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On this episode of Follow the Money, manufacturing industry representative Geoff Crittenden and Australia Institute Principal Advisor Mark Ogge join Ebony Bennett to discuss how governments can ensure there’s more gas available for Australians.

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

Guest: Geoff Crittenden, Chief Executive Officer, WELD Australia

Guest: Mark Ogge, Principal Advisor, the Australia Institute // @markogge

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

Show notes:

Impact of gas exports on Australian energy prices, the Australia Institute (July 2025)

Big gas is taking the piss, Follow the Money (April 2025)

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.

Chips Ahoy | The Roundtable Ep. 282

Trump has reached a deal with semiconductor chip maker Intel to land the government a 10% stake in the firm. It’s a potential safeguard against China in an uncertain age but also a potentially troubling intervention into the market. There are also rumblings about sending the National Guard into Chicago, which would really be an error—but maybe it’s all just lib-baiting. Meanwhile in the UK, a teen girl was arrested after allegedly brandishing a knife and hatchet at an immigrant man by whom she felt threatened, aggravating tensions over the country’s influx of culturally disconnected and often violent immigrants. The guys sit down this week to discuss the happenings in Trump-world and beyond—plus more media recommendations!

“Remember,” Nigel Farage said in late July in his office near Parliament, “I am the moderate…reasonable…democratic…experienced…grown-up face of the fightback. If I lose, just you wait.”

For nearly 30 years, Farage (rhymes with “barrage”) has been the most influential British voice of what he calls the fightback, and his detractors call populism. At the turn of this century, as a member of the UK Independence Party (UKIP), he fought to “save the pound” at a time when London elites hoped to abandon England’s ancient currency for the European Union’s Euro. The pound survived, and in 2010 the Euro crashed. Almost alone among top politicians back then, Farage called for Britain to leave the E.U. outright. By 2016, a majority of his countrymen agreed. They broke their European ties in the so-called Brexit referendum, even if three years of parliamentary and judicial chicanery delayed Britain’s exit till 2020. (See “Why Hasn’t Brexit Happened?,” Summer 2019.) Winsome, bibulous, half-prophet and half-clown, he has a habit of being vindicated.

Conservatives often imagine that winning statewide elections means gaining control over the machinery of government. But this is wrong—and dangerously so. For far too long, red states have confused the two. The assumption that political victory automatically confers political authority is one of the chief falsehoods circulating on the Right. It is the reason Republican states often look like Democratic ones, only with different bumper stickers.

This is an uncomfortable but necessary message for conservatives to hear: red states are facing a major crisis of governance.

The State Leadership Initiative’s new Index Report lays out the evidence in extensive detail. By the most basic measures of lean, accountable, and ideologically grounded government, red states are failing. Many of the policies their representatives are voting for and their governors are signing into law are profoundly out of step with the wishes of voters. Bureaucracies are bloated, universities multiply administrators faster than scholars, there are fewer teachers than administrators in schools, New York-style regulations pile up in red states like Texas, and seven of the ten most federally dependent states wear the Republican label.

The key takeaway is not just that red states are doing poorly—it is that red states are almost indistinguishable from blue states on the metrics that matter.

Many American Founders, including our first four presidents, hoped to establish a national university that would educate statesmen for the new republic. During his second term, George Washington was presented with what seemed to be a golden opportunity to accomplish this goal—and rejected it on cultural grounds.

In 1794, the Swiss exile François d’Ivernois had written to John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, whom he knew from their years of diplomatic service in France. His home city of Geneva was suffering “convulsions” due to “the great political drama which now agitates Europe,” namely the French Revolution, whose terror had recently reached its nadir but whose fervor was still disrupting neighboring countries. D’Ivernois, himself “too much a republican” for the Calvinist Republic of Geneva but “too little a republican” for Revolutionary France, proposed a scheme “to transport into one of your Provinces our Academy [the University of Geneva] completely organised, and with it its means of public instruction.” At a stroke, it seems, Washington could have whisked away one of Europe’s premier universities and established it in the American republic.

Washington balked. “That a national University in this country is a thing to be desired, has always been my decided opinion,” but he doubted the ability of “an entire Seminary of foreigners, who may not understand our language,” to “be assimilated.” As Washington explained to Adams:

Special announcement: As I said Friday, I have secured a fiscal sponsor for Notes on the Crises. That fiscal sponsor is the organization the “Alternative News Foundation” (ANF). What that means in practice is that people can make tax deductible donations to Notes on the Crises. I will have an email laying out more of these details and laying out other options for donations such as venmo, paypal or physical check. For now, those who want to donate can find Notes on the Crises on the popular non-profit fundraising platform Fundrazr.

Hello readers, an hour ago I had an Op Ed published in Politico about the Federal Reserve. For those that didn’t hear, late last night Trump declared that he fired Lisa Cook over the “mortgage fraud” allegations I mentioned last Friday. Apparently I had my finger on the pulse of events. 

As I argued in the first part of this essay, the Catholic Church has much to contribute to the revitalization of right reason and the moral foundations of democracy in a Western world that has increasingly lost sight of its civilizational soul.

But as Paul Seaton has compellingly argued in a recent article at The Catholic World Report entitled “Western Civilization Under Attack,” the current leadership of the Church no longer speaks with any confidence about the need to defend Western civilization, that civilizational order with roots in Athens, Jerusalem, and Rome “in which the humanity of man has been most explored, extolled, and realized (if imperfectly, as such things must be).” As Seaton strikingly adds, if the West—including its deep-seated commitments to constitutional government, liberty under law, religious liberty, and the search for truth—“were to leave the stage of history, both as ideal and as reality, humanity would be immeasurably diminished.”

This blog from Caroline Tosal-Suprun as part of our ongoing Community Economist project, which you can read more about here. Read the first blog, What is the Economy? What is a community economist? Someone with no formal training or in-depth knowledge about the economy who wants to be part of challenging economic inequality. By design, […]

The post Community Economists: How Do You Start Talking About Economics? appeared first on Equality Trust.

Tell your blue state officials that they must proactively protect the people of your state from Trump's "specialized units."

We have to do all we can to head off the occupation of blue states by National Guard troops unlawfully activated in or sent to them. Right now, that means alerting your state officials to the danger and urging them to take strong prophylactic measures.

This morning, Donald Trump signed an Executive Order that directs a barrage of federal agency action to escalate his dictatorial takeover of the District of Columbia. Embedded in the EO is a deeply chilling provision that orders Pete Hegseth and the DOD to create specialized military units for rapid deployment across the nation for "quelling civil disturbances and ensuring the public safety and order whenever the circumstances necessitate." Trump is commanding the creation of standing army units to occupy states across the country.

Policy can seem like opening a blind box: you’ll get something, but probably not what you want. Jim Chalmers’ economic roundtable was no different. Every option is on the table, yes, but what we’ll get is as unknown as what is driving the Labubu craze.

First, the positives. Holding the roundtable is at least an indication that the government is looking to expand the mandate it took to the election. Despite Anthony Albanese’s repeated statements (always carefully worded in the present tense) that “the only tax policy that we’re implementing is the one that we took to the election”, every Labor MP privately admits there is not only the need to do more on tax but also the space. A whopping majority tends to focus even the most recalcitrant minds on the art of the possible.

The issue with the roundtable is that the same groups advising on how to disarm the intergenerational economic bombs that have started to explode are the same groups that helped set them.

The Productivity Commission, Treasury, the Business Council — the same outfits that have spent the past 25 or more years advocating for more privatisation and tax cuts, claiming they are panaceas for productivity growth — are now sounding the alarms that productivity has continued to fall.

On this episode of After America, Allan Behm joins Dr Emma Shortis to discuss Trump’s deployment of federal authorities to Democrat-voting jurisdictions, land grabs by the Russian and Israeli governments, and what a collapse of American democracy might mean for Australia.

This episode was recorded on Friday 22 August.

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 now via the Australia Institute website.

Guest: Allan Behm, Special Advisor, International & Security Affairs, the Australia Institute

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

Show notes:

Beyond the Two-State Solution: Policy responses to the Destruction of Palestine and the Insecurity of Israel by Emma Shortis, Allan Behm and Bob Bowker, The Australia Institute (February 2025)

Sophia Cho and John C. Williams

The Economic Reform Roundtable is ostensibly all about productivity. Treasurer Jim Chalmers has argued that cutting red tape and speeding up approvals is the key to unlocking growth. It’s the old trickle-down idea made new again by Ezra Klein’s book Abundance: make it easier to build, and prosperity will follow. It’s an appealing story. But […]

In 1790, the first United States census was a straightforward affair. Marshals rode on horseback, counted people where they lived, and returned with ledgers that would determine representation in Congress. The idea was as simple as it was profound: political power should follow the actual number of people—not estimates, not probabilities, not manipulated figures—residing in each state. This “actual Enumeration,” written into Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution, was meant to be one of the republic’s great safeguards of equal representation.

Two hundred thirty years later, the Census Bureau turned that safeguard upside down and thwarted the will of voters. In 2020, it implemented “differential privacy,” an opaque algorithm that deliberately injects false numbers into small-area data. Supposedly designed to protect privacy and identities, it instead scrambled population counts in ways that Harvard researchers found made it “impossible to follow the principle of ‘One Person, One Vote.’”

At the same time, the incoming Biden Administration dismantled the Administrative Records Project, the Trump-era initiative that would have allowed the bureau to use existing federal data to determine citizenship and correct census errors. The result was a census that was riddled with miscounts, opaque to challenge, and constitutionally suspect.