A Year in Chaos
After chaos, is there a super-chaos?
By all accounts, 536 started bad and got worse.
The Ostrogoths were at war with the Byzantines, and winning; Carthage was under siege by mutineers; the Patriarch of Constantinople was deposed; and both the Pope and the Emperor of Japan died.
And then, the sun disappeared.
“Each day, it shone for about four hours, and even then this light was only a faint shadow. Everyone declared that it would not return to that state of its original light,” writes Michael the Syrian, an Orthodox saint and historian. “Fruits didn’t ripen; and the wine had the taste of something that came from sour grapes.”1
Another Byzantine historian wrote: “The Sun gave forth its light without brightness, like the Moon, during this whole year.”2 A Mesopotamian source recalls birds falling from the sky and widespread distress amongst men “from the evil things.” A writer in Rome tells of mothers forced to eat their own children. The annals of Ulster were more succinct: “Failure of bread.”
Mixing historical records with climate data, it appears that across Europe, Asia, and Northern Africa, harvests were decimated, animals were spooked, and populations fell into despair. Modern scholars believe it was all due to a single volcanic eruption, perhaps in Iceland, which spit out a dark soot into the skies above Western civilization — lingering there for, according to some sources, 18 months.
The severity of the destruction of 536 would not end with the return of the sun’s warmth. Some scientists and historians theorize that the miserable chill which descended across the cradle of Western civilization set the conditions for plague rats to enter the ports near Suez, where they were carried on to the cramped metropolis of Constantinople. That plague, the first major one in recorded history, is thought to have killed one-in-five in the capital of the empire. Even Emperor Justinian I (no relation) fell ill.
Some go so far as to argue that 536 is the gateway between antiquity and the Middle Ages.
“The importance of this cloud resides in the fact that its mass and its climatic consequences appear to exceed those of any other volcanic cloud observed during the past three millennia,” observed Richard Strothers, the NASA scientist who helped find evidence of this climate catastrophe in 1983.
Whenever the conversation turns to truly dour and chaotic years, people can’t help but point to the truly shit epoch of 536. It was “the worst year to be alive,” per one academic of Medieval history. It is nothing short of a “forgotten apocalypse,” per one biologist. For the past century, the year has become a helpful shorthand for shrugging off our current woes: Well, at least it’s not 536. In thinking of rivals to the miserable year 2020, Vox immediately jumped to 536.
In looking back on the chaos and dark clouds of 2025, I found myself thinking about 536.
But then I ran into a problem. For the small stack of sources seemingly referencing the blotting out of the sun — mostly compiled by Medieval historians — there are just as many sources who mention no such thing. In fact, some contemporaneous sources suggest a perfectly bountiful harvest that year in some corners of Europe and North Africa, and relative normalcy in East Asia. Where hunger and misery were reported, it was in the cities beset by siege and war.
Antti Arjava, a Finnish philologist, penned a fascinating investigation into this mystery cloud in 2005. “Not only is there nothing in our evidence to suggest that the year 536 was a watershed moment between antiquity and the Middle Ages,” he writes, but “it is also evident that, although the cloud occasioned confusion and crop failure at the time of its appearance, its effects did not last long after it had dissipated.”3 And far from 18 months, it seems that the soot plagued certain areas for just weeks.
Subsequent study of tree-rings suggests that a 536 volcanic eruption in North America could have led to crop failure and pestilence in Europe — if so, probably in a smaller area than some writers suggested. But, these data suggest, it is just as likely that another massive eruption a few years later could also explain some of the more extreme climate fluctuations for which 536 has been blamed.4
And so I can’t help but wonder if we’ve been unfairly maligning 536 this whole time. The year was, certainly, no great time for humanity. But, by most accounts, it was followed by years of relative normalcy — and then eclipsed five years later by misery and misfortune that none could have predicted.
As Arjava writes, the evidence suggests 536 was more of a “temporary misfortune.”
So this week, on a very special Bug-eyed and Shameless clip show, a quick look back at a terrible year and a plea that is remembered just as a temporary misfortune.
In the days before President Donald Trump was inaugurated for his improbable second term, I wrote that he “returns to the White House in a fairly weak position.”
Boy was I wrong.
I think I got the constituent parts right: Trump did not, in fact, achieve a peace deal in Ukraine; he did not successfully slay America’s ballooning debt problem; he did not revive American manufacturing; nor has he meaningfully cut taxes; untangled the Gordian knot of American healthcare; or done much else good.
What he did manage to do, even moreso than my dour prediction from last January, was to create a codependent relationship with his most radical fans, influencers, and advisors. Donald Trump has fashioned himself into a reality show despot, and that’s how he’s governed America for the past 12 months. The information apparatuses which surround him are now working overtime to justify his illiberal administration and push him towards increasingly bonkers actions — annexing Greenland, using the military to occupy all major cities, abolishing representative democracy, and so on.
While there’s no doubting that recent weeks have knocked Trump on the backfoot, particularly as he fumbles around the fallout of the Epstein files release and faces the first sustained pushback from his party of sycophants, I think we have every reason to believe he’ll regain the initiative in the New Year.
At the same time, the anti-Trump forces are finally beginning to figure themselves out. Just about 12 months ago, I derided Mark Carney — who hadn’t even yet announced his bid to become Prime Minister of Canada — for speaking in pablum. As anyone who followed by Chaos Campaign mini-newsletter can attest, Carney did eventually figure out how to situate himself against Trump in a way that was both popular and effective.
From Carney to Zohran Mamdani to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Doug Ford, Gavin Newsom, and (most surprising of all) Marjorie Taylor-Greene, we’re seeing a rise of politicians the world over who are finding effective ways of challenging Trump’s overt fascism with their own flavors of liberal(-ish) populism.
Here’s hoping for more of that in 2026.
(Read also: The Neo-Reactionary Regime and They’re Going to Try Fauci for Treason)
For all of the justifiable kvetching around Donald Trump’s open economic warfare against the world, we’ve still got very little appreciation for just how much the world is about to change.
Looking back at America’s past dalliances with protectionism, it struck me just how long the tails of disruption really were.
Historically, beggar-thy-neighbor policies — tariffs, in particular — do work in the short term, kind of. You create breathing room for domestic industry to beat imports on price, you raise money for the treasury, and you incentivize increased domestic production.
But history has shown us again and again and again that these benefits are often exaggerated and are eventually eclipsed by high-prices, a lack of genuine competition, and a lack of innovation. The effects, however, are gargantuan: American protectionism both begets protectionism abroad, and pushes like-minded countries into tighter pacts.
Donald Trump seems to be speedrunning the historical precedent, ripping up supply chains and trade deals with such speed that he’s spooked investors to point where he’s not even getting the short-term sugar rush that past administrations have earned.
You’d think, from the top-line numbers, that things are going well. America grew an estimated 4.3% in the third quarter, far outpacing expectations, while it added about 64,000 private sector jobs. He’s buoyed, too, by around $200 billion in tariff revenue.
But scratch at those numbers and things look dire.
The economic growth is driven largely by consumer spending and a huge surge in the valuation of AI companies. Consumer spending has likely been driven by waning inflation, but that comes as American inflation ticks back up. Modest private sector job growth, meanwhile, can’t make up for public sector layoffs. Tariffs may be pulling in cash, but the revenue is only a tenth of the current budget deficit, meaning Trump doesn’t have a ton of leeway to mail our bribery cheques or bail out struggling sectors. The tariffs are also battering the manufacturing sector, doing exactly the opposite of what Trump wants.
Trump will keep digging down. The Supreme Court may strike down his tariffs as unconstitutional, but he’ll find a new legal justification to reapply them. Some foreign states may try and bribe Trump and/or America to secure lower tariff rates, but major economies are already backing off this race to the bottom. Trade deals will come up for review — CUSMA, in particular — and they are likely to end in disaster.
And yet, with policy continuing to be dictated by quack-economist-in-chief Peter Navarro, it seems unlikely that the administration will alter course.
If 2025 saw most foreign leaders angling for deals, I suspect 2026 will be the year those countries begin looking for new markets.
(Read also: There Is No Land Unhabitable, Nor Sea Innavigable)
If 536 was the year that an ominous cloud stretched over Europe, 2025 was the year that the choking cloud of health misinformation and endemic institutional distrust finally settled over America.
The boils and legions of the Make America Healthy Again movement — fattened on anti-scientific hokum, get-rich-quick grifters, and Russian disinformation — spread across the American public health system with terrifying speed. Led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr, but enabled by a crazed harem of like-minded kooks and opportunists, the American state has rejected vaccines, made villains of doctors and scientists, and prioritized wishful thinking as a cure-all.
I’m always loath to give the troll propagandists in Moscow too much credit, but it’s hard to discount the degree to which Russia has been working to breed this sort of distrust. They’ve finally succeeded, to a degree that none of us really expected.
It has not been a good year for Ukraine.
It has not been as bad a year for Ukraine as it could have been.
Throughout 2025, Kyiv has had to balance its pressing concerns — prosecuting its war on the frontlines, defending its cities from bombardment, managing Donald Trump’s mood swings, amongst other challenges. There is simply no way to manage those things without making some significant sacrifices and accepting some horrific losses. But, going into 2026, the balance remains intact.
Russia, meanwhile, has had a better year than it should have. It has kept together its band of rogue states — from Venezuela to the Central African Republic to North Korea — and juiced its arms industry with ample government cash. Its citizenry remains willing to shoulder the massive cost of this war (now well past 1 million Russian dead and wounded) so long as their pensions remain solvent and their lives remain mostly uninterrupted. Moscow’s flattery of the U.S. president has yet to deliver real results, but Putin keeps getting close to fully winning over Trump.
In that way, both Russia and Ukraine have been desperately gripping their status quo while attempting to knock the other off balance. Going in 2026, it remains unclear who will wobble first.
But I continue to put my chips on Ukraine. For its repeated testing, European solidarity with Ukraine remains strong. (While Canadian, Australian, and Japanese support has been unwavering.) The Ukrainian people do not have endless patience for the foibles of their president, but they are consistently resilient. Ukrainian power plants and apartment blocks can be bombed, but Russia has utterly failed in breaking the spirit of the people they are laying siege to.
Russia continues to sturdy itself on fragile pillars. Its people are more comfortable than loyal. Taxes are going up, interest rates remain high, inflation is persisting, and growth is weak. Its global allies are coming under enormous pressure, and it is extremely likely that more of its dependable client despots will be gone before 2026 is out. Its meddling in Europe is winning over a few new allies, but it is hardening the resolve of everyone else. It is advancing on the battlefield, but not by enough to justify the self-harm it is inflicting.
There’s no good reason to think the war against Ukraine will end in 2026, but it’s always worth hoping it will — replaced with a real, just, and lasting peace.
(Read also: Next Time, in Moscow and The Wagner Group in Africa)
There’s a word I’ve had stuck in my head as 2025 comes to a close: Hyperreality.
The word was conjured up by a French philosopher, but it was really defined and adapted by Sovietologist Mikhail Epstein. In a 2000 paper, he considers the way in which reality was distorted and adapted under Joseph Stalin until there “were almost no gaps” between party line and the real world.
Epstein: Any reality that differed from the ideology simply ceased to exist — it was replaced by hyperreality, which trumpeted its existence by newspaper and loudspeaker and was much more tangible and reliable than anything else. In the Soviet land, “fairy tale became fact.”5
Epstein likens the cult of personality around Stalin — the supposed struggle for the working class, the euphemistic horrors of the “collective farm,” the fight against fascism happening while Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact remained in place — to Disneyland on a national scale. “Communist ideology cannot be accused of lying, since it creates the very world that it describes,” he writes.
Over 2025, millions of people have been convinced to build this hyperreality — in America, in Russia, in Israel, and further afield. Videos of starving Palestinian children can’t be true because the state says it isn’t so, their swollen bellies existing, in fact, as proof of a conspiracy against Israel. Unidentified goon squads grab Americans off the street, sending them off to foreign torture facilities without any due process or rationale, and they are venerated in AI-generated memes as an example of freedom returning. Pardoning and collaborating drug traffickers and sex criminals is a blow against drug traffickers and sex criminals. War is peace.
The information ecosystem which propagates this hyperreality has never been more popular, populated, lucrative, manipulated, co-opted, and easy to join.
There are early indications that things may be falling apart. People are disengaging from an internet obsessed with making them mad. A civil war in MAGAland is prompting some to wake up and recognize the rage industrial complex to which they’ve contributed. There is a pining for a return to real human interactions and physical media, the antithesis of this digital hyperreality.
I’m not so hopeful as to think that 2026 will mean an end to the lies, deception, and anger of our modern age. But I do know that hyperreality has to break at some point.
(Read also: A Man on the Street, A Movement of Weaklings; Hey @Grok, Is My Brain Melting?; The Eye That Never Sleeps)
That’s it for this little year-in-review dispatch.
I’m looking to start 2026 strong, with a good barrage of new BE&S content for your inboxes. So stay tuned.
If you haven’t already, please go over to YouTube and subscribe to Soft Power — new episodes will be dropping later in January.
At the Star, I have some year-end thoughts about Mark Carney and Pierre Poilievre.
I hope everyone’s holidays were pleasant. Thanks, once more, for continuing to support this newsletter.
And happy new year!
Chronique de Michel le Syrien Part 2, Michael the Syrian. Translation: J.-B. Chabot. (1901)
Mystery Cloud of AD 536, R.B. Strothers. (Nature, 1984)
The Mystery Cloud of 536 CE in the Mediterranean Sources, Antti Arjava (Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 2005)
Timing and climate forcing of volcanic eruptions for the past 2,500 years, M. Sigl et al. (Nature, 2015.)
Postmodemism, Communism, and Sots-Art, Mikhail Epstein; in Endquote Sots-Art Literature and Soviet Grand Style, edited by Marina Balina, Nancy Condee, and Evgeny Dobrenko. (2000)