Letter From Plague Island, October 2025
Dear friends,
October has returned - a month that feels weighted this year, thick with memory and mourning.
One year on from 7 October, Gaza remains under assault. The images of tents, rubble, and nameless graves no longer make the front pages, but the silence is deafening. We’re watching something unspeakably cruel, and worse, we’re watching language itself be twisted to justify it.
Israel’s political establishment has long conflated the state with the faith, and that distortion has consequences far beyond its borders. We’re seeing a rise in antisemitic attacks and a hardening of hearts. To criticise the actions of a government is not to condemn a people, and yet nuance has been exiled from the conversation. It is all so heartbreakingly sad. And dangerous.
We’ve written recently about another figure whose language corrodes the soul of democracy: Stephen Miller, the unelected architect behind many of Trump’s most brutal policies. You can find that piece here: The Architect of American Fascism.
What alarms us most is how his rhetoric is no longer confined to the fringes of the American right. In the UK, echoes of his ideology ring out from both Reform UK and elements of the Conservative Party. The Overton Window has drifted so far rightward that cruelty now masquerades as common sense.
And yet, we remain hopeful. Because America, for all its flaws (and what country is without them?), is also the birthplace of resistance. When National Guardsmen line the streets, ordinary people show up not to fight, but to stand. They don’t take the bait of violence. They bear witness. They remind us of Howard Zinn’s words:
“Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world.”
That quiet defiance, that belief that democracy is worth the struggle, is what keeps us going.
Another story we can’t stop thinking about is The Epstein Files. For how much longer can they be hidden?
After the Supreme Court refused to hear Ghislaine Maxwell’s appeal, the walls around that story are beginning to crack. Trump now finds himself in a precarious position: the predator class he courted and protected may yet bring him low. We explored this in two recent pieces - The Disciples of Epstein and The Country Club Prisoner.
There’s a strange symmetry in it all: the people who built their empires on secrecy and silence may finally be undone by the truth they tried to bury.
As for our reading pile this month, it’s been a blend of history and warning signs:
Hayek’s Bastards by Quinn Slobodian - on the neoliberal lineage of today’s libertarian tech elites.
Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise to Power by Timothy W. Ryback - a chilling reminder that democracies rarely die overnight; they erode piece by piece.
Erasing History by John Stanley - a study in how fascists rewrite the past to control the future.
Together, they form a grim but necessary syllabus for understanding the moment we’re living through.
We’ll close, as ever, with gratitude. Whether you’ve been with us from the beginning or just arrived, thank you for reading, thinking, and resisting with us. If you value what we do - the essays, the investigations, the letters like this - please consider supporting Notes From Plague Island with a paid subscription.
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Until next time,
Stay awake, stay kind, stay hopeful.
~ L&A
Notes From Plague Island
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Great reading list!