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Pablo Azar, Francesca Carapella, JP Perez-Sangimino, Nathan Swem, and Alexandros P. Vardoulakis

In the post below, the last one that I am publishing on Substack, I am explaining why I left my academic career, left the United States, left Substack – and need your support now, as I am launching my career as a full-time writer. Come join me over at Democracy Americana’s new home on Steady:

Read Democracy Americana on Steady

If you were already subscribed to Democracy Americana, I have automatically transferred you over to Steady and you should already have this post in your email inbox. And no worries: I will also transfer new subscribers on here over to our new home. I promise you won’t miss anything. If you have any problems, please don’t hesitate to contact me at newsletter@democracyamericana.com and I promise we will get it sorted out.

This is a similar line to the one often used by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Energy Minister Chris Bowen, suggesting Australia needs more gas to underpin the nation’s electricity supply.

Australia Institute research, using the government’s and the gas companies’ own data, proves this is simply not true.

Australia has so much gas that it exports most of it, royalty-free, overseas. Even then, there is enough uncontracted gas to comfortably supply all of Australia’s domestic and manufacturing needs.

The analysis shows that so-called shortages are the result of too much gas being exported, not a shortage of gas coming from underground.

There’s also significant data to show that batteries are a  lower-cost alternative to gas for firming renewables.

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 September 18, 2025.

In April 2022, I re-enlisted in the Air National Guard after a 12-year break in service. Having first taken the oath of enlistment at age 17 with the Air Force Reserve, I approached it this time with a deeper appreciation for its weight: to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”

Three years have passed since that moment, and recent events have revealed something troubling: many service members either misunderstand this oath or treat it as a hollow formality. Following the tragic assassination of Charlie Kirk, I have witnessed service members praise that act of cowardice and terrorism. But our oath is no mere ceremony. It must be the foundation of our duty, our professionalism, and our warrior ethos.

Military service members who glorify the killing of innocent Americans must be removed from our ranks.

The U.S. Department of State is too bureaucratic, insular, and disconnected from the American people to meet today’s global challenges. For those reasons, Secretary Rubio announced a reduction in force and a broader reorganization of the department in July. These reforms should inspire hope in those wishing to enter a career in diplomacy and international relations. Above all, they need to be worthy of the American people’s trust and confidence. One hopes this is just the beginning of reforms that will create a State Department that is prepared for conflict around the world, agile in crisis, deliberate in strategy, and effective in delivering results for the American people.

Secretary Rubio’s reforms reflect the spirit of Harry S. Truman, namesake of the State Department’s headquarters. The last U.S. president without a college degree, Truman was born in the rural Missouri Ozarks in the small town of Lamar and raised outside Kansas City, Missouri. From humble beginnings, he learned the value of grit, service, and earning one’s keep—a reflection of Midwestern values.

The developments in the legal fight between the Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook and the second Trump administration have evolved quite rapidly over the past three weeks. It's past time to examine where we’ve been, where we stand as of this writing and what it all means.

The brouhaha over Donald Trump’s latest attack on a journalist for doing journalism (this time the excellent John Lyons) rather overshadowed it, but Anthony Albanese’s trip to Papua New Guinea made one thing undeniably clear.

The Pacific has lost patience with Australia.

This is not new, nor particularly earth-shattering as analysis. But it does pose larger questions for Australia moving forward, as the old ways of doing business with our regional neighbours no longer cut it.

One reason Australia has always been so clumsy in its dealings with the Pacific is that it only ever views the Pacific in terms of defence.  What can the Pacific do for Australia? Who doesn’t Australia want on its doorstep? What does Australia have to do to ensure the defence of the region?

Defence, of course, has its place. But the Pacific is a diaspora of cultures and people who do not exist to serve as pawns in Australia’s defence strategies with the United States. And yet, in our dealings with the Pacific, that is always the frame.

Papua New Guinea not signing an agreement Albanese visited the nation to sign, on the back of Vanuatu also withholding its agreement on a separate deal makes very, very clear the Pacific has run out of patience with us.

On this episode of After America, Allan Behm joins Dr Emma Shortis to discuss the MAGA movement’s weaponisation of Charlie Kirk’s murder, why no Trump meeting might be the best outcome for Anthony Albanese, formal recognition of Palestine, and Australia’s disastrous fortnight of Pacific diplomacy.

This episode was recorded on Monday 22 September.

‘Save Tuvalu, Save the World’ is our September Politics in the Pub – join us at 6.30pm on Wednesday 24 September live in Canberra or via the livestream.

Dead Centre: How political pragmatism is killing us by Richard Denniss is available now via the Australia Institute website.

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

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

Show notes:

Jimmy Kimmel’s cancellation is the latest sign we’re witnessing the end of US democracy by Emma Shortis, The Conversation (September 2025)

“Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil.” – Isaiah 5:20

On September 17, America celebrated its 238th Constitution Day—the day the framers of the Constitution signed the document destined to become “the supreme law of the land.” Today, September 22, we honor the 249th anniversary of the death of the young American hero Nathan Hale, who gave his life for his country in the early months of the American Revolution. These anniversaries have an especially poignant connection this year in light of the political assassination of Charlie Kirk, another young American hero who, like Nathan Hale, will be an inspiration to generations of Americans to come.

From all I have seen and heard, Charlie bore the same attitude that 21-year-old Nathan Hale made famous as he faced death at the hands of his British captors and said, “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.” America will always need its Nathan Hales and its Charlie Kirks—heroes willing to give “the last full measure of devotion” for their country’s cause. We can’t get on without them.

Though not every citizen will rise to the level of Hale or Kirk, we are equally held to high standards of citizenship, as seen in the oath of naturalization that every immigrant to the United States must take to become a citizen:

I spent September 9 in a cave. It wasn’t planned: I had been promised a waterfall. But there was a long drought, and the streams dried up, leaving a cavern of color and a series of interlocking caves. Cliffs soared above and holes gaped below, beckoning me to explore.

I waded through wildflowers and entered the largest lair, calling to my husband that I was alright, and crawled as far as I could go. The view from the cave was clearer than the view from the cliffs. In the dark, every detail of the outside world shines brighter. In the dark, I move slow and gradual, contorting myself to its crevices, observing everything and pursuing nothing. I took pictures because we had stopped at this park on a whim, and it was not supposed to look this way. I had gotten lucky, and I wanted proof that there was such a thing as good luck.

Chris Hedges Live Q&A: Come Ask Me a Question Now!

 — Author: Chris Hedges — Monday 22nd September 2025

The Chris Hedges Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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The State of the Revolution

 — Publication: Progress in Political Economy — Monday 22nd September 2025

Hunter S Thompson once wrote of San Francisco in the 1960s, ‘with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark – that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.’ His sentiment of faded hope also captures the view of many of us who initially found reasons for optimism in the project of 21^st century socialism that began to be constructed in Venezuela at the beginning of the millennium, initially under Hugo Chávez.

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Charlie Kirk, In Memoriam

 — Organisation: The Claremont Institute — Monday 22nd September 2025

I have one short story to tell you about Charlie Kirk—my friend.  

He became a friend of mine because I interrogated him one time. Nineteen-year-olds are my specialty. I asked him some questions he couldn’t answer. And he was already becoming famous. And I noticed his reaction: he said, “What should I do?”  

And I said,

Well, you have to suffer. If you want to grow, you have to suffer. It’s hard to learn—into the night, crack of dawn in the morning. Start with the Bible. Read the classics. Study the founding of America. In those places you will find that there’s a ladder that reaches up toward God. And at the bottom of it are the ordinary good things that are around us everywhere. If we can call them by their names—they have being, and the beings of the good things are figments of God. You will find that article in Aristotle. You will find it in the Bible. You will find it in Madison and Jefferson. 

“How do I learn that?” he said, and I said, “You have to suffer. You have to study. You have to think.”  

I thought I’d never hear from him again.  

Within a month, he got ahold of my cell phone number, and he texted me a copy of a certificate of completion of a Hillsdale College online course. He would go on to do that 31 times.  

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Financial Intermediaries and Pressures on International Capital Flows

 — Organisation: Federal Reserve Bank of New York — Publication: Liberty Street Economics — Monday 22nd September 2025

Linda S. Goldberg and Samantha Hirschhorn

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Opening Statement to the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Economics

 — Organisation: Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) — Monday 22nd September 2025

Opening Statement by Michele Bullock, Governor, to the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Economics. This speech is being broadcast live.

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Longlist for the 2025 Australian International Political Economy Network (AIPEN) Journal Article Prize

 — Publication: Progress in Political Economy — Sunday 21st September 2025

The selection committee for the Australian International Political Economy Network (AIPEN) Richard Higgott Journal Article Prize is pleased to announce the articles nominated by AIPEN members for the longlist for the 2025 prize, now in its 11^th year.

The prize will be awarded to the best article published in 2024 (online early or in print) in international political economy (IPE) by an Australia-based scholar.

The prize defines IPE in a pluralist sense to include the political economy of security, geography, literature, sociology, anthropology, post-coloniality, gender, finance, trade, regional studies, development, and economic theory, in ways that can span concerns for in/security, poverty, inequality, sustainability, exploitation, deprivation and discrimination.

The overall prize winner will be decided by the selection committee, comprised of AIPEN members. Before that decision can be made, we now require AIPEN members to vote on the longlist to establish the final shortlist of four articles for deliberation.

Voting is being conducted online through Election Buddy and is open to all members of the AIPEN e-list. Voting is open from 9am on Wednesday 24^th September and closes 5pm on Friday 17^th October (AEDT).

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Chris Hedges Live Q&A TOMORROW: Where Is America Going and Should You Leave?

 — Author: Chris Hedges — Sunday 21st September 2025

Join me for a live Q&A on my YouTube channel and X account, Monday September 22, at 6:30 - 7:30pm ET. Questions will be taken from the comment section of this Substack post, as well as during the livestream on YouTube/X. We will discuss the Trump administration’s exploitation of Charlie Kirk’s assassination to build out its fascist, technocratic police state, and whether dissidents of the administration should consider fleeing before it’s too late.

Please attempt to keep your questions direct and relatively brief, as I cannot read entire paragraphs during the show.

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DeSantis’s Blunder

 — Organisation: The Claremont Institute — Friday 19th September 2025

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has made abolishing property taxes for homeowners a centerpiece of his second-term agenda. This idea may sound appealing, but it would be unjust, unsustainable, set back Florida’s economic ascendance, and make the state an electorally inefficient “vote sink.” Instead of following Britain’s Tories in taking the easy route of pandering to rentier gerontocracy, DeSantis should return to making Florida a beacon of smart conservative policy.

The property tax reliably polls as America’s most unpopular major tax, primarily because it must be paid in large lump sums and does not fluctuate with family income. Nevertheless, DeSantis’s plan to eliminate property taxes on Florida residents’ primary residences, presumably funded by a sales tax hike, would be a serious mistake.

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With RFK's Attacks on the COVID Vaccine It's Official: We Don't Have the Tools

 — Author: Julia Doubleday — Friday 19th September 2025

RFK Jr’s ongoing attacks on COVID vaccine access are getting widespread media and political attention.

Recently, his HHS announced that the FDA was authorizing the fall COVID vaccines only for “high risk groups”. His announcement, posted to X (formerly twitter), claims that vaccines will be available to all patients who want them “after consulting with their doctors.”

The Gauntlet is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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Arguing like an asshole: obvious problems, and obvious solutions

 — Author: Patricia Roberts-Miller — Friday 19th September 2025

I’ve spent a lot of time arguing with assholes. Because I’ve spent a lot of time arguing with all sorts of people.

I was at Berkeley for many years, and argued with all sorts of people–anarchists, Democrats, environmentalists, evangelicals, feminists, Libertarians, Maoists, Moonies (they were terrible-car–crash-can’t-look-away bad at arguing), Republicans, Stalinists, Trotskyites, vegetarians. If you’re paying attention, then you’ve noticed I argued with everyone, including people with whom I agreed, but I disagreed with them on some point that seemed important to me. And some of them, even people with whom I agreed, argued in a way that I’ve come to call “arguing like an asshole.” By the way, so did I from time to time (and not everyone with whom I disagreed argued like an asshole).

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Does Who Governs Matter for How States Adapt? A Look Through Gender and Dynamic Capabilities

 — Organisation: UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP) — Friday 19th September 2025

By Maria Paula Nieto

What does gender have to do with a city government’s ability to adapt, innovate, and learn?

At first glance, not much. Dynamic capabilities seem to point towards relatively abstract organisational qualities. But scratch the surface and you find they are shaped by who is in the room.

Here’s the puzzle: despite decades of evidence from Brazil, Peru, India, Sweden, and beyond, the link between gender and state capabilities is still overlooked in mainstream debate. Yet studies show that leaders’ gender influences how governments set priorities, manage resources, and build legitimacy. In this blog I look at dynamic capabilities through the lens of policy capacity, using gender as one example of a structuring condition that shapes how these capabilities are deployed. Ignoring this dimension means overlooking a vital part of how state capabilities work.

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A Manhattan Project for Elite Human Capital

 — Organisation: The Claremont Institute — Friday 19th September 2025

The accelerating ascent, ubiquity, and commercialization of artificial intelligence require a renewed focus on truly elite human capital if we are to safeguard the future of Western civilization—both from external adversaries like China and also, perhaps even more importantly, from ourselves, especially our postmodern and transhumanist tendencies.

We will need in the coming years an elite cadre of Americans residing at the top levels of national and state government and bureaucracy. And yet we are confronted by a very sad state of affairs across K-12 and postsecondary education, making the creation of such an elite class an increasingly difficult task.

Exhibit A of this problem was illustrated in a recent Atlantic article about the peak of elite credentialing institutions, Harvard. The article, titled “The Perverse Consequences of the Easy A,” documents an alarming trend after decades of grade inflation. This excerpt helps give a sense of the problem’s progression: “In 2011, 60 percent of all grades were in the A range (up from 33 percent in 1985). By the 2020-21 academic year, that share had risen to 79 percent.”

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Announcement2025 Annual Conference of NOMOS : Capitalism and Socialism

 — Organisation: Just Money — Friday 19th September 2025

American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy - September 26, 2025, 12:00-6:45 EST


More “Announcement
2025 Annual Conference of NOMOS : Capitalism and Socialism”

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The New York Fed DSGE Model Forecast—September 2025

 — Organisation: Federal Reserve Bank of New York — Publication: Liberty Street Economics — Friday 19th September 2025

Marco Del Negro, Ibrahima Diagne, Keshav Dogra, Elena Elbarmi, Donggyu Lee, and Michael Pham

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Investing in joy. How to save our declining arts sector – submission

 — Organisation: The Australia Institute — Thursday 18th September 2025

Hundreds of live music venues have closed. A string of once-popular festivals have been cancelled. Australia’s artists continue to be desperately underpaid.

The cost-of-living crisis has left our creative sector for dead, despite 73% of Australians saying the arts had improved their quality of life during the pandemic.

Art pays its way. It doesn’t just create joy and happiness for Australians and overseas visitors; it creates jobs and economic growth – on a shoestring budget compared to other industries.

The Australia Institute has written a submission to the NSW government ahead of its Art of Tax Reform summit next week.

Key recommendations:

• Collect tax properly to pay for arts funding.
  • Lobby the federal government to reform the GST so it keeps up with economic growth, as it was originally designed to do.
  • Increase coal royalties and end fossil fuel subsidies in NSW.
• Introduce Youth Cultural Passes, similar to the $200 Dine & Discover vouchers during COVID.
• Introduce a Book Bounty, like the national bounty which was scrapped by the Howard government after 28 successful years.
• Make art prizes and grants tax free.

“The cost of living crisis has had a devastating impact on the arts,” said Skye Predavec, Anne Kantor Fellow at The Australia Institute.

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Assassination, Cancellation, and Freedom of Speech

 — Organisation: The Claremont Institute — Thursday 18th September 2025

The assassination of Charlie Kirk—a law-abiding man peacefully speaking his mind in a public place to a crowd of people gathered to hear him—has touched off a new debate about “cancel culture.” Some on the Right who are understandably disgusted by seeing some on the Left gloat about, or even justify, Kirk’s murder have attempted to get such people fired from their jobs, with success in a number of cases. In response, the Left has accused the Right of hypocrisy for reversing course on the cancel culture that it very recently deplored.

What are we to make of this? Are there any principles to guide us besides the one infamously associated with Lenin: “Who, whom?”

In the first place, there is a difference between cancel culture and the idea that there are just and reasonable limits on the freedom of speech. There is a big difference between getting someone fired for expressing a provocative view on a controversial public question and condoning—or even celebrating—a political assassination.

A free and democratic society can only survive if people feel free to express their views on questions of public import. But such a society cannot survive if we allow the approval of political murder to be normalized.

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How Can Democracy Survive AI? With Peter Lewis

 — Organisation: Per Capita — Wednesday 17th September 2025

Policy Hive is Per Capita’s early career policy network for policy professionals, students and anyone interested in learning more about how they can influence policy and politics to build an Australia based on fairness, shared prosperity and social justice. (Long time policy wonks also welcome!)

On Wednesday 17 September 2025 we explored how democracy can survive the rise of AI across industry and politics, with Peter Lewis, convener of the Centre of the Public Square. He is also executive director of the progressive strategic communications agency Essential Media and the founder of the collaborative engagement platform Civility.

Watch the recording of the event below.

The post How Can Democracy Survive AI? With Peter Lewis appeared first on Per Capita.

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Catch and Kill: The Politics of Power, with Joel Deane

 — Organisation: Per Capita — Wednesday 17th September 2025

Power is the only measure of a politician that matters. How they win power. How they wield power. How they lose power. This new edition of an Australian classic features a new introduction by the author taking into account the latest developments in Australian politics.

Catch and Kill is an inside account of the beguiling and nomadic nature of that unholy trinity of politics. Taking us into the inner sanctum of state and national politics, Joel Deane investigates how four friends – Steve Bracks, John Brumby, John Thwaites and Rob Hulls – beat the factions, won office in Victoria, achieved progressive reforms, then tried to hijack Canberra. ‘We were’, Bracks says, ‘a government that could catch and kill its own’.

Drawing on dozens of interviews with key figures, Deane provides a candid insight into the triumphs and failures of the Bracks-Brumby government, as well as those of its federal and state counterparts. He also shines a light on the personalities behind these decisions – their ambitions, their passions and their disappointments.

Joel Deane joined us for our September 2025 John Cain Lunch to discuss the new edition of his book “Catch and Kill: The Politics of Power.” Watch the recording below.

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Book Launch: Brett Heino, Literary Geographies and the Work of David Ireland

 — Publication: Progress in Political Economy — Friday 19th September 2025

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Carney and the Calgary School with Mack Penner

 — Publication: Perspectives Journal — Thursday 18th September 2025

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.

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America First, Bots Second

 — Organisation: The Claremont Institute — Thursday 18th September 2025

With the release of OpenAI’s Chat GPT-5, artificial intelligence has vaulted forward again. But this is no ordinary tech update. With each new development in this technology, America and the world edge closer to something resembling a world-historical revolution.

Technological and economic shifts have always marched hand in hand, but this wave of automation threatens to upend labor markets like never before, creating what historian Yuval Noah Harari chillingly calls a “useless class.” And in a nation already fractured and struggling to find its shared identity, it would be insane to think of such a transformation without acknowledging that it risks igniting unrest on a scale far beyond mere economic anxiety.

Policymakers must stop treating AI as a purely economic—or geopolitical—matter. They must treat it as a question of national survival. 

Throughout history, as Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne remind us, “technological progress has vastly shifted the composition of employment.” John Maynard Keynes famously cautioned that the pain from these changes “often springs not from the rheumatics of old age, but from the growing-pains of over-rapid changes.” Both observations may ring true today—but this rupture is unlike any before. 

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We Are All antifa Now

 — Author: Chris Hedges — Thursday 18th September 2025

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The American Mind Podcast: The Roundtable Episode 285

 — Organisation: The Claremont Institute — Thursday 18th September 2025

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.

Remembering Charlie | The Roundtable Ep. 285

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