Hello readers! There is a $2.99 sale this week on my book Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America. Hiding was published in April 2020 and was a national bestseller. Then multiple entities tried to censor it, either tacitly (as described here) or overtly. Hiding is a history book that covers the rise of Trump and the decline of the US from the late 1970s to 2019. It has unfortunately stood the test of time. Written before Epstein’s 2019 arrest and alleged murder, it was the first book to cover Trump, Epstein, and transnational organized crime.
And now it’s on sale! I’m told the eBook deal will last all week. I encourage you to get it while it’s cheap — and legal! I will make almost no money off this sale despite earning out my advance. That’s how book publishing works now. If you’d like to support my work, the best way to do it is through a subscription to my newsletter:
On July 14, the State Leadership Initiative was honored to host the Florida DOGE team and their tech partners, Vulcan, Echelon, and DigiBuild, for the Florida DOGE Showcase in Washington, D.C. Spearheaded by Governor Ron DeSantis, the state has become the leader for providing accountable and efficient governance to its citizens.
Since its creation in 2025, the Florida DOGE team has identified nearly $1 billion in waste and abuse at the local government level and sent over $878 million back to the federal government. But the team’s work extends beyond fiscal savings and budgetary cuts—it also includes auditing university curriculum and state union programs and reining in rogue municipalities that had adopted woke-left policies.
On November 10, 1793, the Cathedral of Notre-Dame ceased to be a church. The high altar where the Holy Mass had been celebrated for centuries was made into a stage, and on it, a woman was enthroned as the Goddess of Reason. The French Revolutionaries believed they were liberating France from a faith and a tradition they thought had unjustly shackled mankind. In speech, policy, and action, they sought to overturn the Christian religion that had shaped European civilization for nearly 15 centuries.
About two decades before the French Revolution, another revolution began across the Atlantic: the American colonists rose up against British rule. Yet their goal was neither a triumph of “reason above God” nor a severing of liberty from the moral order that had birthed it. The American Revolutionaries achieved a miracle, establishing the first enduring constitutional republic of the modern age. They secured the rule of law on a vast scale with a robust representative government.
Both revolutions transformed Western civilization’s understanding of authority, man, and God—the American Revolution for good, but the French Revolution for ill. They carried distinctly different anthropological messages about the nature of man, the sources of authority, and the purposes of political life.
In Trump v. Barbara, the Supreme Court deemed birthright citizenship a constitutional right for the children of illegal aliens and birth tourists. It did so based on a dubious reading of the law, a blindness to its spirit, and a stubborn dismissal of relevant history, policy, and practices. That jurisprudence, I argued in part I, could spell coming doom for the Trump Administration in parallel cases likely to arise in response to its effort to exclude illegal aliens from the census apportionment base. This is a critical initiative given that those figures are used to allocate congressional seats and Electoral College votes across the states, redistrict, and dole out trillions of dollars in federal funds.
However, there is one powerful argument the Court did not countenance in Barbara or elsewhere that could lead it to render a more favorable judgment if and when the census-citizenship issue comes before it.
Yesterday's sell-off was fierce, the Dow shed over 1,000 points following the Fed decision and Warsh's press conference, and today we've already made almost all of it back. We're at a genuine inflection point, and my read is that this consolidation is close to resolving higher.
We now have two FOMC meetings under the new chair, which is enough to start drawing conclusions about how to play this Fed. I lay out what the market's response function is actually telling us, why I expect rates to keep grinding higher, and the one thing Warsh would have to do to break the pattern.
There's also a significant change to the flow picture that arrived on July 24th, which starts to reverse the tailwind that's been supporting this market since April. I walk through what it means for the back half of the year and for the cycle timing.
Woodside has reported a revenue jump of nearly 30 per cent to $6 billion over the past three months, with the company branded “one of the Australia’s biggest winners” from the war in the Middle East.
Dr Richard Denniss, co-CEO at The Australia Institute, said the soaring war profits of Woodside and other gas exporters was an opportunity for Labor to enact its pledge to get a fair return for Australia’s resources, which is now part of Labor’s Party Policy Platform.
“This week we hear that gas export profits have soared, while just last week Labor declared it would seek a fairer return for Australian gas. What great timing,” said Dr Denniss said.
“Media outlets are describing gas export companies as Australia’s “biggest winners” of the Iran war. This begs the question of who are Australia’s biggest losers?
“Obviously it is Australians who are giving away their gas to multinationals for free while paying higher prices for petrol.”
Australia Institute research shows that if Labor implemented a 25 per cent gas export tax, it would raise $350 million per week at current prices, or $17 billion per year.
“That is enough to cover the fuel excise discount, which ends on Sunday,” Dr Denniss said.
EDITORIAL NOTE: Given the importance of this issue, and in a desire to be fair when writing such a critical piece, I sent a draft of this article to Ed Zitron to review and give his response to. I've clarified a few points here and there in response to his comments but we mutually decided that it would be best for him to lay out the core disagreement (or misunderstanding) between us in a response piece that I would then respond to. Keep that in mind, and Ed's graciousness in response to harsh criticism, when reading this piece.
It may be a few weeks until Ed can respond to me, given his busy work schedule. Please give him summer grace, especially since he only saw the details of my criticisms- and replied very rapidly- yesterday. He wants me to briefly clarify that the crux of his response will focus on the potential scale of investment expenditures that are not coming from the “big four”, particularly based on the projections of these smaller companies.
On this episode of Dollars & Sense, Greg and Elinor discuss the better-than-expected inflation figures, the global oversupply of once-in-a-lifetime crises, and what the ominous-sounding ‘global balance sheet’ tells us about wealth on Earth.
This discussion was recorded on Thursday 30 July 2026.
In their most recent documentary, “Earth’s Greatest Enemy”, Abby Martin and Mike Prysner examine the US military as not only the world’s biggest consumer of fossil fuels, but also the world’s biggest perpetrator of ecological devastation and a driver of both increasing carbon emissions and militarization in other countries. Chris Hedges speaks about the new film and why it is an important tool in the global struggle against imperialism with Abby Martin in this episode of The Chris Hedges Report.
When President Trump reposted a video featuring President John F. Kennedy warning about subversion in America, he renewed focus on a threat we have long ignored at our peril.
Anton is way off base when he asserts that Wolfe’s creative decision-making was at any point driven by exigent financial needs…. For Wolfe—who never borrowed money—the 1990s were flush: The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987) had been a titanic success, and he had, as a matter of public record, sold a brownstone and bought a co-op. It was struggles with plot, not finance, that delayed the publication of A Man in Full (1998). (Emphasis added.)
Now, some of the above is not in doubt. Bonfire was indeed a huge success, selling 800,000 copies in hardcover alone, plus God knows how many in paperback (nearly 40 years later, the book is still in print), and netting Wolfe a $750,000 check for the movie rights. But does that necessarily mean that, for Wolfe, “the 1990s were flush”?
They trained us to fear quicksand. They laughed at us when we did. But we were right.
We knew. Eating Rice Krispies drowned in milk poured from a carton with a face of a missing child on it — we knew. Snap, crackle, and pop; stop, drop, and roll; hook, line, and sinker — we knew. The most entertaining shows and movies warned of quicksand. Labyrinth, a tale of a secret world where predators steal children; Scooby-Doo, the story of criminals in obvious masks; The Princess Bride, a woman’s guide to outwitting abductors; TheNever-Ending Story, the saga of the Trump regime.
We watched our heroes sink while adults abandoned them and everyone screamed “Quicksand!” but never drained the swamp — and we knew.
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The American Mind’s podcast is a weekly conversation with Ryan Williams, Spencer Klavan, and Mike Sabo devoted to uncovering the ideas and principles that drive American political life. Stream here or download from your favorite podcast host.
A New Phase in the Iran War | The American Mind Podcast
Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu entered meetings with Trump this week to discuss their respective wars with Russia and Iran. Will Trump shift strategies to bring an end to the conflicts in time for the midterms? Will Thibeau, director of the American Military Project, joins the guys to survey the battlefield and its implications. Meanwhile, Senator Rand Paul released pages of Fauci’s COVID-era diary ahead of the ex-public health official’s appearance before a Senate committee, prompting a retrospective on the dark days of lockdown.
The shock announcement comes less than a week after the Albanese Government abandoned Climate Active, its long running ‘carbon neutral’ certification scheme.
“Premier Minns’ claim that coal and gas companies should be prevented from buying carbon offsets generated by his Great Koala National Park is a blow for the Albanese government’s failing ‘safeguard mechanism’ and its key client, the fossil fuel industry,” said Dr Richard Denniss, co-CEO at The Australia Institute.
“Today’s announcement by the NSW Premier is an important admission that Australia cannot cancel out the pollution from fossil fuel projects by simply promising to not chop down some trees.
“Chris Minns is admitting what Federal Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen has been denying for years – that it makes no scientific sense to justify new gas and coal mines on the basis that some trees won’t be chopped down.
“The obvious first question is that if the NSW government won’t allow its carbon credits to be used for the sham of fossil fuel offsetting, why should anyone else be allowed to?
“While the NSW government’s attempt to stop coal mines using its koala park credits is welcome, details of their proposal remain scant.
“There is nothing in federal law that prevents any buyer of carbon credits from re-selling them to coal mines, gas frackers or any particular industry.
“Without explaining how this will work, this is just a clumsy state intervention into federal climate policy.
On this episode of Follow the Money, renewable energy entrepreneur Assaad Razzouk joins Australia Institute co-CEO Leanne Minshull to discuss how the war on Iran is accelerating the global shift away from fossil fuels and why Australia risks being left behind.
“Free Marwan, Free Palestine!” FPM Meet Abby Martin in Naarm During an Australian tour in support of her new feature documentary Earth’s Greatest Enemy, American investigative journalist and filmmaker Abby Martin met with members of Free Palestine Melbourne at an IPAN event in the city. A vocal critic of Israel’s genocide, Martin has appeared as […]
In Trump v. Barbara, the Supreme Court held that the 14th Amendment guarantees birthright citizenship regardless of a child’s parents’ nationality—and that the president cannot change that by executive order.
So what now?
If U.S. citizenship means more than mere birth on our “magic dirt,” we must find other ways to protect it.
One possible fix is for Congress to pass a law clarifying that under the 14th Amendment, “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” excludes any child whose parents hold citizenship in, and thus loyalty to, another country.
But this route is fraught with problems.
First, Congress rarely passes laws that require 60 votes in the Senate, the threshold for all legislation except spending bills. The Senate could eliminate the filibuster for this purpose. But what goes around comes around, and Republicans could soon see Democrats use it for D.C. statehood, immigration amnesty, and other left-wing dreams.
Where: Room 441, Social Sciences Building (A02), University of Sydney
Speaker: Dr Natasha Heenan
Following decades of climate denial, obstruction and delay, we find ourselves in an “overshoot conjuncture” where the absence of a coordinated global phase-out of fossil fuels is justified by the promise of novel climate technologies. Central to this conjuncture is the movement of geoengineering from the fringes of scientific inquiry into mainstream climate policy discourse. As governments and corporations invest billions in technologies to remove carbon from the atmosphere and research ways to potentially reflect sunlight back into space, critical questions emerge: Who creates and owns these technologies? In whose interests will they be deployed? In this seminar, I propose a framework that seeks to move beyond debates that treat geoengineering as either a catastrophic technofix or unavoidable salvation. Instead, I argue that geoengineering is simultaneously an alienated form of our collective capacity to produce the climate and a more transparently social form of climate production, necessitated by an epochal crisis in the conditions of capitalist production. I propose climate repair as a radical ethic, politics, and historical process that is latent within but not guaranteed by the overshoot conjuncture, requiring a third pillar of climate politics alongside adaption and mitigation.
Dr Emma Shortis reflects on Trump’s “joke” about a third term in office at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, before If You’re Listening host Matt Bevan returns to the show to discuss the midterms and Trump’s finances.
America’s debate over poverty has undergone a remarkable—and troubling—transformation. Two centuries ago, the central challenge was persuading needy people to accept public assistance. Today, the challenge is preventing people from fraudulently claiming benefits to which they were never entitled.
That trajectory tells us something profound about the nation’s changing moral culture.
Alexis de Tocqueville noticed something remarkable when he traveled through America in the early 1830s. Unlike Europe, where poverty often produced permanent dependence upon the state or aristocratic patrons, Americans possessed an almost universal determination to remain independent. They formed voluntary associations to care for neighbors in distress, but they regarded prolonged dependence as inconsistent with the character of a free citizen.
That observation reflected a broader understanding shared by the American founders and the generation that followed them. Every state maintained some provision for public relief, but it was deliberately limited and administered locally. It existed for those genuinely incapable of caring for themselves—the disabled, widows, orphans, and others facing extraordinary hardship. Families, churches, fraternal organizations, and private charities bore the primary responsibility for helping the poor.
When Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Pentagon officials briefly removed the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from a list of recognized faiths, Mormon commentators objected immediately, and evangelicals and Catholics jumped into the fray. The debate quickly outgrew the particulars of LDS doctrine and became a vigorous argument over the nature of God, the Trinity, revelation, authority, and the meaning of “Christian” itself. Though some of it was rude, much of it was insightful.
For many Americans, this felt unusual. We have grown accustomed to treating religious disagreement as something best kept away from the public square. But what happened on X revealed something important: Americans are increasingly willing to argue about religious truth in public again. That should be welcomed.
Most Americans assume that self-identification settles whether one is Christian—that anyone who claims to follow Jesus is a Christian. But what one means by “God” and “Jesus” matters more than just adopting a label. A group that worshipped the Flying Spaghetti Monster in Jesus’s name would not count as Christian.
Words have meanings, and categories have boundaries. The significance of the public debate on X was not about one side triumphing over the other—it was that Americans were arguing about first principles again.
On this episode of What’s the Point?, Richard Denniss explains the “fake fight” over nuclear power in Australia and how the gas industry benefits from the nuclear distraction.
However, just as housing price growth decoupled from wage growth in recent decades, new research shows that real wages have not kept up with productivity growth.
So, who is getting the benefit?
Firstly, it’s important to understand productivity. Productivity is getting more output from the same number of inputs, or the same output from a reduced number of inputs. For example, if workers are producing thingamajigs a new innovative way and now make more thingamajigs with the same hours of work, then productivity goes up.
This increase in thingamajigs is sold, and then that the extra money made is then supposed to flow to workers in higher living standards. Productivity has been described as “the engine of living standards”, and the Productivity Commission says the more productive the economy is, the more workers are supposed to enjoy either higher wages, lower prices, or by working less and having more free time.
The Productivity Commission claims that outside of mining and agriculture, productivity has been flowing to higher real wages. But there is new evidence that the Productivity Commission is wrong.
25 July 2026: Free Palestine Melbourne strongly condemns the brutal escalation of settler violence in the occupied West Bank, particularly the attacks on the Palestinian village of Tell near Nablus, as well as the assault on Nablus Hospital. These attacks are part of an ongoing pattern of violence carried out by extremist Israeli settlers under the protection of the Israeli military, leaving Palestinian communities living under constant fear and threat.
The most consequential domestic policy development of the 2020s is neither COVID-19 nor Donald Trump’s reelection. It is Joe Biden’s decision to import ten million foreigners into the United States in violation of standing federal law. Many of the defining political fights of this decade stem from that choice: government shutdowns over border enforcement, states unilaterally redefining the meaning of citizenship, the growing willingness of the restrictionist wing of the Republican Party to defy its own business class, major fraud investigations in Minneapolis and New York, and the unraveling of consensus over whether federal law binds the states.
These are battles in a larger fight over who constitutes the American people, one that escalated with President Biden’s decision to actively facilitate the mass importation of illegal aliens into this country by land, air, and sea.
American politics is no longer primarily a contest over how we govern ourselves. It is a contest over who we are and who decides.
None of this is merely rhetorical. The federal government has shut down six times since 2018—and immigration has been central to nearly every one of them. The government shut down over border wall funding in 2018 and benefits for “Dreamers” in 2019. Two partial shutdowns concerning immigration enforcement occurred in 2026, the second shutdown being the longest in American history at 76 days.
Long time since I've posted here at Heidi Says. Have no fear, it isn't because I've stopped saying things. I'm super busy speaking at Land of Action, the initiative I founded to boost, reinforce, and assist grassroots progressive organizations across New Mexico. Read the Land of Action mission statement to learn more.
As we move into the heart of the general election season, it is imperative that we live a commitment to democracy. That means turning out massive numbers of people to the polls, making sure everybody eligible is able to vote, and doing all we can to keep the elections free and fair. Land of Action (LoA) is leaning heavily into this work. We've got three efforts going.
Johann Kurtz’s essay on why younger generations feel left behind economically, even while official statistics from GDP to stock markets send signals that our economy is thriving, touched a nerve.
Kurtz’s central argument is that young people only appear to be doing fine in official statistics because those measures fail to capture the collapse of “social capital”—the free inheritance of trusted neighbors, functional public schools, safe streets, and marriageable norms that previous generations received at no cost. Because that commons has been liquidated and privatized, young people must now repurchase its components individually at market prices. Expensive homes in good districts, private schooling, daycare, credentials, and more—all of it requires substantial financial resources, even as incomes have risen only modestly. Meanwhile, the cost of these essentials has increased many times over.
The result is a measurement failure: cheap electronics and rising nominal incomes make the young look prosperous, but the actual building blocks of a middle-class life have moved beyond the reach of average Americans, which explains why younger generations are delaying or forgoing them entirely.
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On this episode of Dollars & Sense, Greg returns! He and Elinor discuss the ALP National Conference in Adelaide, the economic impact of the ongoing American war on Iran, and the failures of Australia’s privatised employment services system.
This discussion was recorded on Wednesday 22 July 2026.
With the release of Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, mankind’s foremost moral authority—a Chicago-born priest and the absolute monarch of the longest-running institution in history—addressed a technology so advanced that even its creators struggle to comprehend it.
One of those creators appeared alongside the Holy Father: Chris Olah, co-founder of Anthropic, the leading AI model provider and a company publicly feuding with the government of the pope’s home country over battlefield use of its algorithms.
The remarks of both men were scrutinized the world over by public officials, executives, theologians, technologists, believers, and non-believers alike. The consequences of their attention remain to be seen. For now, as historian T.R. Fehrenbach said of the Korean War, the lesson of Magnifica Humanitas’s unprecedented release is that it happened.
The lessons of the document itself, however, are harder to summarize.
The American Mind’s ‘Editorial Roundtable’ podcast is a weekly conversation with Ryan Williams, Spencer Klavan, and Mike Sabo devoted to uncovering the ideas and principles that drive American political life. Stream here or download from your favorite podcast host.
Trump Reopens the Trade War | The Roundtable Ep. 327
President Trump this week has announced a set of 50 percent tariffs on various Canadian goods, with a 30-day window to negotiate before they are imposed. In retaliation against Canada’s quotas on American cars and alcohol, Trump proposes to levy tariffs on wine, hockey sticks, and cement. But does it serve America and the Right ahead of midterms? Meanwhile, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche’s confirmation hearings, following the dismissal of Pam Bondi, give a snapshot of the Right’s shifting composition ahead of midterms. Plus: Lindsey Graham, RIP.
It would also bring down domestic gas prices for Australian households and businesses.
The Australian Labor Party will reportedly include a new tax regime for the gas export industry in its party platform today at the ALP National Conference in Adelaide.
According to the Nobel Prize winning economist, Professor Joseph Stiglitz, it is a ‘no brainer’ for Australia to tax its gas exports.
“It is great news that the Labor Party seems on the verge of adopting this simple policy which will be good for the Australian economy,” said Dr Richard Denniss, co-CEO of The Australia Institute.
“It will help restore faith in Australia’s democracy among the growing number of Australians who think their governments are no longer willing to stand up to foreign companies.
“Apart from having huge volumes of gas, Australia has a huge opportunity to finally introduce a gas policy which benefits all Australians.
“When Labor was re-elected last year, the Prime Minister spoke about ‘progressive patriotism’, with policies that do things ‘the Australian way’.
“He now has an opportunity to put those words into action, with a policy that would be hugely popular and benefit millions of Australians.
“Tax policy doesn’t have to be complicated to be effective. In fact, the more complicated it is, the more it can be exploited.
