2024 was an eventful year in politics. There was plenty of stories to cover, and we did it quite successfully, judging by the growth of traffic on our site: we reached 150,000 unique monthly visitors in October. Here are our most read articles of last year, broken down by months.
January
The first month of the year saw the unfortunate passing of Gonzalo Lira, a Chilean–American citizen journalist who was imprisoned in Ukraine for his opinions about the war with Russia. He died while being held in a Ukrainian prison. The Biden administration could have tied additional aid packages to the condition of his release easily, but for unknown reasons, they chose not to. Last year, Lira tried to flee to Hungary to avoid prosecution, but was apprehended at the border. May he rest in peace.
January 2024 was also the time when Antifa activist Ilaria Salis’ case made international headlines. Salis is a teacher by trade from Milan, Italy. She travelled to Budapest, Hungary in February 2023 as part of an Antifa group to attack people who (may have) attended a historical commemoration she deemed ‘far-right’ or ‘fascist’. She was arrested in the aftermath of the brutal attack, but never faced full justice—amazingly, she was fielded as an MEP candidate by the Italian progressive Alleanza Verdi e Sinistra party in the June European Parliament elections, and since she won a seat, she was granted political immunity.
February
A black Pope and Native American founding fathers really caught our readers’ attention in the month of February. These were created by Google’s image creation AI Gemini to simple prompts about the leader of the Catholic church or the founders of the United States.
Our exclusive interview with Troup Hemenway, senior consultant of the Heritage Foundation and one of the leaders of Project 2025, was also popular with our readers.
March
Here’s one of the many predictions by ‘experts’ that thankfully did not come true about the 2024 US presidential election: Helmut Norpoth’s primary model gave Joe Biden a 75 per cent chance for re-election. The poor old man ended up not even making it to November, as he was pressured by his own party to step down from the nomination. This evidently was not covered in our original article from March, but Professor Norpoth, by God only knows what logic, gave Kamala Harris a 75 per cent chance for victory after the development—that did not really work out for the Professor, who missed for the second Presidential election in a row.
Our readers were apparently also very excited about AirAsia launching direct flights between Bangkok, Thailand and Budapest, Hungary.
April
The next month, Hungarian Conservative readers were mostly perplexed by what Joe Biden was doing during his ill-fated re-election campaign.
He started the month by declaring Easter Sunday ‘Transgender Visibility Day,’ and ended it by stepping by for a quick visit to Howard Stern’s radio show. He was infamously frugal with his time towards the press at the time (not much has changed on that front, by the way), so choosing the great ‘shock jock’ of the 1990s and early 2000s for one of his very few interviews was a very bizarre call. There is no word if he ever got to meet and have some insightful policy discussions with some of the people from Stern’s famous Wack Pack, such as Beetlejuice, Jeff the Drunk, or Wendy the Retard…
May
it was the month when the third annual CPAC Hungary was held in Budapest, Hungary. A speech made by one of the attendees, Dutch political commentator Eva Vlaardingerbroek, was removed by YouTube for ‘hate speech’. Our coverage of the incident was shared by the news aggregator site Citizen Free Press, which made it one of our most-read articles of the year.
The controversy about the American gym franchise Planet Fitness letting biological men use the women’s locker room if they think it fits their ‘gender identity’ also received a lot of attention.
June
Hungary’s National Football Team made it to their third European Championship in a row. During the tournament in Germany, one player on the Hungarian squad received a lot of international attention in particular, striker Martin Ádám. He got little playtime and scored no goals, but fans of the game fell in love with his unusual appearance anyway: his big, ginger beard, puffy face, and broad shoulders. Since the tournament, by the way, Ádám has changed clubs twice. He first transferred from the South Korean Ulsan HD to the Greek Asteras Tripolis. After a few unsuccessful months there, he decided to return home to Hungary, and has now signed with his old club Paks.
This was also the month when the European Parliamentary elections were held, thus, it was when it became clear that Antifa's Ilaria Salis would avoid a guilty verdict in Budapest, as she was successfully elected to the EP.
July
Users on Elon Musk’s social media site X made this story blow up originally, we just followed the hype: Prime Minister Viktor Orbán eloquently laid out how letting in millions of unvetted migrants into Europe is a specifically stated goal of Hungarian American billionaire financier George Soros.
In anticipation of the upcoming Paris Olympics, a lot of people read our analysis projecting a great performance by the Hungarian delegation at the games as well. It ended up being pretty correct, as Hungary finished 14th on the medal table, with six golds, seven silvers, and six bronzes.
August
In the last summer month, people got very upset by the decision by the International Olympic Committee to let Imane Khelif from Algeria compete in the women’s boxing event. While Khelif never had gender transition surgery or any such hormone treatment, she was born with male XY chromosomes but female genitalia. After beating Hungary’s Luca Hámori in the quarter-finals, she did end up winning the gold, but many people worldwide felt she had an unfair advantage over her opponents. Both of our top two most-read articles in August were about this incident.
September
By the time autumn came around, everyone had the closely approaching US presidential election on their minds, and our articles on the subject were the most read ones, too.
As Vice President Kamala Harris replaced President Joe Biden on top of the Democratic ticket, national and swing state polling suddenly shifted very much in favour of the Democrats. That is why it came as a big relief for Republicans when Atlas Intel released their polling data in September. The São Paulo, Brazil-based data analytics and polling firm was the most accurate in national US elections in the two prior election cycles, the 2020 presidential election and the 2022 House of Representatives election, getting the margins right by 0.3 points both times. In their mid-September polling, they had Donald Trump leading Harris by 2.9 points in the popular vote. Their swing state results were mixed, but still gave President Trump well enough electoral votes to win the election. Their national polling was quite an outlier in the industry at the time, so the good news spread quickly among conservatives around the world, driving a lot of traffic to this article on our site. Atlas Intel will come up next month too, so more on them later.
Alleged bias and misconduct by the moderators of the presidential debate hosted by ABC News also got a lot of attention from Hungarian Conservative readers.
October
As promised, here is Atlas Intel again. We reported on what I, the author of the piece, believed to be the Brazilian polling firm’s penultimate poll release before the election, showing President Trump ahead of Vice President Kamala Harris by 2.7 points nationally in the head-to-head contest. Little did I know at the time that Atlas would start putting out new polls almost every other day in the final two weeks of the election—covering them all would have been redundant, evidently.
In the end, Atlas Intel got it right again. In their ‘final, final, final’ poll released a day before the election, they showed Trump with a 1.1-point lead in the popular vote head-to-head, and a 1.2-point lead in the full field. They were one of the few pollsters who projected that he would win the popular vote. And he did, by 1.48 points when all the votes were finally counted, so Atlas Intel was inside 0.3 points again (if we take their numbers for the full field), and retained their title as the most accurate pollster in US elections. Who knows, maybe if they had dropped their fourth ‘final poll’ on the day of the election, they would have gotten the result perfectly right…
A lot of people read our analysis of the new decentralized crypto prediction market Polymarket as well, which also correctly predicted a Trump victory. In a brief update, the Biden DOJ ceased the electronic devices of Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan shortly after the election.
November
For obvious reasons, November was the most anticipated month of this year. This was when the 60th quadrennial United States presidential election finally came to a conclusion. And that conclusion, as everyone knows, was that Donald J Trump won, becoming the second President in US history to be elected to non-consecutive terms after Grover Cleveland (there’s a name we have been hearing a lot lately, hopefully he is happy to be famous again).
Famed American columnist Rod Dreher’s opinion piece about how Donald Trump’s victory benefits Hungary on the geopolitical stage was our most-read article this month, followed by the news reporting Trump’s historic victory.
December
Our most popular piece of the last month of 2024 (at the time of writing this article) was about JL Partners’ poll of 1,006 likely US voters which ranked incumbent President Joe Biden as the worst president in modern history. The survey was taken shortly after his controversial pardon of his son Hunter Biden, which certainly did not help the current POTUS.
The Russo-Ukrainian war, in its third year in 2024, was evidently a major news topic. PM Orbán continued his peace advocacy all year, which apparently did not please President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine, who recently lashed out at Orbán for his attempts to mediate a peace deal between Moscow and Kyiv—people were also eager to read about these developments in December.
We certainly look forward to publishing ever more stories this year that you will find interesting. Please stay tuned, and thank you for all your attention in 2024!
Happy New Year to Everyone!
