Daisy and the last brisket in Texas

generated via ChatGPT

Are we 'great' again yet? Texas BBQ joints close as beef prices soar amid 75-year low cattle supply and Iran war costs. {ABC News 5 June}

https://www.goodmorningamerica.com/food/story/texas-pitmasters-express-concern-amid-beef-shortages-rising-133612016

linktr.ee/arthurnewhook

🪐💔 #QueSeraSera 𓅨 🕈

Copyright 2026, Arthur Newhook.

Sycophancy in the deep red: the #MAGA base proves yet again they shall never abandon Trump

generated via Gemini

{Texas Tribune 26 May} Ken Paxton defeats John Cornyn for US Senate GOP nomination

Sen. Cornyn's primary defeat this evening in Texas, and Rep. Thomas Massie's last week in Kentucky, reinforces that voters in these deep-red states and regions are, more so than ever, sheep — pathetically sycophantic, doing whatever Daddy Trump tells them, with no critical thought whatsoever. It is the #MAGA rank and file, above all others, who have condemned this country to catastrophe, and who must be held to account, starting ten years ago. They did not have to fall for the world's most transparent conman in 2016, then double down, triple down, and quadruple down on their support over the course of a bloody decade. Roughly a third of the population wants the rest of us dead, and now has the country by the proverbial throat; this is why they will never abandon Trump, not even if he murders their own children and grandchildren. These malevolents may yet get their ultimate wish. Abandon all hope: it is only getting worse with each passing day, as I always knew it would from the moment this long national, and global, nightmare began. 

Copyright 2026, Arthur Newhook

Hantavirus outbreak forces the evacuation of patients from a cruise ship bound for Europe: the next Covid, or merely a warning of worse things to come?

generated via ChatGPT

{NYT 6 May} ‘Hantavirus Patients Land in Amsterdam With More Cruise Ship Evacuations Planned’

A new pandemic cometh? To be fair, hantavirus doth not appear to spread easily, nor is it some novel mutant outbreak of the sort that emerged from the wet market in Wuhan in November 2019. And yet, what happens when there is another public-health emergency, whether this or something else entirely? How marvellous that Trump is in charge, for we all remember how magnificently he performed during COVID-19. Meaning, of course, that we have chosen to forget how badly he bungled it; all part of the larger pattern of a nation that hath simply given up and allowed one monstrously spoiled infant to reign unchecked, utterly above the law, above other human beings, above nature, and above God Himself.

If I sound like a broken record in making this point day after day, year after year, it is because people are still refusing to learn their lessons; not merely about Trump, but about so many things besides. And I guarantee that whatever brings about the next pandemic, the next shutdowns, and the like, people will handle it every bit as badly as they did in 2020, if not worse. At the very least, one would have thought that a renewed emphasis on hand-washing, or on the most basic hygiene — such as covering one’s mouth when coughing! — might have endured. But not even that. #Murica

Copyright 2026, Arthur Newhook.

Grand Old Pedophile-enablers: Only eight of the twenty-six Republicans on the House Oversight Committee are willing to go on the record over any prospect of leniency for Ghislaine Maxwell

NYT

{Forbes 25 April} ‘Only 8 Of 26 GOP Committee Members Say Ghislaine Maxwell Shouldn’t Be Pardoned’

As ever, these Republicans live in sheer terror of alienating Trump’s acolytes amongst the masses, and they know that the American people, in general, are giving the convicted felon a pass for his multitude crimes (Epstein, collusion with Russia, the attempt to overturn legitimate election results, January 6, the criminal mishandling of the COVID pandemic, betraying our allies, and so much more). We know that the likes of Representative Thomas Massie are risking their careers — and far more besides — in trying to do the right thing in the face of mass indifference and, in many quarters, outright hostility from the public. Remember, Maxwell made it known some weeks ago that she would speak only if Trump granted her a full pardon. And she is going to receive one, I stand by that. 

Copyright 2026, Arthur Newhook.

Inflation has climbed to its highest level since 2022, and the same nation that screamed bloody murder over it under Joe Biden now looks the other way even as it bears the cost

generated via ChatGPT

{Yahoo! Finance 10 April} “Consumer prices in March saw the largest monthly gain since 2022 as the US-Israel war against Iran sent gas prices skyrocketing past $4 a gallon”

A surge attributable almost entirely to Donald Trump’s humiliating and utterly futile adventure in Iran. Yet where, I pray, is the indignation from the American people that was so freely directed at President Joe Biden during his term of office? For Mr Biden, at the least, did endeavour to bridle inflation and uphold essential government services, whereas we now have Trump bellowing about cutting Medicare and Medicaid because the United States must pay for wars before anything else (at the same time declaring himself a peacemaker and demanding a Nobel Prize for it). And all the while, Trump is blatantly and shamelessly lying about the cost of gas, food, etc., and the media and general public shrug their shoulders (‘Trump being Trump’). James Carville’s oft-quoted maxim — ‘It’s the economy, stupid’ — no longer applies in post-Obama #Murica: its poor, white, rural denizens hath decided, time and again, that their resentments and grievances outweigh every other consideration, including their own financial survival. Thus they, and the rest of us in this polyglot empire who never wanted this madness and did what we could to prevent it, are being shunned and left behind by the wider world. For that, there shall be no redemption. Y'all done f**ked' up.

Copyright 2026, Arthur Newhook.

The Dow Jones sinks to a 2026 low amid renewed inflation anxieties. Do not expect the American people to ever hold Donald Trump to account for it, or anything else

image generated via ChatGPT

{CNBC 18 March} “Dow tumbles more than 750 points to new closing low for 2026, fueled by inflation woes; Fed holds steady on rates”

Curious how ‘y’all’ are enjoying this beautiful economy that was promised by your orange godking?

No need to ask. So long as grievance remains the organising principle, and the American people – at least, the ruling white trash coalition that comprises the vast majority of the country’s gun owners, law enforcement, military personnel, assorted Christian leaders, trailer park dwellers, conspiracy theorists, dedicated racists, and suburban lay folks of what we used to know as ‘the middle class’ – are granted licence to hate without consequence, no amount of bad news will touch Donald J. Trump. Allegations of sexual misconduct. An attempted coup. Criminal mismanagement of a once-in-a-century medical crisis. We are not even scratching the surface — and still he remains insulated.

All because a culture animated by resentment would rather suffer than surrender its animus. Stop trying to reason with it. When cupboards empty, someone else (be it Joe Biden, or whoever Trump hath anointed as the villain of the day on any given day) will be blamed. It never fails. Hell on Earth. 

Copyright 2026, Arthur Newhook.

The giddy circus of pathologised frailty

Modernity is so obsessed with labels because it is terrified of mystery: is anyone else thoroughly sick of these sanctimonious little memes that continually choke our timelines on Facebook, and elsewhere? Who even is producing this bloody drivel!? And why is it always so predictably tethered to some solemn pronouncements about alleged “narcissists”? Somewhere within the last ten to fifteen years, give or take, “narcissism” hath expanded from a specific, scientific descriptor rarely used by the general public into a universal solvent and catch-word buzz-word, dissolving every nuance it touches. I scarcely recall encountering the term in ordinary conversation, real life, before that period; now it is deployed with monotonous certainty to explain virtually everything.

Any personality disorder, any genuine injury or merely imagined affront, any defect that is real, exaggerated, misread, or simply inconvenient gets bundled into the same accusatory category — particularly when the subject is male (women, I’ve gathered, are more often labeled as “hysterical” or “unsafe”; in both cases, the individual is erased). It hath become less a diagnosis than a fashionable epithet: a moral cudgel masquerading as insight. And is it any wonder, under such conditions, that trust has withered — that people approach one another as potential threats rather than imperfect fellow creatures — when this poisonous, pseudo-therapeutic slurry is everywhere, presenting itself as “self-help” while quietly training everyone to interpret human frailty as pathology?

These bloody memes — like the ones in the screenshot with their "early red flags" and "humiliation" tactics — are the aesthetic opposite of glamour. Flat, ugly, and devoid of the nuance that once made human connection beautiful. The word "narcissist" is all too often a shield to avoid the messy work of actually knowing someone. Enough. Full stop to this f**king nonsense! I have had my fill of the whole giddy, self-righteous circus. And if I am a "narcissist" for saying so, oh bloody well! 

"We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are." — Anaïs Nin.

Copyright 2026, Arthur Newhook.

Vulnerability: perhaps the single most damning reality of living as a man in this ungrateful and impossible world

image generated via ChatGPT

You women and girls, by and large, are repelled by men who display vulnerability – who admit to fear, or confess to the raw desolation that attends desperation. It is simple biology, dating back to the Stone Age. Yet it is also biology that men, when reduced to their most human extremity, are hardwired to seek comfort and solace from women in precisely such moments. To whom else, in practice, are we expected to turn? Who are the first to comfort us upon entering this world? Biology.

Society, taken as a whole, continues to instruct men that they must swallow everything: bear pain without complaint; transmute anguish into stoicism; and do it all with a happy face, as though suffering were a private eccentricity best concealed for the comfort of others. As if suffering is a virtue. How sick. I hope it is understood by all reading this – women, men, and third parties alike – that we men are caught in an eternal Catch-22 in the realm of feeling and attachment: we are told to be emotionally available, yet punished for emotional need; urged towards honesty, yet tacitly sanctioned only so long as that honesty never becomes inconvenient. It makes living as a man on this planet really, really f**king s**tty – and these are not caveman times; we should be evolving. Instead, given the way everything is going in the world at large, we are heading back towards the caves – though I digress. I shall, mercifully, be dead for that. Still, it would be nice to have a little love back in my life before it all crashes down, and not let biology and ancient prejudices get in the way of anything. #JustSaying

Copyright 2026, Arthur Newhook.

Bombing Iran is not going to erode Donald Trump’s support in a society that revolves around grievance. After all that hath been said and done, to believe that anything will do so is fool’s gold

Following the attack on Iran, I am yet again watching my fellow Trump detractors, on social media and elsewhere, put far too much faith in the American people as a whole. For years now, something big happens that would ruin any other politician, and they swear this is finally the end for Trump. No — even when he was defeated and sent into exile for four years, he still dominated the headlines and dictated public discourse. They keep underestimating the strength of the hold this one charismatic man hath upon the collective psyche of the country. If the general public is not in revolt now, when it is reasonably obvious that the president committed unspeakable crimes against minors on Epstein’s island — never mind having blatantly orchestrated a coup attempt, grossly mismanaged the worst public-health crisis in a century, attempted to kneecap the world’s largest economy with brain-dead policies, and appointed an anti-vaxxer lunatic to oversee public health — then they are not going to revolt over a conflict on the other side of the world. Not this country. Not these people.

Americans, historically, fall into lockstep the moment a fresh war or conflict breaks out. The Iraq War was massively popular before it was massively unpopular. Isolationism was a default posture for a vast swathe of the public right up to the morning of 7 December 1941 — then, in an instant, it became non-existent. This reflex is not new: the American people, in the aggregate, are sheep. They do what they are told, and they always have.

Roughly sixty to seventy-five per cent of Americans either fervently support Trump; or support him begrudgingly because he is not a Democrat; or possess some personal and/or financial interest in doing so; or—most commonly—do not care and simply look the other way (i.e. they are apolitical). Only about a quarter, at most a third, actively and vocally disapprove of Donald Trump.

So no: if his extreme megalomania and narcissism (I hate to use that grossly overused word, but it fits in his case), his paedophilia, treason, racism, economic malfeasance, felony convictions, and the wider menagerie of criminality and cruelty barely raise an eyebrow with the vast majority of Americans, then bombing Iran is not going to do it either.

And of the roughly thirty per cent or so who eagerly support this regime, they do so for one reason: they are granted licence to hate other Americans. Period. They will bear economic hardship for it—and they already have. They may not like the country being dragged into another foreign conflict, but it is not a dealbreaker. Nothing is a dealbreaker so long as that permission to hate remains intact.

People are really this awful. That is the hardest lesson we have been forced to learn over the past ten years. And we are not getting out of this hellhole any time soon. —Arthur Newhook, 1 March 2026.

Copyright 2026, Arthur Newhook.

“Trump has tipped the Middle East into a massive war that could last weeks” — or months, or years

Reuters

{Sky News 28 February} US and Israel attack the Iranian capital with the goal of regime change.

The nefarious Iranian regime hath long courted precisely this sort of escalation; yet the orange-stained regime in Washington is scarcely less reckless, and no less morally compromised. It is difficult to avoid the suspicion — more to the point, certainty — that these strikes are being exploited as a convenient diversion for Donald Trump: a spectacle designed to distract the #Murican masses from the fact they are being ruled by a paedophile. And, to that end, it will work: in a country so coarsened and credulous, any resistance in earnest to the laundering of what is beyond grotesque and indefensible is practically non-existent.

Israel’s position is more complex, of course. Its security concerns regarding Iran are real and severe, and long-standing. Twenty years ago, we were talking about the likelihood of a bloody conflict. Even so, it is entirely plausible that Bibi Netanyahu, too, may welcome a crisis that shifts the focus from his internal political troubles, and his reliably deferential posture towards Trump hath been dispiriting to anyone who supports both Israel and democratic, egalitarian governance in this world. Going along with Trump on this is a high-stakes gamble; as I write, reports are emerging that Tehran hath launched retaliatory strikes on Tel Aviv. However one parses it, the outlook is bleak — extremely bleak. And, remember, the Iranian bear nukes. 

Copyright 2026, Arthur Newhook.

#Azumeria: a Valentine's Day lament for the most aloof girl I've ever known

#Azumeria Happy Valentine’s Day. Alas, my erstwhile punk rock princess ranks lowly in the annals of girls I’ve loved before. Over the span of nearly twenty years — beginning in that accursed, long-shuttered record shop on the Middlesex Turnpike in Burlington, MA, and then intermittently thereafter as thou drifted from one corner of this country to another — thou didst move in and out of my life with restless inconsistency.

When last we spoke, it was during the year of the pandemic. I had resolved to visit thee in Reno, Nevada, clear across the continent. Tickets were purchased; arrangements carefully made. And yet, in thy customary fashion, thou unravelled the plan entirely. And I lost hundreds of dollars on it, which I really could not afford to lose. Still waiting on reimbursement from thee for that.

Thou wast ever among the most distant and inscrutable souls I have known — and I have known a fair number, myself included at many junctures, none too proud to say. In the final reckoning, it amounted to little more than wasted years and misplaced investment.

I can only hope that the little girl thou bore at, what, 42 — and to a baby Daddy barely out of high school, a spoiled little rich boy with a most punchable face that thou meet in the halls of Alcoholics Anonymous (do not even get me started on that cult) — is not suffering unduly. The one I was looking so forward to meeting, but never shall. But, she probably is suffering, and is still quite young. Nothing I can do.

Copyright 2026, Arthur Newhook.

#Enchantra A Valentine Day's lament for a girl in East Tennessee

#Enchantra Happy Valentine’s Day. Didst thou remember to send a card to the child-raping, nation-killing demagogue whom thou worshippest as Lord and Saviour, whilst giving lip service to Jesus — the one whose name is now bound to scandal, secrecy, and redacted files, and whose Department of Justice hath seen fit to obscure more than it hath revealed?

I lament that thou once possessed a heart of gold, and then didst allow political, familial, and societal pressure to harden it when that orange demagogue emerged and told ‘y’all’ precisely what ‘y’all’ had long been waiting to hear. And somehow, in all of this, thou didst choose to blame me for thy heart and soul turning sour.

Well, I thank thee kindly for wasting more than eight years of my life — eight years invested in someone who surrendered her judgement to a cult of grievance and cruelty, along with the rest of the yahoos living around there. (It was a long-distance affair, though I visited her and her family in East Tennessee and became well acquainted — to say nothing of the countless hours she kept me on the telephone most every night, for years.)

Someday thou shalt fall to thy knees — not in worship, but in reckoning — and plead with God for having held so fast to the support of so obvious a con-man and horrifically evil entity. Someday thou shalt seek my forgiveness, and the forgiveness of every soul oppressed in the name of thy Lord and Saviour, Donald Trump.

Make no mistake: I am not pining for thee, nor do I care much any longer about the private relationship issues we endured; but I am eternally furious that thou wouldst betray every principle thou once upheld in order to support a tyrant — and for what gain? To the contrary, he robs us all of everything. Wake up, grow up, and repent.

—‘Christopher Robin’

Copyright 2026, Arthur Newhook.

#Enchantra: a lament for a kind lady lost to the scourge of Trumpism

I remain perpetually angered that the woman with whom I shared more than eight years of my life — let us call her Enchantra, once the gentlest and kindest soul I had ever known — hath now devoted a decade to the cult of Donald Trump, QAnon, and sundry other manifestations of embittered, reactionary dogma. I told her so — plainly and without ornament — as recently as last week. The pallid, evasive reply I received this time sufficed: somewhere in the deep chambers of her conscience, she knows I am right. Yet she holdeth fast.

Part of the problem lieth in her upbringing, the gravitational pull of familial and societal appeasement, the ideological climate in which she dwelleth, limited formal education, years of severe health struggles, and an ever-shifting regimen of medication that inevitably clouded her cognitive equilibrium. Yet these are but tributaries. The primary reason is that she — and the millions similarly poisoned — were granted permission to transmute grievance into identity, to sacralise resentment, and to dwell perpetually in a theatre of persecution and self-pity. I devoted countless hours unto hearing her sorrows — many, it must be acknowledged, not without justification; the manner in which this disabled woman was treated by health professionals and certain of her kin often enraged me. Yet once aggrieved, she possessed an inexhaustible capacity to rehearse and elaborate those injuries at prodigious length. Trust me on that.

She cleaveth to Trumpism with a fervour nigh unto self-deification, insisting upon its righteousness, even its sanctity. What I behold is not merely a political allegiance but a corrosive moral inversion — an ideology that hath disfigured public discourse, estranged friends, families, and lovers, and debased the civic spirit. Such darkness, however entrenched, cannot endure indefinitely; history is unsparing with movements that mistake grievance for virtue and cruelty for strength.

I do not claim to have been a perfect angel in this matter; I did make grievous mistakes, though not nearly so grievous as she would have one believe (she is given to hyperbole in all matters). Nonetheless, damn Donald Trump and every person who hath propped this criminal paedophile up for ten years. Damn you to the pits of Hades. Thou art a destroyer of the lowest order, and our country is unlikely to survive thy treachery. The woman I loved for many years, who once loved me more than any other human being ever hath, is practically unrecognisable. I shall neither forget nor forgive this. Not at the barrel of a gun shall I ever give my assent to this nation-killing madness, not at any price.

—Arthur Newhook (pen name), 13 February 2025.

Copyright 2026, Arthur Newhook.

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

image generated via ChatGPT

{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

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.