A year of noticing

Highlights and lowlights from 2025

It’s been a wild year. Much of my writing this year revolved around race, as I kept returning to the ways in which elite institutions denounce racism while practicing a subtler version of it themselves. I explored this in “The banal provocation of Doreen St. Felix’s racism,” and at greater length in “Every racist writer at the New Yorker, in their own words,” where I simply let these racists speak for themselves. Sometimes, the most devastating critique is a mirror.

During these past 12 months, a lot has rightfully been said about the damage President Trump is doing to our democracy, some of it by yours truly. But I part ways with friends who insist nothing on the left compares. Trump changed the Republican Party. But what I’ve been documenting this year is a harm that may prove more durable. Namely, a transformation of American institutions themselves—our schools, newspapers, publishing houses, and scientific outlets. One is a political threat, confined to an admittedly dominant but potentially transient faction within one party. The other is structural, making America more racist, sexist, religiously bigoted, more intolerant of opposing viewpoints, and less capable of parsing basic scientific facts about reality—all in ways that will likely be with us for decades to come.

Then there was violence. Not just the metaphorical kind, but the real thing. I wrote about Antifa—not to pretend it’s a centralized organization, but to push back against those who pretend it isn’t really a thing at all. In September, Charlie Kirk was assassinated, shot in the neck for the crime of having an opinion. In the aftermath, I discussed how publications and colleagues that would have canonized a slain activist on their own side, or even a criminal like George Floyd, literally laugh out loud at his execution or rushed to present him as morally repugnant using misleading clips, distortions, and lies. I also wrote about what Kirk represented, and about why the left has produced no equivalent figure willing to sit in a chair on a hostile campus and say, “Prove me wrong.” In addition to pretending Antifa isn’t real, or that Kirk was a Nazi, other stories were simply ignored when they didn’t feed certain racist, anti-white narratives. When a deranged black man murdered an innocent white Ukrainian refugee, the lack of coverage was instructive, and I tried to make that lesson plain in “The racist silence over Iryna Zarutska.”

On gender, I’ve tried to hold a position that shouldn’t be controversial. Trans individuals deserve dignity and compassion, but dignity doesn’t require us to abandon the category of biological sex, or to pretend that a policy question is settled science. I debated this, and watched my interlocutor deny making arguments even as I quoted them back to him in real time. Thankfully, we can all breathe a deep sigh of relief that strong cultural signals indicate this stupid, and often evil, movement is coming to an end, as I covered in the essay “America detransitions.” I also wrote about the crisis facing young men. As a former Big Brother mentor and schoolteacher, I’ve watched this problem simmer for years. What’s new is the open contempt from progressive women who can barely bring themselves to care, and who blame men for seeking support from the people who love them, which I lamented in “How feminists are weaponizing love.” I also wrote about another troubling issue that threatens our way of life in the West, and which the left refuses to acknowledge as such—immigration—by covering topics ranging from Pakistani rape gangs in the UK and the Manchester synagogue attack to the Somali fraud scandal in Minnesota, and more.

I continued to write about Gaza, too. About the absurdity of the genocide claim, the moral failures within Palestinian culture, and their predictably violent refusal to let the Europeans who welcomed them as refugees celebrate Christmas in peace. Turning my eye back to U.S. politics, I followed the political rise of Zohran Mamdani, the new Marxist mayor of New York, who I profiled in a two-part essay on the man and his politics. The damage he’ll do will likely be limited. But it will last.

Finally, I tried to write about what’s worth preserving. Why blue-collar culture matters. An unexpected, if superficial, example in civility from Trump and Mamdani. I also praised Ben Shapiro’s TPUSA speech, in which he showed the courage to attack antisemitism and conspiracy thinking on his own side.

This wasn’t a year for comfort. It was a year for noticing—a practice that has fallen out of fashion in some corners. If this work accomplished anything, I hope it served as a record, written while the arguments were still hot and before memory could be revised. That, at least, is what a year in review ought to be. Next year, I’ll be doing more of it. Long-form investigations, original reporting, and essays that take time to get right. If you’ve found value in this work, a paid subscription is the best way to keep it going. Please share my work with friends and family too. Thank you.

Happy New Year,
David