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Hunter S Thompson once wrote of San Francisco in the 1960s, ‘with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark – that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.’ His sentiment of faded hope also captures the view of many of us who initially found reasons for optimism in the project of 21^st century socialism that began to be constructed in Venezuela at the beginning of the millennium, initially under Hugo Chávez.

I have one short story to tell you about Charlie Kirk—my friend.  

He became a friend of mine because I interrogated him one time. Nineteen-year-olds are my specialty. I asked him some questions he couldn’t answer. And he was already becoming famous. And I noticed his reaction: he said, “What should I do?”  

And I said,

Well, you have to suffer. If you want to grow, you have to suffer. It’s hard to learn—into the night, crack of dawn in the morning. Start with the Bible. Read the classics. Study the founding of America. In those places you will find that there’s a ladder that reaches up toward God. And at the bottom of it are the ordinary good things that are around us everywhere. If we can call them by their names—they have being, and the beings of the good things are figments of God. You will find that article in Aristotle. You will find it in the Bible. You will find it in Madison and Jefferson. 

“How do I learn that?” he said, and I said, “You have to suffer. You have to study. You have to think.”  

I thought I’d never hear from him again.  

Within a month, he got ahold of my cell phone number, and he texted me a copy of a certificate of completion of a Hillsdale College online course. He would go on to do that 31 times.  

Linda S. Goldberg and Samantha Hirschhorn

The brouhaha over Donald Trump’s latest attack on a journalist for doing journalism (this time the excellent John Lyons) rather overshadowed it, but Anthony Albanese’s trip to Papua New Guinea made one thing undeniably clear.

The Pacific has lost patience with Australia.

This is not new, nor particularly earth-shattering as analysis. But it does pose larger questions for Australia moving forward, as the old ways of doing business with our regional neighbours no longer cut it.

One reason Australia has always been so clumsy in its dealings with the Pacific is that it only ever views the Pacific in terms of defence.  What can the Pacific do for Australia? Who doesn’t Australia want on its doorstep? What does Australia have to do to ensure the defence of the region?

Defence, of course, has its place. But the Pacific is a diaspora of cultures and people who do not exist to serve as pawns in Australia’s defence strategies with the United States. And yet, in our dealings with the Pacific, that is always the frame.

Papua New Guinea not signing an agreement Albanese visited the nation to sign, on the back of Vanuatu also withholding its agreement on a separate deal makes very, very clear the Pacific has run out of patience with us.

Join me for a live Q&A on my YouTube channel and X account, Monday September 22, at 6:30 - 7:30pm ET. Questions will be taken from the comment section of this Substack post, as well as during the livestream on YouTube/X. We will discuss the Trump administration’s exploitation of Charlie Kirk’s assassination to build out its fascist, technocratic police state, and whether dissidents of the administration should consider fleeing before it’s too late.

Please attempt to keep your questions direct and relatively brief, as I cannot read entire paragraphs during the show.

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 2025 prize, now in its 11^th year.

The prize will be awarded to the best article published in 2024 (online early or in print) in international political economy (IPE) by an Australia-based scholar.

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, comprised of AIPEN members. Before that decision can be made, we now require AIPEN members to vote on the longlist to establish the final shortlist of four articles for deliberation.

Voting is being conducted online through Election Buddy and is open to all members of the AIPEN e-list. Voting is open from 9am on Wednesday 24^th September and closes 5pm on Friday 17^th October (AEDT).

I’ve spent a lot of time arguing with assholes. Because I’ve spent a lot of time arguing with all sorts of people.

I was at Berkeley for many years, and argued with all sorts of people–anarchists, Democrats, environmentalists, evangelicals, feminists, Libertarians, Maoists, Moonies (they were terrible-car–crash-can’t-look-away bad at arguing), Republicans, Stalinists, Trotskyites, vegetarians. If you’re paying attention, then you’ve noticed I argued with everyone, including people with whom I agreed, but I disagreed with them on some point that seemed important to me. And some of them, even people with whom I agreed, argued in a way that I’ve come to call “arguing like an asshole.” By the way, so did I from time to time (and not everyone with whom I disagreed argued like an asshole).

By Maria Paula Nieto

What does gender have to do with a city government’s ability to adapt, innovate, and learn?

At first glance, not much. Dynamic capabilities seem to point towards relatively abstract organisational qualities. But scratch the surface and you find they are shaped by who is in the room.

Here’s the puzzle: despite decades of evidence from Brazil, Peru, India, Sweden, and beyond, the link between gender and state capabilities is still overlooked in mainstream debate. Yet studies show that leaders’ gender influences how governments set priorities, manage resources, and build legitimacy. In this blog I look at dynamic capabilities through the lens of policy capacity, using gender as one example of a structuring condition that shapes how these capabilities are deployed. Ignoring this dimension means overlooking a vital part of how state capabilities work.

The accelerating ascent, ubiquity, and commercialization of artificial intelligence require a renewed focus on truly elite human capital if we are to safeguard the future of Western civilization—both from external adversaries like China and also, perhaps even more importantly, from ourselves, especially our postmodern and transhumanist tendencies.

We will need in the coming years an elite cadre of Americans residing at the top levels of national and state government and bureaucracy. And yet we are confronted by a very sad state of affairs across K-12 and postsecondary education, making the creation of such an elite class an increasingly difficult task.

Exhibit A of this problem was illustrated in a recent Atlantic article about the peak of elite credentialing institutions, Harvard. The article, titled “The Perverse Consequences of the Easy A,” documents an alarming trend after decades of grade inflation. This excerpt helps give a sense of the problem’s progression: “In 2011, 60 percent of all grades were in the A range (up from 33 percent in 1985). By the 2020-21 academic year, that share had risen to 79 percent.”

American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy - September 26, 2025, 12:00-6:45 EST


More “Announcement
2025 Annual Conference of NOMOS : Capitalism and Socialism”

Marco Del Negro, Ibrahima Diagne, Keshav Dogra, Elena Elbarmi, Donggyu Lee, and Michael Pham

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has made abolishing property taxes for homeowners a centerpiece of his second-term agenda. This idea may sound appealing, but it would be unjust, unsustainable, set back Florida’s economic ascendance, and make the state an electorally inefficient “vote sink.” Instead of following Britain’s Tories in taking the easy route of pandering to rentier gerontocracy, DeSantis should return to making Florida a beacon of smart conservative policy.

The property tax reliably polls as America’s most unpopular major tax, primarily because it must be paid in large lump sums and does not fluctuate with family income. Nevertheless, DeSantis’s plan to eliminate property taxes on Florida residents’ primary residences, presumably funded by a sales tax hike, would be a serious mistake.

RFK Jr’s ongoing attacks on COVID vaccine access are getting widespread media and political attention.

Recently, his HHS announced that the FDA was authorizing the fall COVID vaccines only for “high risk groups”. His announcement, posted to X (formerly twitter), claims that vaccines will be available to all patients who want them “after consulting with their doctors.”

The American Mind Podcast: The Roundtable Episode 285

 — Organisation: The Claremont Institute — Thursday 18th September 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.

Remembering Charlie | The Roundtable Ep. 285

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The biggest risk to Australia’s economy

 — Organisation: The Australia Institute — Thursday 18th September 2025

On this episode of Dollars & Sense, Greg returns from his holiday to talk about the National Climate Risk Assessment reveals about the future of the Australian economy. Plus: the tricky task of measuring inflation for sectors like health and aged care and why the government’s wellbeing budget is falling flat.

Tickets for our Revenue Summit at Parliament House in Canberra, featuring Hon Steven Miles MP, Senator Larissa Waters, Senator David Pocock, Dr Kate Chaney MP, Greg Jericho and more – are available now.  You can buy second release tickets for just $109 via our website.

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

Host: Greg Jericho, Chief Economist, the Australia Institute // @grogsgamut

Host: Elinor Johnston-Leek, Senior Content Producer, the Australia Institute // @elinorjohnstonleek

Show notes:

National Climate Risk Assessment, Australian Climate Service

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How much bureaucracy do we need to achieve “zero bureaucracy”?

 — Organisation: UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP) — Thursday 18th September 2025

By Rainer Kattel

Three paradigms for digital transformation: identity-first, user-first, and sovereignty-first

Digital transformation is often sold as a panacea for doing away with the ills of existing public services: sleek interfaces, no forms, no friction. In others words, doing away with bureaucacry. But the paradox is quite obvious: getting to “zero bureaucracy” takes a lot of bureaucracy. The real question isn’t whether we need it, but what kind — and how we design routines and infrastructures so that bureaucracy orchestrates public value rather than obstructs it or enables extraction of value from socities. This blog summarises my talk for a Public Digital organised event for policy makers from the Dominican Republic on September 11.

All organisations are, at their core, bundles of routines. These routines never exist in isolation: they co-evolve with infrastructures — laws, funding arrangements, political systems, and of course with digital infrastructres such as data registries or identity systems. Together, routines and infrastructures generate path dependencies that shape which innovations are possible and what kinds of public value can be produced. Once such patterns settle, they are remarkably difficult to change.

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Carney and the Calgary School with Mack Penner

 — Publication: Perspectives Journal — Thursday 18th September 2025

Listen to the full conversation on the Perspectives Journal podcast, available to subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Amazon Music, and all other major podcast platforms.

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America First, Bots Second

 — Organisation: The Claremont Institute — Thursday 18th September 2025

With the release of OpenAI’s Chat GPT-5, artificial intelligence has vaulted forward again. But this is no ordinary tech update. With each new development in this technology, America and the world edge closer to something resembling a world-historical revolution.

Technological and economic shifts have always marched hand in hand, but this wave of automation threatens to upend labor markets like never before, creating what historian Yuval Noah Harari chillingly calls a “useless class.” And in a nation already fractured and struggling to find its shared identity, it would be insane to think of such a transformation without acknowledging that it risks igniting unrest on a scale far beyond mere economic anxiety.

Policymakers must stop treating AI as a purely economic—or geopolitical—matter. They must treat it as a question of national survival. 

Throughout history, as Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne remind us, “technological progress has vastly shifted the composition of employment.” John Maynard Keynes famously cautioned that the pain from these changes “often springs not from the rheumatics of old age, but from the growing-pains of over-rapid changes.” Both observations may ring true today—but this rupture is unlike any before. 

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We Are All antifa Now

 — Author: Chris Hedges — Thursday 18th September 2025

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Death of the Holocaust Industry - Read by Eunice Wong

 — Author: Chris Hedges — Wednesday 17th September 2025

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

Text originally published September 10, 2025.

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Vegas Loop Superfans Are Migraine-Inducing

 — Publication: CityNerd — Wednesday 17th September 2025

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Canada and Europe Need to Build a Firewall Against US Tech Coercion

 — Publication: Perspectives Journal — Wednesday 17th September 2025

When Prime Minister Carney agreed to drop the digital services tax under pressure from the United States, Europe was watching closely. Under President Trump’s “America First” foreign policy, the US had already unleashed a diplomatic storm against its supposed ally — threatening to sanction EU officials over a European Union law, the Digital Services Act, that aims to increase accountability and limit the spread of illegal content on large platforms. It may seem like a risky time for bold policy leadership, but short-term trade agreements and other giveaways on tech issues will only invite further coercion to bend to the US’s will.

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A more useful way to think about authoritarianism

 — Author: Patricia Roberts-Miller — Wednesday 17th September 2025

When I found myself as the Director of the First Year Composition program, I also found myself in the same odd conversation more than once.

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Chris Hedges New Interviews on Charlie Kirk: w/ George Galloway and Democracy Now!

 — Author: Chris Hedges — Wednesday 17th September 2025

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Reporting Inequality, Amplifying Voices in Brent

 — Organisation: The Equality Trust — Wednesday 17th September 2025

This blog was written by guest writer Riham Lotfi as part of our place-based organising work and community reporting project in Brent. Becoming a Brent Community Reporter has been more than just a role — it’s been a personal mission. As a mother, an educator, and a resident of Brent, I’ve always cared about social […]

The post Reporting Inequality, Amplifying Voices in Brent appeared first on Equality Trust.

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What Really Drives the Price of Bitcoin? Debunking the Liquidity Myth

 — Organisation: Applied MMT — Wednesday 17th September 2025

As Bitcoin continues to carve out a larger and larger share of the global financial system, the question of what truly drives its price has never been more important. For years, commentators have pointed to “Fed liquidity” as the main force behind Bitcoin’s price action. But as I argue in my latest video, this explanation doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. Instead, the evidence strongly suggests that fiscal flows—not monetary liquidity—are the true driver of Bitcoin’s long-term price trajectory.

Why “Fed Liquidity” Falls Short

In the post-COVID era, analysts have been quick to tie Bitcoin’s movements to changes in so-called Fed liquidity. Whether through quantitative easing (QE), reverse repos, the Treasury General Account (TGA), or reserve balances, the idea was that when the Fed injected liquidity, Bitcoin’s price would rise.

But there’s a fundamental flaw in this argument: Fed liquidity only swaps assets, it doesn’t add new ones. QE and related tools merely change the composition of private sector balance sheets; they don’t create new net financial assets. That means there’s no direct channel for these measures to bid up Bitcoin—or any other financial asset—in a sustainable way.

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How to Dismantle Far-Left Extremist Networks

 — Organisation: The Claremont Institute — Wednesday 17th September 2025

There is a growing urgency within the Trump Administration to take on what the president has called “the radical left lunatics” following the assassination of conservative icon Charlie Kirk. But despite much of the talk from the Right, including even from the administration itself, there is no easy way to dismantle the far-left’s networks. Defeating the forces arrayed against the American republic will require a detailed understanding of the enemy and a systematic plan to break up their networks, utilizing all methods of national power.

Defining Terms

The biggest initial problem the Trump Administration faces in confronting the radical Left is a refusal by the national security, federal law enforcement, and intelligence apparatuses to even recognize whom the president has identified as a threat.

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My Experience as a Community Reporter

 — Organisation: The Equality Trust — Wednesday 17th September 2025

This blog was written by guest writer Beanica Tripoli as part of our place-based organising work and community reporting project in Brent. As a Politics & International Relations master’s student who has always been passionate about social justice, it has been a privilege to work as a Brent Community Reporter with the Equality Trust. I’ve […]

The post My Experience as a Community Reporter appeared first on Equality Trust.

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