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Over Zero and the Othering and Belonging Institute just launched their new report: (En)Gendering Authoritarianism: A Six-Strategy Framework Examining How Political and Cultural Leaders Weaponize Gender in Ways that Advance Authoritarianism.

This report explores how political and cultural leaders weaponize narratives and policies on gender identity, women’s rights, and sexuality to advance authoritarianism. It demonstrates that attacks on women’s rights, feminism, and LGBTQ communities are neither random nor organic—but part of a larger strategy to manufacture social division, distract from policy failures and corruption, and create a permission structure for power consolidation and violence. 

The report introduces a six-strategy framework that shows how authoritarian movements exploit gendered anxieties to divide societies, launder and normalize social hierarchies, and reshape cultural norms—all while eroding democratic freedoms. 

 Visit our dedicated microsite, where you can access:

On this episode of Follow the Money, transparency advocate Rex Patrick and Australia Institute Democracy & Accountability Director Bill Browne to discuss the failing freedom of information system and why the proposed changes could make government less transparent – not more.

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

Guest: Rex Patrick, former Senator for South Australia // @mrrexpatrick

Guest: Bill Browne, Democracy & Accountability Director, the Australia Institute // @browne90

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

Show notes:

Proposed changes to Freedom of Information scheme don’t add up, the Australia Institute (September 2025)

On Friday, the jobs data hit—and it wasn’t good. Non-farm payrolls came in at just 22,000, far below the already low expectation of 75,000, and well short of the 53,000 that would have at least met consensus. By any measure, that’s a weak print.

It raises a big question: are we looking at the beginning of a major slowdown, or is something else going on beneath the surface?

In this post, I want to break down how to interpret this report, why it might not mean what the “perma-bears” think it does, and how it fits into the broader macroeconomic picture.

Framing the Question: Major Slowdown or Temporary Pause?

Whenever I see a headline-grabbing data point like this, I try to step back and ask a few simple questions:

1. What are the main drivers of the economy right now?
2. What should we expect to see if the bearish case is real?
3. What doesn’t line up with that story?

With jobs data, the natural concern is that weak hiring means the cycle is rolling over. But to confirm that, we need to see reinforcing signals in credit, fiscal policy, inflation, and layoffs. Without those, a bad number might just be noise—or the result of something temporary.

Later this month, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk will issue a report calling for massive reparations from the West for the alleged harms wrought by colonialism. It will be the culmination of a long-gestating effort within the U.N. and by Third World nations to squeeze money and demand other goodies from former colonial powers in the name of “reparatory justice.”

In addition to being historically ill-informed, the effort is racist. What began as a simple extortion effort has since been supercharged into an all-out assault on European cultures. Since being appointed in 2022, Türk has transformed his office. It now issues daily muezzin calls for uncontrolled mass migration to the West and the erasure of white cultures. His report should cause Western nations to abandon every U.N. agency that pursues this sick agenda.

Following our 2025 Community Tax Summit, the federal government announced an Economic Reform Roundtable.

Per Capita and the organisations who partnered together for the Community Tax Summit each added their submissions to the Economic Reform Roundtable in the lead up to the event to help push for meaningful and effective tax reform.

The overwhelming consensus from the summit was that reform was needed. And while our opinions of how this could be achieved align in some places while differing in others, a robust discussion around this matter needs to be had.

We thank our partners for sharing their submissions with us.

Per Capita’s Submission to the Economic Reform Roundtable 

The Centre for International Corporate Tax Accountability’s Submissions

The Brotherhood of St. Laurence’s Submission

The Superpower Institute’s Submission

Prosper Australia’s Submission

The analysis finds that the costs of climate change to local councils – such as repairing roads, drainage, parks and community facilities after floods, storms, and fires – are increasing far faster than local government revenue.

The insured costs of climate change are now 12 times higher than 20 years ago, while local government revenue is only three times higher.

The findings support calls for the release of the National Climate Risk Assessment, which contains important data for councils to prepare for the impact of climate change.

When I served as an Army Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) cadet at Fordham University in New York City, the Department of War paid for my degree in American Studies. During my coursework, I read books like The New Jim Crow and was bombarded with the claim that the country I had signed up to defend was irredeemably racist and broken. My civilian classmates and professors were overwhelmingly liberal, and the university was in the capital of liberalism. I spent most of my time in that milieu as opposed to dedicated environments conducive to military formation.

ROTC should be nowhere near Fordham University. In fact, the Trump Administration should end ROTC programs in blue states, leftist cities, and anti-American universities, focusing instead on institutions that actually love America. Training military officers in environments that serve the national interest is a critical step toward restoring the U.S. military as a whole.

No longer should ROTC programs be benefactors of the woke and weaponized higher education system. The colleges and universities that ROTC cadets attend—and that the federal government pays for—shouldn’t feature Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) quotas, the teaching of Critical Race Theory and other divisive ideologies, and the promotion of gay and lesbian lifestyles.

This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble.

Raz Segal, an Israeli historian and an associate professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Stockton University, analyzes how the weaponization and distortion of the Holocaust, in the midst of the genocide in Gaza, has been used to serve the narrative of Zionists and the Israeli government. He tells host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report:

“We know that Holocaust education eventually was more focused on transmitting this feeling of exceptionality than actually teaching about Holocaust as history, as real history, as normal history, as a part, indeed, of the making of the modern and late modern world.”

Segal recounts his personal experience learning about the Holocaust in Israel, revealing a Zionist perspective that is both skewed and contradictory.

Recent events regarding Lisa Cook’s attempted firing by Donald Trump have convinced me to do a premium series on the history of racial segregation and the Federal Reserve. This is for a few reasons. First, I think it's difficult to understand the import of this moment without understanding the history of racial segregation in the Federal Government and in the Federal Reserve System, specifically.  Indeed this history hasn’t really ever gotten a serious treatment. This is for a variety of reasons which are beyond the scope of this piece to examine.

Most Americans don’t know who Graham Linehan is, but to put it into perspective, he’s the Jerry Seinfeld of the British/Irish sitcom world. Back in the 1990s, Linehan starred in Father Ted, which is now regarded as one of the greatest sitcoms in U.K. television history.

On September 1, Linehan’s real life merged with sitcom-level absurdity when he landed at London’s Heathrow Airport and was immediately arrested by five members of the Metropolitan Police. His crime? Three posts on X.

At The Spectator, Linehan commented on the bizarre and ominous episode:

In a country where paedophiles escape sentencing, where knife crime is out of control, where women are assaulted and harassed every time they gather to speak, the state had mobilised five armed officers to arrest a comedy writer…(and no, I promise you, I am not making this up).

Australia’s national tax system is 110 years old. What has shaped it in the last century, and why is tax reform needed today?

The Federal Government has announced a Productivity Roundtable and indicated that broad tax reform will be part of the discussion to tackle the economic pressures our country faces today, to boost national prosperity, reduce growing inequality and improve living standards for future generations.

Following the popularity of her keynote speech at the Community Tax Summit in February 2025, Professor Miranda Stewart provides a follow-up address outlining how Australia’s tax system came to be how it is today, the reasons it needs reform and what that reform should look like, in light of the recently announced Productivity Roundtable.

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Miranda Stewart is a Professor specialising in taxation law and policy at the Melbourne Law School, University of Melbourne and an Honorary Professor at the Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University. In 2024, Miranda was a visiting fellow at the Australian Treasury. Her most recent book is Tax and Government in the 21st Century (Cambridge University Press).

On this episode of After America, Maskym Dotsenko and Illya Kletskovskyy, the Director General and Deputy Director General of the Ukrainian Red Cross, join Allan Behm to discuss the impact of the Russian invasion on Ukrainians, the role of Red Cross in armed conflict, and the importance of international humanitarian law in saving lives and reducing suffering.

This episode was recorded on Thursday 4 September.

After America: Australia and the new world order by Emma Shortis and Dead Centre: How political pragmatism is killing us by Richard Denniss are available now via the Australia Institute website.

Guest: Maskym Dotsenko, Director General, Ukrainian Red Cross Society // @MaksymDotsenko

Guest: Illya Kletskovskyy, Deputy Director General, Ukrainian Red Cross Society

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

Host: Angus Blackman, Producer, the Australia Institute // @AngusRB

Show notes:

UNC Professor Opening on Financial Regulation


More “Announcement
UNC Hiring Tenure-Track/Tenured Professor in Banking/Financial Regulation”

Recent buzz about the possibility of Trump selecting Budapest to host peace talks between Russia and Ukraine has brought Hungary back into the public consciousness. During the Biden years, Viktor Orbán’s Hungary was relegated to something of a footnote and regarded with distaste by the reigning administration. Now, Hungary has moved from adversary to ally in record time—a welcome reset that offers a window into Trump’s recalibrated foreign policy.

As early as the 2020 campaign, then-candidate Biden branded Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán a “thug” and lumped Poland and Hungary together as “totalitarian regimes”—incendiary language that prior U.S. presidents avoided, even when the two countries were under actual totalitarian control of the Communist Party.

It was hardly surprising, then, that in 2021 President Biden chose a gay, married LGBTQ activist with two adopted children as ambassador to Hungary—a country whose constitution defines marriage strictly as a union between a man and a woman, bans adoption by same-sex couples, and enforces some of Europe’s toughest child-protection laws. U.S. Ambassador David Pressman ignited tensions by denouncing Hungary’s conservative stance on marriage and its 2021 Child Protection Act, which forbids gender propaganda in K-12 schools.

Ross Gittins wins 2025 E.J. Craigie Writing Award for the best article reflecting the ideas of Henry George. Prosper Australia is pleased to announce Economics Editor for The Age/Sydney Morning Herald, Ross Gittins, as the recipient of the E.J. Craigie Writing Award for 2025 for his article: Productivity Commission wants our big mining companies to […]

Not surprisingly given those extraordinary numbers, U.S. immigration officers have prioritized immigration enforcement in the Los Angeles area. The Government sometimes makes brief investigative stops to check the immigration status of those who gather in locations where people are hired for day jobs; who work or appear to work in jobs such as construction, landscaping, agriculture, or car washes that often do not require paperwork and are therefore attractive to illegal immigrants; and who do not speak much if any English. If the officers learn that the individual they stopped is a U.S. citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United
States, they promptly let the individual go. If the individual is illegally in the United States, the officers may arrest the individual and initiate the process for removal.

-- Justice Brett Kavanaugh, Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo, September 8, 2025

Join me for a live Q&A on my YouTube channel and X account, Monday September 8, at 7:00 - 8:00pm ET. Questions will be taken from the comment section of this Substack post, as well as during the live on YouTube/X.

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

New Resource Helps Portland Communities Take Action on Road Safety

 — Organisation: Strong Towns — Friday 5th September 2025

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Volunteers Use Red Chalk to Protect Pedestrians and Drivers Under California’s New Law

 — Organisation: Strong Towns — Friday 5th September 2025

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