From the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal, this is Free Expression with Jerry Baker.

Hello and welcome to Free Expression from the opinion page of the Wall Street Journal.

I'm Jerry Baker, editor at large of the journal. If you're not already subscribing to Free Expression,

please do sign up at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you do, you're listening. This week,

that was the year that was. In a special holiday episode of this podcast, I'm going to take a

look back at 2024. The highs, the lows, the ebbs, the flows, the good, the bad, the happy,

the sad. At home abroad, the perfect, the flawed. Okay, I've run out of embarrassingly cringe-making rhyme.

So let's get straight into this extraordinary year.

It was a banner year in all kinds of respects, politically, economically, internationally

and geopolitically, culturally too.

And I can't think of a better person to reflect on this whole year than one of our most

prominent journalist and commentators one night I most admire, John Podhoritz, editor of

Commentary Magazine, as you know, and not only host, not only the editor of that great magazine,

but host of the magazine's podcast, a prolific writer, critic, and journalist over quite a long career.

John, thanks very much indeed for joining this special episode of Free Expression.

A pleasure, Jerry. Lovely to talk to you.

Thank you. Well, I mean, I know it is that time of year when one podcaster talks to another podcaster about things that they've talked about on their podcast for the last 12 months.

So, forgive me, but that's exactly what I propose to do. Let me start, John, because you're one of the most thoughtful as well as some, I don't find me, you don't mind me saying, so one of the most seasoned political observers around. You and I have been around about this. Are you alluding to my age? Is this just a comfortable way for you to point out that I am but a few short years from collecting

Social Security, because that is true.

Well, you and I are almost exactly the same age, I fear.

So if you are, then I'm older and longer in the tooth.

But the reason I put it like that is that this has been another extraordinary year, right?

...