This has been the hardest year of my life.
Not “busy” or “challenging” in the corporate sense, but a year that has stripped illusions, damaged my body, rattled my mind, and left me staring at the country I live in with a kind of stunned grief.
I believe we are passing through one of the darkest periods in the history of the United States. Not the only dark period, not the bloodiest—but a distinctive kind of darkness: a moment when the very idea of a shared constitutional order is treated as optional, when words like “law,” “promise,” and “institution” sound more like costumes than commitments.
It has also been the year I wrote most about what I now call the machinery of humiliation: the way platforms, money, and resentment cooperate to turn serious speech into parody, to drown inconvenient truth in a flood of sludge and beige noise. I wrote about dead internets, hollow empires, collapsing stages. Much of what I published in 2025 has been diagnosis, not comfort.
But I don’t want to end the year there.
For all my anger at the feeds, I would not have survived this year—intellectually, spiritually, or physically—without a handful of people I only know because of the internet. Algorithms and recommendation engines, the same infrastructure I spent so much time criticizing, still occasionally let real voices through. That’s the only reason a man like me, sitting alone at a screen, could find himself accompanied by a historian in Boston, a senator in Vermont, a broadcaster in London, a war correspondent turned pastor, and an economist dissecting the money beneath the fog.
This is not a grand unifying theory. It is a thank you letter.
What follows are five voices who kept me sane in 2025: five human beings whose presence on this cursed, miraculous network made it harder for me to become cynical, and easier to choose hope over despair. This is my small act of gratitude, written on the last day of the year, for anyone who needs proof that not everything the internet amplifies is garbage.
1. Heather Cox Richardson: History Against Cynicism
Heather Cox Richardson, a historian at Boston College and author of the newsletter Letters from an American, is one of the reasons I still love America.
Not the brand-managed version, not the one that lives in flags on trucks and slogans on cable news, but a quieter tradition underneath: the America that believes knowledge matters, that truth accumulates, that history is not a weapon but a teacher.
She embodies something increasingly rare: a commitment to knowing. Not reacting. Not riding the spike of each scandal. Knowing—slowly, patiently, with context and sources and memory.
In what has been the darkest year of my life—and what feels like one of the darkest seasons in the life of this republic—her writing has been a form of orientation. Not reassurance. Orientation. When the ground moves, she restores continuity. She reminds you that crises are not meteor strikes; they have genealogies. That people before us have faced demagogues, economic collapses, constitutional crises, and that their failures and courage are still on record if we’re willing to look.
I’ve written before that I am not pro-cynicism. Cynicism feels intelligent; it signals sophistication. But it corrodes the soul and leaves you useless the moment action is actually required. Alone, it’s easy to slide into it. Heather Cox Richardson is one of the reasons I didn’t.
She is proof that truth can still be visible, still be popular, and still travel widely without being turned into bait. In a year when I have criticized the internet relentlessly, she stands as evidence that not everything viral is corrupt. Sometimes clarity itself spreads.
She doesn’t chase attention. Her titles are plain. Her tone is measured. She writes like someone who trusts that readers will come not because they are manipulated, but because they want to understand. Reading her has felt, at times, like sitting with an old-school doctor—the kind who doesn’t rush you, who explains what is happening to your body, who believes that comprehension is a form of care.
There were moments this year—this Christmas among them—when I couldn’t be with my family, when airports and headlines and images made the world feel closed and brittle. In those moments, her steady presence mattered more than she will ever know. Not because she offered comforting stories, but because she offered truth without despair.
She makes me want to be a better historian of my own time. A more patient citizen. A more serious human being. She makes me feel that belonging in this country is still possible—not through conformity or noise, but through study, memory, and moral attention.
2. Bernie Sanders: Courage That Refused to Retire
Bernie Sanders, the long-time democratic socialist senator from Vermont, gave me hope this year in a different register.
When a certain force was unleashed on this country—openly contemptuous of the Constitution, delighted to rip up commitments as if they were gym contracts—I expected resistance. I expected that the people who had spent years giving eloquent speeches about norms and democracy would rise to defend them.
Most of them did not.
The soft-spoken heroes of a previous era discovered silence. The party that brands itself as the guardian of democracy discovered patience, process, and carefully worded statements. Watching that happen taught me something I did not want to learn about how easily courage evaporates when it becomes personally expensive.
And then there was this old, hoarse, stubborn democratic socialist from Vermont.
At a stage in life when anyone primarily motivated by comfort could have stepped back—written their memoirs, given some lectures, and retreated to the beach—Bernie Sanders did the opposite. He kept speaking. He kept saying what he had been saying for decades. He refused to develop a new language of accommodation just because the danger became more explicit.
That mattered more than any single vote.
He gathered crowds when others were managing focus groups. And those crowds revealed a different country than the one we were told existed: an America that still recognizes moral consistency, that still responds to someone who sounds like the same person before, during, and after the crisis.
There is something deeply moving about watching a man stand in an almost empty chamber, describing what is happening to ordinary people, and refusing to pretend it’s fine. I remember those speeches with tears in my eyes—not because I agree with every policy proposal he’s ever made, but because of the simple fact that he was there, telling the truth as he saw it, when so many others lost their voices.
If politics were only about winning or personal advancement, none of this would make sense. At his age, with his record, he owed nobody another fight. And yet he stepped forward, again, into a moment that could easily have turned him into a target.
In a year when commitment itself felt up for renegotiation—commitment to law, to promises, to the weak—Bernie Sanders embodied what it looks like to be faithful to a life’s work even when the moment turns hostile.
I don’t pray much for politicians. But this year, when I’ve prayed at all, I’ve found myself asking God for something very simple: that this country be allowed to keep him a little longer. Not as a savior. Not as an icon. But as something rarer and more necessary—a moral elder who refuses to go quiet when quiet would be easier.
3. Rory Stewart (and Alastair Campbell): Adult Conversation, Still Possible
Rory Stewart, a former Conservative MP and cabinet minister, gave me something quieter: the reminder that politics does not have to sound insane.
Listening to him speak—especially in conversation with Alastair Campbell, the former communications director for Tony Blair, on The Rest Is Politics—I hear a kind of warmth I associate with the islands where I once lived. It is not the warmth of agreement, but of familiarity: the ease of two people who can argue, tease, and disagree without ever forgetting that the other is a human being.
There is a distinctly British humility there, and a kind of stoicism—the adult kind that comes from having seen complexity up close and knowing that slogans will not save anyone.
What I value most about Rory Stewart is his instinct to step back from the heat of the moment. He keeps trying to widen the frame: to ask what is actually going on, what the incentives are, what history has to say about similar moments. There is pedagogy in the way he talks. You feel that he sees understanding itself as part of the job.
When he speaks, you don’t feel he is trying to rack up points, defend a brand, or ride a wave of outrage. You feel something closer to duty: a responsibility to think clearly in public, to admit what he doesn’t know, to honor the complexity of events he has seen firsthand.
There is remarkably little resentment in his voice. Curiosity is the fuel. You can hear that he genuinely enjoys the work of understanding the world, and that he wants to pass that enjoyment on. In an era where so much commentary is powered by grievance, that alone is worth noticing.
I imagine many of their listeners are young—young Britons, young Americans, people trying to figure out what adulthood might look like in a time that rewards performative rage. In that sense, Rory Stewart (and the way he and Alastair Campbell meet each other) offers something rare: a model of masculinity grounded in restraint, humor, respect, and curiosity.
They disagree without contempt. They speak firmly without cruelty. They take ideas seriously without taking themselves too seriously.
In a year when almost every feed was screaming, their conversations reminded me that adult conversation is still possible. That it is still possible for men to model strength without menace, seriousness without hysteria, confidence without humiliation.
It sounds small. It isn’t.
4. Chris Hedges: Gravity and Faith in a Time of Decline
Chris Hedges, a former New York Times war correspondent and an ordained Presbyterian minister, brought gravity back into the room for me.
There is a weight in his tone that comes from actual war, not metaphor. He covered real conflicts. He has watched societies tear themselves apart. That experience sits behind his words. You can hear that when he talks about fascism or empire or collapse, he is not borrowing language from social media. He is remembering things he has seen.
We are living through a kind of war now. Not yet the open, uniformed kind, but a spiritual and civic one: a war over reality, over language, over whose pain counts and whose doesn’t. Chris Hedges refuses to flatten that into spectacle. He names it as struggle—a long, grinding struggle inside a declining empire where fear and scapegoating become not aberrations but temptations.
What gives me hope is that he does not surrender to inevitability. He understands decline; he does not worship it.
He keeps placing himself on the side of those being maligned and scapegoated: immigrants, the poor, the incarcerated, the people most easily turned into symbols by those who profit from their suffering. It is not about “rooting for the underdog” in some sentimental way. It is about refusing to let lies about vulnerable groups go unanswered.
He also refuses to surrender Christianity to the loudest, angriest people invoking Christ’s name. In a time when religion is so often weaponized as a brand for resentment, his faith is stubbornly unbranded. He points back to an older Christianity: early church, early martyrs, the Christ who stood with the despised and against the moneychangers, not with the ones who turned him into a logo.
He reminds me that it is still possible to be Christian without becoming punitive, paranoid, or cruel. That matters. Because if every public Christian voice sounds like rage, then Christ is dead in the culture long before the last church closes.
Chris Hedges does not promise safety. He does not promise victory. What he offers is endurance—moral endurance rooted in history, theology, and an unflinching refusal to look away.
That kind of endurance is not glamorous. But it kept me from believing that the loudest faction automatically wins. It reminded me that there are people who will not let this country slide quietly into a walled, miserable prison of its own making.
5. Richard Wolff: Following the Money Through the Fog
Richard D. Wolff, a Marxist economist who has spent decades explaining capitalism’s crises in plain language, did something for me this year that theologians and pundits cannot do alone: he reminded me that if you want to understand what is happening to a society, you have to understand its economic structure.
Again and again, he calmly drags the conversation back beneath the noise: away from slogans and into ownership, incentives, and distribution. He has a way of cutting through cultural fog and saying, in effect: look at who owns what, look at who profits, and then tell me again what this fight is “about.”
He shows how often our most heated culture-war battles are not really about values, but about money. About wealthy people who do not want redistribution, who would rather see the country tear itself apart over identity than unite around class. About how easily purity talk—moral panic, traditionalism, “values”—can be rented to defend interests that are anything but moral.
Understanding that doesn’t remove the importance of moral questions. It simply keeps us from being played.
Wolff helped me see why the internet looks the way it does: why division and outrage are not glitches but features; why platforms owned by billionaires keep serving us content that makes solidarity harder and scapegoating easier. It is not because a demon in a server room hates us. It is because outrage is profitable, distraction is profitable, and anything that might help people see their shared interests is dangerously unprofitable.
What I appreciate is that he doesn’t frame this as a cinematic conspiracy. You don’t need secret cabals to explain it. You just need to follow the incentives of a system where a small class of people benefit from confusion and division, and where almost nobody in power wants to pay higher taxes.
Economic literacy, in his hands, is not a niche skill. It’s self-defense.
In a year where I watched lie after lie wrapped in the language of virtue, Richard Wolff gave me a way to see the economic machinery humming behind the curtain. That didn’t make me less moral. It made me less naïve.
Conclusion: A Small, Stubborn Hope
I have spent much of this year writing about collapse: about dead internets, hollow empires, stages that have replaced real life, algorithms that convert dissent into content and then smother it.
All of that remains true. None of it is cancelled by gratitude.
But it is also true that this year, in the middle of that same machine, I encountered people who refused to let it define them. A historian who treats readers as grown-ups. An old senator who refused to retire from courage. A former minister and a former spin doctor modeling adult disagreement. A war correspondent turned pastor of the wounded. An economist calmly pulling back the curtain on the money behind the fear.
These people do not know me. I doubt they ever will. And yet their work helped keep me alive—to my country, to my faith, to my obligations, and, quite literally, to my own body.
I still believe in a better America.
Not a fantasy empire, not a sanitized myth, but a country that could yet decide to be honest about its past, fairer in its distribution of power, and less cruel in its reflexes. A country where truth-tellers are not turned into memes and deepfakes as quickly. A country where the people in charge discover, perhaps late, that justice would make them happier too.
Hope, for me, is not a permanent mood that arrived and stayed. It is something I have had to choose, over and over, especially on the days it feels least justified. It is fragile. It needs renewal. But the fact that it can be renewed at all is part of the miracle.
I have hope for 2026 not because I think the storm is over, but because I now know, more concretely than before, that there are voices who will not hand this place over without a fight. Some of them are famous. Many are not. Some agree with me. Many do not.
My hope is not just for those who already stand on “my side.” It is also, stubbornly, for those who would prefer I stay quiet. For the people who think dissent is unpatriotic, or ungrateful, or rude. For the ones who have never been told that a more honest, generous America would be good for them too.
I do not know what 2026 will bring. I know only this: I intend, by the grace of God, to meet it sober, clear-eyed, and still capable of love.
Love for the people who kept me sane this year.Love for the strangers who read these words.Love even for those who would rather I shut up and disappear.
Because if this country is ever to be worthy of the best things written about it, that transformation will not be powered by hatred, even hatred of the hateful. It will be powered by something harder: truth told without malice, justice pursued without revenge, and a love of the common good that refuses to die.
Wherever you are reading this—from a quiet room, a crowded house, a bus, a late shift—I wish you a year ahead that contains, in whatever measure you can bear, clarity, courage, and mercy.
May 2026 be, in spite of everything, a hopeful year for you.And may we be, in spite of everything, a little kinder to each other than this year taught us to be.
—Elias WinterAuthor of Language Matters, a space for reflection on language, power, and decline.
