Incoming Feed Items

Fixing American education begins with figuring out what to do about the United States Department of Education (ED). The Trump Administration wants to eliminate the ED at once. Kenin Spivak’s recent article for The American Mind argued that policymakers should simplify the ED and reduce its power, and then consider whether to eliminate the department entirely. Regardless of the option they ultimately choose, policymakers should at minimum return most of the ED’s powers to determine the content and structure of education back to the states and local school districts.

Why should the first priority of education reformers be to eliminate the Education Department, or at the very least remove most of its power over American education?

The National Association of Scholars’ report Waste Land: The Education Department’s Profligacy, Mediocrity, and Radicalism provides chapter and verse on how the ED misbehaves. The Education Department and the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) use four big tools to impose ideologically extreme policies on states and school districts. These tools are:

“An AI created a podcast of your paper,” the email said. I blinked and read it again.

The paper was a work I had written in graduate school and uploaded to the website Academia. The subject was digital freedom and social control in authoritarian states.

I uploaded it in 2010 to thwart the paywalls that blocked academic research from the public. I wanted people to grasp the digital dangers of surveillance, censorship, and impersonation. I wanted them to understand that no one was safe from the future.

It did not occur to me that in 2025 a robot would steal my words and make a podcast out of them and try to charge people, including me, $170 to listen.

I don’t know what the podcast says. I ain’t paying no doppelganger ransom.

In 2010, I sought to debunk the widespread belief that the internet was an inherently democratizing force. In that halcyon era, when Google’s “Don’t Be Evil” motto did not yet prompt bitter laughter, this was a controversial take. It came from researching the internet in authoritarian states, where dictators used it to monitor dissidents and torpedo their rebellions.

On this episode of After America, Dr Emma Shortis and Angus Blackman discuss how Trump is normalising the idea that he might not leave the White House once his second term is up. Then, Helen Haines MP, independent member for Indi, joins Emma to discuss her community’s concerns about Israel’s actions in Gaza and the growing push for more transparency and accountability in Australian foreign policy.

Emma’s discussion with Helen was recorded on Tuesday 29 July. Her discussion with Angus was recorded on Thursday 7 August.

After America will be back on Tuesday 19 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 for pre-order now via the Australia Institute website.

Guest: Helen Haines MP, Independent Member for Indi // @‪helenhainesindi

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

In a recent trip to New York, I visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s John Singer Sargent exhibit in order to bask in the work of the greatest portrait artist of the twentieth century. I had only seen his paintings once before, in Chicago, which quickly converted me into a worshipper of his larger-than-life portraits of the wives of capitalists adorned in silks and pearls and chiffons, the materials rendered with brushstrokes so effusive and instinctive that portraits from the masters that came before him seemed stagnant in comparison.

At the Met, I was finally reunited with these paintings and many more — all showing a painterly grasp of human expression that clearly had no time for the hagiography for which Sargent was likely hired. The expressions he captured on faces were so real, so momentary and subtle, that it’s hard to believe they were the product of hundreds of hours of careful painting and not the momentary release of a shutter. Sargent found his art in the midst of painting for the oligarchs of the time, and he found a way to both aggrandize and humanize them all the same. The material contradictions of his day were transmuted into something ecstatic.

To coincide with the visit of Ilias Alami at the University of Sydney and a series of presentations on raced finance and state capitalism, we are re-blogging his feature on mutations in state capitalism that was first published at the Law & Political Economy Project. 

Global capitalism is undergoing turbulent mutations, including the seemingly unstoppable rise of Big Tech and the aggressive reengineering of globalization to intensifying geopolitical rivalries. The supercharged business and political news cycle is moving at an ever more dizzying pace. In this context, many of us are seeking intellectual resources to help us understand the specificity and significance of the present moment, particularly in light of the long historical development of global capitalism.

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.

Hardball and Big Balls | The Roundtable Ep. 279

From multiple press conferences with parliamentarians, to dicussions around how to fix the GST, to our new research into Australian gun laws, we had a lot to talk about.

Watch a select highlight of content and media from the Australia Institute in July 2025.

The post July Media Highlights 2025 appeared first on The Australia Institute.

My brother told me he’s been watching Mr. Beast videos. “Don’t judge me,” he says, “but you know, you could win money, because you’re basically doing what they do on his shows but for free.” After further probing, I discover that Mr. Beast is paying people to do things like “survive 100 days trapped inside a private jet- then keep it!” I laugh. He’s right. I, and many of us homebound and bedbound folks, could breeze through a certain type of Mr. Beast challenge.

I’ve been mostly homebound since last June, and fully homebound since last September (other than doctor’s visits). I’ve spent nearly a year in my one-bedroom apartment, watching people walk past on the sidewalk far below, blithely running their errands, remembering how it was once so easy. Sometimes I pick a stranger and track them as they trudge up the street, following them until they’re out of sight. I don’t feel resentful, just curious. What are they doing? Where are they going? How does it feel to be in such a powerful body? Do they know how lucky they are?

My brother shares some wisdom he’s gained from watching people on the Mr. Beast isolation challenges. “It would be good if you had a little outdoor area,” he muses. “As soon as they give people a little outdoor area, they spend a lot of time out there.”

Read more

Jason Hickel and Dylan Sullivan

Over the past two decades, the posture of the United States toward China has evolved from economic cooperation to outright antagonism. US media outlets and politicians have engaged in persistent anti-China rhetoric, while the US government has imposed trade restrictions and sanctions on China and pursued military buildup close to Chinese territory. Washington wants people to believe that China poses a threat. 

China’s rise indeed threatens US interests, but not in the way the US political elite seeks to frame it.

The US relationship with China needs to be understood in the context of the capitalist world-system.  Capital accumulation in the core states, often glossed as the “Global North”, depends on cheap labour and cheap resources from the periphery and semi-periphery, the so-called “Global South”.

This arrangement is crucial to ensuring high profits for the multinational firms that dominate global supply chains. The systematic price disparity between the core and periphery also enables the core to achieve a large net-appropriation of value from the periphery through unequal exchange in international trade.

This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble.

Known as the “Silent Holocaust,” the genocide in Guatemala is seldom mentioned in modern history. The United States, with support from Israel, backed yet another violent crusade against an indigenous population as well as against communism. The Guatemalan genocide — preceded by a CIA-instigated coup d’état of the Guatemalen government in 1954 and the ensuing civil war — saw hundreds of thousands of the Mayan Indigenous peoples and alleged communists massacred or disappeared.

Zohran Mamdani’s recent conversation with Sadiq Khan should instill fear in the hearts of the average New York City voter. In the weeks since he defeated Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic mayoral primary in June, Mamdani has reportedly “been in touch with a number of progressive mayors,” including London’s.

During a “warm and collegial” phone call, Khan reportedly advised the young socialist from Queens to shift to the center. After winning the primary by pledging rent freezes and free buses, he urged Mamdani to reassure moderates in the same way that Khan himself did in 2016, after routing his fellow left-wing opponents before defeating the Conservative candidate in the London mayoral race.

Although Khan is not a leftist in the same sense as Mamdani or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, his tenure in London shows his alleged “centrism” can be just as damaging.

Keeping people safe is a basic responsibility of an elected leader—a test Khan is failing. London has a terrible knife problem. Almost one-third of the 50,000 violent and sexual crimes with knives reported in England and Wales last year occurred in the capital.

At the 2025 Panamerican Congress in Mexico City, held August 1st to 3rd, hosted by Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum and her Morena Parliamentary Group, Canadian journalist Naomi Klein gave remarks at the Esperanza Iris theatre.

The author of The Shock Doctrine, No Logo, and most recently the memoir Doppelganger, presented remarks to delegations at the Panamerican Congress, an annual conference of progressive legislators from Nunavut to Tierra del Fuego, entitled: The Rise of End-of-the-World Fascism and Resistance from the Global South.

Click here to watch other political speeches from Álvaro García Linera, Clara Brugada, Ilhan Omar, Andrés Arauz, and Gerardo Pisarello at the 2025 Panamerican Congress, CDMX.

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 July 28, 2025.

Andrew F. Haughwout, Donghoon Lee, Jonathan Lee, Joelle Scally, and Wilbert van der Klaauw

In the 1980s Jesse Jackson helped banish “Western Civ” from Stanford with a silly chant. Many colleges and universities that had not already done so followed suit.

But in the classical counterrevolution of the 21st century, Western civilization is back. The Great Books, long thought a relic of Mortimer Adler’s Cold War-era salesmanship, now guide the curriculum at many of the over 1,000 classical schools that have been founded over the past few decades, dozens of which are publicly funded charter schools. A new Great Books college sprouts up every year or so. Dead languages like Latin seem to be very much alive again.

Whether it is humanism, the medieval liberal arts, or even just memes about the Roman Empire, it turns out that Western Civ did indeed have to go—big.

The 21st-century classical counterrevolutionaries should not get high on their own supply, though. If their project ends up being a retread of the Mortimer Adler-Robert Hutchins show, they may be greeted by an even deeper abyss of failure than the ostracism Western Civ faced in the name of diversity that occurred with the rise of racial and gender studies.

Publisher’s note (Nathan Tankus): A while ago I got the permission of my friends at Bloomberg Oddlots to clean up and publish transcripts of episodes that they didn’t have the time or inclination to produce (Incidentally, you can check out the New York Times profile of Oddlots published yesterday). One episode that I thought was particularly important was their April 30th episode with former BLS Commissioner Bill Beach. 

A cut in greenhouse gas emissions of at least 75 per cent below 2005 levels would broadly align with the science – and strengthen Australia’s bid to host the 2026 United Nations climate conference.

Announcing a bigger number is one thing, though. How the government reaches it is another.

Australia’s current target under the international treaty on climate change, the Paris Agreement, is a 43 per cent cut in emissions by 2030. Progress is tracked through a set of climate accounts called the “inventory” and reported annually. Emissions from across the economy – including energy, transport, industry and land – are recorded, added up, and presented as a single figure.

The Australian government claims emissions for the year to December 2024 were 27 per cent below 2005 levels. But Australia’s emissions inventory is riddled with loopholes and unverifiable modelling that paints a misleading picture of progress. Just this week, United Nations Climate Change Executive Secretary Simon Stiell urged Australia not to settle for the bare minimum as it prepares to announce its 2035 target. “Bog standard is beneath you,” he said. “Don’t settle for what’s easy. Go for what’s smart by going big.” But bog standard would be an improvement on what’s happening now.

The profit motive is a great thing in the right industry.

But long ago we worked out that education wasn’t one of those industries. There is no profit motive driving school education in Australia.

Private schools in Australia are non-profit. They are run by school boards that are supposed to be focused on providing the best education for their students.

How does the government keep the for-profit sector out of school education? A for-profit school is ineligible for government funding.

We need to do the same for childcare.

The only priority of childcare providers should be the children in their care. They should not be distracted by the idea of keeping their shareholders happy.

The government is rushing its childcare changes through Parliament. It will use threats of funding cuts to ensure improvements to safety standards.

It’s a good move. Money talks in this industry.

But the heartbreaking stories out of Melbourne in recent weeks, which are driving these changes, could be a catalyst for significant long-term change.

Australia’s childcare industry is dominated by for-profit providers. They make up 70 per cent of the childcare industry, and 95 per cent of the growth in the industry is in the for-profit centres.

The expansion of government subsidies means that a childcare centre in the right urban location is a licence to print money.

In the 2025 federal election, Labor won a landslide victory. That victory reflects the strong preference Australians had for the Labor Government over the Liberal–National Opposition. In 100 of the 150 seats in the House of Representatives, most voters preferred the Labor candidate to the Liberal or National one.

However, while Labor was preferred on preferences, only about 35% of Australians gave the party their first preference. Despite this, Labor won 62% of the seats. In other words, about five million of the fifteen million votes cast were “1 Labor”, but the party won 94 of the 150 seats in the House of Representatives.

Major parties win more seats than their share of the vote because only one member of Parliament (MP) represents each seat.

Other countries have similarly distorted results. For example, in the 2024 United Kingdom election the Labour Government won 34% of the vote and 63% of the seats. Significantly, the United Kingdom does not use preferential voting but rather first-past-the-post. If anything, Australia’s full preferential voting system reduces distortions.

An alternative to “winner takes all” is proportional representation, where parties and candidates win seats based on their share of the vote. Proportional representation allows for more diverse representation of parties and interests – as in the Australian Senate or the New Zealand Parliament.

At least on paper, DEI in the federal government is dead. On the very first day of his second presidency, Donald Trump issued a presidential action, “Ending Radical And Wasteful Government DEI Programs And Preferencing,” ending all diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility “mandates, policies, programs, preferences, and activities in the Federal Government, under whatever name they appear.” Employees in DEI-specific positions were fired; DEI positions and offices were dismantled; and DEI training programs, newsletters, and promotion criteria were scrapped.

But it would be beyond naive to think that just because federal agencies are not currently promoting DEI that their workforces do not still widely hold the opinions they were encouraged to hold. Thousands of current federal employees participated in or supported DEI programs. Even those who might disagree were coerced to back DEI if they wanted to keep their jobs.

That for a party’s election campaign to be a success, the leaders would need to kiss the ring, and then News Corp’s coverage would decide the outcome of the campaign.

It was never true, but it was a truism for years.

In reality, News Corp would just see which way the wind was blowing and then back in the party that was already ahead, retconning its support as having MADE the government instead of just following the trend.

The strategy worked – for decades those in the political sphere would tell you of News Corp’s power in deciding elections and how the company, no matter how heinous or one-sided its coverage became, could not be ignored.

It became obvious that News Corp only ever had the perception of influence – rather than influence itself – once it switched its editorial position to campaigning for the conservatives, no matter what.

There have been countless state and federal elections where News Corp has thrown as much muck at Labor as possible and the full weight of its media influence at supporting the losers – the Coalition – and not moved the dial.

But the myth remains in many circles. News Corp cannot be ignored. Why? Because you have to make a play to be a player, even when the result is already known. Especially when it is already known.

Except for the US, which is its own basket case of mutable positions, Australia’s major allies will recognise Palestine when the United Nations General Assembly next meets in September.

On this special crossover episode of Follow the Money and After America, Dr Emma Shortis joins Glenn Connley to discuss the Australian protests calling for more action to protect Palestinians, the momentum against the troubled AUKUS submarine pact, and Trump’s decision to fire his chief of labour statistics after job growth slowed.

This discussion was recorded on Monday 4 August 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: Emma Shortis, Director, International & Security Affairs, the Australia Institute // @emmashortis

Host: Glenn Connley, Senior Media Advisor, the Australia Institute // @glennconnley

Show notes: