By Kit Knightly - December 19, 2024

As the embers of 2024 spit out their dying sparks and tendrils of smoke corkscrew into 2025, I want to ask: what were the important news stories of this year?

Most people will say something international. The war in Ukraine, the atrocities in Gaza, the fall of Assad.

Maybe some will cite elections, it was a big year for voting after all. A global shift-change in the corridors of power saw a dozen governments swapped out for new faces, with 2 weeks of the year left it’s still possible Trudeau, Macron or Scholz may join the procession.

The tech minded might talk about advancements in Artificial Intelligence.

Those are the big stories of 2024. The banner headlines. Sound and fury and all that signifies. But were they the most important?

No, the important story of 2024 was The Great Reset.

Remember that? It was this pan-global supranational plan to tear down and then rebuild society in a “sustainable”, “inclusive”, “fair” and “secure” way that would – totally accidentally – eradicate civil liberties and individual freedom for every single person on the planet.

It was all the rage a few years ago, you might remember. But when it didn’t go over too well with a lot of people, the powers that be dropped the subject and there’s been very little talk about it since 2022.

Does that mean it’s gone away?

We need to have “object permanence” in politics as in all things. Something doesn’t cease to exist just because you can’t see it anymore. The world doesn’t vanish when you close your eyes.

The Great Reset is still the plan.

It’s still happening. It’s just distributed now. A compartmentalized strategy uploaded to the cloud, everywhere and nowhere. A million nanobots working a million angles to change a million tiny rules and build a million tiny cells.

Like the end of The Usual Suspects, stand the right distance back and you can see the pattern.

Just last week, the UK’s chief medical officer Chris Whitty published his annual health report. What does he recommend? Sin taxes on “unhealthy” foods and 15 minute cities. Labour have already increased “sin taxes” on sugar, salt, alcohol and tobacco. Next comes red meat, dairy and just “carbon” in general.

Earlier this year the UK introduced licensing for keeping chickens. They banned smoking too.

By 2035 it will be impossible to buy a new petrol car in the UK. Or the EU. Or Canada. Or New Zealand. Or Australia. Or Mexico. Or South Africa. Or California, and 11 other US states.

From that point you and your car will be anchored to charging points. Even better your new car will probably have automatic drive features, speed limiters – oh and remote kill switches.

This week, all of sudden, the news tells us that wood burning stoves cause cancer. A ban is already being discussed. Since coal is already a no-no for domestic users (since 2023), there effectively goes your last chance of energy and heat independence. If they ban stoves there will be no heating available to you that can’t be hooked up to a smart meter, surveilled, controlled.

Unless you count burning a candle inside a plant pot. And they’re coming for those too.

The much-publicized murder of Sara Sharif has already been parlayed into a new bill taking away parents “automatic right to homeschool their children” – if the state deems them “vulnerable”.

Digital IDs are coming for everyone from everywhere. Here’s just a selection of reasons . . .

[SNIP]