The Year of (Fresh) Hell
And so the horror laugh track of 2025 is drawing to a close, climaxing with the Brown University shooting, the Bondi Beach massacre of 15 Jews, and the grotesque slaughter of beloved Hollywood icon Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele, apparently by their own disturbed son. It’s been twelve months of Halloween. Little did I know when I called this newsletter Fresh Hell last year that purgatory could come in so many different forms.
Geopolitics has been hideous enough. No list would be complete without the gutting images of tormented civilians in Gaza herded from one “safe zone” to the next, now told to be happy about returning to 68 million tons of rubble they used to call home—and the unforgettable video glimpse of six ashen Israeli hostages poignantly marking Hanukkah in a Hamas tunnel, with a menorah made of disposable cups, months before they were shot to death at close range. Who isn’t still haunted by the national shame of the president of the United States bullying the doughty Ukrainian war hero Zelensky in the Oval Office for “not having any cards” against Russia, as baby-faced bootboy JD Vance followed up with a dropkick sneer, “Just say thank you”?
2025 has been a carnival of disinfectant-resistant old scandals and bold-faced sexual deviants, from the second round of Prince Andrew’s defenestration by his kingly brother—who, at the time of this writing, still has not managed to eject the now Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor from his 30-room mansion on the Windsor estate—to the reincarnation of the sleek rap mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs as a baby-oil pervert and vicious freak-off fiend. Then, there is the temporary return to American shores from Romania of the misogynist porn influencers, the Tate brothers, despite pending charges of human trafficking. On the day they were permitted to leave Romania, the NYT asked their lawyer if the Trump administration had intervened. He replied, “Do the math. They’re on the plane.” Barron Trump, a Tate fan, must have been happy.
Tucker off his Trolley
Let’s not forget Tucker Carlson. It would have been nice to think that, after his ejection from Fox News as a one-man basket of deplorables, including the self-incriminating texts that reveal he knew his on-air claims of a stolen 2020 election were a lie, Tucker would have evaporated into the putrid slipstream of the hate-osphere. But instead, with his strange new affect of a high- pitched maniacal giggle, Tucker is mainstreaming anti-Semitic, gay-bashing views to his 16.8 followers on X, berating Piers Morgan for refusing to say the word “f**got” on air, and casting it as some kind of free speech issue.
I have come to think America is a country of serial hysteria. The deification of assassinated MAGA podcast host Charlie Kirk is as over the top as the eight years of liberal self-flagellation about toxic masculinity in the wake of MeToo. Now Trump’s war on DEI has given permission for the rise of ball-scratching knuckle-trailers in the corridors of power, cheering on the deportation excesses of a new ICE age. What chance is there that the next pendulum swing is toward the long lost cultivation of sanity?
Epstein Overkill
It could be that the national obsession with Jeffrey Epstein is in danger of peaking, just as Trump hopes. I confess to a tiny yawn myself. Just tell me who killed him, for God’s sake. Wake me up when there’s a concrete answer to what else billionaire Leon Black got for the $170 million he paid Epstein for “tax advice.” The Epstein trove of typo-filled emails to his private-jet circle and the kind of glossy party snaps usually dumped into the photographers’ abyss of celebrity oblivion is, thus far, a big bust. They reveal only smirky, lucrative hustling by (and hustling of) a high-wire con man with appalling taste in interior design. There are a few intriguing cameos of unexplained Epstein weirdness, like that dentist chair and the wall of creepy 3D masks on his “Little St. Jeff’s” Caribbean pleasure island, but supposedly ominous items like the package of novelty condoms adorned with Trump’s face and the words “I’m Huuuuge” strike me as just the vulgar party favors of a horny host suffering from arrested development.
The topic I am fully fed up with is 2025’s feverish veneration of the world-changing, wealth-exploding, solution-creating superpower of AI. Thank God I am not going to Davos in January. The centibillionaire tech barons are lying to us, as they always do. Just as they stole creative IP and journalistic labor in the early 2000s, then shredded the media’s business model and monetized it for themselves, so they are now pretending that our professional lives and personal fulfillment will be enhanced by losing our jobs and getting substituted by AI. It seems being human was overrated, anyway. Sitting at the top of Mount Olympus in their black T-shirts stretched over buffed musculature, the uber-race of on-the-spectrum Dr. Strangeloves are in a contest to annihilate dignity, community, empathy, and truth.
In this holiday season, I wish them all the worst.
Tina, Tina, Tina... I pay for your substack so's I can feast my eyes on lines such as this one: "Now Trump’s war on DEI has given permission for the rise of ball-scratching knuckle-trailers in the corridors of power, cheering on the deportation excesses of a new ICE age." I spent a professional life in media so I know when to envy a fellow scribe. How, pray tell, do you come up with this stuff? No matter. I love it. Keep it up.
It has indeed been a decade or more of Fresh Hell. Tina your summation as always is both laugh out loud funny but also supremely depressing. I’ve come to believe at my dowager age that art and literature and great writing like yours will be the only things that sustain us. Thanks you for your contribution. Always great to read your posts.