Looking back at 2025, it’s easy to mistake noise for impact.
It’s been a wild year. And while most events that have taken place were loud, their impact was also fleeting. Very few will truly reshape the future.
For example, the idiotic “No Kings Day” protests of 2025 monopolized the headlines for weeks. But they won’t even be worth a footnote in five years’ time.
This week as we start to close out the year, we wanted to spend some time examining the most impactful events of 2025— what happened this year that will still matter a decade (or more) from now?
Or, put another way, what trends will unfold in the future that we can directly link in a straight line to something that happened in 2025?
We’ve identified a few that we’ll discuss throughout the week. And today we’re starting with the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
To say this was a big deal is an incredible understatement. Charlie Kirk became famous for engaging in rational discussion with people on college campuses— especially those with opposing political beliefs.
He wanted to debate the merits of ideas. And they shot him for it.
True, it was a single person who pulled the trigger. But there are legions of individuals and institutions that are wickedly complicit in his murder, and in the celebrations after the fact.
We’ve been hearing the legacy media lecture us for years that Trump ‘incites violence’. Yet that same media somehow failed to realize that constantly screaming that conservatives like Charlie Kirk are “fascist”, a “threat to democracy”, and “Hitler”, day after day, would lead to political violence.
And it crystallized what many of us long suspected: the Left is not interested in dialogue. They just want the other side to shut up… or die.
They can’t make a rational argument in favor of their positions. They can’t justify the abject failures of their policies— crime, homelessness, immigration, etc.— with any credible facts.
Instead they just whine and scream and call their ideological opponents racists, bigots, fascists, transphobes, Islamophobes, science deniers, misogynists, etc. And when that stops working, they start assassinating conservative leadership.
They failed twice with Trump. But they succeeded with Charlie Kirk.
And then came the celebrations… from prominent media personalities to everyday leftists.
They defended their glee by quoting Kirk’s “hate speech”, typically quotes that he either never actually said, or were taken completely out of context.
Hardly anyone who took pleasure in his assassination ever bothered to actually listen to him or watch a single debate. It was like the ‘Two Minutes Hate’ from Orwell’s 1984— they were programmed to despise him without knowing the first thing about him.
But if the Left had actually listened to what he said—instead of the caricature they built—they would have seen a man who believed deeply in the most foundational of American values. Free speech. Open debate. The right to be heard—even when you’re unpopular.
That’s why he died.
But Kirk’s death triggered a visceral reaction, especially among countless young white men who the progressive Left loves to mock, marginalize, and blame for every injustice of the last 400 years. This was their breaking point.
Young white men have been instructed for years that they’re toxic racist misogynists who should happily sacrifice their own opportunities because of things that happened centuries ago.
And Kirk’s death crystallized something for them: the Left will never stop. They cannot be appeased. And at their core, they are violent, oppressive thugs whose positions have no basis in reality.
Charlie Kirk’s assassination fundamentally changed a lot of people.
I believe there’s a generation now that will no longer apologize for their beliefs and world view. They are no longer willing to shut up and allow the Leftist fanatics to control the narrative and invent an endless string of victimhood, from #MeToo to Black Lives Matter, gender ideology, and Hamas.
And they will now fight for free speech—because they now understand those are the stakes; this liberty is the last thing standing in the way of the Left’s destruction of Western Civilization.
2025 became the year that you were once again allowed to express your opinion without the fear of being canceled.
People are less likely than anytime in at least the last decade to censor themselves to appease the establishment or the woke mob.
After nearly a decade of the Left calling anyone who disagreed with them a racist, fascist, or some freshly invented ‘phobe’, the magic finally wore off. And 2025 was the year the spell broke.
Once people stop fearing those labels, the entire apparatus collapses. That’s what’s happening now. The public isn’t flinching anymore. They’re speaking openly again, questioning openly again. The monopoly on “acceptable opinion” is gone—and with it, the Left’s most effective tool of control.
That makes me optimistic for the future. Because in a world of open debate, the best ideas win.
And I believe that, a decade down the road, it will be clear that 2025 was a turning point for the better.
