The world is on fire - and I've often been at a loss for how to constructively contribute to public discourse. For decades, I have shared knowledge gained through fieldwork to offer a different perspective on complex sociotechnical matters. Too often these days, I find myself banging my head against the wall while navigating the cacophony of anguish that is emerging in all directions. For better or worse, I chose this time to turn my attention locally. I have found joy trying to find my footing as a professor and think more directly about how to prepare the next generation. And amidst it all, I've also had a series of wins, which I thought I'd share.

Over the past five months, the S&P 500 has gone essentially nowhere.

Yes, we’ve made marginal new highs. Yes, we’ve had bursts of volatility. But zoom out and what you see is a market stuck in sideways consolidation dating back to early October. The S&P is up barely 1–1.5% over that stretch. The Nasdaq is actually down slightly.

So the real question is:

Are we building pressure for a sustained breakout — or setting up for another leg lower first?

To answer that, we have to step away from the noise and focus on what actually drives price.

And if you’ve followed my work for any amount of time, you know exactly where this is going:

Flows.

Markets Follow Flows — Not Narratives

Heading into Q4 of last year, I laid out the case that we were likely to see volatility increase. Why?

Because underlying fiscal flows were slowing down.

That deterioration in flows — partly tied to tariff dynamics earlier in 2025 — suggested we were entering a weaker liquidity backdrop. We did get volatility, but instead of a dramatic selloff, we’ve largely just gone sideways.

That part has played out exactly as expected:

The corporate media recently obtained a leaked Department of Homeland Security (DHS) memorandum changing the agency’s policy on forcibly entering the home of an alien who has been ordered to be deported by an immigration judge. Discussions of the Minneapolis protests eclipsed coverage of the memo, but as one might expect, the chattering class has been experiencing a slow-motion meltdown over DHS taking immigration enforcement seriously.

According to the talking heads, civil rights in the United States will now evaporate. We can look forward to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents busting into our homes to arrest us for removing the tag on our mattresses that says, “Do Not Remove by Law.”

However, such claims are utter nonsense. They are premised on the media’s deceptive implication that ICE is deliberately depriving aliens of due process. But the fact is, 99% of the claims currently circulating in the media regarding aliens and judicial warrants are prime examples of what U.S. Army Lieutenant General Russel Honoré famously referred to as “stuck on stupid.”

The Wrap with Dr Emma Shortis

More often than not, Australia’s relationship with the United States highlights and reinforces the worst in our politics, and the worst in theirs.

Here at home, the week began with some shamefully racist politicking by federal parliamentarians. A “hardline” Liberal Party immigration proposal was “leaked” to the Australian media. Straight from the Trump playbook, the proposal mooted banning immigrants from 37 regions, deporting 100,000 asylum seekers and visa holders, and even vetting the social media of aspiring migrants. To followers of American politics, that might sound very familiar.

Photo: AAP Image/Bianca De Marchi

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Correction: The trailer above advertises our scheduled livestream Q&A on the documentary as being on Feb. 21 at 7pm ET — we have changed the livestream to be on Feb. 21 (same day) at 3pm ET. Apologies for the inconvenience, and thank you for understanding.

With little hope of the genocide in Gaza subsiding, dock workers in major Italian port cities have organized strikes and large demonstrations to halt arms shipments to Israel. These actions are a direct response to the refusal of international institutions and governments around the world to confront the carnage. Though the genocide continues, the dockworkers’ industrial disruption offer us a model of resistance. Will the Italian way spread to the imperial core — and can it end the genocide?

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.

Rubio Looks to the West | The Roundtable Ep. 305

Following on from J.D. Vance’s bracing speech in 2025, Secretary of State Marco Rubio called on European allies to resist the managed decline of the West at the 2026 Munich Security Conference this week. The welfare state is a slow moving trainwreck. Appeasement of climate cultists stunts economies. Mass migration threatens to disrupt our civilization. Playing good cop to the VP’s bad cop, Rubio outlined America’s vision to revive the spirit and strength of the shared Western project. Plus: The guys discuss the Left’s compassion fatigue, Hungary’s coming election, and the legacy of the late Dr. Mickey Gene Craig: teacher, mentor, and friend.

Rachel Schuh

Why do workers still segregate by sex across occupations, industries, and firms? Recent research has focused on how preferences for job amenities, like flexibility, may differ by sex. However, one “amenity” that has received relatively little attention is the sex composition of a job itself. In a recent paper, I conducted a survey experiment to estimate men’s and women’s preferences for sex composition in the workplace. One result is that women and young single men prefer jobs with at least half female coworkers.

The Senate’s failure to pass the SAVE Act, which would require documentary proof of citizenship to vote in federal elections, is a testament to the power of the managerial regime. The bill does not attempt to remake the constitutional order, abolish federalism, or nationalize election administration in any comprehensive sense. It addresses a narrower, more elemental question: whether the American people, acting through their representatives, may insist that those who vote in American elections are in fact American citizens. The answer under the present regime appears to be no.

This is one more instance of a now-familiar pattern: the American people express a preference through elections, their representatives assemble a legislative response, and the legislature proves incapable of translating that preference into law. The constitutional machine, once praised for its capacity to refine and elevate popular judgment through its aristocratic elements, now increasingly appears to dissolve judgment altogether into a diffuse and unaccountable veto.

What is a republic (in the classical sense) if it cannot act on matters essential to its own political existence? And what becomes of constitutional forms when the ends for which they were designed can no longer be secured through them?

The Mixed Regime and Its Assumptions

On this episode of Dollars & Sense, Greg and Angus discuss why Coles is in court over its pricing, whether it’s time to panic with government debt set to hit $1 trillion, and the role of corporate profits in driving inflation.

This discussion was recorded on Wednesday 18 February 2026.

What we owe the water: It’s time for a fossil fuel treaty by Kumi Naidoo, is available now for just $19.95. Use the code ‘PODVP’ at checkout to get free shipping.

You can also subscribe to the Vantage Point series to get four essays a year on some of the most pressing issues facing Australia and the world.

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

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

Show notes:

The pivotal question of what will follow the crack-up of the liberal international order dominated the highest levels of European politics last week.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio gave his own, forceful answer at the 2026 Munich Security Conference. Following Vice President JD Vance’s provocative speech last year, Rubio delivered an equally spirited address that issued an ultimatum: rationalizing collapse and weakness is no longer the policy of the United States—and it should no longer be Europe’s policy either. America has no “interest in being polite and orderly caretakers of the West’s managed decline,” he stated forthrightly.

Instead, Rubio urged a reformation of the “global institutions of the old order” to defend and strengthen the key pillars of Western civilization.

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.

The Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro and his equally despotic wife are under lock and key in a New York prison, living embodiments of President Trump’s revivification of the Monroe Doctrine. Maduro, the chosen successor of the demagogic leftist tyrant Hugo Chávez, presided over a gangster regime that had reduced its people to hunger and penury, driving a third of Venezuela’s 24 million citizens into exile. Maduro’s regime maintained power through stolen elections, the machinations of the Cuban secret police, and active collaboration with the most unsavory drug cartels.

For a time, Chávez’s so-called Bolivarian socialism bought off the poor with bread and circuses—that is, massive subsidies and assorted free goodies made possible by high oil prices. This was bolstered by the ideological illusions of leftist political elites and Hollywood stars, ranging from Jeremy Corbyn, Ken Livingstone, and Bernie Sanders to Danny Glover and Sean Penn, who saw another exotic socialist paradise and an avatar of social justice in the making. But over time the Chavista regime revealed itself as yet another nightmare scenario, where political liberty was confiscated, arbitrary power went unchallenged, and food was remarkably scarce. The war on the rich and the entrepreneurial middle classes always turns out to be a war on everyone, including the urban and rural poor.

Martin Almuzara and Geert Mesters

The results show that support for taxing gas export cuts across party lines, including among voters often seen at opposite ends of the political spectrum, such as the Greens and One Nation.

Australia Institute research shows a 25 per cent tax on gas exports could raise  $17 billion every year, while incentivising producers to prioritise the supply of gas to domestic customers.

The findings come ahead of the upcoming Farrer by-election, expected to be contested by the Liberals, Nationals, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, and independent candidates.

Statement: “Gas export corporations should pay a flat 25% tax on gas exports” 

“Australia is one of the world’s largest exporters of liquefied natural gas,” said Dr Richard Denniss, co-CEO of The Australia Institute.

There is a shipwreck at the end of Zombie Road. I walked miles to see it: past moss-covered cliffs and century-old railroad tracks half-buried in the earth. I hadn’t hiked Zombie Road since 2022, when an elderly woman I used to pass on the trail disappeared. I didn’t know her name, but I knew her smile. When she went missing, I checked the news round the clock, hoping she would be found. Her face is on a memorial bench now. I put a flower there.

I finally felt ready to return to Zombie Road. 2026 leaves you ready for everything and nothing. I live in a nightmare echo chamber where topics I covered for over a decade in my books and articles — autocracy, institutional complicity, extremely specific details of the Epstein/Maxwell case — are now repeated by the same pundits and officials who dismissed them when it mattered most. They buried crimes in silence, then noise, and now spectacle.

The lack of accountability stays the same.

As America approaches its semiquincentennial, a surprising trend offers profound hope for the nation’s renewal: young Americans are returning to church. If you are like me and have noticed week by week more younger attendees and far fewer gray heads in your house of worship, this is anecdotal confirmation that change is afoot.

Recent data from the Barna Group reveals that Millennials and Gen Z are leading a resurgence in church attendance, with younger generations attending nearly two weekends per month on average in 2025—up significantly from just over one in 2020. Young men in particular are driving this shift, with higher weekly attendance rates than women for the first time in decades. This marks a historic generational reversal, as younger adults outpace older cohorts in frequency of worship.

On this episode of After America, Jon B Wolfsthal, former Special Assistant to President Obama for National Security Affairs, joins Dr Emma Shortis to discuss the expiry of the New START nuclear weapons treaty between the United States and Russia, AUKUS and Australia’s nuclear capabilities, and why “nuclear weapons are back with avengeance”.

This discussion was recorded on Thursday 12 February 2026 Australian time.

The latest Vantage Point essay, What we owe the water: It’s time for a fossil fuel treaty by Kumi Naidoo, is available now for $19.95. Use the code ‘PODVP’ at checkout to get free shipping.

Guest: Jon B Wolfsthal, former Director of Global Risk, Federation of American Scientists // @jonatomic

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

Show notes:

Trump has scrapped the long-standing legal basis for tackling climate emissions by Robyn Eckersley, The Conversation (February 2026)