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At two o’clock in the afternoon on August 17, 1858, Abraham Lincoln rose to address a crowd gathered at the Fulton County Courthouse in Lewistown, Illinois. He came to answer Senator Stephen Douglas, who had given a speech in Lewistown the day before. According to newspaper reports, Lincoln spoke for two and a half hours and had more listeners at the end of his remarks than when he began. The speech he delivered was not simply part of a campaign to challenge Douglas for the U.S. Senate seat. It was an act of recovery—an effort to recall the meaning of the American Founding at a moment when its principles were contested and under strain.

Lincoln spoke on that occasion of the evil of slavery existing in the American colonies when the Second Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence in 1776. “These communities, by their representatives in Old Independence Hall,” he recounted,

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.

What Makes an American—Birthright Citizenship and the U.S. at 250 | The Roundtable Ep. 324

A few miles from this room, 86 years ago, Winston Churchill stood in the House of Commons, with Hitler’s army right across the English Channel, and delivered a speech for the ages. We all remember how he ended: “we shall fight on the beaches…in the fields and in the streets…we shall never surrender.” But we stop one sentence too soon. Immediately following that famous line, Churchill made another assertion: that even if his island were subjugated and starving, the struggle would go on “until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.”

In Britain’s darkest hour, Winston Churchill looked across the Atlantic—to a younger nation born of English stock—and staked the survival of the West on the promise that America would come.

This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble.

The war on information in the West has tread new grounds since the genocide in Palestine. Journalists and media outlets who report on the imperialist endeavors of the ruling class increasingly find themselves under the boot of legislators who concoct fascist legislation to act as imperial henchmen. Their methods are stretching the limits of the law with the scope and severity of the punishments imposed. Nowhere is this repression more apparent than in Germany where, since October 7 of 2023, governments have banned languages and symbols related to Palestine and many people, not only journalists but also professors, doctors and lawyers, have lost their jobs for speaking out against the genocide or participating in pro-Palestine demonstrations.

“Like all fascists’ aesthetics,” declared a Guardian editorial, “Trump’s gaze is backward to an idealized ‘classical’ age and forward to a time when he, the Great Man, is immortalized in stone and gold.” The charge is familiar. President Trump is having a roughly 90,000-square-foot ballroom added to the White House and wants to erect a 250-foot-tall triumphal arch near Arlington National Cemetery; the article describes this as “trashing monumental public works while building cheesy monuments” and defiling the United States’ “collective heritage.”

On this episode of Follow the Money, the authors of new Australia Institute research, Dr Fergus Green and Frances Medlock, join Glenn Connley to discuss the major failures of the Safeguard Mechanism, the dodgy “carbon offsets” at the heart the scheme, and what can be done to drive down emissions.

This episode was recorded on Tuesday 23 June.

Guest: Fergus Green, co-author of ‘Safeguarding the fossil fuel industry?’ and Associate Professor, University College London // @fergusgreen

Guest: Frances Medlock, co-author of ‘Safeguarding the fossil fuel industry?’ and policy and law reform lawyer

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

Show notes:

Safeguarding the Fossil Fuel Industry? How Carbon Offsetting Undermines the Safeguard Mechanism by Fergus Green and Frances Medlock, the Australia Institute (June 2026)

Fans of Fox News and various pro-Trump and pro-GOP pundits/media reject Snopes, PolitiFact, and various other fact checking sources as a reliable source. They say those sources are “biased,” since those sites make more corrections of pro-GOP/pro-Trump popular claims than of Dems, critics of Trump, or what they call “liberals.”

Here’s the important point: they don’t refute the fact checking. They don’t go into the data and show that the facts were actually correct, or that Trump (or whoever) didn’t actually say it, or that it was misrepresented, or in any way respond to the assertion.

New research by The Australia Institute shows that Australians have lost over $104 billion to gambling in the three years since the Murphy Review released its final report into the harms of online gambling.

Today the Albanese Government is expected to introduce legislation in response to the Murphy Review. If passed, it will introduce certain restrictions on gambling advertising, but stop well short of the full ban on ads for online gambling recommended by the Review.

The Australia Institute is today launching the National Gambling Toll, a real-time tracker of Australia’s estimated gambling losses since July 1, 2023, right after the release of the Murphy Report. The toll can be viewed here.

Key points:

Chief Justice John Roberts begins the Supreme Court’s birthright citizenship opinion in Westminster in 1608 with Calvin’s Case and the English law of royal subjectship.

I would begin in Philadelphia in 1776.

Between those two places—and those two moments—lies the American Revolution. And the Revolution changed more than who governed America. It changed the very foundation of political membership.

That is the central problem with the Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. Barbara. The Court’s opinion is learned, careful, and historically rich. Chief Justice Roberts traces the English doctrine of jus soli through Calvin’s Case, Blackstone, a substantial body of antebellum American authorities, and finally United States v. Wong Kim Ark. It may well become the definitive defense of the conventional understanding of the 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause.

But it answers the wrong question.

The issue is not whether America inherited English legal language. It plainly did. The issue is whether America also inherited England’s understanding of political membership.

This is a free piece of Notes on the Crises. All pieces in this OMB series will be free. Please take out a paid subscription to support this work. Or leave a tip. 

Joshua Lawrence is a research fellow at Notes on the Crises and graduate of Sarah Lawrence College. Find him on Bluesky here.

Juan Hanes is a research fellow at Notes on the Crises and a Journalism student at NYU. Find him on Bluesky here.

The Declaration of Independence imagines revolution and legislation as two distinct phases in man’s political history. First, an aggrieved people “alter or abolish” a form of government destructive of man’s rights. Only then does that people “institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its power in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

America’s revolutionaries, however, had to fight and legislate at the same time. As they were beating the British, they ratified state constitutions and legislated for a free people. New Hampshire’s temporary constitution was written before the Declaration was adopted, as was South Carolina’s. Ten of the 13 colonies adopted constitutions before the Battle of Saratoga in 1777—only Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island did not. (Massachusetts adopted its constitution in 1780, well before the Treaty of Paris.)

Although state constitutions were defective in significant ways, they accomplished much. Combined with the Articles of Confederation, they were good enough to win independence. State constitutions reflected a social vision for a republican people that Americans could rally around during the war, one that would be elaborated for decades. They contained the promise of something better, something worth fighting and dying for.

In his recent book The Bailout State: Why Governments Rescue Banks, Not People, political economist Martijn Konings argues that the contemporary state has become a standing source of guarantees, subsidies and backstops for capital. Government is no longer capitalist in the sense that it protects property rights or is easily infiltrated by moneyed interests (two logics long recognized by Marxists). Instead, public financial management itself has become deeply interwoven with the production of private wealth. Tracing the origins of the bailout state back to the era of welfare capitalism, Konings depicts the neoliberal period not primarily as a sharp reversal of or decisive break with Keynesianism but as a moment in the longer evolution of institutional mechanisms that socialize the downside risk of asset ownership and manage the resulting inflationary pressure with austerity policies.

Mona Khneisser spoke with Martijn Konings about the book:

The Federal Government’s new carbon credits method for ‘protecting’ native forests will allow fossil fuel companies to greenwash their climate pollution and expand coal and gas production, according to the Australia Institute.

A new carbon accounting method, proposed to fund the creation of the Great Koala National Park in NSW, pits forest and biodiversity protection against acting on climate change, when those objectives are inseparable.

“Climate science makes clear that the Australian Government needs to stop approving new gas and coal projects while simultaneously stopping the destruction of enormous amounts of our native forests,” said Dr Richard Denniss, co-CEO of The Australia Institute.

“The science doesn’t say that it is okay for us to approve new gas and coal mines, as long as we save some trees at the same time. However, under this Great Koala National Park offsets scheme, that is exactly what is being proposed.”

Australia Institute research has shown that:

On this episode of After America, Allan Behm joins Angus Blackman to discuss the negotiations between the United States and Iran, where it all went wrong for British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, and European views of Trump’s America.

This episode was recorded live on Friday 26 June.

Support the research powerful interests fear. Make a tax-deductible donation to the Australia Institute’s End of Financial Year Appeal before 30 June.

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

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

Show notes:

How will Australia pay for AUKUS? Submission to AUKUS Public Inquiry by Rod Campbell, Richard Denniss and Jack Thrower, the Australia Institute (June 2026)

The Iran Disaster Is an Opportunity to Turn Away From Hawkish Idiocy and Reset Our Relationship With the Region by Matt Duss, The Nation (June 2026)

The famous philosophical maxim inscribed on the Temple of Apollo in the sacred Greek precinct of Delphi is “Know thyself,” an imperative at the heart of the Western tradition of liberal education. It includes both the Greek tradition of political philosophy inaugurated by Socrates and the rich and ample resources proffered to Western men and women by biblical revelation. A corollary to that imperative is the Platonic/Aristotelian call for thoughtful and conscientious human beings to “care for the soul” as the one thing most needful, a call that also powerfully resonates in the Christian tradition.

Yet for all its formidable achievements, the contemporary Western world has lost touch with both indispensable imperatives, not least because our dominant currents of thought have attempted to explain away the soul. These currents are determined to reduce the human being to a sophisticated animal bereft of meaningful self-consciousness, moral agency, mutual accountability, and the rich interiority that is nothing less than the “image of God.”

Submission Deadline: August 7, 2026


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On the first episode of What’s the Point?, Richard Denniss discusses the reasons behind One Nation grabbing the headlines, why it is highly unlikely Pauline Hanson will be Prime Minister after the next election and what the current Prime Minister can do to turn things around for Labor.

Host: Dr Richard Denniss, Co-CEO, The Australia Institute

The post What’s the Point of One Nation? appeared first on The Australia Institute.