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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy Thanksgiving, ingrates.  

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

Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook.

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

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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

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

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

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

Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook.

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

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

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

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

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

Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook.