KINSELLA: 2025 was bad enough

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Well, thank goodness that’s over.

2025, that is. It’s hard to know whether it was the worst-ever year, because it has had lots of competition. 1348 had the Black death, when millions in Europe were killed. Same with 1918, when the Spanish Flu did likewise, around the planet. 1933 was a contender, because that was the year Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany, with yet more innocents soon to be killed.

1962: China’s Great Leap Forward, which wasn’t, and in which Chinese-style communism killed millions. 2020, COVID-19, which killed seven million.

The year 2025, then, doesn’t really compare to those other terrible years. As Nicholas Kristof reminded us in the New York Times on Sunday, there have been some good things happening. Child mortality was down. Literacy, in some places, is up. Fewer people are dying from drug overdoses. Global extreme poverty eased in 2025.

Here in Canada, to everyone’s surprise, we had modest economic growth. Inflation went down, a bit. Donald Trump’s insane tariffs were supposed to push Canada into a recession, but didn’t. We had an election, and no one claimed it was stolen. No mobs stormed Parliament Hill. (The Blue Jays were robbed, however. That one still hurts.)

So, was 2025 all that bad? Well, yes, actually. Not so much here in the Great White North, but bad enough – and definitely bad elsewhere. Three big reasons.

Trump among top reasons

Donald Trump. He’s just so, so awful. You still may think he’s somehow praiseworthy, but you are very much in the minority. Presently, Trump is the most unpopular president of the Disunited States, pretty much ever. There’s ample reasons for that: the destructive tariffs; calling us the “51st state” and threatening to take fellow NATO states by force; the unprecedented use of the military against U.S. citizens; the promotion of anti-science, anti-vaccination nuttiness; the executive-level grift; the bombing of boats in international waters, and the unilateral renaming of international waters; the continued cover-up of the Epstein files, which are about rich and powerful pedophiles; and on and on.

Also, he’s just a jerk. Attacking Rob Reiner when the actor’s murdered? Saying he “hates” people, right after Charlie Kirk’s grieving widow called for Christian forgiveness? Calling women “pigs” and “garbage?” In almost every way, on almost every day in 2025, Trump II has been the worst.

Gen Z. I’ve got a book coming out about antisemitism and hate, and the biggest surprise in it, for me, was Gen Z – those roughly from age 19 to 25. They are, without exception, the most angry and hateful and conspiracy-minded demographic out there – and, in 2025, that’s saying something. When pollsters quizzed American Gen Z about the conflict in the Middle East, nearly half of them supported Hamas, a designated terror group. The same number were against – that is, against – a peace plan for the region. They just wanted Israel “ended.”

Meanwhile, in Canada, it was just as bad, or worse. More than 40 per cent of Canadian Gen Z – roughly three million people – sided with Hamas. And, in North America, everyone from the new director of CSIS to the Gallup pollsters have found that a growing number of Gen Z (and Millennials) favour the use of political violence, ie. terror, to achieve their goals – and are cynical about democracy, tolerance and government institutions..”

The year 2025 recalled that classic ’70s horror movie trope. You know: “The intruder is inside the house!”

The year it was popular to hate Jews

Jew hatred. “Antisemitism,” as a word, has clearly lost its emotional impact: it’s become so ubiquitous, so widespread across Western democracy, its (mostly Gen Z) practitioners just shrug when called antisemites – because they have strength in numbers.

So, in 2025, the “ceasefire now” mob got their sought-after ceasefire – but they still kept hating Jews and the Jewish state. And, even when Hamas started slaughtering innocent Palestinians – including children – the Jew-haters said, and did, nothing. The response of Canada and much of the West to all of that? Indifference, a collective shrug. Our government recognized a “state” run by a group that same government, literally, regards as a terror group.

Meanwhile, in the U.S., it was no better: the MAGA movement ushered antisemites into their coalition – with Vice-President JD Vance conspicuously refusing to condemn conspiracy-minded bigots/apologists like Megyn Kelly, Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson. Said one observer: “By failing to denounce antisemitism, Vance has emboldened its adherents to flaunt their prejudices more openly, to dehumanize Jews with greater abandon.”

Encouraged by all that, Hamas and its axis exported propaganda and murder throughout the West.

All in all, 2025 was not a great year. Not the worst, to be sure.