Letter From Plague Island, January 2026

In an age of manufactured darkness, even a steady light becomes an act of defiance.

Dear friends,

What a way to begin a new year.

Within days, Donald Trump has overseen the deposition of Venezuela’s president, openly threatened to take Greenland by force, and presided over a moment so stark it feels torn from dystopian fiction: an ICE officer shooting an American citizen in the face in broad daylight. Her death was then framed as her own fault by J.D. Vance. He gave a cold, bureaucratic shrug followed by a narrative clean-up.

That particular article about Vance is currently performing really well; so many of you are reading and sharing it. This tells us two things:

1. Our readers enjoy articles that respond to current events.

2. More importantly, our readers loathe J.D. Vance (and rightly so).

It is shocking. But perhaps more disturbing is how quickly the shock is meant to wear off. This is politics staged as spectacle: The Running Man meets executive power. Violence is normalised, accountability evaporates, and cruelty is reframed as necessity.

We find ourselves asking the same questions over and over: how sustainable is this? How long can a country exist in a permanent state of escalation? And where does it end?

We do not believe America will see midterm elections this November. The signs are pointing entirely in the opposite direction. The language of emergency is hardening, the justifications are multiplying, and the groundwork for suspension (or something close to it) is being laid in plain sight. We fear we are counting down toward martial law in the United States, or a version of it dressed up as security.

And yet, amid this chaos, we deliberately chose to write something different this month: a piece about what good politics actually is. Not because the moment feels hopeful (it doesn’t) but because despair is precisely what authoritarianism feeds on. If we abandon the idea that politics can be ethical, collective, and humane, then the chokehold tightens.