The year 2024 was, of course, defined by the presidential election. And many of our most-read op-eds address that whole hot mess. But readers were interested in other topics, too, including proposed mask bans, backlash against protesters, and conspiracy theories about the solar eclipse.
So let’s bid goodbye to a year we’re happy to see in the rearview, and check out the essays and opinion pieces that have helped us sort through another wild saga in American politics. Thanks for reading!
Stay up-to-date with the politics team. Sign up for the Teen Vogue Take.
Teen Vogue’s editor in chief, Versha Sharma, laid out the case against Donald Trump and his noxious brand of xenophobic, misogynistic, authoritarian politics in this November op-ed. Of course, we now know what ended up happening, but the piece contains a warning we should all keep in mind with Trump’s inauguration around the corner. Trump thrives on chaos, and he seeks to overwhelm us with so much news and so many wild announcements (see: pretty much all of his Cabinet picks) that we lose sight of the big picture or just check out entirely. But we can’t let ourselves be worn out. We have to take breaks from the news when we need to, focus on local efforts and our communities — and keep fighting.
Trump ran up his margins with Black voters in the 2024 election, but he doesn’t actually care about Black people. As Jameelah Nasheed argued, this goes beyond the racist comments that downplay slavery and questions about whether Kamala Harris is really Black. Trump’s policy proposals simply do not help Black Americans. Trump wants to eliminate federal education funding, has bragged about his role in overturning Roe v. Wade, and has promised to provide immunity to police officers facing lawsuits for misconduct.
Remember that brief but enjoyable period this summer after Harris became the nominee and Tim Walz joined the ticket as her VP? Walz spearheaded a new line of attack on Republicans that was not only resonant but downright fun. As he put it, politicians like J.D. Vance who obsess over the bathroom use of trans kids and the fertility rates of women are straight-up “weird.” Consultants unfortunately got to Walz, encouraging him to tone down the critiques and instead talk about how, uh, similar he and Vance are. But as Teen Vogue’s Vote Harder columnist Rebecca Fishbein wrote, the “weird” critique was actually effective: “Mocking the Vances of the world online and calling them ‘weird’ angers and defangs them. It lessens their grip on us and reveals the truth — that the far-right’s policies are laughably unpopular.”
We love good news! This year, members of a small town in rural Maine banded together to stop the school board from getting rid of a policy that protects trans students. When the board voted to do so anyway, they successfully campaigned to get one of the anti-trans board members replaced with a progressive working mom. As author Ben Perry, who was part of this campaign, wrote, “Trans rights aren’t a ‘big-city’ issue; they’re woven into the fabric of every community. Trans people are our neighbors, children, coworkers, and friends.”
This year’s mass protests against the war in Gaza brought a new policy to the forefront: mask bans. Some states and college campuses banned protesters from wearing masks to conceal their identity, even as they engaged in arrests and surveillance of protesters. In her Disability Visibility column, Alice Wong argued that such bans are “ableist, fascistic, and eugenic,” discriminating against people based on race, disability, religion, and more. “Many people wear masks to protect a loved one,” Wong wrote, “protect themself from airborne pathogens, smoke, and air pollutants, and evade surveillance when practicing civil disobedience.”
In an extremely predictable development, this year’s solar eclipse spawned a constellation of conspiracy theories. Randos online suggested that the eclipse was, of course, an excuse for the US government to declare martial law and imprison us all in our homes, among other wild claims. As conspiracy expert Anna Merlan wrote, “For conspiracy peddlers, any major event — a bridge collapse, a natural disaster, an unusual weather event — is a chance to surf the wave of public engagement, looking for extra attention and public relevance, not to mention a chance to scare people in profitable ways.”
In an eviscerating op-ed on the death penalty, Scott Hechinger laid out just how little regard the US criminal legal system has for human life. Hechinger’s piece came out shortly after a likely innocent man, Marcellus Williams, was executed by the state of Missouri, and before another likely innocent man, Robert Roberson, was set to be executed in Texas. As Hechinger wrote, our system isn’t set up to achieve “justice, fairness, or truth, but instead to enable unjust outcomes and erect every obstacle imaginable toward redress. In other words, the use of the death penalty in the US is not an exception but a natural outgrowth of the system as designed and deployed.”
It’s been a banner year for news about our increasingly illegitimate Supreme Court. Reports surfaced this summer that flags associated with the January 6 Capitol rioters were flown outside multiple homes owned by conservative justice Samuel Alito. As Mackenzie Long wrote, Alito has “forsaken his most basic responsibilities as a justice,” openly allowing himself to be associated with pro-Trump and Christian nationalist movements. These guys aren’t even pretending anymore.
Teen Vogue’s United States of Suppression series analyzed how politicians from both parties are cracking down on dissent and protests in the United States. Attorneys Elly Page and Alana Greer contributed to a vital look at how states are literally criminalizing protests, passing nearly 50 laws that restrict the right to interfere with traffic, obstruct public streets or sidewalks, or trespass. Many cities and states are increasing penalties for engaging in these kinds of basic protest activities. And with Trump and his administration openly threatening to go after their political “enemies,” the rights of everyone — whether abortion fund providers or pro-Palestine organizers — are under threat.
In the days after Trump’s reelection, Tim Walz’s daughter, Hope, kept things refreshingly real. Writer Olive Martin was among those who found solace in Hope’s TikTok channel, where the 23- year-old posted videos of herself vegging on the couch eating SpongeBob mac and cheese and watching The Outer Banks, or celebrating herself for getting up to take a shower or go to a Pilates class. Instead of engaging in finger-pointing for the Harris-Walz loss or immediately exhorting people to get serious about standing up to Trump, Hope let her followers know it was okay to take a minute to just feel like crap. “In a world that demands we power through pain,” Olive wrote, “Hope has used TikTok to model something radically different: a permission slip to feel, grieve, and then, when the time is right, get back to work.”
This post was originally published on here
