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Of all the course corrections Donald Trump has pursued since his now-famous escalator ride, the one with the most lasting implications—perhaps barring immigration enforcement—may be his war against the unelected bureaucracy that has anti-democratically governed America for decades.

What the Trump Administration has undertaken in the past few months, and what is only beginning to bear fruit with cases like Trump v. American Federation of Government Employees, is nothing less than the opening salvos in a war to dismantle the blatantly unconstitutional technocracy that has defined American governance for at least the last half century. Contra the usual “end of democracy” hysterics from critics, if Trump is successful in these efforts he will be the greatest restorer of constitutional norms in the United States in more than 100 years.

The vision of the American system from Schoolhouse Rock!—a legislature that makes the laws, a president who enforces them, and a judiciary that faithfully interprets the law—hasn’t described how our government actually functions for quite some time. Indeed, it’s not an exaggeration to say that Congress has behaved largely as a vestigial organ, transferring the legislative powers the American people originally delegated to Congress to a multitude of agencies.

This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble.

Perhaps the biggest elephant in the room of American politics is the existence of a pedophilic blackmail network that involves some of the most powerful people in the country and the world. Despite efforts to get to the bottom of the Jeffrey Epstein case, which saw the trafficking and sexual exploitation of thousands of children, justice continues to be evaded and the cabal associated with Epstein — President Donald Trump notwithstanding — continues its conspiracy.

On this episode of Follow the Money, Amy Remeikis and Matt Grudnoff join Ebony Bennett discuss the political relevance of the housing crisis, the storm-in-a-teacup over some Treasury subheadings, and #NotAllEconomists.

You can sign our petition calling on the Australian Government to launch a parliamentary inquiry into AUKUS.

Dead Centre: How political pragmatism is killing us by Richard Denniss is available for pre-order now via the Australia Institute website.

Guest: Amy Remeikis, Chief Political Analyst, the Australia Institute // @amyremeikis

Guest: Matt Grudnoff, Senior Economist, the Australia Institute // @mattgrudnoff

Host: Ebony Bennett, Deputy Director, the Australia Institute // @ebonybennett

Show notes:

The American Enterprise Institute is an unlikely place to be reminded of why Donald Trump was necessary ten years ago, and is no less needed now. But a comment by Yuval Levin on a recent AEI panel succinctly brought out the difference Trump has made. Criticizing today’s populist, Trump-led Republican Party, Levin said, “The Right has to ground its approach to the public in a more conservative message, in a sense that this country is awesome. It is not a festering burning garbage pile—that is a strange way to talk to the next generation, and it’s not true, even a little bit.”

Trump has never used the words “festering burning garbage pile,” but he’s used similarly strong language to describe America’s condition in this century under administrations other than his own. Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again” implies that America hasn’t been great lately, although he and his voters can change that. Whenever Trump alludes to what Levin calls “a festering burning garbage pile,” he’s referring to the poor leadership our country has suffered from in the not-too-distant past and the results of its misgovernance.

Australia’s rental crisis has reached unprecedented levels with new data showing rents have increased by an average of 57 per cent across capital cities over the past decade.
 
The new report, titled Out of Reach, by national housing campaign Everybody’s Home has revealed that once-affordable cities have been hit the hardest.
 
It also shows that social housing has slipped to the lowest share on record, remaining stagnant at 4.1 per cent of all dwellings since the Labor government was elected in 2022. This is a further drop from 4.7 per cent a decade ago, putting even further strain on the rental market.
 
Key findings:

On Independence Day, nearly a dozen black-garbed individuals, some equipped with body armor and firearms, allegedly orchestrated a premeditated ambush on law enforcement outside the Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas. According to the federal criminal complaint, the group began firing on the center with fireworks and spray-painting anti-ICE and pro-Antifa slogans on vehicles until law enforcement moved to secure the area. Once law enforcement came out of the building, two assailants opened fire with AR-15s, firing 20-30 rounds and wounding at least one officer.

The attack was entirely foreseeable. Antifa militants motivated by virulent rhetoric have repeatedly doxxed and targeted ICE, going all the way back to Antifa member Willem Van Spronsen’s 2019 attack on a Tacoma, Washington, ICE detention facility. Van Spronsen was killed by responding officers and became a popular anarchist martyr.

The ancient Indigenous rock art on Western Australia’s Burrup Peninsula has been deservedly listed on the UNESCO World Heritage Register.

But the spectacular Murujuga petroglyphs remain under threat.

Extensive scientific evidence reveals that pollution from the adjacent Woodside gas export terminal has seriously damaged the engravings.

Scientists warn that unless the acid gas emissions from the terminal are curtailed, the rock art will be destroyed, regardless of the World Heritage listing.

“The tragedy is that Woodside’s gas development does not need to be at Murujuga,” said Stephen Long, Senior Fellow at The Australia Institute, who produced The Fight to Save Murujuga documentary.

“The gas from the proposed extension will be shipped in from offshore gas fields hundreds of kilometres away.”

Despite the warnings from scientists, in late May, Environment Minister Murray Watt provisionally approved a 50-year expansion of the gas project, claiming the approval was subject to strict conditions to protect Murujuga.

However, those conditions remain a secret. The Australia Institute last week wrote to Minister Watt requesting the conditions be made public.

“Keeping the conditions secret prevents public scrutiny and undermines public trust and accountability,” said Mark Ogge, Principal Advisor at The Australia Institute.

Dr Ruth Mitchell, neurosurgeon and Nobel Peace Prize winner with the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, joins Dr Emma Shortis to discuss why a growing number of Australians want an AUKUS review, Trump’s pharmaceuticals tariffs, and what the US President can learn from Jane Fonda.

This discussion was recorded on Friday 11 July 2025.

You can sign our petition calling on the Australian Government to launch a parliamentary inquiry into AUKUS.

Dead Centre: How political pragmatism is killing us by Richard Denniss is available for pre-order now via the Australia Institute website.

Guest: Ruth Mitchell, Board Chair, International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War // @drruthmitchell

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

Show notes:

Polling – AUKUS, the Australia Institute (July 2025)

Is neoliberalism dead or alive? The latest big beautiful tax cuts fought through by Trump are in hard contrast with his arm wrestling of other states by imposing tariffs. While the tax cuts are conceived as hyper-neoliberalism, many people perceive tariffs as a complete contradiction with neoliberal doctrine. The seemingly contradictory policy mix of Trump and his extreme right companions around the world makes many people call this the end of the neoliberal era. And it is not only the seemingly erratic behaviour of Trump that posed this problem: both Biden and Obama were described as neoliberal, and so were George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. At this point, the labelling appears so broad that it might seem futile to talk about neoliberalism – it functions as little more than a leftist buzz word.

We should not retire the term neoliberalism too soon, though. The problem is that neoliberalism gets too quickly identified with a very specific set of policies – tax cuts, trade liberalisation, privatisations and so on – or, alternatively, with the abstract quest for individual freedom. Both of these perspectives fail to capture what neoliberalism is actually about: the privatisation of power. As long as we are not paying attention to this underlying tendency of capitalism’s latest (if not last) stage, we are unable to really understand economic and social policies, as well as what glues political formations together. And so, we are incapable of effectively critiquing contemporary capitalism and fighting the rise of the extreme right.

Nina Boyarchenko and Leonardo Elias

California generally—and Claremont in particular—has produced some of the most profound and revolutionary conservative thinkers of the last half-century.

And for a great many of them, it’s because they understood what’s at stake if we abandon our American identity.

And we’re lucky enough to have a few of them, like Michael Anton, now working in the administration with us.

Now, Claremont Institute President Ryan Williams asked me to speak a little bit about statesmanship and, more to the point, about how to respond to some of the challenges our movement will need to confront in the years to come.

It’s an interesting question.

And I think it’s useful to reflect on the state of the Left in 2025’s America.

Last week, a 33-year-old Communist running an insurgent campaign beat a multimillion-dollar establishment machine in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary.

I don’t want to harp on a municipal election, but there were two interesting threads. The first is that it drives home how much the voters in each party have changed.

If our victory in 2024 was rooted in a broad, working- and middle-class coalition, Mamdani’s coalition is the inverse.

He wore what he wanted, and if a lounge suit didn’t suit then the event didn’t suit him.

When being sworn into the Privy Council, he simply refused to partake in the elaborate ceremony and in response to the exasperated Lord Chamberlain, just calmly said “I’ll bet you two bob I’m still allowed in”.

He won the bet.

Chifley was an engine driver before he was a parliamentarian, and he made sure he would wear his working-class blue shirt in rooms where the worker should be represented.

It was a political signal – he was a union man, for the worker, and he made sure his dress, when necessary, represented his origins.

Curtin had workers at the heart of his sartorial signals as well. He was, as Stuart Macintyre wrote in Australia’s Boldest Experiment: War and Reconstruction in the 1940s, “determined to make the Labor Party respectable” and dressed in a three-piece suit.

For him, he wanted the worker to be respected when Labor MPs were in the sorts of rooms that workers at the time would be barred entry.

Greg Combet would make a point of rolling up his sleeves when in meetings, which once helped mark the difference between unionists and the capital class.

Volodymyr Zelensky isn’t the first war-time leader to wear military garb as a link to his people – Winston Churchill spent much of World War II in the nautical uniform of the Royal Yacht Squadron.

These signals matter. They’re a public display of a politician’s values and priorities.