Goodbye to 2025

State of the newsletter, an invitation to upgrade, and an end-of-the-year round up of essays.

OK cousins, I'm pulling the ripcord on this not-so-great year. More essays coming early in the New Year. I hope you all have the opportunity to enjoy this time with friends and family. I hope you all read a good book.

If you're new around here, you might not be aware that every three months or so we here at JuliusGoatCorp Incorporated LLC take a break from our regular scheduled antifascist ramblings and LOST recaps to talk briefly about the newsletter itself, and invite anyone who might want to upgrade to a paid subscription. And here we are.

This newsletter is totally free, by the way. Everything I write I just put out there. You can read the long version of why people might pay for a free newsletter here, but in short some people who have the means to do so find enough value in what I do to pay for it even though they don't have to, and that material value in my work helps energize me to write more, and around and around we go. Astonishingly I see I've now been at this for four years and three different platforms. Paid subscriptions sustain me, and allow me to do things like put out a book of these essays every couple years. Another one's coming next year. We'll have a title soon, and then a cover, and then at some point the whole thing will appear in the book places and then holy shit there's no end to what might happen. The future beware, the present beware.

However, some can't pay, and it's always been a core part of this project that those not inclined to pay or not able to pay shouldn't have to. Every week I hear from readers who tell me that my words have helped them, and it would be hard to express how meaningful I find that, and there's something almost holy about that to me. Readers sustain me too, whether money ever gets involved, and give me the clarity and focus and drive to keep doing this. So if payment is a challenge, or if your priorities aren't there right now, please continue reading, and if you want to help for free, maybe consider sharing the pieces around on social media and whatnot.

In full transparency, there's been a rise in cancellations and an ebb in subscriptions here at the end of 2025. Over the years, I've learned it's best to resist the urge to subject this newsletter to the frame of the growth metrics that every newsletter host site very reasonably puts up in the creator dashboards. This, it seems, is a season that will let me exercise that recalcitrant instinct, because the numbers have been shrinking.

I want to be careful with this fact to not ascribe too much meaning to it. Maybe this is the equilibrium point, and some have dropped their subscriptions because it's time for others to drop in. If you think that someone might be you, there are buttons and links in this email and on the site. Or perhaps this is just a time of natural ebb for the newsletter; I don't think the idea that a thing has to keep growing forever is particularly healthy. It would be foolish for me to not apply that belief to my own endeavors.

Some who have dropped off have told me that they've just run out of time to read or interest in reading, and that's a pretty good reason to stop paying. Others have shared that for one reason or another they just can't swing it now, and I am hugely grateful to people in these circumstances for cancelling, for honoring the spirit of this project by understanding that at the foundation it's about gifts, not obligation. Most just fall away without comment. I suspect that means they can't pay. I think we've all noticed that times have gotten generally difficult. It's been a grim year; sabotage of our natural human system and theft of all that it produces is the order of the day.

Honestly, this thing is more of a miracle and a gift—at least for me. I hope in some small way for you, as well. Perhaps there's a reminder here; we're all in this together. You all keep me going. I'll try to help you do the same, and let's all muddle through another year that way.

So, here at the end of 2025, I find myself thinking back about where we've been. I'd like to share with you 12 essays from the year that was—one from each month. These are, if not my "favorites," the ones that I find most emblematic of what I'm trying to build here with all of you.

In January, I wrote The Bishop and the Billionaire, in which I shared a framework for opposing fascism: Notice Direction, Fight Upward, Ladders Downward, Look Inward, Grow Outward.

February brought It's the Fascism, Stupid, a critique of the capitulating urge within the Democratic Party to treat abnormal things as if they were normal, and the generalized urge to behave as if there must be only one uniform response to fascism and supremacy.

In March, The Unmovable Sink considered the necessity of trying impossible things, and the way trying impossible things makes them possible.

In April, I took a vacation, but guest blogger William Shakespeare brought us The Stranger's Case.

In May I got metaphysical with The Everything and the Submarine, a picture of what a beautiful and mysterious thing we humans are in the universe, and the unnatural submerged life we've been living instead of embracing that identity.

In June, I talked about the malicious centrist-centering urge for Winning the Middle, about the moral calamity and tactical disaster of trying to expand your influence by shrinking to an imagined center.

In July, I was pondering how light overcomes darkness, and the greater the darkness, the more it shines, so I wrote So Shines a Good Deed in a Weary World.

In August, I pondered the baffling way people use their lack of knowledge as proof that knowable things are unknown, and ways it harms us all, and wrote Your Ignorance Doesn't Make You An Expert.

In September, I wrote Acceptable Losses, about the murder of Charlie Kirk, and the way people who want to force the rest of us to live in a world of violence and massacre sometimes discover that they have to live in that world, too.

In October, prominent centrist Ezra Klein suggested in the smuggest way possible that the way we beat fascism is by joining it, and in rebuttal I wrote Eventually You're Going to Have to Stand for Something, and I meant it, too.

November brought its twin piece The Extraordinary Power of Standing for Something. It was about Zohran Mamdani's campaign and his way of using positive space to convince convince conservative voters without (contra Klein) entering the shameful negative space of their fears and bigotries.

December brought us Cult(ure) of Abuse, which asked how we stop a cult of abuse, and what our responsibility is to do so, and kicked off a series I think we'll be in for a good portion of 2026.

OK friends. I hope you liked those. I hope you have the time and inclination to revisit one or another of them, and I hope that if you do so it makes your life a little bit better. Writing them makes my life a lot bit better.

It's my great privilege to have a readership. It's my great honor that the readership is you. Thank you, and see you next year.

The Reframe is totally free, supported voluntarily by its readership.

If you liked what you read, and only if you can afford to, please consider becoming a paid sponsor. If you'd like to be a patron of my work, there's a Founding Member level that comes with a free signed copy of one of my books and thanks by name in the acknowledgement section of any books I publish.

Looking for a tip jar but don't want to subscribe?

Venmo is here and Paypal is here.

A.R. Moxon is the author of the novel The Revisionaries, which is available in most of the usual places, and some of the unusual places, and the essay collection Very Fine People. You can get his books right here for example. He is also co-writer of Sugar Maple, a musical fiction podcast from Osiris Media which goes in your ears. He looks into the microscope, he sees Golgi apparatus.