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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.

Uncovered: Administrative State Abuses of Military Contracts | The American Mind Podcast

In this special episode, Will Thibeau, director of the Claremont Institute’s American Military Project, sits down with Claremont president Ryan P. Williams to discuss his recent report on the 8(a) Program, its unique weaponization in the Woke Era, and how the military under Secretary of War Pete Hegseth is combatting the rampant abuses. Plus: What can America’s industrial base learn from the Iran and Ukraine wars?

The post Uncovered: Administrative State Abuses of Military Contracts | The American Mind Podcast appeared first on The American Mind.

In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the “monster” begins as a creature whose maker abdicates his catechetical responsibility. Victor Frankenstein spends nearly two years learning how to give life to an inanimate body. But at the moment of success, when the creature finally opens his eyes, Victor is overcome with disgust and abandons him without teaching him a word.

Spoiler: the creature receives an education anyway. He leaves Victor’s apartment functionally newborn and learns about his environment through direct experiences with hunger, pain, fear, and the elements. The monster eventually takes refuge in a hovel joined to the De Lacey family’s cottage, where he witnesses examples of familial virtue. He learns history and social order from Volney’s Ruins of Empires and draws on Plutarch, Goethe, and Milton to form his understanding of himself, society, and God. The creature’s education is accidental and ungoverned: no one chooses his curriculum, corrects his errors, or even knows he is listening.

16 Sept 2026 – One hundred women’s organisations, LGBTIQ+ groups, unions, disability groups and mental health advocates have united to oppose proposals to redefine ‘sex’ under Australia’s anti-discrimination laws, warning that doing so would put longstanding protections for trans and intersex people, as well as women, at risk. 

The letter comes a day after a Coalition Bill seeking to rewrite the Sex Discrimination Act (SDA) was voted down in the Senate for the second time.

Similar attempts to amend the Act have also been made by a Nationals MP and One Nation. 

The open letter was signed by organisations including the Australian Council of Social Services (ACOSS), Australian Multicultural Women's Alliance (AMWA), Victorian Trades Hall Council, Australian Services Union, Fair Agenda, ACON, National Foundation for Australian Women, Women With Disabilities Australia, Equality Australia, Women's Electoral Lobby and Women's Legal Services Australia.

Sent to all federal MPs, the letter urges them to reject any changes that would redefine “sex” in the SDA or remove gender identity as a protected attribute, warning that such changes would undermine essenital protections against discrimination.

On this episode of Follow the Money, Dr Luke Slawomirski and Matt Grudnoff join Ebony Bennett to discuss the soaring cost of specialists, why pushing people towards the private health system doesn’t take pressure off public hospitals, the government’s proposed changes to private health rebates, and how to ensure Australia doesn’t backslide towards US-style health care.

This episode was recorded on Tuesday 15 September.

Correction: During the discussion on Australian specialist costs, Luke mistakenly said that average costs in the Australian Capital Territory are six times higher than Tasmania. They are actually four times higher.

More Fool Me: How the gas industry tricked Australia by Richard Denniss, the latest edition in the Vantage Point series, is available now.

Use the code ‘FOOLME’ on a four-edition Vantage Point subscription to receive a free copy of Richard’s book, Econobabble.

Guest: Luke Slawomirski, Senior Postdoctoral Research Fellow, the Australia Institute // @lukeslawomirski

The selection committee for the Australian International Political Economy Network (AIPEN) Richard Higgott Journal Article Prize is pleased to announce the articles nominated by AIPEN members for the longlist for the 2026 prize.

The prize will be awarded to the best article published in 2025 (online early or in print) in international political economy (IPE) by Australia-based academic(s). The prize defines IPE in a pluralist sense to include the political economy of security, geography, literature, sociology, anthropology, post-coloniality, gender, finance, trade, regional studies, development, and economic theory, in ways that can span concerns for in/security, poverty, inequality, sustainability, exploitation, deprivation, and discrimination.

The overall prize winner will be decided by the selection committee, which is comprised of AIPEN members and this year includes Ainsley Elbra, Anja Bless, Elliot Dolan-Evans, Tim DiMuzio, and me. Before that decision can be made, we now invite AIPEN members to vote on the longlist to establish the final shortlist of four articles for deliberation.

Voting is being conducted online through ElectionBuddy and is open to all members of the AIPEN e-list. Voting is open from 9am on Monday 21 September (AEST) and closes 5pm on Friday 9 October (AEDT).

This is a premium Notes on the Crises article. Subscribe here to read in full.

With this piece, we accomplish our first “lap” through the tripartite structure of this series. This is how I plan to write the entire series, with maybe some small deviations. I am trying to build up from basic foundations, which going one category at a time wouldn’t accomplish. It wouldn’t make sense, for example, to get to credit derivatives before even having a basic discussion of what a limited liability corporation is. As readers can probably tell, I’m quite excited about this approach to building up from the basics. Gradually increasing the complexity of the instruments, criteria and the organizational forms seems to me to be quite an intuitive way from going from confusion over the basics of finance to becoming conversant in mortgage backed securities and beyond.

On August 21, 2024, I rolled into the Indiana Dunes at the end of an 825-mile bicycle ride from Washington, D.C.—a ride that raised over $100,000 for I AM ALS, founded by former Obama White House counsel Brian Wallach. Two days before my arrival, Wallach was just a few miles away in Chicago, addressing the Democratic National Convention (DNC) alongside his wife, Sandra.

Also inside that convention hall was one of the party’s most prolific progressive fundraisers, a woman named Evan Barker. Her recent loud break with the Democratic Party, overnight as it looked, had been a long time coming. She walked out during Oprah Winfrey’s speech, recorded a video on the convention floor, and posted it to TikTok, garnering millions of views. After the 2024 election, she wrote an essay for The Free Press admitting she’d voted for Donald Trump.

While the movement for Alberta separatism may be framed as a straightforward push for independence, the concerns driving it raise a more nuanced question – do Albertans truly want to leave Canada, or are there real issues of democracy, influence, and autonomy over policies that decide the province’s future? Despite the loud rhetoric calling for independence, recent polling has suggested that support for independence remains a minority position. In February 2026, the Angus Reid Institute found that 30% of Albertans would vote to leave Canada in a referendum, compared with 65 % who would vote to remain. A March 2026 Leger survey similarly found only 17% supported independence, though 58% of Albertans were concerned about the growing momentum of this movement.

Weak support for separatism should not be dismissed. Pollara’s Alberta Spotlight tracking put separatist support at 27% in April 2026, its highest level in five years of its own tracking. While still a minority view, separatism has increasingly become a way for Albertans to express dissatisfaction with Canadian politics.

In his 1807 poem, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”, William Wordsworth wrote about the time he touched grass.

Out on a lonesome stroll, Wordworth’s spirits were lifted by the sight of thousands of “dancing daffodils” near a sparkling lake. The flowers were so striking that they birthed in him a new serenity. “The inward eye is the bliss of solitude,” he proclaimed, marveling that quiet contemplation could return him to fleeting joy.

Whatever came, Wordsworth would have his inward eye. He wrote an ode to memory.

Today our memories are stolen by oligarchs. They drain our lakes of daffodils to build data centers for storing them. You can never have true solitude in a surveillance state. You cannot wander lonely in The Cloud: you are always watched but never seen.

Technofascists want to shut the inward eye. They’ll close it like an eyelid on a corpse: a gambit, a formality. They want it shut for all eternity. Eternity is no big thing: the future is an asset they hoarded long ago. Loneliness is all that oligarchs will give you for free. Loneliness without solitude: the ultimate totalitarian win.

The Australia Institute is deeply saddened to hear of the passing of the Honourable Mary Gaudron KC.

Mary was the first woman judge on the High Court of Australia. She successfully argued the 1972 Equal Pay Case, with the Arbitration Commission concluding women have the right to “equal pay for work of equal value”. In her joint decision with Justice William Deane on the Mabo case, Gaudron wrote powerfully of the dispossession of Indigenous Australians from their land as “the darkest aspect of the history of this nation. The nation as a whole must remain diminished unless and until there is an acknowledgment of, and retreat from, those past injustices.”

As a member of the Australia Institute’s National Integrity Committee from 2020-2023, Mary made the case for effective anti-corruption watchdogs – invested with the powers needed to root out serious and systemic corruption.

Mary and her colleagues were ultimately successful when the Parliament passed the National Anti-Corruption Commission Act in 2022 – although the NACC remains restricted in its ability to hold public inquiries.

Our thoughts are with Mary’s family and loved ones.

Foreword: This is going to be an unusually personal Stained Glass Woman article. All the science is still there, but it also speaks to my life a little more immediately than most. Unlike most Stained Glass Woman articles, the anecdote about my life won’t just be at the beginning.

Additionally, while I usually don’t link research that’s paywalled in Stained Glass Woman, there’s simply no way around doing so for this article, because most of psychology’s most important work only exists in pay-to-access journals.

On July 14—Bastille Day—the French national team lost its semi-final match against Spain at the FIFA World Cup. The very next day, France’s National Assembly voted to legalize assisted suicide and euthanasia, providing a humane way out for those who could not stomach the bitter taste of defeat.

Putting aside the dark humor of the timing, France finds itself in good company now that it has legalized medical practices commonly described as “euthanasia” that actively and intentionally terminate human life. These practices are distinct from those in which a medical professional contributes to the end of a patient’s life either passively (for example, by withholding life-sustaining treatments at the patient’s request) or unintentionally (for example, by administering sedatives with the intention of easing pain, even when there is a risk of hastening death as a side effect).

On this episode of After America, Dr Richard Tanter joins Dr Emma Shortis to discuss his new research on American access to Australian defence facilities, the long-term consequences of the war on terror for the Australia-US alliance, and whether Australia is the only American ally not seriously rethinking its relationship with the United States.

This episode was recorded on Friday 11 September.

Join Emma and Allan Behm for the Melbourne launch of Allan’s new book, New Game New Rules: A foreign policy for dystopian times at 6pm on Tuesday 22 September.

Tickets to ‘The Last Best Hope of Earth: Reflections on the USA at 250’ at the Celtic Club in Melbourne on Friday 18 September are available here.

Guest: Richard Tanter, Senior Research Associate, Nautilus Institute

Host: Emma Shortis, Director, International & Security Affairs, the Australia Institute // @emmashortis

Show notes:

Australian Bases & US Involvement

This article is published alongside a companion article in Jacobin tracing how deregulation, not data center growth itself, has driven up American electricity prices — a framework applied here to Alberta’s own data centre boom.

On this episode of What’s the Point?, Richard Denniss examines Australia’s artificial intelligence boom and the political fight over who reaps the rewards.

This episode was recorded on Friday 4 September.

More Fool Me: How the gas industry tricked Australia by Richard Denniss, the latest Vantage Point essay from Australia Institute Press, is available now.

Use the code ‘FOOLME’ on a four-edition Vantage Point subscription to receive a free copy of Richard’s book, Econobabble.

Read more on The Point.

Host: Richard Denniss, co-Chief Executive Officer, the Australia Institute // @richarddenniss

Producer: Anna Chang, Managing Editor, The Point // @annachang

Show notes:

Climate Integrity Summit 2026 livestream tickets

In an open letter published in newspapers today, organisations representing a broad cross-section of Australian society say the proposed laws should be strengthened to allow Australians harmed by illegal and dangerous online content to take action to enforce the Duty of Care.

“Social media companies facilitate an enormous range of harm, including psychological illness, sexual violence, body dysmorphia and eating disorders, human trafficking, hate speech directed at vulnerable communities, racist violence, fraud, political insurrection and genocide,” the letter states.

“While we welcome the introduction of a Digital Duty of Care, the current plan gives eSafety, the regulator, a monopoly on enforcement,” said Josh Bornstein, Director, Corporate Regulation at The Australia Institute.

“The regulator already receives more than 100,000 complaints a year and can only take action for a tiny percentage of that number.  No regulator can police online safety on its own. Australians who are harmed by Big Tech should also be allowed to seek redress for a breach of the Digital Duty of Care.”

The open letter is supported by groups including the Chinese Australian Forum, the Australian Education Union, the Working with Women Alliance, the Executive Council of Australian Jewry and The Australia Institute.

The myriad laws on Australian statute books addressing these serious harms do not elicit shouty cries of “free speech”.

Yet a misconceived claim of censorship is the hill that One Nation and the Coalition are choosing to die on in opposing the Albanese’s government’s plan for a new legislated digital duty of care – a law that would apply to those same harms.

Pauline Hanson set out her opposition, posting: “Australia should be moving away from government censorship, not building the Orwellian machinery for it”.

Hanson’s post came just days after she demanded enhanced security because she has received violent threats. Presumably Hanson doesn’t regard those threats as a form of free speech.

A YouGov poll of more than 1000 Australians also shows that the conservative parties’ opposition to regulating Big Tech is deeply unpopular with the electorate. A staggering 93 per cent of Australians agree that online platforms should be required to provide a safe online environment that prevents illegal and harmful content.

Last week, The Telegraph published an article titled, “How having a disability became cool,” with the subhead, “Young women, nicknamed ‘sickfluencers’, are turning chronic illness into a lifestyle trend and entrenching a culture of economic inactivity.”

This article serves a political purpose.

It shores up the government narrative that rising rates of disability are being driven, not by the ongoing and unchecked spread of COVID, but by people just deciding they want to “identify as disabled”.

This claim is absurd on its face.

Let’s dive in.

A Far-Right International Is Assaulting Democracy

 — Author: Thomas Zimmer — Sunday 13th September 2026

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Osama Bin Trump

 — Author: Chris Hedges — Saturday 12th September 2026

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The Heavy Yoke of 9/11

 — Organisation: The Claremont Institute — Friday 11th September 2026

Twenty-five years ago this morning, 2,977 people were murdered in the space of 102 minutes. Most of them had gone to work. Some had boarded an airplane. Among them were 343 New York City firemen who climbed the stairs of the World Trade Center towers while everyone else came down, knowing what that act meant. Aboard a plane over Pennsylvania, 40 passengers and crew learned by telephone what was happening and took their plane back from the men who had seized it.

We memorialize them, as we should. But a quarter century is long enough that we owe them something more than memory. We owe them an accounting. The honest question on this anniversary is not whether we honored the dead. That we have done. It is whether we have ever understood what had been done to us and why—and whether the American people have been made safer or left exposed in ways their forefathers would have found unthinkable.

In Natural Right and History, the political philosopher Leo Strauss opens by asking whether the United States, having become the world’s most powerful and prosperous nation by adhering to the principles of the Declaration of Independence, still held those truths to be self-evident.

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The Escalating Crisis in Canada-US Trade Negotiations: An Explainer

 — Publication: Perspectives Journal — Friday 11th September 2026

With the collapse of 2026 US-Canada trade negotiations in August and the implementation of counter-tariffs by Prime Minister Mark Carney in early September, Canadians are left wondering what happened and what comes next. Perspectives Journal editor Clement Nocos spoke to Daniel Drache, political economist and Professor Emeritus of Political Science at York University, for an explainer on the escalating crisis.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

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Clement Nocos: Prime Minister Mark Carney promised to deliver a trade deal with the United States with much of his “elbows up” campaign rhetoric, but this has since spiralled as the US escalates its tariffs and Canada imposes retaliatory measures. What stands out about the collapse of interim trade deal negotiations meant to in August 2026 that were meant as a stop gap in place of CUSMA’s renewal?

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