A republic without moderation

The GOP hath curdled into a death cult; the Democratic Party, for the sake of the nation itself, cannot afford to permit its own zealots, cranks, and ideological exhibitionists to seize yet greater influence. Yet that is precisely the course upon which we now hasten. The great middle ground of American political life hath all but evaporated: most citizens no longer dwell in ‘the centre’, but have migrated to their respective fringes, and nothing salutary hath issued from this polar flight. On the contrary, it hath begotten a crisis of such magnitude that a full civil war appears inevitable.

Those who decline to ‘pick a side’, desiring only to live unmolested by the madness engulfing them, shall be the first to be devoured. For my part, I want none of this. I have grown beyond weary of most everyone and everything in this diseased society, and I want nothing to do with collectivism in any of its varieties, whether left or right. 

We now stand in a condition akin to that of Weimar Germany: a rabble of Marxists and Nazis—though God forbid one should dare to name them as such—monopolising all the oxygen, rendering common sense and basic decency obsolete. This Mamdani fellow is bad, bad news.

Copyright 2026, Arthur Newhook.

Really f**king typical of all you people: #Murica lost its collective bearings over Biden, sits back and does nothing as Trump loses whatever bearings he had left

There is something fundamentally wrong with a populace that, on the one hand, dissolved into a national tantrum in 2024 because the sitting president, a man whose principal defect was the inexorable march of age, appeared momentarily forgetful during a single debate; yet, on the other hand, by late 2025 greets with a shrug the daily unravelling of their self-anointed orange god-king, a visibly deteriorating elder whose lucidity flickers like a faulty bulb.

White, working-class America, by and large (obviously there are plenty of exceptions, just not enough), does not care about competence, mental sharpness, or even basic suitability for office; what they crave and revere is the licence to be as malicious as their hearts incline, unburdened by shame or civic duty. Until 2016, I would have dutifully dismissed the idea as so fantastical and childish that it could not possibly be that simple—but it actually is.

Looking back, so much of the appalling behaviour of so many random people I have been unfortunate enough to know over the years, and the vile ways I myself acted in trying to placate these swine, all makes sense—and yet I am no less staggered. For a bloody decade now, even during the blessed four years when Trump was in exile and a grown man held the helm (a thankless burden, as events made plain), I remain aghast—in a state of perpetual disgust—that so many of you are as wretched, as spiteful, as morally decayed as ever I feared. Nay—far worse.

This nightmare abateth not; it is metastasising. Trump’s devotees will kill—eagerly kill—to enthrone him as dictator-for-life, and nothing in the present climate suggests they will fail. When a nation’s institutions tremble before the phantom of a white, working-class uprising, justice becometh a theatre of cowardice. Were it otherwise, Donald Trump would already be serving a life sentence, accompanied by the entire cohort of witless acolytes who stormed the Capitol on 6 January 2021. And, frankly, by many of those who have enabled, defended, financed, and propagandised this treasonous movement.

Let us not mince words: this sedition endures because the most heavily armed demographic in the country hath anointed Trump as their messiah and awaits only the signal to unleash wholesale bloodshed. Their hatred of the rest of America is so bottomless that what we have thus far witnessed is but the faintest overture.

The Trump regime will order the arrest of Joe Biden, and other high-profile figures deemed as political adversaries, within the coming year. And I expect the public response to be one of mute paralysis—and vigorous approval in many quarters. I likewise anticipate that many of our friends, colleagues, and family members shall begin to vanish, spirited away into the machinery of autocracy… and few will dare speak of it, publicly or privately. Yet through all this darkness, Americans will continue to thunderously proclaim themselves the ‘Land of the Free, Home of the Brave’.

Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook.

Strip both names from it, for neither merits the honour: a reflection upon the ‘Trump–Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts’

Hulton Archive/Getty Images

{WP 19 December} ‘Kennedy Center adds Trump’s name to building, despite legal concerns’

The Trump–Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts: I confess I indulged in no small measure of sentimental reverence for the Kennedy dynasty over many years, but it is time—well past time, in truth—for such nostalgia to be laid to rest. Howsoever towering John F. Kennedy may appear when set beside the present holder of the office—and I do freely acknowledge his true heroism in war—we must at last reckon with the full measure of the man: he was corrupt; his fumbling hand brought the United States perilously close to the brink of a third world war (albeit he was not the architect of that crisis); and he behaved appallingly toward Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, toward Marilyn Monroe, and toward Heaven knoweth how many other women.

The dynasty’s moral deficiencies did not begin nor end with him. Joseph Kennedy, the family patriarch, held an admiration for Hitler. Ted Kennedy, lionised by many, bore responsibility for a woman’s death. And today we behold Robert F. Kennedy Jr., dragging American public health discourse back unto the intellectual standard of the colonial age—an erstwhile advanced medical system now obliged to genuflect before a man whose understanding is, at best, mediæval.

For generations there hath existed an almost tribal fealty toward the Kennedys within the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, most especially among the predominantly Irish Catholic working class. Yet these have never been my people. As a nominal Protestant of largely English and German descent, I understood from childhood—keenly and unforgettably—that I did not belong, nor was I welcome, within my overwhelmingly Catholic community situated scarcely ten miles north of Boston. (Think somewhere in the vicinity of Spot Pond). It was no phantom of my imagination; I was told so in the plainest, most wounding terms on countless occasions—most vehemently by the Irish kids, and, to a lesser but still palpable degree, by the Italian ones. Why, then, have I spent so many years idealising the Kennedys, a clan whose mythology I was never invited to share? Only Jacqueline ever embodied genuine grace or dignity.

So let us say it plainly: enough of the Kennedys, and curse the cult built around them. And as for Trump—his name, and that of his brood, deserveth no sanctified place in the public square. Strip both names from the façade. We are not the Soviet Union, and no civilised republic ought to plaster the monuments of its cultural life with the surnames of dubious dynasties.

—Arthur Newhook (pen name), somewhere in the vicinity of the Middlesex Fells and severely pissed-off, 19 December 2025.

Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook.

The DOJ hath released a tranche of the Epstein files, though (predictably) ‘significant portions’ remain obscured beneath thick bars of redaction

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{The Guardian 19 December} ‘US justice department releases heavily redacted cache of Jeffrey Epstein files’

And against this darkling backdrop, the Trump regime continues its brazen campaign of gaslighting the American public: assuring citizens that prices have fallen when every household ledger says otherwise; indulging in puerile vandalism of official presidential plaques within the White House gallery; and conducting itself with a vindictive frivolity that a majority of Americans either greet with indifference or, worse, applaud as tokens of strength and leadership.

Given such moral torpor, why wouldn’t Trump and his inner coterie presume they can obfuscate even the gravest allegations—those touching upon the exploitation of children? And why wouldn’t vast swathes of the populace respond with a bored ‘eh’, or an enraged cry of ‘fake news’, as though this Pavlovian refrain were a sufficient answer to every horror?

The relative few who persist in clinging to reason and decency are now shouted down with ever-greater fury, perpetually accused of suffering from the fantastical malady dubbed ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’. The truth is far simpler and far darker: most of America has no appetite whatsoever for resisting Donald J. Trump or the grotesquely contorted creature the ruling Republican Party hath become. Much like the common Germans who, though not always votaries of the creed, nevertheless shrank from opposing the Nazi dictatorship, so do today’s Americans avert their gaze, either desiring only to be left untroubled or to take this golden opportunity to gleefully hurt—even kill—other human beings.

Thus standeth a nation of some 330 million souls, too cowed, too exhausted, and/or too compromised to confront the appalling likelihood that their president may be implicated in crimes of the most abhorrent nature. It is, in every sense of the word, pathetic. And, evil.

Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook.

No more pretences: the majority of the American people either rejoice or shrug their shoulders as the POTUS justifies murder of anyone opposed to him

Imagine but for a moment, if Barack Obama had so much as hinted—let alone declared outright—that a notable conservative or Republican figure had been murdered because his or her deranged slayer had been driven to distraction by the victim’s anti-Obama rhetoric, irrespective of the actual motives or tragic circumstances involved. Imagine, further, one’s disbelief had greater than half the American public responded with a gleeful ‘amen’, or with a shrug of chilly indifference, whilst those who were justly outraged were mocked, dismissed, and threatened with violence. Even a decade ago, in what now feels a more sober age, such a spectacle would have been unthinkable: that an American president would exploit another’s private grief so nakedly in order to menace the roughly forty per cent of the population who oppose him.

We all know precisely what would have followed had this been Obama—or Biden, or Clinton, or even George W. Bush, who long ago fell from favour with the very voters who once rallied behind him in the aftermath of 9/11. But most of all, had it been the black guy. The same #MAGA partisans who now rush to defend Donald Trump’s grotesque exploitation of the deaths of Rob and Michelle Reiner—using their passings as a blunt cudgel to chill political dissent—would be marching through the streets with torches and pitchforks, bellowing (rightly, in that hypothetical) of tyranny and persecution. They know it; we know it; the hypocrisy is so brazen it scarcely troubles itself to counterfeit disguise.

Nay, now it doth not hide at all. Beginning in earnest with the January 6 insurrection, accelerating through the 2024 presidential election and the rise of the ‘manosphere’ that presently poisoneth the hearts and minds of young men at scale, and culminating in Trump’s return to office, #MAGA hath cast off any remaining pretences. What remains is an unambiguous supremacist movement: racial, gendered, and theocratic in equal measure. Roughly sixty per cent of the population is being mobilised—a fair number actively, but more commonly by enforcing passivity and apathy—against the approximate forty per cent of us who resist this nation-killing and soul-killing frenzy. I should like to claim some residue of optimism, yet truthfully I cannot summon the least glimmer of it.

We inhabit a profoundly dark chapter of national life when a majority of the public either tolerates or actively revels in a president willing to rationalise the killing of individuals on account of their political persuasions (or, more to the point, that they hurt his little feelings). We are no longer poised at the brink of the abyss; we have passed within its gate. Trump and his coterie manipulate the American populace with the effortless virtuosity of a master fiddler, and mass bloodshed—spontaneous and orchestrated—is not hypothetical, but imminent.

Most disquieting of all is the truth that remains largely unspoken—though I shall articulate it plainly: many of you reading this are not dreading what comes next. NO… you eagerly await it! For forty-eight humiliating years upon this benighted planet I have sensed, however dimly, that most of you are, at your core, rotten and malign; yet I lacked the vocabulary, the conceptual framework, to name the malignancy. Now I can. And I know, with no small measure of grim consolation, that many others have come to the same conclusion regarding people in general… yet I am entirely alone in my recognition and pain.

Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook.

Trump post making himself the subject of the tragic murders of Rob and Michelle Reiner tells us all we need to know: he urgently must depart office

As matters stand, the millions of bullies, partisans, and sundry miscreants who idolise Donald Trump will not permit him to be removed from office, and the opposition remains far too cowed by their wrath to act decisively. The four years of Merrick Garland’s diffident stewardship of the Department of Justice demonstrated plainly enough that even the US government, law enforcement, and military are scared of a mass uprising of the coalition of the ‘unwashed’ that enabled Trump to come to power. Yet the necessity of casting him from power could not be more urgent. Were Melania anything other than a spent and useless trophy wife, or had any power over anything whatsoever, she would be seeking immediate and appropriate care for her visibly ailing, elderly husband. Instead, the nation is left in the hands of an unstable, deranged figure who leadeth us, step by step, towards the very pits of Hades.

The millions of my fellow Americans who voted for him—especially those of you who did so a second time in 2020 in the middle of COVID, and most tellingly a third time in 2024 (granted, the opposition’s betrayal of President Biden yielded a wretched and pitiful alternative)—ought to have both their heads and hearts examined. FULL STOP! Folk must grow a spine and demand, en masse, that this man resign for the good of whatever remains of the country. They must also call upon the legions who still profess loyalty to him to relinquish the fantasy at last: they backed a loser; they encouraged cruelty; they have erred grievously; and they cannot forever lay blame upon others for their (largely) self-inflicted miseries and myriad failures.

Whatsoever the cost, the rest of us must take a true and resolute stand against those among us who have enabled this degeneration—at the very least since his grotesque mishandling of the most severe public-health crisis in over a century, which he then compounded by fomenting a coup attempt when the election did not go his way. Nay, the reckoning ought to have begun in 2016, when he mocked a disabled reporter on national television. That moment told us all we needed to know about his character, yet millions revealed the poverty of their own by embracing him nonetheless.

And even now—after the passage of a number of years, after the catastrophic failures, after the felonious convictions, after all said and done (or not done)—they double down repeatedly, not from conviction but from spite, for to afflict the rest of us hath become their only animating purpose. The rest of us must, urgently and collectively, cultivate a backbone and cease tolerating this madness: whether from the president himself or from every soul that hath aided him across this ill-starred decade.

Enough.

Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook.

A classic entry from the dictator’s playbook: the Trump regime seeks to restrict tourism from forty-two countries. Wider prohibitions will follow in due course in the ‘land of the free, home of the brave’

image generated via Google Gemini

{Reuters 11 December} ‘US travel group, foreign tourists leery of Trump plan to vet social media’

The Trump regime doth now prepare to demand of visitors from forty-two nations a dossier of their private selves—social media histories, phone records, and sundry other proofs that are almost impossible to assemble—before permitting entry into the former United States. It is an act of bureaucratic derangement, economically suicidal and morally shrivelled, yet far from without precedent: for every tyranny, when it begins to tremble, first builds walls—about its borders, about its people, and even about their very thoughts. One can already see the next stages materialising with grim predictability: internal passports, digital censorship, and the slow suffocation of contact with the wider world.

Mad as it is, tourism—once the nation’s great soft power and a pillar of her prosperity—shall be sacrificed without much hesitation. Trump’s rural, nationalist faithful will greet the ruin as virtue, imagining it a purgation of alien influence. ‘Purity’, in their lexicon, means exclusion: a fantasy of whiteness and dominion wherein only certain sorts of foreigners—white Afrikaners, perhaps, or those who can afford a $5 million platinum visa; rich folks will largely be exempt, of course—may pass through the gates.

But this, too, follows the pattern. Who complains more about tourists than those who greatly rely on their spending? Who wounds themselves more eagerly than the zealot who mistakes his own suffering for righteousness? We are merely witnessing the culmination of a pathology long in gestation: a civilisation so devoured by spite that it would rather collapse upon itself than concede the humanity of others.

Nick Fuentes, the twenty-something anti-Semitic, weaselly-voiced agitator who visited Mar-a-Lago during Trump’s exile, tells Piers Morgan he is ‘tired of pretending’ Hitler was not ‘really f**king cool’, despite also declaring him ‘a paedophile and kind of a pagan’. {Mediate 8 December}

Trump may move to direct federal agencies to reclassify marijuana as a Schedule III substance, in spite of opposition from Republicans and the usual procession of prudes, worrywarts, and meddlesome busybodies. {WP 11 December}

Disney has acquired a $1 billion stake in OpenAI and is poised to become the first major media conglomerate to license its characters for use in video-generation technologies. {NYT 11 December}

New England’s climate is warming faster than nearly anywhere on earth. {The Guardian 4 December} 

Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook.

Trump insists he is ‘FIXING’ the affordability crisis, despite all available evidence indicating quite the opposite

image generated via ChatGPT

{The Hill 6 December} ‘Trump says Biden to blame for affordability crisis: “I’M FIXING IT”’

Such an egregious falsehood—one that anyone who has set foot in a grocery store or gas station knows to be demonstrably untrue—nonetheless passes unchallenged within his circle, for his supporters will dutifully echo any absurdity, however brazen, so long as it serves the puerile objective of ‘owning the libs’. Neither he nor they exhibit the slightest concern for the welfare of the broader citizenry.

Trumpism has long since metastasised into a Christian-nationalist, predominantly white supremacist movement, determined to subject the entirety of the American populace to its tyrannical will. If Trump declares that two plus two equals three, one is expected—indeed compelled—to affirm that it is three. That is the trajectory upon which the former republic now finds itself.

And the millions who cast their ballots for this orange demagogue are receiving exactly what they sought: the persecution and marginalisation of all who fall outside their narrow, exclusionary tribe.

“The grocery checkout line will now be a battleground where state officials control what millions of Americans on SNAP can buy… directly from a playbook written by white plantation owners in the South.” {Baptist News 25 November}

Employers in the former US have cut over 1.1 million jobs in 2025, 54% higher than 2024; tech sector haemorrhaging fastest. {CBS News 4 December}

Elon Musk in hiding, claims he is the most vulnerable in the former US for assassination behind his former partner-in-crime. {IBT 4 December}

Ex-British PM Liz Truss resurfaces as a YouTube grifter, her new series pitched in earnest to American right-wing populists. {The Guardian 5 December}

Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook.

Optimism hath little soil: a large and ever-growing plurality of Trump 2024 voters express extremist, hard-right leanings in poll

image generated via Google Gemini

{Manhattan Institute 1 December} ‘The New GOP Survey Analysis of Americans Overall, Today’s Republican Coalition, and the Minorities of MAGA’

A disquieting proportion of GOP voters are willing to embrace conceits that had long been relegated to the feverish margins of our public life—averring that the Holocaust was but a hoax, that the moon-landing was but a cunning masque, that the attacks of 9/11 were ‘an inside job’, and that vaccines be the very fountain of autism. More than half do yet maintain that the 2020 presidential election was fraudulently contrived against Donald Trump, a belief impervious to evidence and judicial review alike.

Yet more grievous still, some seventeen per cent of Republicans and Trump-aligned voters are reckoned to harbour devoutly anti-Semitic notions, a vice most sharply found among the younger cohort. Alas, among Democrats the figure rises to twenty per cent, and in both camps these numbers are growing: the future estate of Jewish safety and dignity within the former United States standeth, by any sober measure, in most ominous and perilous uncertainty.

And let us not forget: there is every reason to assume that a certain proportion of those surveyed were not wholly candid about the extremity of their convictions. This is invariably the case—in polling, in public discourse, and in the unguarded corners of daily life. Always. The past decade or so, during which so many individuals’ true colours have bled through with startling clarity, hath rendered this truth almost painfully obvious; only now, instead of recoiling from the rot thus exposed, most appear content to embrace it.

Nihilism rules the day, and we stand a long, long way from any conceivable moment—if such a moment will ever come—when the tide may turn back toward the relative sanity and civic composure once enjoyed in the America of earlier decades. One might say this equilibrium reached its apogee in the 1980s and 1990s; and though I freely concede that my judgement may be coloured by the fact that I grew up in those years, it remains, by any rational assessment, a period in which the nation was stronger, its people more resilient, and American power at its undisputed zenith. My instincts tell me that we now inhabit the terminal stages of the republic, and that optimism hath little remaining soil in which to grow.

And what, then, is to become of this fractured multitude, all these bloody people, when the edifice finally collapses outright? A nation whose citizens despise one another is singularly ill-equipped to weather a total societal unravelling; indeed, even the most harmonious civilisation would struggle to withstand the gathering HELL into which the former United States is, day by day, further descending. 

Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook.

Sir Winston Churchill on the reality of public opinion

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“There is no such thing as public opinion. There is only published opinion,” stated Winston Churchill—a remark that lands with eerie foresight in the age of dictatorial algorithms and mass hysteria, wherein opinion is made a merchandised trade, and the mob a marketplace. One may well conceive the old war-dog beholding the endless scroll of social babble, and judging—after his wonted fashion and without the least strain of hyperbole—that our civilisation had clean parted company with its wits.

Born on 30 November 1874 amidst the rolling fields of West Oxfordshire, and sprung of an American mother of notable grace and an English father of noble blood yet scant forbearance, Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill embodied a species of Englishman now almost extinct. A lover of cigars, whisky, and the English language in equal measure, he stood as the living antithesis of his nemesis, the teetotal vegetarian tyrant across the Channel. Churchill’s vices were human; his virtues, monumental.

By any reckoning, the twentieth century’s most formidable statesman—a relic of another age even whilst he lived, and yet utterly needful to his own time. In an era that prized shallow cries above substance, he wielded words as others wield artillery; and when civilisation hung by a thread, it was his voice—gravelled, resolute, and adamant—that held the rampart fast.

In today’s absurd universe, one with many echoes of the atmosphere that led to the Second World War, Churchill’s spectre is more needed than ever. Yet I discern much of his iron resolve in Volodymyr Zelensky: a witness that greatness, however blemished, once walked amongst mortal men, and that valour, when once uttered aloud, may yet ring forth with truth.

Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook.

Thanksgiving? An open missive to nearly every former ‘real-life’ acquaintance I have endured across forty-eight wretched years

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Am so not in the mood for Thanksgiving. Not when I realise that, throughout my entire life—and especially now—people have scarcely appreciated anything or anyone around them. Over the past ten years it hath become painfully, almost grotesquely apparent just how dreadful some ninety-five to ninety-eight per cent of human beings truly are. Every baleful intuition I ever harboured about humanity—those judgments which, by my mid-thirties (born in 1978, so do the arithmetic and then recall what befell in #Murica, beginning in earnest circa 2016) I had dismissed as childish or wrong-headed—hath been vindicated in full, and indeed surpassed by yet grimmer evidence.

The past five years in particular have confirmed the trajectory beyond doubt, and one must be wilfully blind not to see what is coming. The only certainty now is that matters shall deteriorate further. Much further.

On a personal level, I am so bloody angry that I ever expended time or effort on virtually, more or less, any individual I have ever personally known. About all of them; any exceptions are so exceedingly rare (or dead) that, if they ever read this, they would already know in their guts I am excepting them. And let it be clearly understood that I speak not of those I have known only virtually—for I do not truly or personally know any such people beyond the occasional friendly exchange and the like—but of what we once called ‘real life’; people I have had face-to-face contact with. Nearly forty-eight years upon this benighted and absurd planet, and about all of it squandered on the unworthy.

This anger is not ebbing, and I have tried everything—literally everything—so this is not an invitation for suggestions, consolations, or idle commentary from the peanut gallery. Indeed, comments are shut off. No, this is merely to place on the record, for all my former ‘IRL’ friends and acquaintances, somewhere in the cosmos and before the Almighty, that when the day comes for me to cross into the Beyond—whenever that may be—I shall go as a free man: free of pain, free of you, and free of all memory of you—you wretched and malevolent creatures. 

And I shall not trouble myself with forgiving or withholding forgiveness; I vow, in due course, simply to cease recognising. I care not anymore that many of these individuals had their own issues, nor that I, in turn, projected mine upon others. I am striving to forgive myself merely for having dared to survive in this world; I no longer have the time or the will to decipher what anyone else was thinking. For I already know that, in the great majority of cases, they regarded me as a useful dupe for whatever petty or nefarious purpose occupied them at the moment.

Thus I continue striving to forgive myself, for I did, one time too many, give the impression of being precisely that: a useful dupe. The whole bloody world hath only ever instructed me that I must serve as such for others, beginning on day one. Damn this world and the multitudes who hath come and gone, and who have insisted I be their ragdoll.

The pain each of you, those I have been unfortunate to know in my personal face, hath engraved upon me is woven into my very DNA for eternity; but, in eternity, I shall no longer burden myself with the details or the particulars—the current moment is one of detoxing myself of you, and of all of that that ever enslaved me to appeasing you.

Thus, whatever time remains to me upon this earth I am devoting to incantatory prayer to the Almighty: that those who squandered my time, exploited me, and wilfully wounded me be brought to repentance. And, for my part—indeed the heaviest burden of all—I acknowledge that I, the neurodivergent fool so ravenous for human connection for decades, committed nearly every misstep, awkward moment, and ill-judged act as an exercise in pathetic appeasement, an endless cycle of people-pleasing. It sprang from a childhood in which I was incessantly commanded—and by more than a few, and above all by those closest to me—to be a nice, docile, passive boy, or else. I shall be grateful for life only when all of this ends.

You—many of you, at least, though certainly not all—possessed better social skills. Most of you had more energy; I suffer from Chronic Fatigue. Most had more ostensibly ‘likeable’ personalities, even if I myself found any given one of you scarcely tolerable. Above all, the majority of you were simply ‘lucky’, to one degree or another, in your ability either to function or to feign functionality in this cesspit of a world. That is all. None of you were ever any better than me. Ever. And many of you were far more foul, stupid, crass, and uncultured than I have ever been, even at my worst. Yet the fingers have always pointed at me; I suppose I have ever been an easy mark, and I hate myself for allowing that.

My mistake was in trying at all, for every one of you made me feel as though Jesus had hated me from the day I was born—and I am not wholly certain that is not the case; I pray it is not, of course—and I have felt accursed since boyhood. You vultures sensed as much and took advantage. So what sense was there, ever, in attempting to pretend otherwise, or in striving to appease you?

None of this is to suggest that I am ungrateful for the world’s splendours. From the majesty of a symphony to the drama of a Game Seven of the World Series, there remains much worthy of gratitude in the wider picture; for those things in which I could only ever be a spectator to, but never part of. On a deeply personal level, I have felt only unwanted and unneeded by anybody I have ever personally known, and those who made me feel thus were never worth the trouble. Full stop. 

Happy Thanksgiving, ingrates.  

—Christopher James Swallow of Stoneham, Massachusetts (a/k/a Arthur Newhook); 26 November 2025.

Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook.

The ongoing murder of a republic: federal judge temporarily forestalls the persecution of two of Trump’s more prominent enemies

image generated via Google Gemini

A federal judge has dismissed the Department of Justice’s cases against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, after the prosecutor in question was declared to have been unlawfully appointed {NPR 24 November}.

Thus collapses yet another fragment of what passes for law and order under the Trump regime—an inept gaggle of tinpot despots, draped in counterfeit piety and patriotic bluster, yet commanding the unwavering devotion of millions.

For all their corruption, cruelty, and chaos, they have achieved what tyrants throughout history have most craved: the unwavering loyalty of a vast and credulous multitude. Their iron grip endures upon the hearts and minds of white working-class Americans, most professed Christians, most gun owners, most in the ranks of law enforcement, and, not least, much of the corporate aristocracy that feeds upon the same trough of grievance and greed. The opposition, meanwhile, remains enfeebled and timorous—its own moral vanity a shackle—shouting platitudes about equality and inclusion while offering neither courage nor coherent policy.

One court ruling, however just, signifies little in the grander theatre of this nation’s decay. Trump 2.0’s only true objective is to terrorise, to intimidate, and to annihilate dissent—and the American people, by their own hand in the election of the previous year, have ensured that he and his acolytes shall do so with unrestrained efficiency. They voted not for deliverance, but for domination; not for liberty, but for spectacle and vengeance.

And so, I shall go on reminding all who will listen of who bears the ultimate responsibility for this criminal cabal’s resurrection and for the murder of their own republic: the American people themselves. Not merely those who voted for the orange demagogue, but also the pious moralists and hollow progressives who, in their feckless vanity, busied themselves policing pronouns and debating lavatory access while the foundations of democracy crumbled beneath them.

Soon enough, Trump will again attempt to place James Comey, Letitia James, and any who dared oppose him behind bars, while sycophants like Lindsey Halligan—pictured above in illustrated form, her actual face also lacquered beneath a pound of paint—will glide effortlessly through the corridors of the new orange-stained America, radiant in her complicity.

What was once the republic is now but a stage for farce and fanaticism, ruled not by principle but by spectacle. And the audience, clamouring in rapture, mistakes its own degradation for deliverance.

Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook.

John Milton’s Areopagitica: a voice of reason from a fractured age, yet also for our present fractured age

public domain

Published on this day in 1644, Areopagitica remains John Milton’s impassioned admonition to heed ‘the voice of reason’, and his powerful denunciation of the English Parliament’s decree (the Licensing Order of 1643) that all authors must first obtain governmental approval before publishing their works. It was composed at the height of the English Civil War, an age of violent ideological fervour and division that was, perhaps, a grim portent of what we now witness unfolding across the globe—most acutely, and relevant to yours truly, within the former United States of America.

It was a fiercely partisan era, yet Areopagitica is the work of a man of nuance and integrity—the very sort of soul who is rare in any epoch, and indispensable in times such as those of seventeenth-century England. Indeed, such men and women are just as vital in our own age of omnipresent technology, nuclear armament, and zealots as unenlightened now as they were in 1644 (or perhaps worse).

Family tradition long held that John Milton was among my ancestors, and though I have found the name ‘Milton’ in my lineage, I have traced it only as far back as the early nineteenth century, in northern Maine and the Maritimes. Doubtless, the line originated somewhere in England—I have confirmed ancestry from virtually every corner of the old country. No matter; I cannot say with certainty that he is a forebear of mine. Yet, I offer humble thanks to the man for what he bestowed upon humanity: ideas that still resonate in certain circles today (amongst the dwindling numbers who still think, that is). I rather suspect he would be appalled at the state of our world today.

Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook.

Blue wave? 2025 off-year elections in the former United States: false hope, and the ballad of a dying democracy

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Honest question: how elated ought we truly to be that the Democrats have swept a smattering of off-year elections held almost entirely in a few blue and blue-leaning states and districts? I do not relish being perpetually the voice of gloom—though, as an independent, I am happily no mouthpiece nor cheerleader for the Democratic Party, particularly after the disgraceful manner in which President Joe Biden was treated by his own. Far more vital than my opinion of that ineffectual rabble, however, is the task of subduing and removing from power the Christian-nationalist populists and other right-wing zealots who enable our criminal president and have debased the GOP. None of that, not even a faint suggestion of it, occurred on Tuesday.

Indeed, in one instance—namely the election of an actual Marxist zealot as Mayor of New York City (as opposed to the traditional liberal who routinely gets mislabeled as such by right-wing twats)—they have very likely galvanised the #MAGA base. You should have voted for Cuomo, citizens of Gotham. This Zohran Mamdani fellow is becoming the new emblem of why the Democratic Party can no longer command majority support in the former United States, even under the most propitious of circumstances.

How many times over the past decade have we thought something along the lines of, “Right, this is it—at last, the Trump farce is finished; he’s going down this time”? Even on the single occasion when he was genuinely defeated—the presidential election of 2020—we were denied any true sense of vindication, for Trump spent the remainder of his term propagating demonstrably false allegations of electoral fraud, before proceeding to mount a coup attempt (albeit a botched and lamentably inept one). And yet, scarcely a soul speaks of it now.

In any other era of American history—or indeed in any other modern, civilised democracy—he would have been charged with sedition and condemned to hang. Jair Bolsonaro now languishes in a prison cell for attempting the same stunt in Brazil. Plain and simple, it was an act beyond criminality, and yet not even the faintest slap on the wrist was administered to Donald Trump in the four years between his reigns of terror. If the American people could not bring themselves to compel their populist folk hero to face justice under a Democratic administration—and make no mistake, the reason that administration did next-to-nothing to stop Trump was because of fear of a mass uprising by the growing ranks of armed rednecks and assorted yokels that are holding all of us hostage—there is ZERO possibility whatsoever of it now that the tyrant has been restored. The US presidential election of 2024 represented the public’s tacit endorsement of sedition and decay—with a conspicuous torrent of old-fashioned American racism. Still, this truth is almost universally dismissed—shrugged off—even by many who claim to detest Donald Trump, and most stridently of all by those whose silence rings the loudest.

A principal reason—the predominant one—that this nightmare has persisted for so long is that the average white American despises the Democratic Party. Whatever electoral victories the Democrats secure at the national level following the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1965 are almost invariably the product of exceptional circumstances or catastrophic failures on the part of the GOP: Watergate; the manifold disasters of the Bush 43 presidency—the Iraq War, the calamitous response to Hurricane Katrina, and the economic collapse of 2008; and, of course, one man’s historically deranged and criminally negligent mismanagement of a global health crisis in 2020. Yet every one of these transgressions by Republicans is swiftly forgiven by the American people. The electoral reckoning of 2008 gave way, within two years, to a Republican landslide in congressional races; and in 2024, Donald Trump was received once more with open arms by an adoring white-majority public that wanted nothing whatever to do with being governed by a black woman—and it scarcely helped that the woman in question possessed neither charisma, integrity, nor honour, nor any genuine solutions to anything. But that is a tale for another time.

The Democrats control very little beyond the major cities and a miniscule number of states with Democratic super-majorities in their legislatures, yet we are expected to believe that a Democratic wave is imminent in 2026 because they secured the governorships of two states that are reliably blue in presidential contests, and because an extremist on the party’s fringes captured the mayoralty in perhaps one of many five-to-ten municipalities—large or small—out of approximately 20,000 in the entire nation that would entertain such a candidate. When will we learn not to count our chickens before they hatch?

Indeed, my instinct tells me the GOP will enjoy a resounding year in the 2026 mid-terms, even as everything collapses around us and Trump’s dementia-fueled buffoonery continues to stun and amaze. He mishandled the gravest public-health crisis in a century and then blundered through a half-baked coup attempt; at present, millions go without sufficient food because he is toying with their benefits for political sport. Yet upwards of sixty per cent of Americans either cheer him on or avert their gaze, while most of the remaining forty-ish per cent dash about like headless chickens, either vainly attempting to halt this fascistic delirium or just avoid suffering a nervous breakdown.

Add to that the gerrymandering and other institutional barricades now entrenched by Republican legislatures across most states, and the alarming speed at which young men are being radicalised and politicised within the online Manosphere, and one begins to discern the outline of an electoral bloodbath—one that shall greatly delight the orange god-king and effectively transform the former United States into one-party rule. ALL OF THIS is both enabled and sustained by tribalism, not reason, nor any sincere concern for the nation’s welfare by the majority of its citizens. The American people no longer yearn to heal their country; the majority do not even bother to vote, but they do yearn to hurt and kill one another.

This spirit of evil and bloodlust was simply not in the air when I was young, in the 1980s and 1990s. There were plenty of racists, though they were almost always discreet about it and sometimes semi-apologetic when such views were expressed in private conversation, even among exclusively lily-white people. At least that was my experience growing up in the greater Boston area of Massachusetts. There were always problems: crime, poverty, pollution, corruption, religious zealtory—but citizens and authorities were a lot more level-headed about addressing these maladies. It was a far less ideological age, but the clear beginning of the end came on 11 September 2001. We never recovered from that day—and we shall never recover from having permitted a crooked property magnate and television showman, beholden to sworn enemies of the United States in Moscow, to occupy the presidency.

No, a so-called ‘blue wave’ is not coming, so let us be realistic and cease giving ourselves false hope; nothing in this rotten world wounds more deeply than hope betrayed. There is no crueller evil one may visit upon oneself. Please, stop doing this to yourselves. It is over but for the shouting. We must now turn our thoughts towards bare survival. And if I am wrong, then so be it. It is far safer to presume the worst in all things, for thus one is spared the full weight of disappointment—and may even feel a flicker of relief when events prove only half as dire as feared. —Arthur Newhook, 7 November 2025.

Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook.

Federal judge orders Trump to restore SNAP payments—futile in a lawless land where the nation ravenously consumes its own

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{ABC News 6 November} Federal judge orders Trump to fully fund SNAP November payments by tomorrow, 7 November.

SPOILER ALERT: Trump shall not do so, and there is nobody stepping up to force him to comply. WARNING: these assaults on Medicaid and SNAP are mere probes of public apathy—Social Security shall be the next citadel besieged. Trump and his confederates are getting away with literal murder—met with mass approbation.

Do not prattle of polls to me: for about a decade, between forty and sixty per cent of Americans have consistently either cheered this tinpot-dictator on or have averted their gaze, whilst the Democratic Party remains the nation’s most reviled institution—particularly among men, the devout and superstitious, the rural, and above all those who bear arms. The Democrats have not secured a majority of the white vote in a presidential election since 1964. Democracy lies dead now—for the majority of Americans, as of humankind generally and eternally, elevate tribal loyalty above reason or principle.

Abandon all hope of repairing the former United States: the self-styled patriots have slain their country in the name of ‘saving’ it. The Democratic Party—and its voters—have for far too long busied themselves with pronouns, quotas, and assorted p.c. frivolities, yet possess not the slightest courage when it comes to confronting the true adversary: the white-trash American—most often rural, though found everywhere—who enables this criminal network of nation-destroying tyrants. And they would see the rest of us dead and gone. That is why all this unfolds—and that truth must be spoken plainly, the bloody feelings of white-trash be damned (none, after all, are more enslaved to their feelings than those who bellow “f**k your feelings”).  —Arthur Newhook, 6 November 2025.

Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook.

No depravity too great: Donald Trump, the American people, and the caprice of human adulation

A caveat is in order: the above image derives from a Facebook screenshot, and not every utterance cast in meme form can be presumed accurate. The dates and figures may well be awry—I know not. Yet what hath been rendered unmistakable is this: Trump will recoil from no species of moral abomination in his relentless endeavour to escape both justice and judgement. Moreover, it ought by now to be recognised as a self-evident truth that if an individual is endowed with charm, charisma, and the insidious gift to enthral, others will forgive them anything they would condemn in any other. Were the pop singer Michael Jackson—though long since gone to dust—merely an eccentric black man afflicted with a peculiar dermatological malady and an unseemly fascination with children, rather than an entertainer idolised the world over, he would, in all likelihood, have been cast into a prison or institution ere the age of thirty. Such is the caprice, the whimsical tyranny, of human adulation.

These abominations—these ‘alleged’ vile depredations upon the innocent—might be captured in full upon film and displayed before the entire world, and still the greater part of the #MAGA cult would persist in their denials. Some, indeed, would strain to contrive a justification; this is already occurring to a considerable extent, amongst those deluded souls who maintain that Trump was some covert operative pursuing Jeffrey Epstein—good grief, the mind fairly reels.

No power is stirring to stop him; the time for that came and went. Our solitary hope resides in his age and failing health; and perhaps, when at last he shuffles off this mortal coil, a few of the dullards inhabiting this benighted nation may descend from their fevered delusions and, with any luck, abandon politics altogether. —Arthur Newhook 31 October 2025.

Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook.

The death of journalism in Trump’s #Murica: veteran political analyst Jon Keller laid off from CBS Boston

Boston Globe

{Boston Herald 30 October} ‘WBZ’s Jon Keller and other employees let go by Boston TV station’

Jon Keller is one of the last practitioners of a vanishing art—an authentic television/radio news reporter, genuinely ‘fair and balanced’, whose broadcasts were marked by actual fairness, discernment and intellectual depth. And now, inevitably, he too hath been cast aside as the tide of mediocrity and fealty swells.

It is a sombre augury of our times: CBS/Paramount have plainly capitulated to the Trump regime in their corporate cowardice—as is elsewhere abundantly chronicled—and their news division is now sliding headlong into that sordid morass of spectacle and distraction wherein the regime would fain see all public discourse entombed. The less we think, the more we watch; servitude made palatable through the sugar of sensation.

I do hope Mr Keller finds another pulpit from which to speak, but he is not a young man and I would not begrudge him if he were to seek repose now. In either case, much gratitude to Jon Keller for all he hath done to better inform New England citizens, and I am now even less inclined to bother watching local television news given how every station is now but a hollow echo of its former self. —Arthur Newhook, 30 October 2025.

Extortion assumes its latest guise in #Murica: ever more vexatious intrusions of advertising upon ‘smart’ devices, from refrigerators to car consoles—designed to weary the user into paying tribute in order to silence said insolent devices that were already bought and paid for. {Ted Gioia 29 October}

The former United States is on track to lose a potential war against China. {The Atlantic 28 October}

Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook.

The Emperor Has No Clothes — Pentagon dispatches aircraft carrier to Latin America as Trump signals escalation

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{WP 24 October} ‘Pentagon orders aircraft carrier to Latin America as Trump signals escalation’

I make no claim to expertise in Latin American affairs—though it has, of course, been common knowledge for decades that the region is a nexus of narcotics trafficking and violent gang activity. Yet there is something curiously opaque, almost theatrical, about the sheer display of force being exerted at this particular juncture by the Trump administration.

Ordinarily, I bristle at the facile refrain that any given event is merely a ‘distraction’; such assertions are made far too recklessly by the general public, grossly oversimplifying the world’s complexity by reducing intricate realities to the cartoonish machinations of some shadowy puppet-master redirecting attention from A to B.

In the case of Donald Trump, however—an individual whose conduct and appetites would place him somewhere between extreme egomaniac and libertine of the darkest variety—the pattern is impossible to ignore. Distraction is his modus operandi laid bare: a perpetual barrage of noise and outrage designed to obscure, deflect, and exhaust. Any pretence of subtlety has long since vanished; what remains is a crude, blustering spectacle in which those who dare to state the obvious—that the emperor is stark naked—are shouted down by the mob that crowns him clothed.

Merely another day in #Murica, then—a nation so desensitised to absurdity that tyranny now parades as entertainment. —Arthur Newhook, 24 October 2025.

Rising Medicare premiums—to say nothing of inflation and other external economic pressures—are going to wipe it out, yet Social Security recipients are set to receive a 2.8% cost-of-living adjustment in 2026, says the SSA. {AP 24 October}

Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook.

The USDA has announced that SNAP benefits will not be issued in November—and yet there appears to be scarcely a murmur of public outrage

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{WABI 21 October} ‘USDA announces SNAP benefits will not be issued in November’

One might have thought that the spectacle of a corrupt regime weaponising a government shutdown to advance its nation-killing, people-crushing agenda would rouse some degree of indignation. But no; the real outrage is reserved for matters such as who is performing at the bloody Super Bowl halftime show in #Murica. The cessation of SNAP benefits—however temporary, and let us not assume it will be—unfolds while the shelves of food banks stand perpetually bare, resonating only with the hollow silence of despair. This happens whilst an unrelenting war upon empathy itself is waged by that ever-so-valorous and manly anti-woke brigade.

And do not imagine that those Americans still able to feed themselves will rise in significant number to fill the breach. Quite the contrary: charitable giving is increasingly derided as a form of enabling—compassion itself now suspect—in this benighted dystopia that has supplanted the former United States. The nation’s ruling party—more accurately, a personality cult now—seems positively intent on waging economic warfare against its own citizens, including the very sheep that are their voter base who shall continue to worship the demagogic charlatan up to the moment of slaughter.

Perhaps I sound like a broken record, but I remain utterly flabbergasted by the speed and depth of the descent—how swiftly this nation, and indeed the wider world, are sinking into the infernal abyss. —Arthur Newhook, 23 October 2025.

Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook.

A politically motivated splinter from the US Episcopal Church descends into turmoil after its presiding prelate stands accused of sexual assault, bullying, and plagiarism

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It is always the most zealous among these types with the most skeletons in the closet. Excerpt from the Washington Post, 23 October:

The Anglican Church in North America — forged from the headline-grabbing conservative revolt against the Episcopal Church’s first openly gay bishop — is now confronting allegations by clergy and parishioners against two of its top leaders: One is accused of sexual misconduct, while the other allegedly abused his power by allowing men with troubling histories into the church. 

The denomination’s senior-most official, Archbishop Stephen Wood, 62, has been accused by a former children’s ministry director of putting his hand against the back of her head and trying to kiss her in his office in April 2024. The incident allegedly occurred two months before he was elected to the helm, according to a new church presentment, which The Washington Post obtained in advance of its Monday submission.

The woman, who gave an interview to The Post, also accused Wood of giving her thousands of dollars in unexpected payments from church coffers before the alleged advance. Wood, a married father of four sons, remains the rector of St. Andrew’s Church in the Charleston, South Carolina, area, and a bishop overseeing a diocese of more than 40 churches across the South.

If the presentment triggers an ecclesiastical trial, Wood could be defrocked and forced to step down. He is the first archbishop in the Anglican Church in North America to face a presentment, a denomination spokeswoman said.

Prediction: Stephen Wood shall remain the archbishop of this renegade denomination for years to come, comfortably astride the lucrative anti-woke, men-as-victims bandwagon—or, to use the plainer term, the Trump Train. There exists no vestige of shame within the various organs of this grotesque cult of personality that has devoured all reason, all restraint, and, indeed, the very moral fabric of a nation in collapse.

I commend those within their sect who still labour for accountability; yet, in truth, there is none left to be found in the blighted realm of #MAGA, to which they have gladly lent both sanction and allegiance for the past decade. —Arthur Newhook, 23 October 2025.

Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook.

Amazon collapses, dragging half the internet—and all reliant upon it—into paralysis: a mere fire drill for civilisation’s fall

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{Mashable 20 October} ‘AWS outage update: What happened today and why’

Perhaps the body politic hath been something more than rash in permitting a slender coterie of vast corporations to hold dominion over near the whole compass of human commerce—and to consign it all to ‘the cloud’. If an entire infrastructure collapses at the faintest tremor, of what practical worth is that infrastructure? And why does no redundancy—of any worth, at least—exist to sustain it? From the internet to the power grid, from energy production to the extraction of the earth’s finite resources, few of us truly grasp the fragility of our modern age, or how fearfully we have enthralled ourselves to the artificers of Silicon Valley. Verily, we are become their vassals—SLAVES at the mercy of our technological overlords.

These incessant glitches fray my nerves and leave me in a state of abject vexation—and of late, there hath been no paucity of such afflictions in my own affairs. I shall not recount the full litany of woes, yet it suffices to note that my grocery delivery—through Amazon Fresh—was abruptly cancelled this very morning amid their latest systemic collapse. Then, in attempting to activate a new debit card with a different institution—yet one of the countless enterprises now beholden to Amazon Web Services, alongside such disparate entities as McDonald’s, Venmo, and innumerable others encompassing nearly every conceivable sphere—I found myself stymied by yet another glitch, and obliged once more to telephone some remote call centre in India to have the matter rectified.

It is without end—until, at last, the entire fabric of society doth crumble utterly, and whatever remnant of humanity survives is cast back into the dim estate of the cave-dweller. This technological grotesquerie hath insinuated itself into the sinews of daily existence, sowing silent chaos in the lives of billions. And this most recent outage—still not wholly resolved as I write—is but a fire drill, the ominous prelude to a coming conflagration that shall devour the whole edifice.

Do I, then, harbour hope for that collapse? I cannot with certainty avouch it. For I was an unwanted soul upon this planet long before the rise of the tech barons in the 2000s and 2010s; unwanted I remain beneath their cold dominion; and it shall matter little whether I be wanted once they—and the brittle edifice of their devising—have dragged the sum of civilisation into the abyss. For I shall not endure to behold the final ruin. Then again, judging by the precipitous haste of our present decay, that reckoning may well descend upon us before next Thursday—and I may not be so fortunate as to miss the ensuing ghastly revels. Such would be my luck. —Arthur Newhook, 20 October 2025.

Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook.