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Linda Robinson, author of Women in Power: Fighting for Democracy in an Age of Authoritarianism, joins Dr Emma Shortis to discuss the misogyny of the Trump administration, how Big Tech enables its spread, and the stark realities facing women in politics.

This episode was recorded Friday 31 July.

1800RESPECT is the national domestic, family and sexual violence counselling, information and support service. Call 1800 737 732, text 0458 737 732, chat online or video call via their website.

More Fool Me: How the gas industry tricked Australia by Richard Denniss, the latest Vantage Point essay from Australia Institute Press, is available now. Use the code ‘FOOLME’ on a four-edition Vantage Point subscription to receive a free copy of Richard’s book, Econobabble.

Guest: Linda Robinson, Senior Fellow for Women and Foreign Policy, Council on Foreign Relations // @lrobinson

Appearing before Rand Paul’s Senate committee on July 29, Dr. Anthony Fauci, who headed the federal government’s response to COVID under Presidents Trump and Biden, refused to answer any questions, even though Biden gave him a preemptive pardon “for any offenses against the United States…in any manner related to his service” to the government between January 1, 2014, and January 19, 2025.

Certainly Fauci has much to answer for, starting with severe errors in judgment—whether criminal or not. As Dr. Scott Atlas and his coauthors put it in a 2024 report, “[A] calm, proportionate response would have applied the lessons from past influenza pandemics and used existing pandemic response plans. Instead, from the moment the virus was detected in America, the public health community and politicians spread an outsized message of fear and doom.” Public health officials “overlaid enormous economic, social, educational, and health (including substantial non-COVID excess mortality) harms on top of the virus itself, which nonetheless worked its way through substantially all of the population.”

The global labour movement has been divided over ‘free trade’. Many unions in the Global North, especially in export-oriented sectors, supported such agreements to secure markets and jobs, while unions in the Global South opposed them, having experienced job losses and deindustrialisation. In my new article, ‘Divisions in the Core of Global Capitalism? Italian Labour and “Free Trade”’, published in the journal New Political Economy, I demonstrate that a split has opened up in the core of Global Capitalism. Against the background of drastic deindustrialisation, Italian trade unions have moved to an explicit anti – ‘free trade’ position, while especially the export sector German and Scandinavian trade unions continue their support.

Historically, support for ‘free trade’ was part of a post–World War II national consensus in Italy, including also trade unions. Given Italy’s shortage of raw materials and advanced industries, export-led growth was seen as essential to finance necessary imports. Similar to trade unions in other European countries, this pro – ‘free trade’ position first changed in 2014 and 2015 during the broad mobilisation against the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) negotiations. As most tariffs between the EU and the US had already been removed at that time, the danger of removing non-tariff barriers such as health and safety regulations, the key focus of TTIP, was clear.

This policy statement affirms APA’s support for unobstructed access to health care and evidence-based clinical care for transgender, gender-diverse, and nonbinary children, adolescents, and adults.

Furthermore, this policy statement addresses the spread of misleading and unfounded narratives that mischaracterize gender dysphoria and affirming care, likely resulting in further stigmatization, marginalization, and lack of access to psychological and medical supports for transgender, gender-diverse, and nonbinary individuals.

https://auspath.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/APA-statement-on-affirming-evidence.pdf

The Australian Professional Association for Trans Health (AusPATH) was established in 2009 and is Australia’s peak body for professionals involved in the health, rights and wellbeing of all trans people – binary and non-binary. The AusPATH membership comprises over 600 experienced professionals working across Australia.

The NHS England has recently released a Clinical Policy advising that “Puberty suppressing hormones (PSH) are not available as a routine commissioning treatment option for treatment of children and young people who have gender incongruence / gender dysphoria.” In this policy document, it is stated that a Policy Working Group commissioned by the NHS has concluded “that there is not enough evidence to support the safety or clinical effectiveness of puberty suppression hormones to make the treatment routinely available at this time”. They recommend “that access to puberty suppressing hormones for children and young people with gender incongruence/dysphoria should only be available as part of research”.

AusPATH has significant concerns about this decision by NHS England, and the negative impact that it is likely to have on young gender diverse people in the UK. It is our opinion that the NHS England is undertaking an enormous and unprecedented public health experiment on children with no safeguards. 

The Australian Professional Association for Trans Health (AusPATH) was established in 2009 and is Australia’s peak body for professionals involved in the health, rights and wellbeing of all trans people – binary and non-binary. The AusPATH membership comprises over 600 experienced professionals working across Australia.

AusPATH firmly stands by the ethical responsibility of medical professionals to offer unbiased, evidence-based care to all individuals, regardless of personal beliefs.

Recently, it has come to our attention that two doctors, utilising their professional status, have publicly called for the cancellation of the Orange Rainbow Festival. Their statements, invoking their medical credentials, have misrepresented research and practice surrounding gender-affirming care.

AusPATH calls upon the Australian Health Ethics Committee to conduct a thorough review of the conflicts of interest among doctors who let their personal moral or religious judgments influence their professional obligations. Healthcare professionals must prioritise the well-being of their patients, adhering to the highest standards of evidence-based care without letting personal biases interfere.

https://doi.org/10.3390/children10020314

The Australian Professional Association for Trans Health (AusPATH) was established in 2009 and is Australia’s peak body for professionals involved in the health, rights, and wellbeing of all trans people – binary and non-binary. The AusPATH membership comprises over 450 experienced professionals working across Australia.

Elkadi et al (2023) recently published a research paper in the journal ‘Children’, entitled Gender Distress: A Prospective Follow-Up Study (heretofore referred to as “the study”). The AusPATH board and its membership have serious concerns about the misrepresentation of data presented in this research, as well in the choice of language used throughout the paper, which demonstrate a clear agenda of the research team to undermine the provision of gender affirming care to transgender children and adolescents. This response will outline our major concerns with this research article.

AusPATH has concerns about the methodology used and reporting of data in the study. The headline reporting of an “overall desistance rate” of 22.1% of participants does not accurately represent the cohort as, from the authors’ own published data, the following can be seen:

In August 2022, AusPATH issued a position statement about the interim report of the Independent Review of gender identity services for children and young people. NHS England has now issued an interim service specification for “Phase 1” services pending establishment of new regional services in England. https://www.engage.england.nhs.uk/specialised-commissioning/gender-dysphoria-services/

AusPATH has major reservations about this interim service specification.

On this episode of What’s the Point?, Richard Denniss explains the purpose of the Reserve Bank of Australia and whether it’s fulfilling that role.

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

Host: Anna Chang, Managing Editor, The Point // @annachang

Climate Integrity Summit 2026 tickets.

Pre-order More Fool Me: How the gas industry tricked Australia by Richard Denniss, the latest Vantage Point essay from Australia Institute Press. Use the code ‘FOOLME’ on a four-edition Vantage Point subscription to receive a free copy of Richard’s book, Econobabble.

Theme music: Blue Dot Sessions

Hello readers! There is a $2.99 sale this week on my book Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America. Hiding was published in April 2020 and was a national bestseller. Then multiple entities tried to censor it, either tacitly (as described here) or overtly. Hiding is a history book that covers the rise of Trump and the decline of the US from the late 1970s to 2019. It has unfortunately stood the test of time. Written before Epstein’s 2019 arrest and alleged murder, it was the first book to cover Trump, Epstein, and transnational organized crime.

And now it’s on sale! I’m told the eBook deal will last all week. I encourage you to get it while it’s cheap — and legal! I will make almost no money off this sale despite earning out my advance. That’s how book publishing works now. If you’d like to support my work, the best way to do it is through a subscription to my newsletter:

On November 10, 1793, the Cathedral of Notre-Dame ceased to be a church. The high altar where the Holy Mass had been celebrated for centuries was made into a stage, and on it, a woman was enthroned as the Goddess of Reason. The French Revolutionaries believed they were liberating France from a faith and a tradition they thought had unjustly shackled mankind. In speech, policy, and action, they sought to overturn the Christian religion that had shaped European civilization for nearly 15 centuries.

About two decades before the French Revolution, another revolution began across the Atlantic: the American colonists rose up against British rule. Yet their goal was neither a triumph of “reason above God” nor a severing of liberty from the moral order that had birthed it. The American Revolutionaries achieved a miracle, establishing the first enduring constitutional republic of the modern age. They secured the rule of law on a vast scale with a robust representative government.

Both revolutions transformed Western civilization’s understanding of authority, man, and God—the American Revolution for good, but the French Revolution for ill. They carried distinctly different anthropological messages about the nature of man, the sources of authority, and the purposes of political life.

The American Way of Life

On July 14, the State Leadership Initiative was honored to host the Florida DOGE team and their tech partners, Vulcan, Echelon, and DigiBuild, for the Florida DOGE Showcase in Washington, D.C. Spearheaded by Governor Ron DeSantis, the state has become the leader for providing accountable and efficient governance to its citizens.

Since its creation in 2025, the Florida DOGE team has identified nearly $1 billion in waste and abuse at the local government level and sent over $878 million back to the federal government. But the team’s work extends beyond fiscal savings and budgetary cuts—it also includes auditing university curriculum and state union programs and reining in rogue municipalities that had adopted woke-left policies.

[This is more or less a continuation of the previous post.]

The important variable in democracies shifting to authoritarianism is media.

The post We’re hiring! Content Producer and Media & Communications Advisor appeared first on CPRC.