Incoming Feed Items

This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble.

As U.S. hegemony continues to dwindle, Donald Trump and his international allies are making preparations to maintain some grip on world power. One of these methods includes the “Board of Peace,” which was ostensibly created to reconstruct Gaza, but has demonstrated yet another attempt by Trump to undermine international law.

[I posted this on FB, but I should have posted it here also.]

People keep asking me what opponents of our authoritarian administation should be doing, and it’s pretty straightforward in the abstract but very much up for argument in the specific:

DO WHAT HAS WORKED IN THE PAST, AND DON’T DO WHAT HAS NEVER WORKED.

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.

Halfway to the Midterms | The Roundtable Ep. 301

As anti-ICE protests escalate in Minneapolis, agitators storm a church mid-service. But Trump’s deportation efforts are combining with economic pain to drive his poll numbers down. Uncertainty about Greenland doesn’t seem to be helping matters, though the breakdown of NATO may be unavoidable or already happening in all but name. With midterms looming, how should the administration approach this delicate moment? Plus: the discipline of classics, and with it the prestige institutions of the American academy, seem determined to self-destruct. Ryan, Mike, and Spencer survey the landscape and offer up a few cultural recommendations.

The post The American Mind Podcast: The Roundtable Episode 301 appeared first on The American Mind.

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.

SUBSCRIBE to the Perspectives Journal Podcast and Activists Make History for previous and upcoming interviews with the 2026 NDP leadership race candidates.

What is unfolding in Minnesota cannot be understood without first confronting a difficult truth: some cultures arrive intact. They do not dissolve on contact with modern society, nor do they gently adapt—they replicate.

Somali society is organized around the clan. Loyalty is not abstract, nor is it civic. It is biological and binding. The individual exists only insofar as he serves the group. Protection, marriage, honor, silence, and punishment are governed by this code. Obligations flow inward, sanctions flow downward. The clan precedes the individual and outlives him.

This structure is pre-modern, but it is also anti-modern. It resists the very conditions that make liberal societies function: individual accountability, transparency, impersonal law, and trust beyond kin. Ernest Gellner warned that a modern nation-state cannot be built on tribal loyalty. Tribalism fragments authority and dissolves shared obligation. Where it persists, institutions decay.

Industrial societies require a high culture that is transmitted through mass, state-run education, because only such a culture can sustain economic mobility, the bonds of social trust, and full political citizenship within a highly differentiated division of labor. Nationalism in this sense is not an irrational passion but the adjustment mechanism by which politics and culture come into alignment.

On this episode of After America, Allan Behm joins Dr Emma Shortis discuss the global “rupture” identified by Prime Minister Carney, President Trump’s petulant response, why Trump’s apparent climbdown over Greenland may not save NATO, and what this all means for America’s allies, including Australia.

This discussion was recorded on Thursday 22 January 2026.

A time for Bravery: what happens when Australia chooses courage is available now via Australia Institute Press. Usually available for $34.95, use the code ‘POD5’ to get $5 off – offer available for a limited time only.

After America: Australia and the new world order is available from Australia Institute Press for just $19.95.

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

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

Show notes:

Special Address by Mark Carney, Prime Minister of Canada | World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2026, World Economic Forum on YouTube (January 2026)

What can a sepia-toned postcard of Lüderitz Bay (pictured), formerly a German South West Africa naval base, teach us about the dynamics of global capitalism? The answer is a great deal, according to the central argument of Heide Gerstenberger’s Market and Violence: The Functioning of Capitalism in History. For Gerstenberger, Karl Marx and Marxist theoreticians have fallen into a key misunderstanding regarding the role of violence in capitalism, an oversight they share with liberal figures like Adam Smith: namely, the optimistic interpretation of capitalist accumulation as a historically progressive social development that would ultimately eliminate direct, explicit forms of violence. The link between colonial violence and exploitation in German South West Africa is thus mobilised by Gerstenberger as one of several prime examples of the pervasiveness of overt violence in the “concrete historical developments” of capitalism. However, how plausible is this sepia-toned understanding of violence, as it were, in the face of increasingly digitalised forms of social life? With all the rich historical detail it provides, Gerstenberger’s book seems to shine more as a retrospective account of earlier forms of violence than as a prospective analysis of the sharply colourful and AI-mediated violence of contemporary market transactions.

Gerstenberger’s vocabulary of violence

President Trump began the first full week of 2026 with several announcements, one of which was likely to get missed in everything that’s been taking place: he committed his administration to “ban[ing] large institutional investors from buying more single-family homes,” because “[p]eople live in homes, not corporations.” A fair enough observation.

However, according to the Brookings Institution, large institutional owners account for less than 3% of home ownership nationally. Yet home prices are still absurdly high.

Affordability is a key topic for young people who lived through the post-CARES Act inflation and resent many of their elders for owning homes they don’t think they’ll ever be able to afford. Zohran Mamdani soared into the New York City mayor’s office in part because he repeatedly spoke on this issue. While it is a positive sign that the Trump Administration is looking to tackle exorbitant home prices for young Americans, its ban on institutional investing may miss the forest for the trees, that great expanding forest being the Federal Reserve.

The deaths of Alex Pretti and Renee Good, who was shot after hitting an ICE officer with her car according to video footage, have many asking the question, “What exactly do these anti-ICE activists think they are doing?”

The seemingly incomprehensible decision by Good, a mother with stuffed animals in the glove box of the vehicle she used to obstruct the enforcement of federal law, is leaving people scratching their heads. Reporting that Good became an activist through a peer group at her child’s progressive, social justice-focused charter school has not provided many answers. Media outlets like CNN have sought to demonstrate that the work Good was involved in was more like a side project of the local Parent Teacher Association than domestic terrorism.

But reality was something else.

Amid heightened political and economic uncertainty with the United States, neoliberalism continues unabated in Canada with the election of former central banker Mark Carney as Prime Minister in 2025. Despite today’s crisis stemming from decades of erosion under the neoliberal economic paradigm, through austerity, wage suppression, and cuts to public benefits, the Carney government’s push to make artificial intelligence (AI) a central part of Canada’s economy would accelerate that erosion.

In the name of protecting Canada’s economic integrity from U.S. instability, Carney has increasingly positioned AI as a pivotal piece of Canada’s future economic growth. Canada’s bet on AI, only if successful as an inflator of growth, would represent another manifestation of trickle-down economics: hype-driven, top-heavy, and disconnected from the lived realities of Canadians. 

The murders of unarmed civilians on the streets of Minneapolis, including the killing today of the intensive-care nurse Alex Jeffrey Pretti, would not come as a shock to Iraqis in Fallujah or Afghans in Helmand province. They were terrorized by heavily armed American execution squads for decades. It would not come as a shock to any of the students I teach in prison. Militarized police in poor urban neighborhoods kick down doors without warrants and kill with the same impunity and lack of accountability. What the rest of us are facing now, is what Aimé Césaire called imperial boomerang. Empires, when they decay, employ the savage forms of control on those they subjugate abroad, or those demonized by the wider society in the name of law and order, on the homeland. The tyranny Athens imposed on others, Thucydides noted, it finally, with the collapse of Athenian democracy, imposed on itself. But before we became the victims of state terror, we were accomplices. Before we expressed moral outrage at the indiscriminate taking of innocent lives, we tolerated, and often celebrated, the same Gestapo tactics, as long as they were directed at those who lived in the nations we occupied or poor people of color. We sowed the wind, now we will reap the whirlwind.

Today has been a wretched day in a sea of wretched days for the United States of America. I organized, protested, raised money for an Immigrant Rapid Response Fund in Minnesota, read news and legal filings, shared whatever I could on Mastodon. No matter what I was doing, Abraham Lincoln’s words at Gettysburg kept ringing in my mind. I repeat them here, emphasizing the ones I dedicate tonight to Alex Pretti and Renee Good.