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Well, That Sure Was a Year

S Peter Davis

26 Dec 2025 — 7 min read

LA burned down and then it... just kinda got worse? A year in review.

Have you ever stopped to think about the fact that we’re now more than a quarter of the way through the 21st century? That it’s now actually plausible that some of you reading this will see the 22nd century?

One thing I’ve been doing this year is writing a book about the last 25. For those who have been following the excerpts, don’t fear about the long pause—I’ll be posting chapters again in the new year.

I’ve been writing this blog, newsletter, thingy, since July 2022, writing it every week consistently since May 2023. I haven’t missed a single week since then, barring a few times when I’ve posted reruns due to a vacation. I want to thank all of you who have stuck with me. Your readership and support makes this worthwhile.

So now once again it’s time to reflect on my past year of writing—the popular pieces, and the good pieces, and those two aren’t always the same thing.

The year of Substack cynicism

2025 has been a year characterized by struggles with the Substack platform, which is my primary host for this column. You're receiving this from Ghost, an alternative provider that I set up as a mirror due to Substack's, let's call it, inconsistent reputation on the internet.

One of Substack's most recent crimes is botching the rollout of user age verification, a legal requirement for social media sites to operate in Australia as of this month. In an email sent out to Substack publishers a while back, Substack assured us that paid subscribers would not be required to verify their age, as their possession of a credit card is evidence enough.

Nevertheless, the morning this rule went into effect, I was immediately locked out of Substack until I verified my age. My paid Australian subscribers have backed this up. So either the site weirdly lied about this or this was just an incompetent rollout.

This isn’t the only struggle I’ve had with Substack in 2025. A few weeks ago I started emailing free subscribers paywalled “teasers” for posts that were not yet free to read, and it’s resulted in an uptick of paid subscriptions (thank you so much for your support!) but also a plateau of free subscriptions, views, and interactions. On balance, I’m not sure how I feel about it, but the collapse of traffic on the whole might be best explained by something I reported on in August—ironically (or appropriately?) the most viewed and liked thing I’ve ever done on that site, which is how Substack administration has acted to squash discovery of less popular publications.

Changes in social media algorithms killed the last paid writing gig I had in 2019, so I’m still sore on this topic. I’m thrilled that people are paying me for my work here, it feels really good and it covers the power bill, but I also felt it was important to temper the expectations of anyone who thinks they’ll ever make a living doing this, which is incredibly fanciful when you look at the numbers, and a blessing awarded only to, like, Matt Taibbi and a handful of others.

I honestly don’t know how many people are able to say that they’ve had their account blocked by a prominent jazz historian, but I’m among that number after I argued with Ted Gioia about whether Trump officials setting up shop on Substack is good for Substack.

But I’m not all completely bearish about Substack. Beyond the issues I have with its management, there are those who say it’s unethical, even shameful, to have a publication or an account here. To which I say… have you seen the rest of the internet lately?

The year of American fascism

It is really difficult to argue that what’s going on in Trump’s second presidential term isn’t fascism. I tend to be really reserved about this kind of thing but you have to call a spade a big fat spade sometimes. I even did a pretty measured take on a thing that many people will yell at you for having a measured take on…

But then, early in the new administration, they put Elon Musk in charge for some reason. Like, for a couple of months it really seemed like Musk was the president. He invited a bunch of techbro CEOs, VCs, right wing script kiddies and Gamergate era right-wing influencers to do a sack-of-Rome reenactment on Washington that was both incredibly destructive and deeply sad.

Much of the media capitulated quickly to the new political order, betraying their own supposed principles for their survival. The trend varied between change-of-heart sycophancy and just an uptick of usage of certain slurs in the hope that people who matter will take note.

But for all those who want to draw direct comparisons to the 1930s, really, what we’re looking at here is McFascism. A unique and incredibly 21st century variant of an old ideology that is heavily reliant on TV and ratings and memes and celebrity and UFC on the White House lawn, a new phenomenon that needs new solutions.

The year of conspiracy

An early fascination of mine was conspiracy theories as a western subculture, and that subculture’s evolution over the course of the 20th century. That culture hit a milestone in 2025 when it sort of won, in a way that nobody expected it would. The Alex Jones crowd were basically hired to run the U Justice Department, the equivalent of Fox Mulder being made Director of the FBI, and what they found, or didn’t find, was devastating (to them):

But this year I wound up chastising the left much more than the right on their conspiracism. After all, you kind of expect it on the right. It’s just part of their whole thing. It’s embarrassing when the left falls for the same stuff, even though I understand it’s all just human nature.

This became the core request of what I guess I accidentally wound up calling the “I Am Begging the Left” series.

This extends to the actually pretty bipartisan issue of the “Epstein Files,” which kind of don’t exist the way that the mainstream expects them to exist, but also, what does exist, as shown by the recent redacted files debacle, will never be released in a way that will satisfy anyone, and the breathless focus on our preferred targets going to prison is ultimately pointless and does great disservice to Epstein’s actual victims.

The year of MAGA civil war

Something nobody really expected when Trump won with all three branches of the government united in sycophancy was how soon and how badly the entire GOP establishment would collapse. But the collapse is kind of intuitive for a racist political coalition seizing power and then deciding on policy: Bitter arguments form about which races are the good ones and which are the bad ones.

The rift began as early as January when Trump was assembling his cabinet but perceived to be hiring too many Indians (the ones from India, but Native Americans would presumably be bad also)

But this just kind of began to intensify. The Nick Fuentes Dominionist antisemite coalition began to peel out further from the Evangelical Zionist coalition as popular dissatisfaction with the Israel/Gaza war started to result in a media boost to some genuinely disgusting people.

But, I argue, what else did the mainstream GOP actually expect from openly courting and embracing people from the harder and harder right? This was a stupid strategy that they have now oopsie-daisied themselves into.