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

image generated via ChatGPT

“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

image generated via ChatGPT

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

image generated via ChatGPT

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

image generated via ChatGPT

{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

image generated via ChatGPT

{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

image generated via ChatGPT

{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.

Trump posts AI-generated video of himself wearing a crown and defecating upon #NoKings protesters, then insists, “I’m not a king”

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{NYT 19 October} ‘Trump Posts Fake Video of Himself Flying a ‘King Trump’ Jet Over Protesters’

A grotesque spectacle, and the act of a petulant man-child masquerading as a statesman—an overgrown bully and gaslighting autocrat who yet occupies the highest office in the land. If the President of the United States cannot conduct himself with a modicum of dignity and extend respect to all Americans, including those who dissent from him, as each of his predecessors managed to do, then he has no business holding that office.

The current GOP base is defined by a startling deficit of respect for those beyond its own tribal orbit—a moral decay that, if not arrested forthwith, will culminate in widespread atrocity. We already inhabit the danger zone of dehumanisation. Yet it was not always thus. Richard Nixon, for all his paranoia and moral blemish, never descended to such belligerent indecency; nor did any other Republican president or aspirant within living memory—from Eisenhower through to Mitt Romney—stoop to the dehumanisation of political adversaries or ordinary citizens.

Nor, indeed, have our Democratic presidents done so. Barack Obama, at his most incautious, made his now-infamous remark concerning rural Americans who “cling to guns and religion”—a comment that drew sharp rebuke, yet was expressed within a thoughtful, analytical frame and contained more than a measure of truth (and nothing offends such types more than hearing hard truths about themselves). Obama did not, however, produce puerile videos depicting his critics as yokels being drenched in filth, nor indulge in crude name-calling and mockery.

Manners matter. The current president and his acolytes would do well to rediscover that elementary precept of civil society. They have already learnt that millions of their countrymen are neither cowed nor compliant, and that we will not simply lie down and die to humour their authoritarian fantasies.

President Trump ought, at the very least, to issue a public apology to those he hath insulted—but of course he will not. Neither his party, nor the pliant media apparatus that shields him, nor the cultish fervour of his followers, will exert the slightest pressure upon him to do so. On the contrary, they are collectively manufacturing a civil war—and they shall have it, unless they remember, and swiftly, how to behave like human beings once more. But they won’t. —Arthur Newhook, 19 October 2025.

Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook. 

None of this is normal, but a wise few remain: #NoKings, and the last vestiges of sanity and reason struggling for breath in a nation given over to absurdity

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I avoid crowds and cities as one avoids contagion, and am not presently in the physical condition to attempt them; yet I stand wholly in solidarity with those taking part in the #NoKings demonstrations today—and indeed, such assemblies ought to become a daily ritual. A small act of civic penance, a means of shaming those Americans who have lent their sanction to the bovine-in-chief. It may avail nothing, but futility can bear its own kind of dignity sometimes. My instincts have ever inclined towards the public mortification of wrongdoers, and I confess a certain dark satisfaction in having exposed those who wronged me in life—though I cannot claim I was always successful in getting the responses desired. Too many of my past acquaintance are proof against shame altogether.

And speaking of the shameless—Donald Trump remains the apotheosis of the breed: a grotesque blend of vanity, cruelty, and avarice, his corruption so complete it now passes for ideology. His supreme arrogance and gall must be called out at every possible turn. Not in the naïve hope that the man himself is ever going to change—especially not when he is pushing eighty—but because some among those who have voted for him, yet are not entirely devoured by the #MAGA cult, may at last feel the stirrings of buyer’s remorse, and henceforth know better than to extend their faith to the Republican Party again. Perhaps, if enough citizens recover their senses, this long-degraded republic might yet birth a true third party, and in doing so become at last the representative democracy it has long pretended to be under this two-headed serpent.

As for the true believers in #MAGA—those countless millions who worship their false messiah with the fervour of medieval zealots; far more numerous than any of us once dared to imagine, comprising about thirty to forty per cent of the entire populace, which is far more than sufficient to keep their grip upon the nation’s throat. Well, they shall never know shame, not even when confronted with the most grotesque abominations perpetrated in the name of their self-anointed saviour on earth, …or in the name of their professed saviour above—for indeed, they serve two masters, a condition expressly cautioned against in the Scriptures. And understand neither.

Yet the truth must still be spoken, ceaselessly, until either this nightmare exhausts itself or consumes us outright: none of this is normal. Donald Trump is a moral derelict who, in any sane and civilised society, would be confined to an asylum rather than permitted to defile the presidency. The world must be made to see that there remain, within American life, a few who still recognise the squalor into which the nation has fallen, and who refuse to dignify its degradation with silence.

Whether any of it shall make the faintest difference, I cannot say; the descent may already have progressed beyond recall, and our destiny—as a Babylon reborn, once again undone by its own enthralment to a great and unholy deception—may well be sealed.. Yet it heartens me to know that some of my compatriots still recoil at the desecration of our country, while the rest either shrug in indifference or bend the knee before the most transparent charlatan this republic has ever produced. God help what remains of us. —Arthur Newhook, 18 October 2025.

Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook.

Compassion is no repeal of law: DOJ orders Facebook to remove a group tracking ICE agents in Chicago

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{NYT 15 October} “Meta on Tuesday removed a Facebook group that was used to share information about Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Chicago after the Department of Justice requested that it be taken down.” 

One may rightly condemn the excesses of ICE, and insist that non-violent migrants deserve dignity rather than degradation—and I would concur. Yet compassion, however noble, does not erase law. To obstruct officers acting within their legal remit remains an offence, regardless of intent, and regardless of how unjust the methods ICE is employing these days may be. And, furthermore, if one must broadcast the movements of federal agents, then at least choose a medium less porous than the echo-chambers of social media. #JustSaying —Arthur Newhook, 15 October 2025.

An omen, perhaps: the aircraft bearing ‘Secretary of War’ Hegseth home from the NATO summit in Brussels makes an unplanned descent in Britain—its windshield fractured, as if by prophecy itself. {BBC 15 October}

“Nations that embrace openness and cooperation are surging ahead, while those resting on past privilege are being left behind.” Once the world’s most powerful passport, the US now ranks 12th—its holders welcomed visa-free to fewer shores than a decade past. {WP 15 October}

Trump confers a posthumous Medal of Freedom upon a man whose life’s work advanced Christian nationalism—curtailing freedoms for undesirables, and all who refuse the yoke of Dominionist rule. {The Guardian 14 October}

Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook. FULL LIST OF LINKS - linktr.ee/arthurnewhook. DONATIONS GRATEFULLY ACCEPTED on Cash App ($ANewhook).

Cruelty enthroned as creed: the Supreme Court rejects Alex Jones’ appeal, but the permission to be vile is sacrosanct in Trump’s #Murica and he will never be compelled to pay a single penny to the Sandy Hook families

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{USA Today 14 October} ‘Supreme Court rejects Alex Jones' appeal of $1.4 billion Sandy Hook judgment’

The Supreme Court of the former United States hath declined to hear broadcaster Alex Jones’s final appeal, thereby upholding the $1.4 billion judgement against him for his monstrous defamation of the Sandy Hook families. One might have hoped this would mark the end of his grotesque spectacle—but Alex Jones holds no intention of paying a penny to those he so cruelly tormented for profit, attention, and the hollow currency of infamy. Bankruptcy merely another pageant upon his stage.

And mark me: Trump will wade in—perhaps on the orders of the puppetmaster in Moscow—to absolve Jones of culpability. A pardon, a reprieve, some grotesque political gesture—nothing should astonish us. We are dealing with a cabal that hath proclaimed open war upon Reality herself, hellbent on turning Americans against one another, and therein they have triumphed beyond their wildest fantasy. These individuals do not merely distort the world; they unmake it, and demand applause for the wreck.

Long hath Jones sheltered behind the corruption of ‘free speech’, wielding the First Amendment as both shield and cudgel, whilst his retainers bleat about liberty even as they crush its very heart beneath their heels. If they cannot pardon him, they shall canonise him; if not canonise, they shall martyr him, à la Charlie Kirk, demanding again that homage be rendered at football games and flags be flown at half-staff in mock mourning. One way or the other, the next phase of the farce shall be redemption, not remorse. Millions will once more dutifully follow along, for this country—God deliver it—long since bartered sanity and decency for spectacle.

Indeed, a renewed campaign to ‘redeem’ Alex Jones is already underway this afternoon—a grotesque rehabilitation in the name of populist grievance. Observe how brazen in general the right-wing sphere hath waxed since Trump’s return to power; their confidence is absolute, their scorn unveiled. They know the nation’s fracture runs too deep to mend, that the peasants are itching to begin slaughtering each other en masse, and they lick their lips thereat. These be heady, halcyon days for American Fascists, theocrats, white supremacists, and the like.

The tragedy lieth not only in what was wrought upon the Sandy Hook families—hunted, exposed, and driven from their homes in Newtown—but in the cold indifference of the nation that beheld it. Who rose in their defence, in earnest? None. Barack Obama then sat upon the presidential throne, conjuring up a rather infamous tear, and the trembling voice, and the familiar elegy of ‘thoughts and prayers’—a pantomime of pity so practised it might have been writ in advance (and probably further encouraging malevolent fools in their conspiracism). Yet when the curtain fell, nothing changed.

I remember that dreadful day with nauseating clarity: even whilst the bodies of children lay cooling in their classrooms, the national conversation was already pivoting—not to grief, nor justice, but toward the largely phantasmal tyranny of gun control. In this land, the right to bear arms hath been elevated to a sacrament, sanctified above human life itself. School shootings are now so routine they scarcely interrupt the afternoon news cycle, each massacre met with the same weary shrug and constitutional catechism: ‘necessary evil, price of freedom’.

That any soul could gaze upon those parents, those tiny coffins, and pronounce them deserving of their woe is thought enough to curdle the spirit. Yet here we are, a republic whose moral arteries have calcified beyond cure—a nation that hath mistaken cruelty for conviction and named it liberty.

We stand upon the brink of that which, in my youth in the late 20th century, had been unspeakable: civil war, and a rot of conscience so absolute that compassion itself is spent. Would that I could summon hope—for the families of Sandy Hook, for the country—but the abyss hath already opened. What awaits is no mere politics, but total civil collapse: cruelty enthroned as creed. And Alex Jones shall yet be laughing all the way to the bank. —Arthur Newhook, 14 October 2025.

Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook. FULL LIST OF LINKS - linktr.ee/arthurnewhook. DONATIONS GRATEFULLY ACCEPTED on Cash App ($ANewhook).