It’s a big, big one. I went over the whole year (three times – thanks, Apple elf lords) and assembled some of the best stuff for you.  Click here or on the fancy pants flowery graphic below. And happy Kinsellacasty 2025.

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Texas born and raised. All-American.

U.S. Army veteran, too, and a member of the Army Reserve.  Senior Information Management Officer in the Army. Army team leader and human resources supervisor. Member of Army Corps of Engineers. Honors graduate. U.S. Army combat training. And on and on.

How did Shamsud-Din Jabbar go from all that, from serving under the American flag, to murdering ten people under the ISIS flag? How did he decide he would kill innocent New Year’s revellers with a rented truck in New Orleans in the early hours of 2025? How did he reach that point?

Those are questions that will be asked many times in the days ahead. Answers are so far elusive. Jabbar’s act of mass-murder happened just hours ago, so we don’t know yet the names of the web sites the “Senior Information Management Officer” was frequenting. But we can hazard a guess.  

They are likely the same web sites and social media platforms favoured by the masked figures who have shot up and firebombed synangogues and Jewish schools multiple times in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver in the past year.  They all use the same source material, after all.  The only qualitative difference is that Shamsud-Din Jabbar was much more effective at spilling blood than his fellow monsters up here.

Now, this writer does not ever profile mass-murderers, or even name them. The victims are the ones who deserve to be remembered, not their executioners.

But like Timothy McVeigh before him – another medalled U.S. Army veteran, who would go on to murder 168 men, women and children in Oklahoma City in April 1995 – Jabbar became radicalized somewhere along the way.  And, like McVeigh, he was an American who had sworn allegiance with these words: “I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same.”

So how did Shamsud-Din Jabbar, having sworn an oath to defend the United States against all enemies, become one himself?

The Internet, almost certainly, will be the reason.  Because the Internet – social media platforms, mostly, but also old-fashioned Internet platforms, like YouTube or web sites – have been the recruitment office for Islamist terror groups for a generation. From al-Qaeda to ISIS to Hamas and Hezbollah and back to ISIS again: the Internet has provided terrorists – McVeigh’s neo-Nazis and Jabbar’s Islamists – with an abundant source of funds, recruits and public relations muscle. 

Al-Qaeda, ISIS and Hamas don’t merely use Internet platforms – they actually are Internet platforms themselves. On TikTok, X, Facebook, Instagram, Telegram, Discord and many other variants, Islamic terrorists address two distinct audiences. One is found in the West, and they use horrifying images – Hamas slaughtering 1,200 Israelis on October 7, 2023, or al-Qaeda slaughtering 3,000 people on September 11, 2001 – to terrorize us, often in English with slick production values.

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2024.

Ungood: first full year without a parent. Lost Roxy. Lost only campaign worked on. Lost friends and family member to the dark side. Anguished over antisemitism that was everywhere.

Good: great kids – law school, golf pro, happy Haligonian. E, amazing and brilliant. Wrote book for Penguin Random House, out in 2025. Doing a big global documentary, also out next year. 52 more podcasts. Worked for Kamala, proud of it. Got Tommy. Daisy turned 18, more successful than ever. Big gig at the Bovine; recorded some not-bad punk music. Painted, got a bit better. Healthy. Wrote for scrappy tabloid who don’t censor me. Israel, NYC, Jamaica, Maine.

Feel pretty lucky. Feel blessed. Here’s hoping your 2025 is blessed, too. Keep fighting for the light.

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Never make predictions, especially about the future.

So said baseball great (and quipster) Casey Stengel, and he was of course right. The prediction business is high-risk and low-reward.

The punditocracy loves making predictions, however, especially at year’s end. So who am I to buck a trend?

Here’s five of mine for 2025.

Justin Trudeau is going to leave.I’ve got several lunches riding on this one, so I’d better be right. My reasons? For starters, he’s been behind Pierre Poilievre’s Tories by double digits for more than a year. Nothing he’s tried has reversed his downward spiral.

Another reason: along with public opinion, he’s lost the support of most of the Liberal caucus, a sizeable chunk of cabinet, and every party in the House of Commons. Theirs is simply no viable path back to victory. So, sometime soon, he will say he’s written to the president of the Liberal Party to say that he plans to step down when a new leader is picked, give us all a Trudeau-esque wave, and then jet off to do some international sight-seeing. All at taxpayer expense, naturally.

Like Stephen Harper did in similar circumstances in 2008, the Grits will prorogue to avoid getting defeated in a confidence vote. That’ll give them some breathing room. Trudeau’s announced departure will boost their numbers, as will a leadership race. And then, with a shiny new leader at the fore, the Libs will get even more popular – because every new leader gets a bit of a honeymoon. But who will that leader be?

The new Liberal leader will be an outsider. That is, someone who isn’t in Trudeau’s cabinet, all of whom are too close to the blast radius. Outsiders always tend to do better in leadership races, particularly if a party has been in power for too long. Voters are looking for fresh faces, and so are party members. The Grit tradition of alternation between French and English leaders narrows the field even more.

That all leaves just three options. One is Christina Freeland, who executed a brilliant pirouette out of Trudeau’s circle, and has effectively become the leader of the opposition from within Trudeau’s caucus. Another is Mark Carney, who has been a former governor of both the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England – and therefore a good guy to have around when facing the economic existential threat of Trump tariffs. The third choice is Christy Clark.

The Liberals want a female leader to offset Poilievre’s angry guy: Clark, a happy warrior, offers that. They’ll want someone who knows how to govern: Clark, a former Premier, offers that. They’ll want someone who has never been part of the Trudeau oxymoronic brain trust: only Clark offers that.

Christy Clark is the only viable alternative to Pierre Poilievre. Big question: does she speak French well enough?

Pierre Poilievre will win. Doug Ford will win. Notwithstanding everything above, the federal Conservatives are still going to win a majority. It won’t be nearly as big as it would be, were an election to be held today. But Poilievre is still going to win. He may not be the cuddliest guy to ever offer himself to the people, but the people aren’t looking for cuddly, these days. They’re mad as Hell at all incumbents, and they’ve had time to get used to the idea of Poilievre as prime minister. He’ll win.

So will Doug Ford. As my colleague Brian Lilley has reported, a debate is raging within Ford’s team about when to seek re-election – this Spring, or later. Either way, Ford will still win. Ontario Liberal Leader Bonnie Crombie remains an unknown quantity, and the Ontario NDP (like their federal cousins) seem to be more preoccupied with Gaza than Guelph. Ford is routinely underestimated by his opponents, he’s coated in several layers of Teflon, and he’s morphed into the anti-Trump Captain Canada. He’ll win, too. Big.

The world will continue to orbit to the Right. A variety of factors are at play: an increasingly-dangerous world, which progressives seem unable to understand or fix. Anger towards political elites, who always tend to be pointy-headed political progressives. Frustration about the cost of living and porous borders, which have always been winning themes for conservatives.

For the next year, the Right will continue to dominate – and then, by 2026, the Left will come roaring back. Politics is pendulum, always swinging between Left and Right.

Which is always predictable, too!

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Said the famous socicultural expert, with typical insight and perspicacity : “I don’t like parties past 2 a.m. Then it’s all losers and weirdos.”

The expert, of course, is socialite Paris Hilton, who knows whereof she speaks. Her wisdom about losers applies, with particularity, to one Justin Pierre James Trudeau, Canada’s 23rd Prime Minister and – the way things are looking – the guy who is going to reduce the once-great Liberal Party of Canada to extinction. Paris knows losers when she sees them, and Justin is a big one: he’s stayed way, way too long at the party.

And that’s why, when crafting a year-end column about political losers, it’s pretty hard to come up with one in which Justin Trudeau doesn’t fill every single spot. That’s because the Canadian Liberal Party leader is concluding 2024 in worse shape than just about any politico in Western democracy.

He’s the Number One Loser, but there are other contenders for the list. Herewith and hereupon, here they are:

1. Justin Trudeau: He survived the Aga Khan, Grope-gate, blackface, WE, SNC Lavalin and innumerable scandals. He survived myriad broken promises, too, from Indigenous reconciliation to balanced budgets to electoral reform. He got elected or re-elected every single time (way to go, Canadians). But now, finally and praise the Lord, it feels like the Boy Blunder’s goose finally cooked: he is ending 2024 as the year’s top loser because his cult’s second-in-command, Chrystia Freeland, decided she would drink no more of the Liberal-red Kool Aid. Trudeau now faces a full-on caucus revolt, and a country that finds him revolting. He’s done like dinner and will leave – which means that Brian Lilley and several others will have to buy me dinner!

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