If the original American dream was that you could own a home, plant a tree, and not get gassed by your own government on a weeknight, that fantasy met its final act this month in the East Side of Chicago. A red SUV, a white SUV, a handful of agents playing Fast & Furious: Sanctuary City, and a few dozen ordinary residents—families, kids, grocery bags in hand—who now have to add “tear gas exposure” to the list of side effects of living in the United States in 2025.

The building that invented acronyms, leaks, and irony has decided it’s allergic to all three. According to CNN’s media desk, the Pentagon under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has rolled out sweeping new restrictions that would make even the Kremlin’s press office blush. The new “access pledge” requires journalists to sign away their ability to do journalism — barring them from seeking or publishing “unauthorized” information and forbidding movement without an escort.

There’s a certain kind of American optimism that only emerges when we start talking about statehood, the same bright-eyed, civics-class sparkle that insists representation is a moral right and not a political chess move. But let’s be honest—if every U.S. territory and D.C. were granted statehood tomorrow, the fireworks wouldn’t be about democracy fulfilled. They’d be about which side of the political spectrum gets to put twelve more shiny stars on their banner of self-interest.

Once upon a time, “Young Republicans” conjured up an image of overeager poli-sci majors in red ties quoting Reagan and networking over light beer. You know, the overconfident debate-team archetype—annoying, yes, but largely harmless. Fast-forward to 2025, and Politico has dropped a leak that proves the next generation of GOP leadership is less “country club conservatism” and more “Telegram channel reenacting the Reich.” Thousands of messages from a private chat labeled RESTOREYR WAR ROOM—because apparently every bigot thinks they’re running the Normandy invasion—show these rising stars gleefully swapping slurs, glorifying Hitler, joking about gas chambers, and plotting party takeovers as if they were auditioning for a Proud Boys internship.

There was a time, not all that long ago, when America had one reality. It wasn’t perfect, but at least it was shared. We all tuned in to Walter Cronkite or Peter Jennings or Dan Rather. The evening news would come on, everyone would collectively lower their voices, and for thirty blessed minutes the country had something resembling a common narrative.

There’s something serenely apocalyptic in waking up to the news that a former prime minister of Canada is now a tabloid subject aboard a yacht off Santa Barbara. What began as a vintage clickbait headline—“Katy Perry caught on camera kissing a shirtless Justin Trudeau”—has erupted into real tabloids printing fresh, full-color proof: Perry and Trudeau were photographed embracing and kissing on her yacht, confirming months of rumors that had once seemed the fever dream of gossip columnists.

There’s a particular tone you can hear only in the voice of a man who has seen the apocalypse, accepted it, and still shows up for soundcheck. Marc Maron has been that voice for sixteen years—equal parts therapy session, post-mortem, and open-mic confession booth—and on October 13, 2025, he turned off the mic for good. The final episode of WTF…

In international diplomacy, plagiarism usually comes in subtler forms. A reworded communique here, a borrowed talking point there, maybe a flag repositioned in front of the podium to make it look like something new. But leave it to Donald Trump to turn global peacemaking into the intellectual equivalent of copying someone else’s term paper and stapling your name to the cover.

It begins, as all global crises now do, with a push notification and an open microphone. President Donald Trump, standing at a White House podium flanked by flags and self-importance, threatened to send Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine unless Vladimir Putin “ended the invasion immediately.” In Trump’s world, diplomacy is performance art—equal parts bluster, bluff, and Broadway show tune. Somewhere deep in the Pentagon, a general probably mouthed the words…

In a city famous for kombucha, kale, and kombucha-flavored kale, it was only a matter of time before San Francisco’s billionaires decided the next great innovation would be fascism—but with better UX. On October 12, 2025, the San Francisco Chronicle reported the unthinkable: Elon Musk and Marc Benioff, two of the Bay Area’s most inflated egos, agreed on something. For the first time since the tech boom began, the billionaire class has found its North Star.

There’s an old superstition that when the world begins to eat itself, a showman appears to tell it the apocalypse is just a ratings opportunity. Even if you don’t believe in God, hell, or horned beasts rising from the sea, you have to admit that Donald Trump’s recent “peace deal” in the Middle East reads less like diplomacy and more like Revelation fan fiction.

You knew it would happen: someone on 60 Minutes lifting it all up, peering into the neon smog of 2025, and muttering, “I think it’s a bubble.” That someone was Andrew Ross Sorkin. As markets wobble after tariff threats, Sorkin told Lesley Stahl that today’s economy is being propped up by an AI sugar rush—hundreds of billions are flooding into chips, data centers, startups—while the guardrails come off, transparency fades, and ordinary Americans become collateral in the next speculative swing.

Congratulations, America. We’ve finally done it. We’ve brought back a disease that modern medicine already defeated when bell-bottoms were still a gleam in disco’s eye. Somewhere, Jonas Salk is shaking his head in the afterlife, muttering, “I leave you people alone for sixty years and you start playing Oregon Trail again.” According to NPR, the United States is now enjoying a full-blown measles revival tour.

Somewhere between your tenth doomscroll of the morning and your third attempt to remember which war we’re supposed to care about this week, PBS quietly aired the most important documentary of the decade — Raoul Peck’s Orwell: 2+2=5 — and almost no one noticed, because there wasn’t a trailer trending on TikTok. It’s a film about how truth has become a boutique subscription service, curated by algorithms and sponsored by defense contractors.

I want to start by acknowledging that writing satire about someone’s death is delicate—especially when the person is beloved, irreplaceable, and has left an indelible mark on our lives. Diane Keaton’s passing on October 11, 2025, at age 79, is real grief; the only ironic jabs I’ll risk are at the world she leaves behind, not at her memory. A Quiet Exit in a Loud Year…

If you ever needed proof that America has officially become a satire written by a malfunctioning chatbot, behold: the CDC accidentally fired itself during a government shutdown. Not metaphorically. Not “downsized for efficiency.” Literally—hundreds of our nation’s top epidemiologists, lab chiefs, and field investigators got layoff emails mid-pandemic prep because someone in Washington pressed “Send All” instead of “Save Draft.”

On the heels of a government shutdown, a stock market trembling under tariff scares, and a political climate so charged it could detonate, comes news that seems tailor-made for the age of rival prosecutions: former National Security Adviser John Bolton is expected to be indicted as early as next week. FBI agents searched his Maryland home and Washington, D.C. office in late summer.

If you ever wondered how quickly a global economy can go from “steady simmer” to “rolling boil,” welcome to the October 2025 edition. Beijing quietly dropped new export controls on rare earths. Trump responded by threatening a blanket 100 percent tariff on all Chinese imports beginning Nov. 1 (or “sooner,” depending on China’s mood). He also floated export curbs on critical American software and cast doubt—then backpedaled—on whether he would even meet Xi Jinping at APEC in South Korea.

In what can only be described as a collaboration between Law & Order: SVU and Real Housewives of Potomac, NBC News reports that Dr. Wendy Osefo and her husband, Edward, have been arrested in Maryland for allegedly staging a home burglary to collect a fat insurance payout. Yes, you read that right. Another week, another Bravo star allegedly confusing “storyline” with “criminal enterprise.”

At dawn on October 10, 2025, House Speaker Mike Johnson went on Fox News and denounced the upcoming No Kings rally as a “hate America” event. He claimed it would be populated by the “pro-Hamas wing” and “ANTIFA people,” accused Democrats of selling T-shirts to support it, and ominously warned that the government would stay shut down because lawmakers can’t face their “rabid base.”

Week two of the federal shutdown was supposed to be grim but familiar—employees furloughed, services on pause, griping about microwave lines in the Pentagon cafeteria. But this week, the White House slipped a clause into the apocalypse: permanent layoffs, not temporary pauses. On October 2025’s midpoint, OMB Director Russ Vought dropped the bomb that “the RIFs have begun.” That’s bureaucrat-speak for “the culling starts now.” Over 4,000 civil servants—across HHS, DHS, Treasury, Commerce, Interior, EPA, NOAA, National Parks, and more—are in the crosshairs.

There’s a new kind of foreign investment in America—one that comes with F-15s, a ten-year commitment, and a PR team insisting it’s definitely not a base. This week, the Pentagon proudly unveiled plans for a Qatar-funded “training complex” at Mountain Home Air Force Base in Idaho, which will host Qatari pilots and their U.S.-made fighter jets for joint training under “American command and jurisdiction.” It’s technically U.S.-controlled, sure, but it’s also, you know, …

Somewhere in a Pentagon sub-basement or a Mar-a-Lago group chat, someone must have said, “What if we just did 2020 again—but meaner?” Because here we are, October 2025, and President Donald Trump has decided to reboot his greatest hits tour: the “War on Antifa.” It’s like the “War on Drugs,” but with fewer facts and more merch. This week, MSNBC broke down how Trump’s new executive order claims to…

If you logged into X on October 9 or 10, 2025, you probably expected the usual feed: a few memes, your cousin’s dog video, maybe one of those cryptic subtweets from someone who still thinks “vaguebooking” works in 280 characters. Instead, what you got was a carnival barker’s megaphone of right-wing political content—accounts you never followed, takes you never asked for, rants you thought you blocked years ago.