Wrapping Up 2025 (#112)

In this edition: thinking about being more optimistic about the state of everything as we enter 2026 than I was a year ago. Plus some quotes and ideas to which I keep returning from articles and books I’ve read over the past 12 months.

Here we go. I’m glad you’re here.

Leading Off

I end this year more optimistic than I entered it. That’s not to say 2025 was a good year. It most definitely was not.

The United States is now a competitive autocracy. Millions of people across the world will die because of President Trump, Elon Musk, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and the work of DOGE and others to destroy USAID. The Supreme Court’s majority rules by Federalist Society vibes, rather than originalism or any other rule of law. The GOP Congress spent the year submitting to Trump rather than asserting its Constitutional powers. The tech broligarchs are seeking to destroy our democracy and replace it with rule by them. Legacy media outlets have surrendered to the regime. The economy is faltering and businesses are closing because of Trump’s inane tariff policy. Trump has created a secret police that violates the rights of immigrants and U.S. citizens every day ending in a y. We may be at war with Venezuela. The Trump family is finally a real billionaire after a year of grifting off the office of the president.

But while Trump may wish to be an autocrat, he has been unable to seal the deal. He is unpopular, as are his policies. Millions of people protested Trump at rallies across the nation. Individuals show up every day to fight back against immigration raids and other Trump regime lawbreaking. Lower courts are standing up for the rule of law and our Constitution. The fact that federalism gives the states and local governments real power has limited what the Trump regime has been able to accomplish. Kilmar Abrego Garcia is back in the United States. Indiana state legislators told Trump no when the president demanded that they gerrymander. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene moved from being Trump’s biggest supporter to a fierce critic.

Democrats continue to win elections—including an Iowa State Senate seat at the end of December that prevents a Republican supermajority and demonstrates a swing of 27 points from what former Vice President Kamala Harris won in that district last year.

I can write this newsletter attacking the Trump regime—and you can read it—without fear of incarceration or worse.

People must continue to organize and demonstrate to push back against the Trump regime’s attempt at authoritarian capture. I’m thankful we still have a chance. I’m optimistic today that after much struggle, we are likely to win. That is something I’ll discuss as the new year progresses.

Thank you for reading! Happy New Year! Let’s work together to make 2026 a landmark year for the renewal of our democracy.

Quotes that Made Me Think In 2025

Here are ten quotes from articles and books I read this year that I keep returning to and thinking about. To close out 2025, I wanted to share them below in the order I read them, starting in January.

• 24 Things I Wish I Had Done Sooner (or my biggest regrets) (Ryan Holiday, Meditations on Strategy and Life, Link to Article)
  
  I once interviewed the peerless Dr. Edith Eger, Holocaust survivor and the author of one of my favorite books, The Choice. At the beginning of the podcast (you can listen here, I ask her about something I regretted, a relationship I had messed up. She looked at me and said she could give me a gift that would solve that guilt right now. “I give you a sentence,” she said, “One sentence—if I knew then what I know now, I would have done things differently.” That’s the end of that, she said. “Guilt is in the past, and the one thing you cannot change is the past.”
  
• Trump is creating a selfish, miserable world. Here’s what we can do (Michael Plant, The Guardian, Link to Article)
  
  Fighting back doesn’t have to mean shouting louder. Another option is gracious, determined decency. Choose kindness over cruelty, generosity over selfishness, and evidence over bluster. Today, these quiet choices are acts of radical courage – ones that help build a better tomorrow. They might even make you happier, too.
  
• More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity (Adam Becker, Link to Book Publisher’s Website)
  
  The fact that our society allows the existence of billionaires is the fundamental problem at the core of this book. They’re the reason this is a polemic rather than a quirky tour of wacky ideas. Without billionaires, fringe philosophies like rationalism and effective accelerationism would stay on the fringe, rather than being pulled into the mainstream through the reality-warping power of concentrated wealth.
  
• “Why Are We Funding This?” (David Samuel Shiffman, American Scientist, Link to Article)
  
  A lot of the time, those world-changing discoveries are utterly unexpected. If someone had said, “Who cares how desert lizard venom works? Let’s not fund that research,” we never would have discovered semaglutide, a key component of drugs such as Wegovy and Ozempic, which have helped millions of Americans lose weight. If we had decided not to study how bees optimize nectar foraging and distribution among a colony because it sounds silly, we never would have developed an algorithm that allocates internet traffic among computer servers—a technology that powers the $50 billion web-hosting industry. If we hadn’t funded research into how bizarre microorganisms thrive in boiling Yellowstone geysers, we never would have discovered the bacterium Thermus aquaticus, whose Taq polymerase enzymes now enable medical tests for countless genetic diseases.
  
• We Go Deep in the Manchester United Quagmire (Ed Maylon and Matt Hughes, FootBiz Newsletter, Link to Article)
  
  The Times reported on Thursday evening that [Ruben] Amorim has the backing of the United board, which after such a short spell in charge largely brings to mind a quote from fictional spin doctor Malcolm Tucker in The Thick of It:
  
  “The PM [prime minister] is not going to sack you after a week.
  
  “Sacked after 12 months and it looks like you've fucked up.
  
  “Sacked after a week - looks like he's fucked up.”
  
• Poets persist (Zach Rabiroff during interview with Tal Lavin, Flaming Hydra, Link to Article)
  
  ⁠So let’s say there’s value in speaking out—and I do think there is. That raises the question of what it is we’re obliged to be saying. One answer is just to observe the world as we see it, and try to set it down that same way, “for the drawer.” But there’s another approach, maybe just as important. Milan Kundera has a line: “The struggle of man against nature is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”⁠⁠
  
  ⁠⁠I get the sense these days that all of us in the United States, whether we know it or not, are already refugees. The country we knew isn’t here anymore except to the extent that we once knew it, and if anyone is going to remember what it meant or what it could have been, it will only be because the writers and poets and other artists among us now find a way to tell them.
  
• The Sky is Falling; We've Got This (Margaret Killjoy, The Sky is Falling; We've Got This, Link to Article)
  
  Deescalate all conflict that isn’t with the enemy.
  
• The Ministry of Time (Kaliane Bradley, Link to Book Publisher’s Website)
  
  Forgiveness, which takes you back to the person you were and lets you reset them. Hope, which exists in a future in which you are new. Forgiveness and hope are miracles. They let you change your life. They are time-travel.
  
• There Will Never Be Another ‘WTF With Marc Maron’ (Diana Moskovitz, Defector, Link to Article)
  
  That is the moment, every time I listen, when I weep. If WTF had its own philosophy of life, it would go more or less like this. You will start out young and filled with righteous anger at how unfair the world is. You will try many things, and you will probably fail at them. But that's OK. Everyone fails, and everyone is hiding shame they believe nobody else will understand. Everyone gets at least a few bad breaks, and some more than a few. But if you hang in there, at some point, you will cease to fail. At some point, you will get a lucky break. At some point, you will look around and realize that while this might not be the life you envisioned, it's still a good life and one you can be proud of. You will fuck up, and you know what you should do after? Fucking apologize. And then at some point after that you will get older and wiser and realize your apprehension about Sir Ian McKellen was ridiculous.
  
• (Jessica Ritchey, Bluesky, Link to Post)
  
  If I had explain American history in one sentence, I could do worse than "John Brown was hung for treason, but Robert E. Lee was not."
  
  ‪
• Trump’s Plan Is Now Out in the Open (Peter Wehner, The Atlantic, Link to Article)
  
  As we continue along this journey, into places none of us has ever quite been before, it is worth holding close to our hearts the words of the Czech playwright and dissident Václav Havel. They moved me when I first read them, in the early 1990s, when so much was so different, and I have cited them several times since, but they hold more meaning now than ever.
  
  “I have few illusions,” Havel wrote. “But I feel a responsibility to work towards the things I consider good and right. I don’t know whether I’ll be able to change certain things for the better, or not at all. Both outcomes are possible. There is only one thing I will not concede: that it might be meaningless to strive in a good cause.”
  
• Eventually You're Going to Have to Stand for Something (A.R. Moxon, The Reframe, Link to Article)
  
  You can't beat the mentality that leads to abuse by taking on the abuser's mentality. You can't defeat bad ideas by adopting them. You can't grow a coalition by selling out its members. And you can't persuade people who disagree with you that you can be trusted to fight for them when you won't even fight for those you say are with you.
  
  Eventually you have to stand for something, or somebody else will tell you where to stand, and if you'd rather not, they'll force you to stand there, and stand there you will.
  
• "We the People" vs. "We the Court" (Adam Bonica, On Data and Democracy, Link to Article)
  
  A democracy cannot survive permanent judicial supremacy. In the long term, Congress must reassert its constitutional powers by setting jurisdictional limits to pull crucial issues like voting rights back from a hostile judiciary, imposing term limits to lower the high-stakes partisanship of any single appointment, or expanding the bench to rebalance a Court that has been captured by one party. The Constitution vests sovereignty in “We the People,” not “We the Court.” Judicial reform is not a threat to constitutional order but rather its preservation.
  
• Separation of Church and Hate (John Fugelsang, Link to Book Publisher’s Page)
  
  Jesus emphasizes that nations will be judged based on their actions and treatment of the vulnerable—not their religious affiliations or beliefs. He’s not just commanding individuals—he’s calling on societies to commit to compassion, mercy, and kindness on a policy level. This means that Christians living in a democracy have the option to vote for—or against—Jesus’s very direct instructions. Note that he doesn’t care how pious you are, how often you go to church, or how much money you donate. You get zero points with Jesus for being religiously observant. He’s giving instructions on exactly what a Christian nation should do, which is why conservative politicians never talk about it.
  
• What is Evil? (Amanda Knox, The Atlantic, Link to Article)
  
  The only thing I’ve found that has actually helped me heal from my own terrible experiences has been acceptance, and a desire to understand the flawed, complicated, and sometimes extremely dangerous humans around me.
  
• Do What You Believe In (Hamilton Nolan, How Things Work, Link to Article)
  
  At the risk of stepping too firmly on The Rake of Obviousness, I want to suggest a different mental model of politics—a different way of engaging with the political process. It is this: Think about what you want to happen. Then fight for that thing.
  
  Note that this model of political engagement removes from you the burden of being an omniscient being with the ability to predict the future. Whereas in the other model you are required to spend a great deal of time gaming out probabilities about how each and every word and action and position will interact with every other word and action and position in the world and what thoughts those refractive combinations will produce inside the minds of people you don’t know, the model that I am suggesting does not require that. You can wipe that off your schedule. Now you have a lot more free time. What could you do with that free time? You could think about what kind of world you want to see. Then you could fight to make that world a reality.
  
• How MAGA Took Over Legacy Media (Julie Roginsky, Salty Politics, Link to Article)
  
  But there is something you can do today and every single day. Work every media ref you can find. When Trump so much as utters a run-on sentence, contact Jake Tapper and ask him why he’s not writing a book about this president’s mental fitness. When CBS News does not lead every newscast with a story about how Trump is violating the Constitution, contact the network and demand to know why it has gone full MAGA. When Kristen Welker lets an administration official lie on Meet the Press without cutting off the mic, let her know that this is unacceptable. Do this over and over again, even if you think it is overkill. It isn’t.
  
• After the Crowd Moves On (Amanda Knox, Hard Knox, Link to Article)
  
  What I hope people take away from Cabot’s New York Times interview is the afterlife of shame, the part that unfolds long after the internet gets bored and moves on: children who are afraid to leave the house, former friends falling silent, being recognized months later, death threats that don’t make headlines, a family living in a constant state of hypervigilance long after the story has cycled out of the news. This is the part we almost never see. Public shaming doesn’t end when attention does; it metastasizes into a chronic condition. It rewires how you move through the world, who you trust, and how you imagine your future. You are no longer a person with a nervous system, with relationships, with flaws and hopes and dreams. You are content.
  
• Strap In: What I Told Danish Students About America’s Collapse (Tad Stoermer, Link to Article)
  
  Do you care about democracy? Then what does it actually mean? Not as an abstraction you gesture toward in arguments, but as a daily practice. What is freedom? Who deserves it? How do we protect it? What are you personally willing to risk for it? Define your terms. Be specific. Don’t let anyone—including yourself—slop over them with vague generalities that could mean anything or nothing.
  
  These aren’t seminar questions anymore, the kind of thing you debate in a classroom knowing the stakes are academic. They’re immediate. They determine what you do tomorrow morning. What stands you’re willing to take. What risks you’ll accept. What lines you won’t cross. And most importantly: what do we actually do about any of this?

Follow me on BlueSky to see the stories I’m finding and the tabs I’m opening in real-time.

Craig Cheslog (@craigcheslog.com)

GenXer against fascism. Talking politics, women’s soccer, WNBA, Manchester United men and women, USWNT, USMNT, Green Bay Packers, Boston Celtics, Chicago Cubs, and Taylor Swift. (he/him/his) My newsletter: https://thelongtwilightstruggle.com/.

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