The end of the year seems like when many take the time to take stock of the status of life in general. I try not to do that because it seems a bit pointless (like new year resolutions – why not start good habits at other times?) but since one cannot avoid that because the media is full of such articles, one might as well give in. One thing that I find helpful at this time of years are lists of good films released during the year in which I occasionally find something I missed and can mark for future viewing.
The biggest contributor to this horrible year is of course the ongoing carnage in Gaza, a tragedy of immense proportions carried out by Israel with the overt support of the US and the acquiescence of Canada and many countries in Western Europe, all of whom could do something to stop it if they chose. Then we have the ongoing war in Ukraine plus lesser known conflicts in Somalia and Yemen which are taking a terrible toll on civilian lives, as all military conflicts do. The massacre in Bondi Beach and the continued mass shootings in the US all add to the sense of a general lack of a sense of a common humanity. It has been such a bad year that there may well be other major awful things that I have forgotten to list.
Adding to all this and making things worse is of course the pestilence known as Donald Trump. As Susan Glasser writes, “In the future, historians will struggle to describe that feeling, particular to this Trump era, of being prepared for the bad, crazy, and disruptive things that he would do, and yet also totally, utterly shocked by them.” He seems to be stoking the flames for more conflict by attacking Venezuela, clearly laying the groundwork for a full-fledged military assault or fomenting a coup. He also seems to have this weird desire to promote himself as the protector of Christianity and white people worldwide, as seen by his bombing of Nigeria, his preferential treatment of white Afrikaners in South Africa, and his tirades and attacks on immigrants of color in the US. And then we have his use of the department of justice and the FBI as his personal organizations for seeking revenge, and the conversion of ICE and CBP agents into heavily armed paramilitary secret forces equipped with masks and unmarked vehicle to terrorize people like the death squads did in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile during the heyday of military juntas in those countries.
Writing in the Guardian, David Smith lists all the things that Trump has done to take life hell for so many this year, saving me the task of doing so.
Smith concludes by saying what I have seen repeated many times by other commentators, that Trump and the GOP are increasingly unpopular and headed for a drubbing in the mid-term elections to be held on Tuesday, November 3, 2026.
But as 2025 draws to a close with Trump struggling to stay awake at meetings, the prevailing image is of a driver asleep at the wheel. Opinion polls suggest that Americans are turning against him. Republicans are heading for the exit ahead of congressional contests next November that look bleak for the president’s party.
…Last month a poll by Gallup showed Trump’s job approval rating down to 36%, the lowest of his second term, while disapproval had risen to 60% (his all-time low was 34% in 2021, at the end of his first term after the January 6 attack on the US Capitol). Notably his approval rating was underwater on crime (43%), foreign affairs (41%), foreign trade (39%) and immigration (37%).
The polls suggest that groups who moved towards Trump in 2024 – including young voters and Latino voters – are now deserting him and returning to the Democratic fold, animated by jobs, inflation and healthcare.
I try not to put too much stock in these predictions, since they likely contain a large dollop of wishful thinking by those who cannot bear to think of three more years of this. But even if this scenario does come true and Republicans take a huge beating and Democrats take back control of at least one of the two congressional bodies, making Trump (in the curious language of US politics) a ‘lame duck’ president, that may not end the nightmare.
Charlie Sykes, a conservative author and broadcaster, said: “With Donald Trump, ‘lame duck’ may just be another word for nothing left to lose. He will still have vast, unchecked powers, which he’s already made clear that he will exercise in the rawest, most reckless way possible.
“He’s figured out what he can do with the power of pardoning – for my friends everything, for my enemies the law. He’s pardoning major drug kingpins and corrupt politicians right and left before he’s officially a lame duck. How does Donald Trump behave when he has nothing politically left to lose? That’s a question I’m not sure that we’ve gotten our heads around.”
For me, the most hopeful sign is the resurgence of popular resistance to Trump on a large scale that spans generations and classes and ethnicities. Nothing makes people more aware of the rights that they claim to cherish than seeing them being taken away by an authoritarian. Those rights, even if they are enshrined in law and the constitution, mean nothing unless people are willing to fight to preserve them. As Judge Learned Hand once said, “I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon laws and upon courts. These are false hopes; believe me, these are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it.”
I hope that more and more people realize that the only real counterbalancing power to the erosion of civil and fundamental rights by creeping authoritarianism and incipient fascism is mass resistance.
2026 will be worse.
I’m old. I got my Aunt Tifa t-shirt, and am ready to be arrested or worse. Bring on 2026, it will get interesting.
YA THINK?
Like the wishful thinking that said “Trump is running to be the Republican candidate? He’s got no chance.”
Like the wishful thinking that said “He’s beaten Bush but there are so many other candidates, he’s got no chance.”
Like the wishful thinking that said “He’s beaten all the other candidates but he can’t beat Cruz, a serious politician with experience, he’s got no chance.”
Like the wishful thinking that said “Well he’s the candidate but look at all these tweets and things he said, he’s got no chance.”
Like the wishful thinking that said “Well those haven’t affected his poll numbers, but he can’t beat Clinton, he’s got no chance.”
Like the wishful thinking that said “Well he’s won but surely he’ll calm down now and be presidential.”
Like the wishful thinking that said “Well, he’s getting impeached.”
Like the wishful thinking that said “Well, he’s getting impeached. Again.”
Like the wishful thinking that said “Well, Biden’s beaten him so that’s the last we’ll see of him (even though the number of people who voted for him went UP by millions.”
Like the wishful thinking that said “What? He’s standing again? The Republicans will put up a proper politician this time, he’s got no chance.”
Like the wishful thinking that said “Biden’s sharp as a tack, he’ll dismantle Trump in a debate, Trump can barely string a sentence together.”
Like the wishful thinking that said “Well yes, that was embarrassing but stop talking Biden down, he’s still better than Trump, he’s got no chance.”
Like the wishful thinking that said “BIDEN OUT, let’s crown Kamala, she can’t lose, he’s got no chance.”
Like the wishful thinking that said “Well, OK, he’s won again, and this time with the popular vote as well as the electoral college, but at least now he can’t run again he’ll settle down and be sensible.”
I mean, wherever could anyone ever have developed a habit of consistently and in the teeth of the evidence repeatedly applying wishful thinking to the ever-worsening reality? Maybe by reading, y’know, pretty much all non-Republican media of any kind for the last ten years, this blog very much included?
And this mass resistance you speak of -- what does that even look like, when you’re surrounded by militarised police, ICE, the surveillance state, active duty troops deployed within your own borders to “keep order”? If you think Gandhi-style passive resistance is going to work, do please remember that that only worked on the British because they had a sense of shame. If you can detect ANY sense of shame in your current leaders the world must look amazing because you can probably see the little crinkles on the surface of quarks.
It’s not going to get better. Right now your economy, and by extension the world economy, is tottering along on a downward track, only not falling over because of the AI bubble… but the end of that is coming, likely in 2026. And WHEN it comes, then everything falls apart and 2008 will look like a walk in the park. A lot of things that are “too big to fail” will be bailed out by governments, meaning rich people will get richer and pay less tax, poor people (and I, with my $130,000 household income count as “poor” in this, because there’s no such thing as “middle class”, only people with capital and people like me and likely practically everyone reading this without any) will get poorer, a lot of people will literally die as a result, and… nothing much else will change.
The electoral choices US voters have made over the last ten years have taken the world from a place where, as I recall, things weren’t too bad and looked like they were getting better, to a place where most of what made me optimistic has been dismantled and things only look like they’re getting worse.
As a father it gives me no pleasure to contemplate this, but to think anything has any likelihood of getting better seems to me to be blind, mindless bloody stupid optimism of the type I started this reply railing against.
Happy New Year everyone.
Offtopic: I read FtB pretty frequently -- most days.
I note that, of the blogs listed in the sidebar, more than half didn’t post anything at all in 2025. A couple haven’t posted anything since the summer of 2020.
When I first started reading here (can’t even remember when that was) there was something of a revolving door of contributors actively talking about all sorts of interesting things -- people getting shunted out for non-compliant ideas of what constituted acceptable free thought, other people replacing them with more orthodox views, some just drifting off and disappearing from the sidebar.
Is FtB no longer “recruiting”, or whatever? Is it that blogging like this is very 2009 or something in this era of the Tiktokfluencer? Does the site “need” a nice long sidebar to make it look like it’s got a lot of contributors for some admin reason?
Just curious what happened to/since:
Against The Grain -- Sept 24
Andreas Avester -- Sept 21
Atheism Music and More -- December 24
Death to Squirrels -- May 22
Free Thinking Ahead -- Feb 22
From the Ashes of Faith -- Oct 24
I Have Forgiven Jesus -- Mar 21
Intransitive -- Sept 23
Jonathan’s Musings -- Nov 24
Marissa Explains It All -- August 20
Nastik Deliberations -- Jul 20
Oceanoxia -- Dec 24
Pervert Justice -- Jul 24
Recursivity -- Sep 21
Taslima Nasreen -- Jun 22
The Digital Cuttlefish -- May 24
Note that I’m not saying I miss any or all of these -- my opinion of their individual quality is irrelevant to my point. It just crossed my mind, going into 2025, why so many of these threads were moribund and being allowed to remain so, and why there are so few newer voices here.
sonofrojblake @ 4
Seconded.
We need more voices. I was especially upset over the death of Dispatches From The Culture Wars author (he had moved to another blog by then, but I liked him a lot. He showed us a lot of deranged troll mail that brighetened my day)
From the FtB about page:
“Freethoughtblogs is open to new bloggers, upon approval. To apply, fill out our application form.”
@4 sonof…
No doubt many others have noticed this as well. I don’t know why so many authors have stopped posting. Maybe burn-out, change of job/family that doesn’t allow the time, posting is more lucrative elsewhere or has a better climate. Who knows? Personally, I think it would be good to shuffle those blogs off into some manner of archive sidebar (after contacting the authors and warning them of the move if nothing new is forthcoming). It certainly would be a more honest and realistic presentation of the site.
As you’re a consistent commenter, perhaps you could help solve this problem by starting your own blog here. I recall when Marcus (stderr) was “just” a commenter and then started his FTB blog. I used to share a blog with a few others prior to the existence of FTB, and considered coming over when it was created (but obviously didn’t for a variety of reasons).
@5 birger…
You’re referring to Ed Brayton. Dispatches was one of several blogs (including Pharyngula) that were on ScienceBlogs. There were some nice blogs there that I enjoyed. Too bad Seed Media let it die. It was out of that that FTB was born.
blogging is a dying medium, as evidenced by the median ages of the commenters. i’ve noticed my readers are mostly ten to fifteen older than me, and i’m no spring chicken. maybe some of those people will show up on tiktok doing cartwheels and shilling diet pills. the future is looking good, as you mentioned.
Reading, writing, and commenting on blogs requires a certain attention span, that younger people increasingly struggle with. Blogging also pays little to nothing, and people have day jobs. The average Pharyngula comment count would have gone down by 80% or so in the last 10 years, there’s often hours between comments now, we used to have thousands for a single post back in the days.
FTB was the brainchild of Ed and PZ, and it seems it is not curated very well anymore, but Ed is dead and PZ is busy, so fair enough.
HNY everyone.
Videoblogging on Youtube -yes, I know they have a very unpredictable way of pulling videos, the bastards -- seems to be going strong. Even if the income is minuscule for most bloggers there seems to be an attraction for being seen in a live picture.
sonofrojblake @3: My parents came out of WWII as (massively) displaced teenagers who barely escaped with their lives, and whose families had been torn apart and decimated. If they’d had your attitude, they’d have slashed their wrists long before me and my sisters were born.
Happy New Year.
Don’t forget Trump is a figurehead. You can mostly think of him like a 6 year old who’s been crowned king. He wants attention. He whines, he cries, he pouts, and he really loves to throw tantrums. He’s also almost entirely irrelevant.
The pardons are about the only thing he can do all on his own. And yes, that’s bad but it doesn’t change the fabric of society. The rest is all him being propped up by other people who aren’t doing their job. He needs a corrupt Supreme Court and Congress or he’d immediately run into barriers. The only reason he isn’t is because the majority in Congress and the Supreme Court are using procedural measures to fast track Trump’s moves while blocking everyone else’s. Don’t let them all tell you it’s just Trump making this mess. We need to hold them accountable.
As sonfrojblake noted, Trump will feel no shame. That’s fine, he doesn’t have to. The corrupt justices and congress people also will not feel shame. That’s fine, they don’t have to. The people who really need to feel ashamed are voters. Looking around at what we got from these bozos the voters should feel too ashamed to vote for more of it next time. Or too angry. Or too artificially poor to pay for billionaires. Trump and his corrupt gang have shown the nation that the GOP agenda, bigotry, misogyny, and wildly unreasonable fantasies about prices trending down are luxuries the vast majority of us can’t afford.
As far as New Years goes, I don’t put much stock in it. There’s nothing magic about this particular spot in the Earth’s orbit around the Sun as far as I know. Mostly I think 2025 was a trying year for a lot of us for various reasons. But getting through it with friends made it a much easier pill to swallow. Remembering that is quite possibly the only point to this holiday. So I wish you all a better 2026 and good friends to share the journey with.