Only three days remain in 2025, which means it’s time for our annual look back at the year that was through the lens of what future historians might remember about this most recent trip around the sun.
BC: In many ways, 2025 has been a watershed for our evolving entertainment media landscape. For years, multiple trends have been upending established norms and bolstering new players, but rarely before has it felt like so many of them have been so prominent in the space of a single calendar year. The most basic of these is the declining health of the movie theater industry. The COVID pandemic in 2020 was disastrous for cinemas, and just as they began to regain their footing, strikes by both actors’ and writers’ guilds in 2023 crippled movie production for almost a year and put theaters back on the ropes. Huge blockbusters in the two years since have somewhat stabilized the industry, yet the continued prominence of short theater windows for films before their availability on streaming services combined with the insistence of major theater chains like AMC on raising ticket prices while simultaneously refusing to effectively police deteriorating behavior by some members of the public have led to continued downturn; in just the third quarter of 2025 alone, AMC reportedly lost a quarter of a billion dollars. While the end is not here yet, if things don’t turn around soon we face a near future without movie theaters, at least as we’ve known them for the past century.
All is not well in those aforementioned streaming services, either. For over a decade now, streaming has been heralded as the next evolution of television, cheaper, more personalized, and with higher quality content than cable. It’s steadily becoming apparent, however, that streaming did little more than reinvent television as it always has been; not only were none of these platforms profitable at their starting monthly price tag (or indeed any price tag, given how much money studios are pouring into direct-to-streaming content that can never possibly be made back through subscriptions alone), but the volume of quality content spread across all of them urges viewers to sign up for so many subscriptions that cable bills look small in comparison. Seeking to revise the balance sheet in their favor, all streaming services have begun cracking down on password sharing while also raising their prices, and 2025 has been filled with news of such increases; indeed, some services have increased multiple times within this same year! Though driven by different factors than other elements of the current affordability crisis, streaming continues to contribute its fair share.
Both of these general entertainment industry trends pale in comparison, however, to the high profile confluence of entertainment and politics in 2025. As with many industries in this “Second Gilded Age,” entertainment has seen a series of mergers and buyouts as major corporations seek to acquire their competitors and consolidate their hold on the market. The Federal Communications Commission has largely kept silent about these deals, but under the Trump administration its new head, Brendan Carr, has made it known that continued non-interference comes at a cost. In July, Skydance Media acquired the ailing Paramount Global—and to grease the wheels with the FCC, Paramount announced the cancellation of The Late Show with Steven Colbert after its current season ends in June of 2026. Colbert’s contract may have been up in June, and late night television has seen a steady downward trend in popularity, but these excuses rang hollow given that the Late Show is currently the highest rated such program and the celebrations of Trump and his officials, including Carr, at the silencing of one of their most outspoken popular critics (and some have wondered if the conservative Ellison family that is behind Skydance and, now, Paramount have set their sights on acquiring Warner Bros to further silence dissent). If anyone had any doubt about the quid pro quo of all this, just two months later in September Carr explicitly stated that if ABC did not take disciplinary action against talk show host Jimmy Kimmel for comments made in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, his agency would not look kindly on the merger that Nexstar, the biggest carrier of ABC stations, was then pursuing (and which in fact violates current laws against any single company owning a majority of news stations in the United States). Conservatives howled that the comments in question were out of line and lied about the shooter’s motivation—when in reality all Kimmel did was chide conservatives for immediately blaming any and all groups in the country other than themselves before any information was available—and then gleefully celebrated when first Nexstar and then ABC’s parent company Disney bent the knee and suspended Kimmel indefinitely. Much of the rest of the nation–joined by a small number of conservatives—recoiled in horror and disgust at such a blatant display of corruption and censorship, leading to a widespread boycott of Disney’s streaming service Disney+ and ultimately Kimmel’s reinstatement a week later. The damage has thus been mostly mitigated, but with no actual legal repercussions for the administration’s transgressions, it’s anyone’s guess what the future may hold for our First Amendment liberties, even as the familiar contours of our entertainment landscape evolve around us.
HC: I confess, I’ve never mastered the art of cut-and-dry history. Where others draw neat dividing lines, I delight in squiggles and swirls. Thankfully, history loves nuance, so in a nod to elisions like the long nineteenth century (1789’s French Revolution to 1914’s Great War outbreak), I’ll venture here to coin the term the long 2025. Why fudge the dates here? Because I’d like to make the case to consider the December 2024 shooting of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO as part of the 2025 timeline.
In many ways, the shooting of Brian Thompson (allegedly) by Luigi Mangione acted as the opening to 2025, as Mangione’s pretrial hearing in December 2024 served to close that year. Thompson’s death and its ensuing frenzy were inextricably woven into the following year’s fabric. When it became clear just how large a minority sided with Mangione, it shocked the nation, and particularly its older, more conservative citizens. But why the shock? For America’s young labor force, Thompson’s death didn’t feel untimely. It felt like symbolic and overdue vigilante justice, the antiheroism of a figure part Robin Hood, part John Brown. Behind the online avalanche of pro-Luigi memes was a sincere feeling of deep betrayal—betrayal by the very companies who promise to prioritize member well-being over corporate profit but who seem to side with shareholders at every turn.
Support for Mangione started strong and has just kept going. Directly after the shooting in December 2024, an Axios poll found that 41% of 18- to 39-year-old respondents felt the killing was “acceptable” or “somewhat acceptable.” Reasons for support given then and now have run the gamut. Some have offered their support reluctantly, seeing Mangione’s actions as a desperate attempt to give voice to the voiceless; as one Stanford student put it, “We want to believe that someone is fighting for us.” Other supporters have overtly championed the violence of Mangione’s act, at times even calling for further bloodshed.
Of course, public opinion about Mangione is just one piece of a larger conversation around political violence. A September 2025 Pew poll offered a glimpse into layperson perception when it reported that 85% of those polled believed politically motivated violence is on the rise in the United States.
Interestingly, positive opinion of political violence is growing most markedly on the Left. The first six months of 2025 saw a spike in left-wing terrorist attacks and plots, at 42% of the total and more than ten times the 1994 rate. After the September 10 assassination of far-right activist Charlie Kirk, a YouGov poll found younger and more left-leaning respondents were most likely to think being “happy about the death of a public figure they oppose” is “usually” or “always acceptable.” And in October, polling by PBS News, NPR, and the Marist Institute for Public Opinion demonstrated that 30% of respondents now believe Americans may need to take violent measures to “get the country back on track,” with Democrat participants showing the greatest shift for the evaluated period of April to October 2025. It should be noted, however, that despite this trend, the vast majority of actual acts of political violence are committed by individuals on the Right.
Long story short? The American melting pot is quickly reaching its next boiling point. And just as in the turbulent 1960s, some are already sounding the call to “Burn, baby, burn!”
FB: Traditional accounts explain that US Foreign Policy from 1789 to 1898 was isolationist. This is an incomplete narrative that ignores the US conquest of the West and America’s consistent military engagements within Latin America. Future historians may very well consider 2025 as the year in which the United States reasserted itself as a hemispheric hegemon, as it did throughout the Twentieth Century, and tested the constitutional limits of the Executive Branch’s diplomatic and warmaking powers.
The current US military attacks against speedboats leaving Venezuelan waters present the most pressing example of US hegemonic actions. The US War Department has ordered the Navy to bomb speedboats in the Caribbean Sea with the explanation that the people on these boats are transporting illegal drugs to America, that these drugs are weapons of mass destruction designed to kill Americans, and that the cartels transporting them are terrorist organizations. Such an explanation echoes both the casus belli that the Bush Administration used to invade Iraq in March 2003 and explanations that the US gave for intervening in Latin American countries in the 1900s. They are also parallels to US interventions to defend American business-interests or counter Cold War rivals throughout Latin America.
The current conflict between the United States and Venezuela is concerned with the issues of illegal drugs, Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro’s illiberal tactics meant to squash his opposition, and the Socialist policies of Maduro’s regime. Each of these sources of conflict have historical precedents in US covert or military operations during the Cold War. The United States intervened in Cuba and Nicaragua to destabilize Communist or Socialist regimes there. The most famous of these were the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion by exiled Cuban anti-Communists during JFK’s Presidency, an event that precipitated the Cuban Missile Crisis. Then, in the 1980s, the CIA facilitated the illegal sale of weapons to Iran to fund anti-Communist rebels in Nicaragua (all in violation of US law). The US calculated that such interventions were necessary to stop the spread of Soviet Communism. However, they were also initiated with dubious legality. As a covert operation, the Bay of Pigs Invasion was meant to spark a civil war in Cuba against the Communist regime of Fidel Castro without requiring a US ground invasion. JFK’s successful handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis swept the controversies of the Bay of Pigs Invasion from public discourse. Later, two members of President Reagan’s Administration were convicted for their role in the Iran Contra Affair, but the repercussions for breaking the law did not extend to Reagan himself. These evasions of full accountability for foreign policy miscalculations or overt illegal actions are similar to the lack of congressional oversight and accountability for high-ranking members of the Trump Administration whose orders and actions in the Caribbean have a high potential to break US law and the laws of war.
Moreover, US pressure against Maduro’s regime seeks to oust Maduro from power and install a pro-capitalist, pro-American government. While there are indeed clear reasons to criticize Maduro for managing a repressive, anti-democratic government whose policies have contributed to the mass emigration of Venezuelans over the last few years, the American desire for regime change has similar precedents in US interventions in Grenada and Panama in 1983 and 1989. In both cases, the US deposed regimes hostile to American interests. In Grenada, the US feared that the Socialist deposers of Grenada’s government threatened the safety of US students there while, in Panama, the US sought to eliminate dictator Manuel Noriega’s narco-funded government. Each of these interventions saw a change in government to one more favorable to US interests (and, albeit, sometimes the interests of US allies within the region), but were also orchestrated through war rather than diplomacy. If the US, in 2026, were to invade Venezuela, the closest corollary would be the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 since the United States has claimed that Venezuelans’ transport of illegal drugs constitute the distribution of weapons of mass destruction, akin to the charge leveled against Saddam Hussein’s regime, and that the US would be better served by a pro-American, pro-capitalist government that could provide regional stability.
In sum, 2025 may become the year that America’s Great Power Politics in Latin America returned in full force, reversing over thirty years of a more cooperative, diplomatic process for resolving regional disputes in the Americas and returning US Foreign Policy in the Western Hemisphere to one designed to protect American interests over respecting other nations’ sovereignty. The consistent power that the Executive Branch has had to initiate and implement these operations within the Caribbean Sea also raise questions about the evanescence of checks and balances and congressional authority within the US constitutional system. It certainly raises the question if the legal implementation of foreign policy and war powers now operate under the conditions of an unwritten, common-law interpretation of the Constitution that grants the Presidency the unchecked ability to wage and prosecute war without Congress, due to the many precedents of Presidents doing as such, even if the written letter of the law divides these powers between the Legislative and Executive Branches.