It's New Year, so time to look back and forward. These are 10 things I think we need to recognise in 2026. It’s a response to what I think are profoundly damaging mistaken assumptions I’ve heard and read from practitioners, journalists, and analysts in 2025. Warning: very long🧵

Yesterday, I did a thing... I spoke with the lovely Michigan Ave. Media Podcast & Book Promo with Marsha Casper Cook. it was a fabulous off-the-cuff conversation. Thank you Marsha!

The campaign against “antifa” is about establishing a beachhead for further attacks on speech and assembly rights. We see that today in the effort to preemptively label No Kings protesters as “terrorists.”

a friend of mine in antifa told me that antifa's headquarters is SHEIN and if the company fell the whole network would fall

I'm on the slowest bus line in the city with the slowest buses in the nation to talk to New Yorkers about what it would mean for their lives if we made them fast and free.

"no more superficial individual expression"

To ‘ultra-crepidate’ (19th century) is to lecture others on subjects you know very little about.

What I’m wearing to the Rapture.

*stepping out of a time machine in 2007* I come from the future - the most consequential men in society are the hosts of the Man Show, Fear Factor, and the Apprentice

Happy 135th birthday to the Queen of Crime. 🎨 Illustration by Helen Green, @helengreeen

Whoa.

Charlie Kirk was not a “free speech activist” and any outlet that tells you he was is lying to you. He wanted unlimited freedom for himself and as little as possible for the people he hated, ie anyone who wasn’t a white male conservative. His values were trash

The Speaker of the House of Representative telling elected civil politicians to "yield" to military force. A significant moment.

we gave people a magic device in their pockets with access to all the knowledge in the world and they used it to cook their brains with racist memes.

Produce the bodies, be they alive or dead.

Oof. The Dems need to stop pretending, based on some imaginary focus group, that there’s some common ground with Trump. The key is to fight everywhere. You should go study Neville Chamberlain’s attempt at “common ground.” It didn’t end well for his historical reputation. Or the world.

Remember when Hillary coughed and the media were practically writing her obituary?

Dear Americans, welcome to the thrilling game of ‘Did this dictator die or just disappear for a day?’ We’ve been playing it with Putin and Lukashenko for decades. Enjoy the suspense.

Karl Marx, Malcolm X, Hannah Arendt, Frederick Douglass, and Emilio Zapata all got married, and obviously I'm not comparing the Double-T brand to them, but I am saying anyone who thinks marriage turns all people into conservatives should also ask what tank rolled over their cranium recently.

As some of you know, I am an absolute, unapologetic Janeite. She is the master. The worst Austen would do to any adversary would put them in an excruciating 10-page conversation, with a spirited but clumsy younger sister playing on a musical instrument, before a final cutting, devastating silence.

"...everything is going to be alright" Conflict, balance and resolution in law and policy New, by me: Substack: emptycity.substack.com/p/everything... Personal blog: davidallengreen.com/2025/08/ever...

Part of the problem is that the NYT tries to put a second-day headline on a breaking news story. It happened just a few hours ago! There's nothing wrong with a hed like "FBI Raids Home of John Bolton, a Fierce Critic of the President"

Hoagie assault guy, if convicted, will be punished more strongly than J6 folks who beat police officers with poles and other objects and are now walking free (and probably joining CBP)

Celebrating the birthday of Alma Reville Hitchcock, born on this day in 1899. Reville was an editor, an assistant director, and a writer all on her own, but it is her unsung work on Hitchcock’s movies that cement her place in cinematic history.

The road to authoritarianism is littered with people telling you you’re overreacting.

Winter people on their way to the beach with their summer people friends

I used to live in a 1960s council flat where the previous resident had meticulously stuck leaded lights strips to all the aluminium sliding windows. Despite their great effort, the flat was still unlikely to be mistaken for an Elizabethan cottage. But it didn’t look quite as tragic as this

Leeds Royal Armouries understood the assignment.

Diddler On The Roof

🐛🪲

The friend lives in Florida and is named George…Glass

Mamdani: I would say that for the former governor to have spent an entire day speaking almost exclusively about me and barely about the New Yorkers who have been killed is indicative of the very politics New Yorkers want to leave in the past.

Unsolicted writing advice, no. 1161: CONTRACTS. If you're a with a trad publisher, you should receive a publishing contract. You should have the chance to look at this with the help of an agent or other professional, to make sure that it's in your best interests to sign it. Don't sign if it isn't.

Exclusive: The Justice Department told President Trump in May that his name is among many in the Epstein files.

This is a pretty good sketch of the George Washington Bridge! Think how different history would have been if Trump hadn’t been rejected by the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts.

I’m not downloading any more apps you all can go to hell

The Iranian regime is the oppressor of its people. It should be destroyed. But Trump and Netenyahu couldn't give a single solitary fuck about the people of Iran. They're children running around the streets with grenades, high on sugar.

Why are no headlines focusing on the unconstitutional and dictatorial nature of this action?

the administration don’t think the budget bill or the iran bombing will be popular. they don’t really have a plan for becoming popular again. it might not be possible. this is just them doing the things they wanted to do, while they can

Some U.S. media (such as the Washington Post here) trace U.S.-Iranian animosity back to the 1979 Islamic Revolution, conveniently forgetting that the CIA helped overthrow a democratically elected Iranian government in 1953, forcing Iranians to endure decades of the Shah’s brutal rule.

After the barrage of illiberalism in recent times, this vote on assisted dying - following the vote on late abortions - is welcome. The starting point for such significant decisions should always be with the individual where possible, and not the State imposing its view on the individual.

PUTIN WAS KICKED OUT OF G8 in 2014 WHEN HE ANNEXED CRIMEA. TRUDEAU WAS ELECTED IN 2015. THANK YOU FOR THE ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER.

I thought I was losing my mind when this happened because it was an attempted assassination of a national political leader and it was treated like it was nothing.

Immensely significant - and worrying.

A military parade brought to you by the Temu tyrant.