On this episode of After America, Professor Elizabeth N Saunders from Columbia University joins Dr Emma Shortis to discuss the “chaotic cruelty” of the Trump administration, its escalation of hostilities over Greenland and whether it will strike Iran.

This discussion was recorded on Tuesday 13 January (AEDT) 2026.

A time for Bravery: what happens when Australia chooses courage is available now via Australia Institute Press. Use the code ‘POD5’ to get $5 off.

Guest: Elizabeth N Sauders, Professor of Political Science, Columbia University // @profsaunders

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

Show notes:

‘What happens now in Venezuela – and the world?’ by Elizabeth N Saunders, Good Authority (January 2026)

‘Imperial President at Home, Emperor Abroad’ by Elizabeth Saunders, Foreign Affairs (June 2025)

This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble.

Order Norm’s book, Gaza’s Gravediggers, now.

Lawlessness has been a common theme characterizing the events of the first weeks of the year. The kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, the murder of Renee Good by ICE agent Jonathan Ross, the threat of bombing Iran by the Trump administration. Perhaps one of the worst violations of the law has slipped under the radar amidst the chaos — the continued genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and the United Nations’ abetting of Israel and the U.S.’s efforts to ethnically cleanse the region.

For years, AI has been surrounded by extreme predictions of ushering in either catastrophe or paradise, with breakthroughs in machine intelligence repeatedly promised as imminent for well over a decade. Elon Musk has recently stated that artificial general intelligence, where AI matches or exceeds human-level capabilities across tasks, could arrive as early as later this year. A reasonable person might assume that’s optimistic, but it nevertheless merits a serious look at what that means for Americans and our politics.

Many on the Right are correctly concerned about what this transition could look like for our nation. As government spending at all levels exceeds 40% of GDP, the reality is that it will be a political issue with implications for both this year’s midterms and the 2028 presidential election. Figures like Steve Bannon and Ron DeSantis are staking out pro-regulatory positions on AI, emphasizing risk mitigation and regulations that could alter the development of this technology. The regulatory appetite will likely only increase as we see the impact on the economy grow—a fact that must be reckoned with.  

We share a positive vision for the future AI may bring, where it dismantles bloated bureaucracies, unleashes economic growth, and rewards high-agency individuals to build the future we want to live in.

Danial Lashkari

It has been a healthy development that parts of the conservative movement over the last decade or so have become increasingly skeptical of the Republican establishment’s slavish devotion to excessive individualism, indiscriminate immigration, and globalism.

In a recent First Things article, R.R. Reno pointed to America’s original Progressives—and to Woodrow Wilson in particular—as sources of inspiration for today’s conservative reassessment, because they too yearned for greater solidarity as they contended against the excesses of individualism. While I sympathize with Reno’s aims, Wilson and his fellow Progressive fathers of our modern state should not serve as guides to escaping our present mess—after all, they were the figures most responsible for bringing it upon us.  

Conservatism is a divided movement today. But if we’re honest, it almost always has been, coming as it did out of the shotgun marriage of traditionalists and individualists. What united the diverse elements of the conservative movement, however, was their opposition to the collectivism and statism foisted on us by the likes of Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt. It is a sign of just how precarious our times have become—and of just how badly establishment conservatism has fallen short—that sensible conservatives should now turn for inspiration to those whose principal mission was to overturn the American political tradition and replace it with the modern state.

On this episode of Follow the Money, Richard Denniss and Ebony Bennett discuss the political and policy response to devasting Bondi terrorist attacks, the cancellation of Adelaide Writers’ Week, Trump and the Australia-US alliance, and what to look out for in federal politics in 2026.

A time for Bravery: what happens when Australia chooses courage is available now via Australia Institute Press. Use the code ‘POD5’ at checkout to save $5 off the price – available for a limited time only.

Dead Centre: how political pragmatism is killing us by Richard Denniss is also available now.

Guest: Richard Denniss, co-Chief Executive Officer, the Australia Institute // @richarddenniss

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

Show notes:

La historia, tal como se entiende en la mayoría de los países occidentales, a menudo omite capítulos importantes que dejan espacios cruciales en la historia del surgimiento de los países modernos. En Latinoamérica, en el siglo XX, se reconocen episodios de guerrillas y juntas militares, junto con representaciones de la guerra contra las drogas, generalmente representadas en la cultura popular.

Lo que se omite, sin embargo, es la participación clandestina de las agencias de inteligencia estadounidenses, incluidas la CIA y la DEA, y cómo sus operaciones de tráfico de drogas estaban íntimamente ligadas a las brigadas anticomunistas latinoamericanas financiadas por el capital occidental durante la Guerra Fría, y la liquidación a menudo brutal de la izquierda que llevaron a cabo estos narcoterroristas.

At the time of his death in the summer of 1987, James Burnham was falling into obscurity. Today, though, his work has surged rapidly in prominence on the Right, especially among some of Donald Trump’s most ardent supporters. The reasons for this merit close attention.

At one time, Burnham was widely known as one of America’s sharpest Marxist intellectuals. His most recent biographer, intellectual historian David T. Byrne, ably captures the young Burnham’s contradictions in James Burnham: An Intellectual Biography: a professor of philosophy at New York University, unapologetically bourgeois and completely in his element at black-tie dinner parties, he could respectfully engage Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. Yet he was also a militant Marxist and a trusted protégé of Leon Trotsky, whom he met and befriended in the 1930s. Distraught over the mass unemployment that was then sweeping across the United States, he admired the ferocious determination of the Marxist revolutionaries who promised an overthrow of America’s supposedly irredeemable capitalist system. Byrne writes that he “loved the idea of violent revolution.”

Why reducing the 50 per cent discount would improve the tax system 

Capital gains tax (CGT) was introduced in 1985 as part of reforms to broaden the income tax base and reduce the rate. CGT is leviable on the increase in the value of an asset, such as property or shares, and is levied when capital gains are realised (i.e. the asset is sold).  

In 1999, the previous inflation adjustment was replaced with a flat 50 per cent discount, with the goal of stimulating investment in the share market. 

The 50 per cent discount goes beyond the purpose the discount and undermines the progressive nature of Australia’s personal income tax system. The discount should be reduced to 25 per cent to improve equity and fund more effective ways to encourage productive investment.  

The alternate reality Democrats have constructed is falling apart in real time. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said the following when asked to comment on an ICE agent’s shooting of a woman in Minneapolis who was attempting to run over him with her car: “What we saw today was a criminal murder [of] a woman [who was shot] in the head while she was trying to escape and flee for her life.”

She then called “disgusting” the “editorializing” of those who argue that the ICE agent was in front of the car as it was accelerating, just before he fired. “Watch it for yourself, watch it for yourself,” she concluded, with supreme confidence that any viewer would see with the same skew of her own lenses.

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey went even harder over the rhetorical cliff in responding to the shooting. He classified interpretations of the ICE officer’s action as self-defense as “bull***t” and demanded that ICE “get the f**k out of Minneapolis.” Mayor Mamdani in New York followed suit, calling the event a “murder” and a “horror.”

It is a stark bit of evidence of how American society has been warped by the twisted rhetoric of the radical Left regarding political conflict in our country.

Rajashri Chakrabarti, Thu Pham, Beck Pierce, and Maxim L. Pinkovskiy

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 January 3, 2026.

The Machinery of Terror

 — Author: Chris Hedges — Sunday 11th January 2026

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Media Release: Palestinian existence is not “culturally insensitive”

 — Organisation: Free Palestine Melbourne — Saturday 10th January 2026

10 January 2026: We stand in solidarity with Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah following her expulsion from the Adelaide Festival's Writers’ Week program. We condemn the Festival's very clear and unambiguous anti-Palestinian racism.

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Media Report 2026.01.11

 — Organisation: Free Palestine Melbourne — Saturday 10th January 2026

FPM Media Report January 11 2026

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US invades Venezuela, threatens Greenland while ICE wreaks havoc

 — Organisation: The Australia Institute — Saturday 10th January 2026

On this episode of After America, Emma Shortis and Angus Blackman discuss the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, the credibility of the Trump administration’s threats against Greenland and elsewhere, and the fatal shooting of a woman in Minneapolis by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer.

This discussion was recorded on Friday 9 January 2026.

A time for Bravery: what happens when Australia chooses courage is available now via Australia Institute Press. Use the code ‘POD5’ to get $5 off.

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

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

Show notes:

‘What you need to know about Trump administration’s abduction of Nicolás Maduro’ by Emma Shortis, The Point (January 2026)

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Daniel Webster’s Natural Rights Nationalism

 — Organisation: The Claremont Institute — Friday 9th January 2026

The American Founders freely acknowledged that natural rights were granted by God—“endowed by their Creator,” to use their language. They and their early republic successors saw the United States as an example to the rest of the world in practicing the art of self-government. But what bears remembering in our own day is that they did not believe the United States was a home for all the world’s freedom-loving people. Instead, constitutional nationalists like Daniel Webster understood the U.S. as a teacher of mankind, a republican people seeking to pass along the blessings of liberty they cultivated to their posterity.

Due to an explosion in unrestrained Enlightenment universalism, Democrats of Webster’s day wanted to obliterate national borders and all non-democratic governments. Webster affirmed those same universal natural rights, but believed they could only be truly expressed through the particular history of the people of the American republic. It was not America’s job to tear down borders or obliterate national distinctions. It was America’s duty to teach all nations the value of natural rights by their example so that every nation might embrace natural rights in its own particular way, through its own institutions.

America was a nation founded upon universal principles, but those principles could only be truly expressed through the historical development and experience of the particular people who called themselves Americans.

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The Decline and Fall of Republican Government in America

 — Organisation: The Claremont Institute — Friday 9th January 2026

Ronald J. Pestritto has done a splendid job in supplying us with a succinct account of the ideological origins of the administrative state, its evolution, and the attempts by Donald Trump and some of his predecessors to rein it in. Essentially a fourth branch of government, the administrative state has taken over most of the functions of government, yet is not directly responsible to any elected official.

Its establishment and expansion presuppose the existence of what Hegel called “the universal class”—an impartial, benevolent, all-wise cohort of Platonic Guardians apt to take better care of us than we would be capable of doing ourselves, even if we were blessed with ample resources. Such an arrangement makes a mockery of our pretension that, as human beings, we have the capacity to govern ourselves, and that it is incumbent on us to do so. How can there be liberty and personal responsibility when our conduct is governed in nearly every particular by individuals over whom we exercise no leverage? And how can there be a redress of grievances when our true rulers are largely beyond our reach?

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