Incoming Feed Items

Last year at this time, I posted my 2024 annual wrap-up.

This year, I was planning to do this same.

Instead, I want to take a minute to acknowledge this newsletter’s first and greatest supporter, the person who has encouraged and praised my writing since I was 6 years old, and who has masked and protected me from COVID reinfections without protest: my mom.

Her birthday is Christmas Day, and this Christmas she turned 73.

While I was growing up, she always insisted that we carefully identify which presents were “Christmas” presents and which were “birthday” presents- ensuring that no one used the date as an excuse to skimp out.

Unfortunately, three days before Christmas (and her birthday), my mom had a bad fall on the stairs in our family home. She had previously been diagnosed with Parkinson’s dementia, which likely led to her fall.

Since then, she has been in the ICU. She has bleeding in the brain which has been ongoing for a week. We are unsure whether she will recover, but desperately hoping that she will.

I have been unable to travel to my mom’s bedside since I’m homebound and largely bedbound with Long COVID in DC, and my parents live in Pittsburgh. I cannot drive anymore, nor am I well enough to fly.

The United States Constitution establishes a republic, not a monarchy. If an American president ever had royalist or autocratic aspirations, it would pose an existential threat to the Constitution. Numerous Americans believe that’s what made President Richard Nixon so dangerous. When House Speaker Carl Albert denounced Nixon’s “one‐man rule” in 1973, he was channeling the opinion of many at the time—and since. But removing a monarch from office is no smooth, straightforward affair. If it’s true that Nixon acted like a king, then the closest the country has ever come to regicide was the drama of Watergate. The scandal began with the arrest on June 17, 1972 of five men working for the Republican Committee for the Re-Election of the President (CRP), who were caught breaking into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee, located in the Watergate Office Building. The scandal appeared to end with Nixon’s resignation speech two years later, on August 8, 1974. The successful removal of the president took presidential authority down in its wake, condemning any president who tries to recover it as another Nixon, another monarch-in-the-making. This has itself become a scandal, a stumbling block to understanding some of the most tumultuous years in American history, when the country and its politics changed forever.

Nick Fuentes is a problem. His influence is growing, fueled by his deft channeling of valid grievances. He has been further buoyed by neoconservatives and the progressive Left, both of which are desperate for “Nazi” bogeymen to validate their anti-MAGA hysterics. However, their ritual denunciations of Fuentes and his groyper legions are worse than useless. They merely encourage groyperism by providing a bigger kick of frisson due to breaking social taboos.

Chris Rufo argues that Fuentes’s critics misapprehend the groyper phenomenon by taking it in earnest instead of recognizing the “hyperreal” run amok. The French sociologist Jean Baudrillard used the term to denote the condition of postmodernity wherein our representations of reality become more phenomenologically real to us than reality itself, until they detach from reality entirely. “Emptied out, [signs] then circulate through digital media,” writes Rufo, “where they drive the discourse and, while purely derivative, still spark real emotional involvement.”

Gen Z women, the most liberal demographic in the country, are becoming a powerful share of the electorate. Yet conservatives are misreading what actually drives our political decisions. While the legacy media fixates on a supposed surge of right-leaning youth, the reality is more complicated. Young women are not moving right because Republicans keep repeating the same mistakes Democrats made with young voters in the last election cycle. 

Last year, I wrote about former presidential hopeful Kamala Harris’s failed attempt at being hip with the cool girls during her 2024 campaign. During a year when women were suffering sexual violence in conflicts from Gaza to Ukraine, and when the prospect of marriage and family felt economically out of reach, Harris had countless opportunities to show young women she understood our concerns. Instead, she fixated on the fact that British musician Charli XCX made a pop culture reference about her, invited social media influencers to the Democratic National Convention, and appeared on a sex podcast while Americans were dying in a hurricane. Harris’s endeavor to win over the youth was more than wildly unsuccessful. It was vapid, unserious, and embarrassing. It communicated a belief that young women’s concerns begin and end with oversexed pop culture. 

Following my annual practice, I have listed here my “novel” reading for 2025. This is a way of documenting what I get through in a year’s worth of reading on the commute to work, in the evenings after work, and while travelling outside of my “normal” academic reading. My use of the term “novel” reading is loosely adopted, as you will see from the list to include fiction and then really important non-fiction work I get excited to read in my spare time. As you will see, my novel reading shifted away from novels to much more academic reading in my “free time” and then back again. But that approach has been richly rewarding.

This year my imagination was captured by Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall Trilogy, a choice inspired by old school friend Mike (“Sarge”) Denson, who is still educating me now as much as he did back when we were teenagers. Aside from reading, Mantel’s core rule for writing is “show up at the desk”, which is pretty much relevant to us all as writers of whatever form.

This post updates my previous writings on how inequality data based solely on income ignores housing tenure, wealth and social transfers in kind. This fundamentally misunderstands hardship and inequality and leads to poor policy.

The post Revisiting Issues of Affordability, Income and Inequality appeared first on Greg Ogle's After Dinner Political Economy.

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.

We Wish You a Merry Christmas | The Roundtable

This week, hosts Ryan and Spencer sit down as the year closes out to share their Christmas plans and recommendations: music, theater, food, drink, and more! Stay tuned in the new year!

This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble.

Noam Chomsky once said “The more privilege you have, the more opportunity you have. The more opportunity you have, the more responsibility you have.”

Today, this profound quote from an important figure is ensconced in irony, not only in light of Chomsky’s close ties with Jeffrey Epstein, but also regarding the entire ruling class structure’s facilitation of the pedophile’s rise to the top. Anand Giridharadas, in his book Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, talks about this privilege and the elite delusions that capitalism and capitalists can save the planet from the very problems that they create.

Confronting new analysis reveals renters in some of Australia’s capital cities are thousands of dollars worse off this Christmas compared to last, with Sydneysiders facing an extra $3,770 in rent annually.

Everybody’s Home has analysed SQM Research data on weekly asking rents to find the annual increase in rents from December 2024 to December 2025 across capital cities.

The analysis reveals renters in Sydney are paying an extra $72.50 per week to rent a house this year compared to last year, adding up to $3,770 extra annually, while unit renters face an additional $2,109.

Brisbane renters are paying $2,839 extra annually for a house, while renters in Perth are facing an additional $2,639.

On average across the capital cities, renters are paying $2,567 more annually to rent a house compared to last year, and an additional $1,823 to rent a unit. 

The only capital city that is bucking the trend is Canberra where rent caps have kept increases significantly lower – just $0.79 extra per week to rent a house this Christmas compared to last. 

Rent increases for units and houses

Maureen Egan

Each year brings a new set of economic challenges: In 2025, major areas of focus included tariffs and trade tensions, as well as the financial pressures facing younger adults. New York Fed economists contributed insightful research on both topics—and readers took notice. In fact, all five of the year’s most-read posts on Liberty Street Economics analyzed aspects of these issues. Read on to see how the restoration of student loan data to credit reports affected borrowers’ credit scores, whether the costs of a college degree are still worth it, how businesses are responding to higher tariffs, and why the U.S. runs a trade deficit.

As we close out 2025, the Trump Administration has racked up many big wins. But none are as significant as what President Trump and Secretary of War Hegseth have done to repair the recruitment crisis that took place during President Biden’s watch.

When I served in the House of Representatives, I chaired the Military Personnel Subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee, so I saw firsthand how bad things got under Biden, especially at the Pentagon and in our military.

When Biden was president, he presided over the worst recruitment crisis since our military became an all-volunteer force over 50 years ago.

In 2022, the Army set a goal to recruit 60,000 new soldiers, but it only managed to recruit 45,000. That’s 15,000 soldiers short. And the same thing happened again the following year, when the Army was again 15,000 soldiers short of its 65,000 recruitment goal. When you add up the recruitment losses under President Biden between 2021 and 2025, the Army shrank by 40,000 soldiers due to a lack of recruits. That’s as many as four divisions of troops.

The Navy fared no better. In 2023, it was 7,500 sailors short of its recruitment goal of 37,000. In 2024, it was nearly 5,000 short of its goal of over 40,000 new sailors. So between 2021 and 2025, the Navy shrank by 16,000 sailors, which is about three aircraft carriers’ worth of United States sailors.

That’s how bad the recruitment crisis got during Joe Biden’s watch.

The assassins who conspired against Julius Caesar could have stabbed their victim in the street, but they chose to commit their crime in the Curia of Pompey while the Senate was in session. The location’s symbolism was part of the message they intended to send. Charlie Kirk was assassinated on a college campus with a microphone in his hand as he answered questions from the crowd. It was the style of debate that earned him the love of millions and the admiration of many powerful figures, including the president of the United States. It was also the activity that led his murderer to mark him as someone who “spreads too much hate” and therefore deserved to die.

Charlie Kirk was a once-in-a-century talent who will not be replaced. He had boundless energy, acute judgment, and a capacity to evolve that was unusual in a public figure. His organization, Turning Point USA (TPUSA), and its political affiliate, Turning Point Action, managed a turnout operation for President Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign that helped achieve the biggest popular-vote victory in a generation. Kirk himself could have been on a presidential ticket someday, possibly even the first ticket for which he would have been eligible. Had he lived, he would have turned 35 a month before the 2028 election.

The Albanese Government’s announcement of a gas reserve for Australians is an acknowledgement that there is no gas shortage, and that excessive exports have driven up energy prices for Australians.

The Gas Market Review Report acknowledges that unrestricted exports linked Australian prices to world prices, tripling the cost of gas on Australia’s east coast over the last ten years.

Currently 80% of Australia’s gas is exported including two thirds of gas produced on the east coast.

The new policy will require gas exporters to supply between 15% and 25% of gas they produce to the Australian market, as opposed to simply being required to “offer” it to Australians.

Next, the government needs to address:

• • The giveaway of gas resources – over half the gas exported from Australia is given to gas exporters for free, with no royalties and no petroleum tax paid.
  • The need to stop new gas projects – Australia has no need of new gas projects that damage the climate and divide communities.
  • Reducing gas demand – helping Australian businesses and households use less gas.

“Finally, after a decade of policy failure, the Government has acknowledged there is no gas shortage and exports are the problem,” said Mark Ogge,Principal Advisor at The Australia Institute.

“This is an acknowledgement that the gas industry’s constant claim of a gas shortage was a lie, designed to force governments to support their unnecessary new gas export projects.