What You Read, Watched, and Shared Most in 2025

And why it mattered.

As 2025 comes to a close, I wanted to pause and reflect not just on what I wrote or recorded, but on what you chose to engage with most.

These were the pieces you read closely, shared widely, commented on, and came back to. Together, they tell a story about what mattered this year, and about the kind of community we’re building.

This isn’t a victory lap. It’s a reflection on attention: where it went, and why that choice mattered.

1. 🎥 The Sound of the U.S.–Mexican Border Isn’t Fear. It’s Music.

The work pushed back on one of the most overused and distorted narratives in American politics. Instead of fear, it centered lived experience, culture, and humanity. It mattered because borders aren’t abstractions. They’re communities. And telling that story honestly cuts through propaganda more effectively than outrage ever could. You saw that firsthand when I walked you through Puerto Palomas, Mexico, a real place with real people, not a talking point. In the year ahead, I’ll continue taking you to places and perspectives grounded in lived experience, not abstraction.

2. 🎥 No Kings Coverage with Jim Acosta and the Rally in El Paso, Texas

What mattered here wasn’t commentary; it was documentation. And what stood out here was presence. Capturing events as they unfolded, grounded in real places and real people, including El Paso, where these debates aren’t theoretical. Recording truth in real time matters, especially when later attempts are made to revise or erase it.

3. 🎥 Live: “No ICE in My Cup” –World Cup Draw

The moment captured something increasingly rare: civic expression without performance. It was about visibility, solidarity, and showing up where power didn’t expect resistance, on a global stage built for spectacle, not accountability. In 2025, moments like this underscored a simple truth: sometimes presence itself is the message.

That lesson matters going forward. As cities, small business owners, and local communities around the world prepare to navigate the World Cup here in the United States, showing up thoughtfully, visibly, and together will be essential to ensuring that an event meant to unite doesn’t leave communities behind.

4. Attempted Silencing by Lawsuit: Why This Matters

Throughout the year, we saw moments of intimidation not as an anomaly, but as a tactic. For me, personally, after being sued again over the same claim that had already been dismissed in court, the pattern was unmistakable. Litigation, even when meritless, is often used not to win on the facts, but to impose cost, pressure, and silence. It’s a familiar approach from Richard Grenell, whose recent theatrics at the Kennedy Center only reinforce the point.

Freedom of speech rarely disappears all at once. More often, it’s narrowed through attrition—through expense, delay, and fear. Naming that process, and refusing to normalize it, remains one of the most effective forms of defense. And to be clear I’m not shutting up, or going anywhere!

5. Behind the Noise: The Document You Didn’t Hear About

While the country was consumed by daily outrage cycles, a far more consequential shift happened quietly: the White House rewrote America’s National Security Strategy.

This piece mattered because it redirected attention from spectacle to structure. It explained how migration was elevated above Russia and China as the central security threat, how a newly named “Trump Corollary” reoriented military posture across the Western Hemisphere, and how culture-war ideology was embedded directly into national security policy.

What stood out wasn’t just what the document said, but how few people noticed it at all. This was the operating system beneath the noise, and understanding it helped clarify why so many seemingly disconnected decisions in 2025 began to align.

6. The Adversary I Misjudged: My Reckoning

There were a lot of significant changes in the national media space. I highlighted a moment of reckoning: personal, but not isolated. It mattered because reassessment isn’t weakness; it’s accountability. In a year when certainty was often rewarded over honesty, this piece made space for reflection and growth. We’re seeing that same instinct carry forward across the media landscape, as voices like Joy-Ann Reid build independent platforms rooted in clarity rather than conformity.

7. Susie Wiles and the Myth of “Not Being an Enabler”

One of the most comfortable fictions inside power was confronted head-on: the belief that proximity equals restraint. Drawing on firsthand experience and reporting about Susie Wiles’s role inside Trump’s White House, the piece examined how systems are designed to erode conscience–not all at once, but incrementally—until facilitation replaces accountability. What came into focus was a harder truth: you don’t sanitize a dangerous system by standing close to it. You professionalize it.

8. Tim Haugh’s Firing Is a Red Alert

Quiet decisions inside institutions often signal more about the future than public speeches ever will. What made this moment especially consequential was what lay beneath it: the removal of experienced leadership at the National Security Agency and Cyber Command at a time when surveillance authorities like FISA Section 702 sit at the center of national debate. The piece traced how the loss of principled, independent leadership isn’t just a management issue; it has real implications for privacy, civil liberties, and how power is exercised behind closed doors.

9. First They Came for the Immigrants

This piece marked a turning point: the moment immigration enforcement crossed into the erosion of citizenship itself. It documented verified cases of U.S. citizen children being deported alongside their parents, not as a bureaucratic error, but as a policy signal. What came into focus was how quickly protections once considered absolute can become conditional, and how normalization works when cruelty is framed as enforcement and due process is treated as optional.

10. 60 Minutes Exposed It: The First Amendment

The contrast was stark. As Washington celebrated itself, a national warning was unfolding in plain sight. Drawing on reporting highlighted by 60 Minutes and the growing role of independent media, the focus turned to mounting pressure on journalists and the quiet effort to control, intimidate, or sideline factual reporting. What came into focus was a simple reality: a free press doesn’t erode all at once. It weakens when threats are normalized, pressure is dismissed, and defense of the First Amendment is treated as symbolic rather than essential.

Across all of these pieces, the pattern is clear.

What ties these pieces together isn’t outrage. It’s context. You didn’t just click headlines. You stayed for explanation, accountability, and lived experience. That says something important about this community. None of this was passive consumption. It was attention, chosen deliberately in a noisy year. And attention, sustained over time, remains one of the most powerful tools we have.

Thank you for staying curious, for valuing context over chaos, and for continuing to pay attention when it would have been easier not to. As we move into 2026, let’s keep this commitment to clarity and attention alive, together.

On January 6, 2026, I’ll be in Washington, DC with Jim Acosta, Glenn Kirschner, Harry Dunn, Miles Taylor, and others for a live, in-person discussion marking five years since the attack on the U.S. Capitol. Reclaiming Democracy: Five Years Later. The past informs us. The future demands us. Get tickets: HERE.

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See you in the New Year!
-Olivia