You would think a miserable year would be inspirational for a true hater. In actuality, it was hard to hold onto petty grievances and curmudgeonly grudges when the world has tilted into disarray. There is no respite from our constant toiling in a dystopian nightmare. Who really cares about Travis Scott and his Gatorade commercial music when you see what's happening to Palestine, Sudan, and immigrants right here at home? But criticism is about forming opinions and maintaining standards on what art should aspire to, and calling things out when that standard is not being upheld. Through the best of times and the worst of them.
And so we have the 2025 Hate List, my own Hater's Ball about the bullshit and shenanigans of a year that I cannot be silent about. It's a varied collection, a snapshot of the kinds of drivel and dishonesty that have been allowed to thrive mostly unchecked for much of the year. It's also full of pettiness, because sometimes you hate things for no other reason than the love of the game. But just as it's important to catalog the year's worst offerings, it's also important to give clarity on what is not featured on this list and why.
For starters, some things are so obviously detestable, there's no reason to give them more space than they deserve. That's why neither Donald Trump nor the many cronies in his administration are on this list. I've also left out the various members of the news and sports media who have gone out of their way to obscure facts or position themselves as celebrities in their own right at the expense of their job to inform people—the starfuckers, access junkies, aspiring influencers, eugenicist freaks, and Pat McAfees alike. Even Bari Weiss's invasion of CBS News fits into this mold. A special exception has been made for two men, and we'll get to why that is in time. No podcasters or YouTubers here either—if I had a nickel for every podcaster that made me sick to my stomach, I'd be the one buying Warner Bros. right now.
It's safe to say that if there's a media member or YouTuber worth hating, I already do. This is also true for politicians and the entire tech industry. AI is obviously hateable, Peter Thiel is obviously evil, Elon Musk is obviously on so many drugs that not only does he look like a walrus now, he might actually think he is one. These people are clowns who we have to take seriously because they're destroying the world, but understand they are disgusting clowns. Deserving of hate, but not deserving of being on this list.
Because this is the 2025 Hate List, we are keeping this to people who made themselves hateable in this year alone. I'd love an excuse to shit on J. Cole, Travis Scott, or Sam Levinson for instance, but they didn't do much this year to give me that excuse. This is about 2025, and it's important to celebrate the people who achieved the most in earning dishonor in my eyes.
The Year In Documentaries
To paraphrase the kids, the collapse in the quality of documentary filmmaking needs to be studied. The last couple years have seen the documentary subsumed fully into literal commercial filmmaking. Thanks to streaming library overinflation and cozy relationships with famous subjects—themselves often the producers of their own "documentaries"—the genre has lost much of the rigor, insight, and perspective it was once known for and has now devolved into just a marketing tool for celebrity. You can be like Robert Kraft and use the documentary to spin the narrative that you were the good guy in your fight against the legendary coach you fired. You can also be like Bill Belichick and greenlight, but later cancel, a doc made about you when it becomes clear that your new team sucks and won't bolster your hagiography. Even documentaries that cover crimes or infamous news stories end up shoddy, getting mindlessly churned out by streamers that care more about keeping you on their service than quality. At best these docs provide no meaningful insight, and at worst they completely upend facts for more dramatic conspiracies, like the Netflix Jussie Smollett documentary. The form as a whole is in a sorry state right now.
Ja Morant
I have put up with a lot of Ja Morant's bullshit in the past, because I (still) want him to succeed. He's shown himself wholly incapable of making good decisions either on or off the court, he talks as if his team has been better than play-in quality for the last couple years, and nobody who griddies that much can ever be taken that seriously. This year really did him in for me: from the press conferences throwing his new coaching staff under the bus, to getting suspended, to starting fights with Klay Thompson while riding the bench. By the way, the Memphis Grizzlies are three games under .500 as of writing. We'd all love to see an American superstar again, but Anthony Edwards actually helps his team win games. I don't care how many shoes Morant sells; he sucks. And he seems hellbent on living out the Allen Iverson trajectory, despite not being one-fifth the megastar Iverson was.
Anemone, dir. by Ronan Day-Lewis
Anemone, the acting return of Daniel Day-Lewis, is not the worst movie I've ever seen or even the worse one I've seen this year. It is, however, the most shameless. DDL's dumb kid coaxed him out of retirement for what is essentially a dumb rich bro's kind of movie: all surface-level philosophy and cheap homages to better movies made by his father. The story follows DDL as Ray, a former soldier in Northern Ireland who has lived in the woods as a hermit, cut off from civilization and from his son, who has been raised by Ray's ex-wife and his brother Jem (Sean Bean). Jem makes the journey into the woods to reconnect with Ray when the son gets into a bad situation and needs ... guidance, I guess, from the father he's never met. Whatever psychological mumbo jumbo is happening with that plot line, the movie is mostly betting that DDL is such a good actor that he can just sort of pantomime past performances and string it into a cohesive whole. But good filmmaking also means knowing when to save actors from themselves, and this level of acting indulgence and pretentious silliness goes unchecked by this nepo-novice. And the way the movie climaxes, with a very obvious homage to a very famous moment in Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia, made me want to shout "Oh, fuck you" from the highest mountaintop. It's always important to remember that simply watching good filmmakers does not then make you one.
Gambling's Media Takeover
This year made clear just how bad gambling's takeover of all media has gotten. It's in every commercial. It's all over every segment of ESPN and Fox Sports and Fox News and the regular news. It's on every podcast, all of which gambling companies basically now own. With the advent of AI, they plan to turn any and every aspect of our lives into a betting opportunity. It's only natural that there are so many gambling addicts, and the addiction has reached into the exact places they should not be reaching, most prominently in the NBA. But this is just the beginning. It is only going to get worse.
Wale
It's been awhile since I've had the chance to hate on Wale, and to be honest, I missed it dearly. I dare say I was a little nostalgic to be a hater of Wale again. His new album is probably fine; I don't need to hear it to know the deal—lots of R&B-inflected samples for tender romance rap, afrobeat moments to remind everyone he actually is Nigerian, lots of bad poetry to make it seem like he's deep. Music to buy sneakers or stalk exes on IG to. Wale was always fun to hate because he took himself so seriously, and he could never understand why no one else did, and why he isn't regarded as on the same level as peers Drake and Kendrick Lamar. That neediness and insecurity is all over his persona. Even if he's less online, he's no less that guy. Plus, without major releases from J. Cole or Big Sean, there are no other rappers out that I just love to hate so much.
John Harbaugh
Rooting for a Lamar Jackson team is rough. He's incredibly fun to watch and easy to root for, but he and his team seem to crumble at the biggest and tensest moments. Because (for whatever reason ...) people cannot agree on Lamar Jackson's greatness, he tends to take the brunt of the criticism for those big-moment failures. As he should—he's the quarterback, and that's the way it works. But as anyone who knows ball would tell you, when an entire team seems to play worse on the big stage, when the defense can't stop a cold, when receivers drop passes and running backs fumble at the worst moment, that is a sign of an unprepared team, which is the coach's responsibility.
John Harbaugh has been the coach of the Ravens since the end of the Bush administration. Outside of a triumphant, Super Bowl–winning season in 2012, Harbaugh's Ravens tend to look great in the regular season and poor in the playoffs. (Sound familiar?) In fact, the coach had strung together multiple bad years and was on the cusp of getting fired, until Lamar Jackson fell into his lap in 2018 and saved his ass.
I don't know why there's this idea that good coaches can simply coach forever, that because they're not athletes they don't have the same kind of finite lifespan as the players do. Coaches get old and useless like anyone else. It's not that they stop being smart, but more that success and security can shift a coach's priorities, moving them away from innovation and progress and toward loyalty and power maintenance. It happens to every coach, and it's happened to Harbaugh, who I'm not even sure was that great to begin with. I cannot do another year of listening to him try to motivational-speaker his way around the poor management of his team while relying on Jackson to bail him out time and time again. Yes, there is no guarantee that a new coach would be better, but the same coach is more than likely to keep bringing in the same results. Kick this old man into mutual retirement country.
Clipse - "Ace Trumpets"
I respect the Clipse enough to have tried, with all my heart, to convince myself that "Yellow diamonds look like pee-pee" is fine actually. A perfectly good rap line, surely. I mean, they're the Clipse, one of the greatest rap groups of all time. But in my heart of hearts, I know that the line is bad, and represents the worst aspects of Let God Sort Em Out: indulgent, goofy, and over the top. A first draft of a rap line with no editors around, just Pusha, Malice, and Pharrell (more on him soon) patting each other on the back. The album may be perfectly fine, but this line cannot stand.
Play Dirty, dir. by Shane Black
On the surface, Play Dirty should be the perfect kind of dumb, USA-channel afternoon crime film. A Shane Black movie can never be completely bad. But Play Dirty's problem seems to be one of post-production. It's the editing, which has no real rhythm and seems to have used every actor's worst takes. Mark Wahlberg, the star of the film, seems even more drained of charisma and personality than usual. On top of all that, it has the worst CGI I've seen in some time, made even worse by the fact that the movie is full of CGI. Only Netflix's Havoc has more of this ugliness crawling over every inch of screen time. Because this is Amazon Prime, it feels safe to assume there's a lot of AI being used, and it will make you nostalgic for the bad CGI of the '90s in comparison. When will Hollywood stop ruining Shane Black movies?
Florida State
A couple weeks ago, a report came out alleging that FSU had taken a run at Lane Kiffin at some point before he decided to leave Ole Miss for LSU. The story smelled fishy, like it had been planted by an administration taking a lot of heat for not getting rid of its expensive and terrible coach after another disappointing season. It is the very entertaining behavior of losers, and that's what my alma mater has become: a loser school. Sure, our old reputation was of being sore winners, whiny complainers, and general assholes, but all of that is better than being just plain losers, with a loser coach and a loser NIL fund. Do we deserve it? Maybe. But that doesn't mean I have to like it.
Manosphere Drake
If you thought he was awful before, Drake's predictable, pathetic pivot to the manosphere has only heightened all the worse things about him. He's showing up on Adin Ross streams and liking IG posts relating to Andrew Tate. Anyone who's listened to Drake knows that this throughline of "angry nerd mad at women he's in love with" weakness has always been there. But now the mask has fully come off, and after getting pantsed by Kendrick Lamar, he is probably even more into the grievance porn of online radicalism. There's something pathetic about the stolen valor of a perpetually single man trying to act like the most divorced middle-aged man. Being divorced from reality doesn't count. Can a loser become even more of a loser? Drake is on a quest to find out.
GELO - "Tweaker"
Remember when people were convincing themselves this song was good? "The next big thing." And the whole time I'm just wondering why no one is questioning a half-black kid from Southern California rapping like he's Soulja Slim.
The Stephen A. Smith Conservative Pivot
I said I would save my media criticism for two people. The first is Stephen A., for his transparent attempt to get in on the conservative grift market by tacking to the right. Now, you don't have to convince me that Stephen A. has always had black Republican tendencies, but what makes his recent maneuvers particularly shameless is the way he's clearly dabbling in ultra-rightwing spaces in order to plan out his own future political career (and he absolutely plans to run). He's talking to anti-trans activist Riley Gaines, selling out multiple black women in media, stumping for Trump at a time when Trump's own party barely stumps for him. More than anything, it's just so weak. He's a lapdog for the powerful who has parlayed that into great wealth and self-importance, and now believes it's the rest of the world that should be perched on his thigh. As for the other media person who needs to be called out ...
Shannon Sharpe
No one has done more to piss away their lofty status in the media world than Shannon Sharpe. If last year's bizarre "accidental" Instagram Live audio sextape wasn't enough to see him run out of polite company, then this year's sexual assault lawsuit and subsequent settlement should have done the trick. Sharpe did lose his job at ESPN after the settlement, but his little digital-only media empire has continued growing. His podcast kept fishing for more viral moments to manufacture. He was feeling himself too much, which itself isn't a crime, at least not the one he's accused of. But he is in my opinion the poster child for the problems with "new media." A media based primarily on gossip and drama and personal vendettas, where attention is the only currency that matters. It's like perpetual high school—a nightmare for the rest of us. Also, please stop calling this man "Unc," like he's some friend of the family. He's grandpa at best.
Guillermo del Toro
I don't know, man. I've tried to get into this guy. I want to like his movies. I do like him personally, particularly his eloquence about movies. But there's something so bleh about his movies. Frankenstein just annoyed me—a Disney horror movie where Jacob Elordi gives a great performance as a Promethean monster who keeps bashing you over the head with the theme of the movie. I don't know, man. I don't know.
Glen Powell (???)
I don't really hate Glen Powell, not yet at least, but he is skating on thin ice lately. He's just on the verge of having too much dip on the chip. This also goes for Taylor Sheridan, Lil Yachty, and Seth Rogen.
David Zaslav/The Ellison Family
David Zaslav's regime at Warner Bros. has been a clusterfuck of bad decision-making, bad branding, and tech-brain fuckery. Only a tasteless moron who hates art could run a studio the way Zaslav has, and with his final masterstroke he wants to cash out by either selling to Netflix, an evil algorithm-run business, or to the Ellisons, who are bringing their broligarchy to the movie business. The various Ellisons and their grotesque faces are in the midst of destroying Paramount and CBS, desperate to make it a safe space for rich old men who date 19-year-olds. It is exhausting to have all these monopolies run by cretins who long to replace artists with AI.
The Diddy Trial
Watching people outside the courthouse celebrating Diddy beating RICO charges by drowning themselves in baby oil was a real end-of-civilization moment. The trial brought out the worst in everyone (except maybe courtroom sketch artists), with people titillated by the gossipy aspects and the gay panic around the details. The actual violence and terrorism committed by Sean Combs was secondary in so much of the conversation around the case, and that's before the very obvious astroturfing campaign by Diddy's marketing team to undermine every accuser's story in real time to a jury that was somehow not sequestered in this shitshow carnival. An embarrassment for all of us.
A House of Dynamite, dir. by Kathryn Bigelow
The dumbest movie of this year.
Monster: The Ed Gein Story, created by Ian Brennan
Can a television show be dumb and evil? Ryan Murphy is on a quest to find out.
The Boys of Love Island USA
It's fun to hate people on Love Island USA, but this year stood out by having literally every guy on the show be kind of detestable: passive-aggressive, annoying, and all somewhere on the bad end of the online radicalization spectrum. The corny cowboy Taylor, the fake island prom king Ace, and the worst, "professional basketball player" Chris, just to name a few. None of them are cool and all of them drove me crazy the way they drove most of the women there crazy. Men, amirite?
Pharrell Williams
I have had enough of this guy and his I-don't-see-color bullshit for a while now. I'm sick of pretending he still has it as a producer. I'm sick of celebrating his milquetoast Louis Vuitton collections that are really only worthwhile because the bags are so colorful. And I'm sick of his phony hippy "everything is peace and love" affect like it isn't the biggest put-on. Ask Chad Hugo how peace and love everything is with Pharrell. He is a ruthless capitalist and an attention hog, which would be easier to ignore if he didn't also try to pass it off as some elevated way of being.
The Male Loneliness Epidemic
After a year of constantly hearing about how men are in trouble and alone and being radicalized because women don't like them anymore or whatever, I am burnt out. No conversation about men in crisis can be honest if we don't talk about the ways in which men played a large role in their own irrelevance. Even beyond that, I do not believe men need to have their hands held and their heads patted in order to transition into a new, better world. Life is changing and men have to change with it, and any argument otherwise is just stubbornness. Whatever happens, men need to get it together and quickly, because I cannot deal with listening to Scott Galloway anymore.
