Filmmaker, author and journalist Antony Loewenstein documents how Israel has used Gaza as a weapons showcase. Spyware, killer drones, robot dogs and other weapons are debuted in Gaza and field-tested on the civilian population, demonstrating their effectiveness to regimes around the world that await their chance to purchase them.
Today’s conservative legal movement is the proverbial dog that caught the car. After years of effort (and more than a little fortuity), a solidly conservative majority now sits on the Supreme Court. The movement has racked up a string of wins on longstanding priorities, ranging from affirmative action to abortion to administrative agency deference, with perhaps the most seismic changes still to come. The Court’s blessing of the long-theorized “major questions doctrine,” which grants courts broad power to deem a particular action outside the purview of administrative agencies and properly committed to Congress, is a blade perfectly forged for dismantling that perennial movement bogeyman, the administrative state.
Broadbent Research Fellow Angella MacEwen explains how public ownership and public investment are needed to fight inflation, fix inequality, and improve economic productivity. MacEwen shows that Canada has the power to build a stronger, democratic economy to fight back against the US Trump administration’s trade war and as an alternative to Mark Carney’s austerity agenda.
Progressive Political Economy is a video series that spotlights progressive economics and political ideas that push for a just and equal society.
Through interviews with Canada’s leading progressive economic thinkers, we lay out alternative approaches to orthodox economic thinking that have lent today’s inequalities and injustices.
I am on stage at the Ryman Auditorium, the most famous concert hall in Nashville. A photographer tells me to smile. I hate getting my picture taken, but that day smiling came easy.
After years apart due to the pandemic, my family was reunited: my mother and father, my husband and children, and my sister and her husband and kids. We were in Nashville to celebrate my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary. My parents drove from Connecticut, my sister flew from Dallas, and we drove from St. Louis. It was the first time the ten of us had taken a vacation together.
We didn’t know it would be the last.
Sunlight poured through the stained-glass windows of country music’s holy ground. Legends surrounded me: Willie, Dolly, Hank, and my favorite, Johnny Cash. Johnny Cash, who sang with the weariness of reconciling mortality with morality; Johnny Cash, apocalyptic and American to the end.
There is no better music to ride out a pandemic than Johnny Cash. That’s a truth I never wanted to learn. Twenty-first-century truths are like that.
On this episode of Follow the Money, Mike Rann addresses the fossil fuel industry’s tobacco-like tactics, South Australia’s leadership of progressive reform, and why policy bravery can be great politics, as he delivered the Australia Institute’s Hugh Saddler Memorial Lecture.
This episode was recorded live on Thursday 13 November.
President Donald Trump’s latest comments on semiconductor exports sounded almost conciliatory—until they weren’t. Speaking recently on 60 Minutes, the president said he would let NVIDIA “deal with China,” but drew a bright red line: Beijing could buy chips, just not the “most advanced” ones. The message was calibrated for maximum effect: permissive enough to please markets, hawkish enough to claim toughness. NVIDIA’s stock jumped immediately—but China did not get what it wanted.
Days later, in a Financial Times interview, NVIDIA’s CEO Jensen Huang warned that if the U.S. blocked his company from selling more of its advanced chips to China, it would “lose” the AI race. The argument was astonishing in its candor: cut us off, Beijing wins.
The comparison between a president sounding measured and a CEO trying to sound indispensable captures a dangerous inversion of power. NVIDIA has become more than America’s most valuable company. It’s attempting to become its policymaker, shaping the boundaries of what Washington thinks possible in its competition with China.
To understand how one company reached that position, it helps to revisit what happened in Washington just days before Trump met Xi Jinping in South Korea.
On this episode of After America, Crikey’s Charlie Lewis joins Dr Emma Shortis to discuss Congress’ failure to extend life-saving health insurance tax credits, Trump’s inability to make the Epstein files go away, and whether there is evidence of US involvement in the dismissal of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam.
This discussion was recorded on Friday 14 November.
For decades, U.S. education has been dominated by the American Left. Their stranglehold was highly visible during the Biden Administration, with countless stories about wildly inappropriate books in school libraries, Critical Race Theory being taught in classrooms, and national associations calling for parents to be designated as domestic terrorists.
How did our public school systems—including those in red states, from Iowa to Alaska—become infected with radical leftist ideology? The answer is education consulting groups.
Most Americans don’t realize that every aspect of governance, from parks and wildlife departments to the curriculum in kids’ schools, has been outsourced to a coalition of nameless, faceless NGO consulting groups that are funded by millions of taxpayer dollars funneled through the government. One of the worst offenders is the American Institutes for Research (AIR).
Launched on 31 October 2025 at Gleebooks, Sydney, this post focuses on the book by Brett Heino, Literary Geographies and the Work of David Ireland, which follows last week’s commentary from the same evening delivered by Brett Heino.
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In acknowledging that we are on Gadigal land of the Eora Nation, I want to start by paying my respect to elders past, present, and emerging and also to those Indigenous peoples that are either in the audience or reading this commentary. Sovereignty in what is now called Australia was never ceded but, rather, violently dispossessed. In paying respects to Indigenous voices, I also want to draw inspiration from Tara June Winch’s novel The Yield(2019) that received, among others, the 2020 Miles Franklin Award. To cite one key passage:
Don’t know what it is about us that seems to rile the white man. The burden, the burden of their memory perhaps, or that we weren’t extinguished with the lights of those empires after all!
This episode looks at one of the first feminist social democrats in Canadian history: Francis Marion Beynon. Her work as journalist in Winnipeg in the early 1900s was critical for pointing out how exploitation wasn’t just about workers and bosses — it was also about the way that women were being treated by their husbands at home.
When OpenAI announced its latest wave of safety improvements in ChatGPT’s mental-health responses, the company framed the development as a major ethical advance. Working with more than 170 clinicians worldwide, it reported that the model now handles conversations about psychosis, mania, self-harm, and emotional dependence with up to 80 per cent fewer “undesired responses.” The company spoke of compassion, empathy, and progress in promoting the latest iteration of their LLM. These changes do matter, and it would be both unfair and unhelpful to not acknowledge them.
What’s On around Naarm/Melbourne & Regional Victoria: Nov 17-23, 2025 With thanks to the dedicated activists at Friends of the Earth Melbourne! . . . See also these Palestine events listings from around the country: 10004
The Discipline of Political Economy and the Journal of Australian Political Economy (JAPE) is hosting a Teaching Political Economy Symposium on Monday December 8th at the University of Sydney. This workshop is being held as part of a suite of events celebrating the 50th anniversary of Political Economy at the University of Sydney. In 1975, a full program of study in political economy was offered for the first time at an Australian university, following a significant student-staff campaign for a pluralist and practical economics curriculum. On this important anniversary, this workshop will feature a range of panels and papers discissing and debating the past, present and future of political economy pedagogy and education both at Sydney and in other institutions in Australia and internationally. Papers presented at the workshop will be considered for inclusion in a dedicated winter 2026 issue of JAPE.
The program for the workshop is available here and reproduced below. Everyone including non-presenters is very welcome to attend. Please register by Monday 1 December for catering purposes.
Details
When: Monday 8 December 2025
Where: Room 650, Social Sciences Building A02, University of Sydney
Editor’s note: A post with this same headline was sent out a few minutes ago. That post had the wrong video linked to it — for The Chris Hedges Report email list, we are sending out another post with the correct link attached below.
Western nations will do nothing to halt Israel’s ongoing slaughter of Palestinians. They will do nothing to alleviate the hunger and disease that is decimating Palestinians in Gaza. Our nations have been, and remain, full partners in the genocide. They will remain partners until the genocide reaches its grim conclusion.
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November is my birth month so I'm doing a birthday sale all month long. I'm turning 34, so an annual subscription is now just 34 dollars. I've never offered subscriptions at this low rate and probably won't again so take advantage now. Thanks for your support!
This article is read by Eunice Wong, a Juilliard-trained actor, featured on Audible’s list of Best Women Narrators. Her work is on the annual Best Audiobooks lists of the New York Times, Audible, AudioFile, & Library Journal. www.eunicewong.actor
First, thank you. This newsletter is now two years old. Because of your support, I’ve been able to write for a living and provide for my family. I also have the creative freedom I long desired, and I thank you for that as well.
Sarah Kendzior’s Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
At the end of COP29 in Baku last year, I described the so-called climate finance outcome as “300 Billion Lies and Economic Traps,” and I said that COP29 was not about climate finance. It was not even about climate. It was about a colonial economic and geopolitical hierarchy that refuses to be disrupted, because the kind of transformative climate finance that the Global South was asking for was going to unleash the huge development potential of the Global South, which is home to the youngest labor force in the world, the largest reserves of green transition minerals, and a massive renewable energy potential.
The great civilizations of antiquity have never needed a majority to survive. They have always required just a quorum of men who knew what they believed and acted on the courage of their convictions. A few hundred trierarchs at Salamis, a few thousand hoplites at Thermopylae, a Roman handful who backed Scipio when everyone else wanted to sue for peace—a hearty few have helped preserve their respective ways of life in times of turmoil.
The American Founders understood this. Fifty-six merchants, farmers, and lawyers in Philadelphia signed their own death warrant, and 12,000 half-frozen men at Valley Forge kept that signature from being erased. Formation of character is about learning how to stand when everyone else sits down. We don’t study great men to cosplay greatness—we study them to see how a group of determined souls can change the world.
Today’s America, however, no longer forms leaders. It manufactures influencers and administrators. Its schools churn out credentialed mediocrities fluent in therapy and management but strangers to duty, tragedy, or honor. The republic’s elite, once shaped by Scripture and Cicero, is now shaped by LinkedIn. The result is a leadership class without leadership, a caste of clever children managing the ruins of their inheritance.
I had a busy day, and will be minimally (maybe not at all) on social media for the next few days. My taking the stance that people who oppose Trump should stop saying “the Dems caved” got enough disagreement from various people that I thought I should explain it more. I haven’t had time to write it out thoroughly, and I’m not going to be able to explain it very well, but I thought I should try. So, here’s the short version (without links–sorry).
Delivering The Australia Institute’s second annual Dr Hugh Saddler Memorial Lecture at the State Library of South Australia last night, Mr Rann slammed the fossil fuel lobby’s grip on climate policy in the country.
“Australia’s continued approval of new and expanded coal mines and its massive embrace of a gas industry means Australia is often seen internationally as walking both sides of the street on climate,” said former South Australian Premier and Chair of the UK Climate Group, Mike Rann AC.
“The fossil fuel lobby has learned from tobacco industry tactics of the past and they are desperate to avoid any commitment to phase out the cause of the problem that threatens billions of people on our planet.
“For the Australian fossil fuel industry, maintaining an ongoing, bipartisan commitment to gas exploration, production and almost tax-free exports is their central objective. For fossil fuel polluters, gas has become the lifeline that vaping was for the tobacco lobby.
“Like The Australia Institute, I am appalled that multinational gas companies are making massive, multi-billion profits from exporting Australian resources while paying little or no tax. Fixing this could be a big, first step in the second term tax reform agenda of the Albanese Government.”
Fall is not just a time for campfires and s’mores—it’s also when the Supreme Court starts its new term. This session comes at an especially significant time for conservatives, given that in just the last few years almost all of the most infamous cases that have been driving legal conservatism for roughly two generations have been overruled or substantially narrowed. Indeed, the Supreme Court has repudiated and formally overruled Lemon v. Kurtzman (1971), Roe v. Wade (1973), and Chevron v. NRDC (1984)—cases that, respectively, represent church-state separationism, abortion rights, and the administrative state. Likewise in SFFA v. Harvard (2023), the Supreme Court sharply criticized and substantially narrowed Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978) and Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), the two doctrinal pillars of affirmative action.
Such success, however, raises an unnerving question: What’s next? That is, what should drive the conservative legal movement now that its biggest enemies have seemingly been vanquished?
Before we can supply an answer to that question, however, we must first give some background on the conservative legal movement, beginning with an important distinction between legal and political conservatism, which will show that legal conservatives must create new strategies that are tailored to our current political and social moment.
Withholding food benefits is obviously morally depraved. It is also utterly despotic. The drafters of the original American state constitutions and the eventual federal constitution believed that to be legitimate, a government must be committed to and must enable individuals' pre-legal rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. They believed that a government that does not protect the lives and well-being of those who live under it is not owed the loyalty of those people.
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.
After two years of genocide, it is no longer possible to hide complicity in Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians. Entire countries and corporations are — according to multiple reports by UN Special Rapporteur on Palestine Francesca Albanese — either directly or indirectly involved in Israel’s economic proliferation.
Tax doesn’t just affect markets, it shapes society. On housing, excessive tax concessions have driven up prices, concentrated wealth and locked many of the market. On this special episode, Maiy Azize from Everybody’s Home, Josie Lee from Oxfam Australia, and housing advocate Jordan van den Lamb join Amy Remeikis to discuss how bad policy created a housing crisis.
This discussion was recorded on Wednesday 29 October 2025 at the Australia Institute’s Revenue Summit at Parliament House in Canberra.
Today I want to talk about presentation—boymode vs. girlmode and all that—but before getting into the trans-specific stuff I want to start by examining presentation more generally. Take a look at these three women:
The FBI’s Arctic Frost investigation is confirmation that the Left sees conservatives as enemies of the state. If you are a conservative when the Left holds the reins of power, you will be treated as such.
Arctic Frost began in April 2022, with the approval of then-Attorney General Merrick Garland, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, and FBI Director Christopher Wray. In November 2022, the newly appointed Special Counsel Jack Smith took it over. Smith declared he was focused on the allegations of mishandling classified documents, but Arctic Frost shows he was much more ambitious. He helped turn the investigation into an effort to convict Donald Trump and cripple the Republican Party.
In 2025, the Federal Reserve has cut interest rates, trade policy has shifted abruptly, and economic policy uncertainty has increased. How have these developments affected the functioning of the key U.S. Treasury securities market? In this post, we return to some familiar metrics to assess the recent behavior of Treasury market liquidity. We find that liquidity briefly worsened around the April 2025 tariff announcements but that its relation to Treasury volatility has been similar to what it was in the past.
On this episode of Follow the Money, former head of the Australian Greens Bob Brown joins Ebony Bennett to discuss the irreplaceable beauty of Australia’s natural environment, the current government’s efforts to change our nature laws, and his latest book, Defiance: Stories from Nature and Its Defenders.
This episode was recorded live on Friday 31 October as part of our Australia’s Biggest Book Club webinar series. Join the Book Club to find out about our upcoming webinars with authors.
China's ageing population is expected to slow the country's economic growth in coming years. Population ageing can have a negative effect on a country's growth due to the decline in the working-age population relative to the dependent population, and could cause decreased labour productivity growth, as has been the case in other countries which have experienced similar demographic shifts. This paper seeks to estimate the causal effect of ageing on GDP per capita growth in China using data among China's provinces. I find that over 10 years a 10 per cent increase in the proportion of the population aged over 60 decreases nominal GDP per capita by around 7 per cent, all other things equal. These estimates imply that an ageing population has placed downward pressure on China's economic growth in the 2010s and 2020s so far, with this pressure likely to continue in the coming years. Authorities have so far responded to this challenge by increasing retirement ages and introducing policies such as a nationwide childcare subsidy. Different sectors in the economy are not likely to be affected uniformly by population ageing. I find that an increase in the old-age ratio increases the contribution of services (excluding real estate) to output, and decreases the contribution of construction.
Yesterday, a young woman named Laura filed the first medical malpractice lawsuit against doctors in Latin America for perpetrating the lie that she was born in the wrong body. Doctors from the Clínica Valle del Lili in Colombia diagnosed Laura with gender dysphoria on her very first visit. Though only 15 at the time, they told her that testosterone and puberty blockers would solve her distress. Despite Laura’s desire to breastfeed one day, they performed a double mastectomy after she turned 18. Now, with the help of lawyers, she is going to court and to the public because “kids and teenagers shouldn’t be able to transition.”
Like youth in other countries, Laura first encountered gender ideology online. After seeing a Swedish girl use a breast binder, she became seized with the idea that she could “become a boy.” This offered her escape from impending womanhood—something she dreaded. Additionally, at only six years old, Laura was sexually assaulted by a person who worked in her household. As she began to go through puberty, that trauma resurfaced, and crippling fear made it hard just to leave the house.
