What Samuel Johnson said of Milton’s “Paradise Lost” can be said of 2025: No one ever wished it longer. As this year slinks offstage, remember some memorable moments:
Cracker Barrel stumbled into crisis when many Americans who have too much spare time became enraged because the restaurant chain deleted from its logo an elderly man in overalls. An Immigration and Customs Enforcement social media graphic said: “If it crosses the U.S. border illegally, it is our job to stop it. People. Money. Products. Ideas.” Particularly pesky ideas. A trans-identifying male Transportation Security Administration agent at Dulles Airport sued the TSA because its discriminatory policy would not let him (now her: Danielle) conduct security pat-downs of female travelers. After 32 years at Ford Motor Co., an executive retired with 2,229 examples of colleagues’ verbal pratfalls, including: “He’s going to be so happy he’ll be like a canary in a coal mine.”
To prepare young Oklahomans for the demands of a high-tech future, the state’s board of education mandated instruction about “discrepancies” in the 2020 presidential election. Intellectuals really are the last to learn things: Harvard Law School thought the Magna Carta it bought 79 years ago for $27.50 was one of many later reproductions. Now British researchers think it might be one reissued in 1300.
In a mailing to its 3 million members, the National Education Association, America’s largest union of K-12 teachers, linked to an article explaining that Hitler was “pushed into the genocide option” because European Jews refused his offer to send them elsewhere. In other organized labor news, the United Auto Workers (1.5 million members in 1979; 400,000 today) had in 2025 about 100,000 members from higher education’s proletariat. Neither the UAW’s communications director nor its chief of staff have ever worked in an auto factory. Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont socialist, said many warehouse jobs are (a) inhumane and (b) should be protected from automation.
Elon (“I’m not just MAGA, I’m dark gothic MAGA”) Musk’s DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency), which never existed (actual departments are created by Congress), went out of existence after streamlining the government, which you might not have noticed. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, who last year helped make Kamala Harris what she is today, told a 2025 crowd he relishes watching stock of Musk’s Tesla company tumble. Two Minnesota state funds own a total of almost 2 million Tesla shares.
The 24-day fire of 2025 indicated that in 2024 Los Angeles County should have spent on firefighters some of the $70.8 million it then spent on 134 lifeguards, one of whose compensation was $523,351. The U.S. president — he is such a cut-up — posted an AI-concocted video of himself as a fighter pilot wearing a gold (of course!) crown and dropping excrement on “No Kings” protesters. Explaining his commutation of the prison sentence of the fraudulently elected ex-congressman George Santos, the president said Santos “had the Courage, Conviction, and Intelligence to ALWAYS VOTE REPUBLICAN.” So there.
The president decreed that the Gulf of Mexico is the Gulf of America. In 1945, Manhattan’s Sixth Avenue was renamed Avenue of the Americas. Has anyone ever called it that?
In the Republicans’ hotly contested Toadyism Sweepstakes, a House member proposed legislation to mandate carving Donald Trump’s visage on Mount Rushmore. Channeling the etiquette of the Golfer-in-Chief, American spectators at the Ryder Cup shouted vulgarities at the European players. Cannot protectionism fend off the NBA’s overbearing foreigners? In the season that ended in June, the five top players, as identified by two sophisticated metrics, had passports from Canada, Serbia, Greece, France and Slovenia.
New York elected a socialist mayor (“free” buses and child care and lots of other stuff). Seattle, whose motto should be “Anything you can do we can do weirder,” elected a 43-year-old socialist mayor who has been living partly on checks from her parents. (Shocker: Both are professors.) She promises government guided by people from, among others, the following communities: Black, Indigenous, Asian and Pacific Islander, Latinx/Hispanic, people of color, women, immigrants, refugees, people with disabilities, and 2SLGBTQIA+. Q = Queer or Questioning, I = Intersex, A = asexual. 2S = Two-Spirit, which you understand or you probably are a bigot. A taxpayer-funded Chicago nonprofit’s “Subversion Summer Camp” taught “queer magic” for resisting Trump.
Paleontologists in New Mexico found evidence that before a six-mile-wide space rock smacked Earth 66 million years ago, dinosaurs were flourishing. Post-rock, all was desolation, but out of this came, eventually, human beings. Was this progress? Not on the evidence of 2025.
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