2025 Retrospective

ICYMI

At the beginning of last year, I rebranded from a “politically homeless plea for new political parties” to “f*** you, I’ll say what I want to” and that got off to a great start.

so edgy

Revisiting the list of topics I included in my rebranding post, I have touched on most of them either in posts or notes, with the exception of “Religion without Faith.” I often find myself defending the faithful against the faithless these days, because rational skeptics seem to put religious believers into a big box labeled STUPID and stop paying attention to them. In fact, the believers have some interesting ideas, and sometimes deserve more attention than they get.

In January, I started my series on Islamic Settler-Colonialism, and that has attracted many of my subscribers. I posted consistently on that topic through April, and it has both my most popular post (at about 2800 views) and some later ones that I think deserved more attention (minimum: 449 views so far). The Substack algorithm seemed to promote these less as the year went on. Here’s the list:

The many notes I wrote on this topic could make a lengthy article of their own, but instead of that, I’ll just include this Venn diagram which I am still proud of:

I continued to write cultural and political commentary from time to time. My most viewed piece in that category was my discussion of how small intransigent minorities can punch above their weight class in political change efforts:

I also sounded off on “queer”/LGBTQIA2S+ versus “gay” in my Pride month post, which did decent numbers by my standards:

All told, the subscriber count for my A Narrow Bridge Burning publication increased nearly tenfold, which sounds cool but is less significant when you’re starting in double digits. Some of you may not be aware that I also have a fiction, narrative, and publishing-focused publication called hapax legomena. Fiction used to be my main thing before my social world imploded. I am proud of the work there, even though it has only seven subscribers. (Substack seems like a terrible place for fiction publishing. On the other hand, I’m not convinced that WattPad or RoyalRoad or AO3 is better.)

One of the best things about my 2025 on Substack was getting to know some interesting and thoughtful people and becoming a subscriber to some great writers. A few accounts that I want to promote here are Yassine Meskhout, who can both make me laugh and make me think at the same time, and Hussein Aboubakr Mansour who writes some of the most insightful deep dives into western philosophy and the current state of the cultures influenced by Abrahamic religions. Kaiser Bauch is a recent discovery who provides fascinating perspective on immigration and national identity from a Central European POV. Elana Gomel keeps me from hating all science fiction, fantasy, and horror writers.

Sometime around March or April, the Substack algorithm seemed to boost my writing less. Maybe it was the volume of new content competing with the few articles I posted. Maybe it was that I wasn’t posting as frequently. Around the same time, I was invited to join the New Western discord, and that soon took pride of place as the primary arena where I thrash out ideas with other people. That group is viewpoint-diverse, so it’s a good exercise in resisting audience capture. They helped me rediscover the benefits of debate with people who disagree on many things while not writing off each other’s humanity. While that sounds basic, it was HUGE for me, because my decade spent in the woke mines had focused on increasingly narrowing my circle of discourse into more extreme and deranged groupthink.¹ Having a place to mouth off with my takes on this, that, or the other thing punched my dopamine buttons enough to lead to fewer articles on Substack, for better or for worse. Those conversations also challenged me to refine my thinking, which will hopefully pay off in my future writing.

I have two significant articles I want to write that involve a lot of personal disclosure. I have worked on each of them on and off throughout the year. They are the most difficult to finish because 1) I have so much material to choose from, and 2) I don’t want to expose myself or others to harassment or cancellation due to uncomfortable truths. We’ll see if I manage to finish them and get them past the editor (AKA spousal review) in 2026.

Perhaps one of the biggest events of 2025 for my mental world was the return of the remaining hostages from Gaza and the ceasefire that (mostly) ended two years of active conflict. Since my social world and self-concept fell apart starting on October 7th, 2023, the changes in the Levant should allow me to figure out what my “new normal” is, but that is still a work in progress.² The forces of the Red-Green Alliance are still agitating against Jews in western countries and increasingly against western Judeo-Christian values themselves, so my work on highlighting this civilizational struggle is far from over.

Thanks for reading and may you have a healthy and agentic 2026!

1. There’s so much viewpoint diversity that one or two guys in the New Western discord might think the rest of us are engaging in groupthink, but if so, it’s nothing compared to the woke left.

2. Unfortunately, my IRL Jewish community was full of other brain-rotted leftists, and they have doubled down on being useful idiots for the Palestinianist death cult and other oikophobic/suicidal groups.