone.

I guess that kind of law would run afoul of the First Amendment … but most of the people affected don’t care about the First Amendment anyway, right?

Happy holidays.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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