Brownstone Insights

Predictably, Moderna has secured up to $60 million from the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) to accelerate development of an Ebola “vaccine” amid an ongoing outbreak in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, where there have been 282 confirmed cases, 42 deaths, and around 1,100 suspected cases, plus nine confirmed cases (one fatal) in Uganda.¹ ^,2

In case you didn’t know, CEPI is the brainchild of the WEF (conceived in 2015; launched in 2017) and co-founded (and co-funded with US$460 million) from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Wellcome Trust.

This seems a little odd to me considering that Ebola is highly containable and Bundibugyo has a lower CFR than Zaire.

CEPI plans to advance their modified mRNA candidate to trials within months, while also funding other candidates (Oxford/Serum Institute and IAVI), though development remains unpredictable amid a challenging “security environment,” including local resistance such as the recent burning of an Ebola treatment center over burial protocols.

Yeah. Let’s not consider that these are people whose lives are being destroyed because we need our precious “vaccine.” According to the latest, apparently there are some locals who simply want to bury their loved ones – to send them off to the afterlife in a non-space kinda suit way. Now, don’t get me wrong! Ebola peeps must indeed be handled with appropriate care, but there is always a happy medium and “authorities” must consider that these aren’t simply “dead patients” – they are people. Brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, etc. – all victims of God-knows-what shenanigans are going on in the world of ebola biowarfare. I am sorry to put it this way but after everything I’ve seen, read, and been put through, I cannot believe that government-sanctioned dual-use technology is not the reason for most of the “outbreaks” going on in the world. Especially in Africa.

Sigh. I can only imagine what they’re being put through over there. It almost makes me want to space suit up and go over to find out.

Let’s look closer at the Moderna product.

By the way, Moderna has been playing with the development of a modified mRNA ebola “vaccine” since 2018. In guinea pigs.³

This new “vaccine” indeed is going to be a plug-and-play product whereby Bundibugyo ebola genes are going to be swapped in as the coding template (as opposed to spike genes in the case of the Covid-19 shots), all snug as bugs in those nasty LNPs. This was always going to the next play, and if I might say so, the forever forward play.

Save money, save time, do inevitably crappy rushed trials. Which makes it kind of weird that $50 million is going to “preclinical testing and Phase I trials.” Boy, I would love to see the details of that clinical trial budget – both direct and indirect costs.

Financial support. This work was supported by a research grant from Moderna Therapeutics (A. B.) and National Institutes of Health (grant number 1R01AI102887-01A1) (A. B.).

CEPI dude (see: Dr Richard Hatchett, CEO of CEPI) said that injectable products against Bundibugyo could be ready for trials within a couple of months, “leveraging” Moderna’s established mRNA platform.⁴

You don’t say.

CEPI has committed up to US$50 million for preclinical testing and Phase 1 clinical trials. CEPI will support simultaneous manufacturing of doses to enable large-scale Phase 2/3 trials to begin immediately if Phase 1 data supports progression. This candidate uses the same fast, flexible, scalable mRNA technology validated during COVID-19 and builds upon Moderna’s existing R&D on related Ebola viruses. The collaboration leverages CEPI’s existing strategic partnership with Moderna. [4]

Strategic partnership, eh? I wonder what the controls will be?

You can sign up today! You have until June 12! I’m kidding.

Just look at this reassuring statement with those all-too-familiar words that send a shudder through my body now!

The safety data accumulated with the platforms and this prior experience with related viruses strongly suggests that safe and effective vaccines can be developed against the Bundibugyo virus.
If Phase 1 trials are successful, CEPI anticipates working with partners to support late-stage trials to generate data for emergency use authorization or licensure. [4]

Emergency use eh? Hmm. Are they planning another “pandemic” to usher this “emergency” in? Or are we simply going to blame the need of emergency authorization on those damned family members who want to bury their dead?

Ah, and of course Mr. Bancel has this to say!

At Moderna, we believe our mRNA platform can play an important role in responding rapidly to emerging infectious disease threats. We are proud to expand our strategic partnership with CEPI to advance a potential vaccine against Bundibugyo ebolavirus, leveraging our established technology and experience in related filoviruses. We will move with urgency and scientific rigor to support the response and help bring a potential vaccine closer to the communities that need it most. [4[

Color me sketical.

I can’t find anything on the actual name of the modified mRNA ebola product yet (I’d bet it’s gonna be something stupid like Ebolarna), but when it comes out, or when the clinical trial data has some meat, I’ll let you know what I observe.

In the meantime, I smell a repeat performance involving pandemonium.

References

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/moderna-snags-50-million-ebola-vax-contract
https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/moderna-partners-with-global-health-coalition-develop-bundibugyo-ebola-vaccine-2026-06-01
Meyer M, Huang E, Yuzhakov O, Ramanathan P, Ciaramella G, Bukreyev A. Modified mRNA-Based Vaccines Elicit Robust Immune Responses and Protect Guinea Pigs From Ebola Virus Disease. J Infect Dis. 2018 Jan 17;217(3):451-455. doi: 10.1093/infdis/jix592. PMID: 29281112; PMCID: PMC5853918.
https://cepi.net/cepi-fast-tracks-three-bundibugyo-ebolavirus-vaccine-candidates

Republished from the author’s Substack

Since Lockdowns, a 12% GDP Loss; Half of US Dollar Purchasing Power Stolen

Brownstone Institute — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 09:10:55 GMT

BY JEFFREY TUCKER

Author note: In response to reader collaboration, and more precise renderings, the conclusion is revised: the purchasing power loss since 2019 results from a 65% overall price increase (the doubling of prices hit many but not all categories) and a real GDP loss of 11%, as revealed by the Reality Index. This is not as terrible as the initial claims in this article but still far from official data and extremely devastating.

Many of us have had the intuition that the economic damage from 2020 – including industrial stoppages, monetary printing, supply-chain disruptions, extended school closures, and general population demoralization – was in fact far greater than official statistics indicate.

What follows will shore up this intuition, using new techniques and numbers from an innovative project called RealityIndex.co.

It’s true that official data is bad enough, showing a 26% loss in purchasing power, slow growth in output, and only marginal improvements in real income. The labor participation rate and worker/population ratio never fully recovered and continue to fall.

Output has been lackluster. It’s supposedly running 2.3% which is about half the postwar norm for US economic performance. It feels like a general downshift. Official data shows a brief recession in 2020 followed by gradual economic recovery overall.

But is this even true? In 2024, Brownstone Institute commissioned a study (by E.J. Antoni and Peter St. Onge) that concluded that we have never really entered recovery after 2022. We’ve been in a technical recession since that time. They got this with some limited adjustments of price data bumped up against output data. That study was met with brutal attacks, with every critic falling back on official data and doubting the supposed extremism of the conclusion.

That’s where matters have stood even as reports pour in concerning broken labor markets, no raises for 1 in 4 professional-class workers, and sketchy Gross Domestic Product (GDP) data that seems barely above zero thanks mainly to medical-sector subsidies, government spending, and social services. Then there are the learning losses showing dramatic declines in test scores among affected students.

We are left with real questions. How can consumer sentiment be at historic lows given that the overall data seems to raise no loud alarms?

In the meantime, Artificial Intelligence has come along to make these complicated calculations possible, ones that seek to discern and delineate the huge gaps between official data and reality. The goal is to come up with real data concerning real prices, sans the many different methods that the Department of Labor uses to adjust price changes.

For example, housing prices are not measured directly but rather converted to owners’ equivalent rent (OER). Medical service prices are adjusted for consumption, not premiums or final bills. When consumers substitute one good for another, that is also factored in. When the quality of a good or service improves, the statisticians apply what they called hedonic adjustments, which are invariably designed to minimize price increases and never run the other direction.

Where does this leave those of us who are looking for a plain index of prices? A veil has been put over that basic question and answer, such that we don’t know for sure. This matters tremendously for issues like raises, examining cost of living increases, taxes, and pension payments. Everything is adjusted for inflation to convert it to real valuations but if we don’t have a clear number, what are we to do?

This is why we should be thrilled about a new study/service called the Reality Index. You are free to browse the site yourself and examine every aspect of the method. Essentially, the site owner, an independent intellectual in Madrid, Tom Elliott, has deployed tools of AI to wholly reconstruct price indices in a way that is consistent with actual prices. His results are absolutely eye-popping. I’ve examined the method here in detail and found no fault.

The Wall Street Journal has also taken notice. This is good news and raises the possibility that we can finally get to the truth.

The core of the problem is a constantly changing methodology in official data. The formula was changed eight times over 35 years. All the changes seem technical and vaguely justifiable, once explained. Adding them all up, you get wild distortions in the data that the index is supposed to reveal. All these changes came home to roost in the great inflation of 2021-2024, which might be entering a second wave right now.

In 1983, owners’ equivalent rent replaced basic housing prices. The new formula was based on an estimate of what homeowners would have to pay to rent their own homes. But in real life, people pay mortgages, property taxes, and home prices. When home prices and mortgage rates rise faster than rents, the new formula understates the housing inflation real households face.

In 1996, the Boskin Commission announced that the Consumer Price Index (CPI) was overstated because people substitute higher-priced goods for lower-priced goods which are too slow in being calculated. The agency made the correction to eliminate the bias in the fixed basket of goods. The problem is that every single adjustment ended up forcing the reported rate to be less than a plain addition of the same goods over time.

In 1998, there was a new fashion for hedonic adjustments. This stemmed from an observation that quality is always improving, especially in digital goods and computer functioning. The idea is that you might be paying the same or even more but you are getting more bang for your buck with quality shifts. You guessed it: hedonic adjustments drew the inflation rate lower. Notably, hedonic adjustments never run the other way, raising prices when quality decreases.

In 1999, a geometric mean formula replaced arithmetic mean for most CPI components. This was intended to capture substitution effects. This was the change that ended up disguising the increase in medical service costs. By looking at consumed services rather than actual prices, the inflation rate in this sector ended up burying inflationary trends. This highly technical adjustment completely ignored all the ways in which substitution is a behavioral adaptation to inflation, not a reduction in the inflation experienced.

In 2002, we got a continuation of this same method with new “chained CPI” which changes the basket weighting based on new purchasing patterns. Sure, if people buy less beef and more chicken, the household will experience inflation in a different way. But this ignores the manner in which the substitutions themselves are a response to higher prices. In 2017, the new calculation was applied to taxes causing people to pay more than they otherwise would have under the old method.

In 2018, the hedonic adjustment strategy was expanded to a huge new range of products including smartphones, residential telephone services, internet services, and cable and satellite television. In 2020, at the same time the composition of M1 was changed and not retrospectively applied such that the data is essentially useless. Following money supply data became more difficult. Then in 2024, the Bureau of Labor Statistics stopped looking at the actual cost of medical services and started only looking at claims, completing the consumption-only bias against actual posted prices. In 2025, a month went by with no data collection at all.

So what happens when we strip all this away and examine actual prices as reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, without all the many adjustments? We find that a basket of goods and services that cost $100 in 1980 costs $515 per the Reality Index in 2025. The official CPI reports only $391.

That means that real prices have run 32% higher over 45 years than the government reports. Over a 55-year window, the Reality Index ran 54.4% faster than CPI.

To put it another way, consider the loss of purchasing power since 1980. According to the CPI, the loss has been to make $1 in 1980 worth only 26 cents. According to the Reality Index, the loss is greater: $1 in 1980 is now worth only 19 cents. By any standard, that is a shocking devaluation. All of this became much worse starting with lockdowns.

There is much more work to do with this method. The charts could be interactive. They can also be set for real-time updates. They will be if Elliott continues to develop this. He should. There might even be commercial value in this.

Think about the implications. Isolating from the beginning of the Covid period to the present, Elliott’s data estimates as much as a 40% loss in purchasing power over six years. Or perhaps closer to 50%. Here is a zoom in of the above chart covering 2019 to the present.

This seems correct to me. Government data, meanwhile, logs only a 26% loss. That’s a massive gap between the official data and what prices actually reveal. With an AI re-rendering that tracks purchasing power – the flipside of the increase of prices – we get numbers closer to 50%. That means that Covid cut the value of the dollar in terms of goods and services to half its former value.

There are still larger implications. We measure national output with the Gross Domestic Product, a national income statistic used since the 1930s. For output data, it would make no sense to report it in nominal terms without factoring in inflation. As a result, the GDP is usually reported in real terms, with an inflation adjustment that is continually compounded on an annual basis.

Elliott’s own data – which is shocking enough – did not go into the implications for GDP. But I was able to use a simple AI tool to make those adjustments, adding the corrected price index as the deflator metric.

The result is rather astounding. The recession of 2020 never really ended in a sustained way. Charted by hard numbers and then by percent change, you gain a very different picture of present levels of output. It causes one to completely rethink the last six years.

The official definition of recession is two quarters of declining real GDP. In revised data, we’ve had consistently negative GDP in all but three quarters since summer of 2022. In those three quarters, output barely rose above zero. Mostly real GDP has been falling, a recession without end.

Overall, Grok AI estimates a loss of 5-12% of GDP from 2019 to present using Reality Index numbers. Sorry but read that again. Instead of any recovery, we’ve seen as much as double-digit declines in GDP overall since 2020. This is the cumulative loss spread out over six years.

That’s roughly half of the losses of the full period of the Great Depression, which was more catastrophic than people know. Most research from the 1930s, for example by George Selgin, shows that this was not a normal business cycle but a structural hit tracing to the very coercive measures designed to fix the problem. Price controls and market disruptions made a bad situation far worse. This is precisely the sort of hit that should worry us the most.

The lockdowns were a similar situation: a massive exogenous shock to commerce, accompanied by a huge devaluation of the currency. It amounted to a gigantic transfer of wealth to elites, the largest in history, followed by a destruction of wealth of the middle and lower classes.

At least during the Great Depression, people knew it was happening. It was officially documented. Our times are different. We have heard nothing for six years except happy talk about economic recovery. Based on real data, the opposite has happened, most tracing to the disastrous lockdowns of 2020.

The beauty of this data is that it is subject to replication. Anyone can look at the methodology and disagree. Be my guest. From what I can see, the actual picture is far closer to the reality that most people are experiencing.

In other words, that only one in four workers has had a nominal raise in five years barely scratches the surface. The reality could be that we’ve lost as much as 12% of national output since the lockdown era, along with a halving of the currency value. It’s somehow worse that we are only now able to document this.

Also, I would like to see his methods applied to my own concern over effective household income per hour of work. We keep hearing that household income is rising in real terms without considering that it generally takes two incomes to provide what one once did. It won’t do to pretend that two incomes in a single household is double the income when one person has been drafted into the workforce to sustain living standards.

Adding that consideration in here, and the dramatic change in household remuneration between 1950 and 1990, would be very revealing. After all, only 1 in 5 households (with children under 18) had two income streams in 1950 where it is 3 in 5 today. That is effectively a diminution of wages per household hour and not an increase in income. Add that consideration and you would generate a chart of declining living standards in the decades before lockdowns delivered the final coup de grâce.

And that is where we are today. Households are scrambling to keep the bills paid while juggling children and domestic life while running from job to job to keep the flow going as best they can. Meanwhile, they money they earn has less buying power than ever. It’s no wonder consumer sentiment is rock bottom.

It is long past time for this technical work to be done. What Tom Elliott has provided is what index numbers should provide: clean and stable comparisons of the same or similar products over time, no adjustments, refinements, and manipulations. Run those numbers against conventional output numbers and you produce a very different picture of economic performance since 2020.

We’ve lived so long with distorted statistics. It fascinates me that the person who finally did it is an independent data expert in Spain rather than an employed academic in the US. That itself is revealing.

The big picture is that the lockdowns, not only nationally but globally, were far more catastrophic for us economically than has been generally admitted or recognized. It is not unusual in the history of economics for the really bad news to emerge years and even decades after an exogenous shock such as war.

We would rather not wait that long. The crisis is too real and the public knows, even if the official data does not admit the truth.

Lockdowns were a kind of war on the population. The economic carnage might have sliced off half of the purchasing power of the dollar and cut output by as much as 12% over six years (in real terms, leaving aside missed counterfactual growth on the previous trajectory), even as labor participation never recovered and continues to fall.

Did Covid kick off a kind of permanent recession? How many decades must pass before we admit what happened? More precisely, how much longer will it take before the public mind recognizes what they did to us?

Jailed for Hantavirus Exposure

Brownstone Institute — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 09:10:11 GMT

BY RICHARD KELLY

flurry of excitement has gripped news services in the last week or so as several groups of ‘ISIS Brides’ arrived back in Australia, from parts of the Middle East. The actions of these women have caused consternation, to say the least, among Australians who consider that giving support and comfort to terrorists is at best an error of judgment. Some were arrested, others were not.

Some had scuffling supporters to welcome them, others arrived more or less unnoticed. Various opinions were voiced, or whispered, about what ought to have happened. Politicians did what politicians do. Talking heads talked.

At least two things became clear – they are real people, with friends and critics, and they are newsworthy. Nothing like a jostling crowd bumping into cameramen and reporters as the main characters barge their way through the arrivals hall blinking into the sunlight of the concourse, trying to spot an Uber to whisk them away, for a TV news item.

Newsworthiness is a difficult thing to define. I suppose newspaper editors and TV producers routinely make what to the naïve public look like heartless calls on what to leave out of the day’s edition. (And moronic calls on what to include.)

Indeed, the content of a paper or a nightly news bulletin is as instructive for what is not mentioned as it is for the items that do get a run. One gets a picture of what kind of overall story or stories the editor or proprietor feels most comfortable portraying. It is tempting to draw further conclusions from this kind of analysis about the motives behind the stance – but without further facts any conclusion would be just speculation.

Not that there’s anything wrong with speculation – sometimes it’s all we have to go on. When the story is NOT run, what are we to make of that?

Imagine a set of circumstances whereby a real family or group of friends was taken from a cruise ship mid-holiday and forcibly dressed in plastic overalls, masked, paraded across tarmacs, flown back to Australia, and detained indefinitely in a purpose-built stalag in Western Australia. It’s the Hantavirus, don’t you know. Not infection, just contact-traced.

Surely newsrooms would be frantic with activity, already looking beyond the smug claim from the federal Health Minister Mark Butler that these people would be subject to quarantine measures he boasted to be the toughest in the world. “I do make no apology for the fact this is one of the stronger approaches you’d see around the world,” he said, adding some countries are only quarantining passengers for a few days.

That kind of sound bite is good for a 20-second item on the telly. But the whole thing is a goldmine. Stories for months; even a cadet reporter could knock up a list of angles as long as Victoria’s lockdowns (262 days, lest we forget):

Who are they? What are their names? Are they related to each other? What was the rest of their holiday going to be? How long had they been planning it? Was it the trip of a lifetime? Are they missing their dog? Did they have other things they needed to be doing? Is their internet access working? How often are they Facetiming the grandkids? Are they getting exercise? Do they like the food they are being served?

Do they have a GoFundMe to pay for the rent they can’t afford because they can’t work? Has their small business gone bankrupt yet? Will they be able to claim compensation or sue the Department of Foreign Affairs or the Health Department for locking them up? Have their pre-existing medical conditions remained in check, or have they deteriorated? Have they missed an important event like a wedding or the birth of a granddaughter?

Newsrooms ought to be covering their plight. That they are not is proof that they are not regarded as newsworthy. Having reached that conclusion, we are back to wondering why.

According to my calculations, these Australians are about 2 weeks into their ‘at least 3 weeks’ nightmare. No questions have been put to the Prime Minister about their condition or their prospects. No talkback callers have claimed to be relatives. No updates on their frustrations or their excitement at their coming release. Diddly squat from the Human Rights Commission. Ditto any archbishop. Nothing, either, about whether they have yet shown any symptoms of the bogeyman disease that started the whole thing.

Surely we would have heard if any of the above had happened. Where does that leave us? Back to wondering and speculating.

A few possible, but not necessarily true, explanations include:

There is a court injunction on any sort of reporting or disclosure about anything connected with these people;
There is no injunction, but editors and producers really don’t think it is newsworthy;
The people have no family or friends who care or who are capable of raising their voice loud enough to be heard;
Australians generally don’t care about their fellow citizens being locked up;
The whole thing is a hoax.

Perhaps there are other explanations – I’d love to hear them. But from those I’ve listed, I sure hope the thing is a hoax. Because any of the other explanations reveal what kind of country we have become: censored, submissive, and self-centered. And these poor bridesmaids are left to themselves.

California the Rogue State

Brownstone Institute — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 09:14:01 GMT

BY BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE

As we prepare this email, the election returns from California are not complete, due to the counting of mail-in ballots. Where this is going is incredibly obvious. They aren’t even trying to hide it anymore. California seized on Covid to institutionalize voter fraud while locking down its population as brutally as anywhere in the country, while the elites wined and dined.

Nothing has changed. The corruption is brazen. And yet its spokesmen pretend like all is normal. It is not.

At what point does a governmental system collapse under the weight of public incredulity? This is the great question of our age.

Two years ago, Brownstone Institute commissioned a study on inflation and recession. It concluded that we never really left the 2020 recession. This past week, we published an article that is even more telling. The dollar has lost half its value (in terms of purchasing power) since 2019. GDP has fallen 12 percent in total.

No one has disputed this conclusion because everyone knows it is true, even if the official statistics tell a different story.

This is where we are today and in most parts of the world. The people know the truth. The elites say otherwise. This gap is growing in a host of areas: economics, pharmacology, medicine, surveillance, agency corruption, and pretty much every other area.

This is not sustainable. You can feel the cracks in the consensus growing by the day. How this story ends is anyone’s guess.

Meanwhile, Brownstone Institute content, events, and books are growing in popularity and influence. Our journal archive is approaching the 4,000 mark, way too much for even a basic search to handle.

This is why we installed a new engine on the site. You can find it in the lower right-hand corner of Brownstone.org. You will be delighted how it handles your every question and gives pointers to our deeper content.

This is just one example of how our work – thanks only to your generous support – is far ahead of the game. Another example concerns our growing network of Supper Clubs extending coast to coast. On most nights of the week, there is one taking place, bringing new communities together over the main issues of our time.

Did you notice that others are attempting to copy this model? It’s wonderful. Imitation is flattery.

Have you made your plans to come to Chattanooga, Tennessee, for our annual conference and gala, November 6-7, 2026? It will likely sell out long before, so you might as well take advantage of early-bird pricing and get your hotel reservations now.

Brownstone truly needs your support right now. We invite your support. The cause of freedom itself – deeply rooted in the culture as such – needs your commitment today.

The Brownstone Show is going well. Tune in to these episodes, including the latest with Fr. Robert A. Sirico. The interviews are blunt and rooted in far-reaching expertise.

Go to the Brownstone Show.

We have out now a template for all nations of the world to leave the World Health Organization. The Right to Health Sovereignty is now available at Amazon. So is the technical report of this Brownstone-backed team. The coverage of this has been global. These two reports amount to heat-seeking missiles aimed right at the WHO.

See all our books.

These are the sorts of topics we talk about at Brownstone Supper Clubs, now coast to coast. Pick one and go!

June 10, 2026 — Brownstone Manhattan Supper Club: Bobbie Anne Flower Cox — Get tickets
June 11, 2026 — Brownstone Utah Supper Club: Jeff Hays — Get tickets
June 15, 2026 — Brownstone Midwest Supper Club: Mark Fraley — Get tickets
June 16, 2026 — Brownstone Pittsboro Supper Club: Tracy Hollister — Get tickets
June 17, 2026 — NEW!!! Brownstone Chicago North Shore Supper Club: Todd Ricketts and Kristin Jackson — Join waiting list
June 23, 2026 — Brownstone Puget Sound Supper Club: Dr. Janet Baseman — Get tickets
June 24, 2026 — Brownstone Pittsburgh Supper Club: Tom Harrington — Get tickets
June 24, 2026 — Brownstone W Hartford Supper Club: Jeffrey Tucker — Get tickets
June 24, 2026 — Brownstone Austin Supper Club: Mary Parker and Cyndi Collen — Get tickets
June 24, 2026 — Brownstone Ashland Supper Club: Steve Bhaerman — Get tickets
June 26, 2026 — Brownstone Bandera Supper Club: Daniel Mentz — Get tickets
June 30, 2026 — Brownstone Charlotte Supper Club: Mayor Robert Burns — Get tickets
July 7, 2026 — Brownstone Chattanooga Supper Club: John Holler — Get tickets
July 7, 2026 — Brownstone Boston Supper Club: Gigi Foster — Get tickets
Aug 28–29, 2026 — Brownstone Polyface Retreat, Swoope, VA — Register | VIP Dinner tickets
Nov 6–7, 2026 — Brownstone 6th Annual Conference and Gala, Chattanooga, TN — REGISTER NOW Early bird rates available until July 31.

If you are interested in being a supper club host in your area, please visit our Supper Club information page here.

Here is some content since our last email.

Economic Calculation and the Vaccine Industry By Jeffrey Tucker. Compliance is tanking, which is what one would expect after brutal mandates and ubiquitous injury and death. Meanwhile, pharma bots are dominating social media to shame dissidents, while legacy media turns news pages into nonstop shot-and-pill advertising.

Bioethics and Freedom to Choose By Robert Malone. True consent must be voluntary and free from coercion, deception, or informational manipulation. Without full disclosure and comprehension, consent becomes mere compliance, negating the principle of autonomy and transforming medicine into a form of technocratic control.

The Shocking Damage Caused by Covid Policies By Ian Miller. The Covid lockdowns may not have been remotely effective, but at least they harmed millions of people and created long-lasting negative impacts that we’re still dealing with today. That’s the conclusion of a massive new body of research.

Major Journal under Fire for Omitting Pfizer’s Failed Flu Data in Seniors By Maryanne Demasi. Unless this system is forced into the open, selective reporting will continue to be standard practice in even the most prestigious journals. And the public will keep receiving a polished marketing story instead of the full scientific truth.

Charles Augustus Leale, Abraham Lincoln, and the Physician We Are Slowly Losing By Joseph Varon. Maybe the biggest lesson from Leale’s story is that medicine was never just about technical skill. It was meant to include responsibility, sacrifice, judgment, and deep human connection. Those qualities used to define the profession.

Jailed for Hantavirus Exposure By Richard Kelly. Perhaps there are other explanations. But from those I’ve listed, I hope the thing is a hoax. Because any of the other explanations reveal what kind of country we have become: censored and self-centered. And these poor bridesmaids are left to themselves.

Since Lockdowns, a 12% GDP Loss; Half of US Dollar Purchasing Power Stolen By Jeffrey Tucker. Many of us have had the intuition that the economic damage from 2020 – including industrial stoppages, monetary printing, supply-chain disruptions, extended school closures, and general population demoralization – was greater than official statistics indicate. What follows will shore up this intuition.

Moderna Is Building a Modified mRNA “Vaccine” for Ebola Bundibugyo By Jessica Rose. Predictably, Moderna has secured up to $60 million from the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) to accelerate development of an Ebola “vaccine” amid an ongoing outbreak in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.

The Trouble with Health Science Reporters By Toby Rogers. The old paradigms are failing and new paradigms are struggling to be born. Standing in the breach are mainstream health science reporters. They’re just smart enough to be arrogant but not wise enough to know what they don’t know.

Detours and Missteps on the Road to Medical Advances By Steven Kritz. Given that life expectancy in this country has stagnated over the past 12-15 years, and it is universally acknowledged that chronic disease has risen, it’s past time that we step back and take a hard look at what we’ve done.

The WHO Denies the Lab Leak By Pat Fidopiastis. Unsurprisingly, a recent paper from members of SAGO concluded: “We did not find evidence to suggest that SARS CoV2 (sic) resulting from experimental manipulation was a more likely scenario than it emerging from recombination events.”

Should an Industry-Friendly Rider in the Farm Bill Override Over 1,000 State Laws? By Meryl Nass. If Congress adopts sweeping federal preemption in this area, it will not merely reshape meat markets; it will establish a precedent that states may no longer meaningfully govern the terms under which food is produced and sold within their own borders.

Less Is More in Medicine By Alan Cassels. We need to be asking questions about whether sending more of our collective wealth towards our healthcare system is producing good returns. We might expect that anything spent on healthcare provides good returns, but what if those investments end in losses?

Inside the FDA’s ‘Cover-Up’ of Child Deaths Linked to Covid Vaccines By Maryanne Demasi. Now, months after the internal disputes first erupted, the FDA continues to face questions about what officials knew, when they knew it, and why the agency failed to promptly release its investigations into paediatric deaths following Covid vaccination.

Charles Augustus Leale, Abraham Lincoln, and the Physician We Are Slowly Losing

Brownstone Institute — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 09:10:27 GMT

BY JOSEPH VARON

When Abraham Lincoln was shot, America saw more than just the loss of a President. Something quieter happened that night, but it was just as important. People saw the kind of doctor that society once truly respected.

Doctor Charles Augustus Leale was just 23 years of age when he walked into Ford’s Theatre on April 14, 1865. He had finished medical school only weeks before and was assigned to the theater because the President would be there.¹ By the end of that night, his name was forever linked to one of America’s most tragic events.

As soon as the gunshots rang out, panic took over the theater. People screamed, soldiers rushed in, and confusion filled the room. In the middle of it all, Leale climbed into Lincoln’s box and faced a scene that most doctors would remember forever.²

Years later, he described the moment with remarkable simplicity: “As I looked at the President, he appeared to be dead.”³ He then added, “As the President did not respond, I thought about the other form of death, apnoea, and I assumed my preferred position to revive by artificial respiration.”^1,3,4

Those initial sentences stand out. Simple, honest, and very human. They do not sound planned or practiced. They sound like a young doctor facing a disaster, trying to make sense of what he saw as it happened. Leale did not freeze. He immediately acted. He quickly checked Lincoln’s head wound, cleared a blood clot to ease the pressure, opened the airway with his fingers, and tried artificial respiration with the methods he knew.^1,3,4 Historians still debate whether he performed an early form of cardiac massage^1,5,6, but that seems less important now. What matters most is that he acted right away to help. He acted as a real doctor.

The Doctor as a Moral Figure

There was a time when doctors, like Charles Augustus Leale, held a special place in society. People didn’t just see them as skilled professionals. They saw them as moral leaders. Communities trusted doctors not because they were always right, but because patients felt doctors truly cared about them, not just the system. Leale had no protocol to follow that evening. No committee advised him. No administrator stood nearby explaining liability concerns. No electronic medical record demanded documentation. There was no legal department, no compliance office, no billing specialist, and no corporate structure surrounding him. There was simply a physician, a dying patient, and a sense of duty. Medicine today feels very different.

Today’s healthcare is full of amazing technology. We can use machines to support organs, read genomes, use artificial intelligence for diagnosis, and keep people alive in ways we couldn’t imagine years ago. Intensive care units now look like engineering labs. But even with all this progress, many patients say healthcare feels impersonal and cold.

People often leave medical encounters feeling processed rather than cared for. We shouldn’t pretend that medicine in the 1800s was perfect. Doctors in Leale’s time didn’t have antibiotics, ventilators, modern anesthesia, or many of the treatments we take for granted now. Death rates were very high. Still, medicine back then often felt much more personal, and that quality now seems at risk. Yet, the doctor belonged to the patient. Now, many doctors feel like they belong to large systems instead of their own practices.

When Medicine Became an Industry

This change didn’t happen all at once. Over many years, medicine slowly turned from a calling into an industry. Hospitals became big businesses. Doctors became employees. Patients became consumers. Even the way we talk about healing started to sound like business talk.

Doctors now hear words like throughput, optimization, efficiency, productivity targets, and market share more often than words like presence, reflection, or bedside intuition. Even the words we use for doctors have changed. More and more, doctors are called “providers,” a term so bland that it could just as easily describe a cable or internet company. When that happened, something important was lost. A doctor isn’t just someone who provides a service. In the past, doctors were expected to show judgment, courage, and responsibility when people were at their most vulnerable.

Many young doctors started their careers wanting to heal people, but instead found themselves stuck in paperwork and bureaucracy. Much of their day is now spent on electronic records, insurance forms, documentation, compliance training, coding, and meeting institutional goals. The electronic medical record, which was supposed to help with care, often feels more like a billing tool than a medical one. Older doctors (like myself) often say quietly to each other that medicine just doesn’t feel like medicine anymore.

The emotional toll has been huge. Burnout among doctors is now almost normal, which is troubling on its own.⁷ More and more, doctors say they feel emotionally drained, disconnected, and even morally injured.⁸ Many feel they aren’t practicing medicine the way they were taught. Some feel stuck in systems where efficiency is valued more than wisdom, and paperwork matters more than connecting with patients.

This doesn’t mean today’s doctors care less. Many care a lot, maybe even too much. The real problem is that modern healthcare systems make it harder to practice real, human medicine.

Covid-19 and the Fracture of Trust

As I have mentioned in other papers in Brownstone Journal, the Covid-19 era intensified many of these tensions dramatically. Regardless of political perspective, the Covid-19 pandemic made these problems much worse. No matter your politics, the pandemic revealed some tough truths about medicine and public health. Many doctors found that big institutions didn’t handle disagreement or uncertainty well. Those who questioned the main story or suggested different ideas sometimes ended up isolated, censored, or criticized. During the pandemic, however, many institutions projected certainty even when data remained incomplete or rapidly evolving. Recommendations shifted repeatedly while public messaging often insisted confidence had never wavered.

Trust suffered as a result.

The harm went beyond politics. Many patients started to wonder if doctors still thought for themselves or if they were just following big systems. Even asking that question marked a big change in our culture.

Charles Leale probably wouldn’t understand this world. At 23, standing next to a dying President, he trusted his own judgment. He didn’t wait for permission or check any policies. He relied on his knowledge, his observations, and his courage.

Modern medicine often celebrates new ideas but quietly discourages doctors from thinking for themselves. Protocols are important. Evidence-based medicine matters. Standardization can help care. But medicine has always needed something harder to measure: the ability to think for yourself when things get uncertain or chaotic. If doctors lose that, they risk becoming just technicians instead of true healers. And patients want simply true healers that listen.

What patients want most is actually simple. They want honesty. They want their doctor to be present. They want to know that the person across from them still has the freedom and humanity to stand up for them as people, not just as names in a system.

That was once assumed. Now it feels uncertain.

Medicine has also lost something important on the intellectual side. Doctors used to play a bigger role in society. They wrote essays, debated ethics, talked about philosophy, and joined public discussions about right and wrong. They were expected to think beyond checklists and routines. Now, medical training focuses more on technical skills, standardization, and performance, leaving little space for reflection or independent thought. The profession became narrower.

Leale stood for an older kind of doctor, one based not just on skill but on personal responsibility. After Lincoln died, he is said to have kept his blood-stained shirt cuffs for the rest of his life.^1,9 That detail feels very human. It shows that medicine once let doctors carry their emotional memories openly, instead of hiding them under layers of professionalism.

Today, many doctors cope by keeping some emotional distance. Seeing so much suffering can be too much otherwise. But if doctors become completely detached, that brings its own problems. If they stop feeling altogether, medicine loses something essential.

What Still Remains

Still, even with all these challenges, there are lots of great doctors. You can find them in tired intensive care units, doctors who sit with grieving families long after their shifts are over. You see them in rural doctors who handle huge workloads because there’s no one else. You see them in emergency doctors who keep going despite crowded rooms, tough situations, and exhaustion. And you see them in older doctors who remember what medicine was like before it was run by administrators and numbers. These doctors still have the same spirit as Dr. Charles Augustus Leale. The real tragedy isn’t that these doctors are gone. It’s that today’s systems make it harder for them to keep going.

Another problem facing us is that artificial intelligence (AI) will probably make these questions even more important. AI might greatly improve diagnosis, workflow, predictions, and cut down on paperwork. It could become one of medicine’s best tools. But technology alone can’t keep the human side of medicine alive. Patients don’t just want information from doctors. They want judgment, honesty, calm in scary times, and a real human presence when things are uncertain. No machine can fully replicate that. The real risk isn’t that AI gets smarter. It’s that doctors slowly lose their human touch.

The Lesson of Charles Augustus Leale

Charles Augustus Leale couldn’t save Abraham Lincoln, although his interventions appeared to restore weak cardiac activity and irregular breathing for several hours.^1,3,4 No doctor in 1865 could have changed what happened. But we remember him because he showed the qualities people once expected from doctors. He went toward suffering. He stayed calm in chaos. He acted even when things were uncertain. Most of all, he stayed with his patient until the end.

Medicine needs that spirit again. This isn’t about nostalgia or myths, or turning away from science and technology. Medicine needs progress, AI, new treatments, and innovation. But none of these can take the place of moral courage or a human presence.

Maybe the biggest lesson from Leale’s story is that medicine was never just about technical skill. It was meant to include responsibility, sacrifice, judgment, and deep human connection. Those qualities used to define the profession. If we lose those qualities, no amount of technology will be enough to save what medicine was meant to be.

References

Sternbach GL, Varon J, Fromm RE Jr. Charles Augustus Leale and the resuscitation of Abraham Lincoln. Resuscitation. 2000;45(1):3-5.
Brooks SM. Our Murdered Presidents: The Medical Story. New York: Frederick Fell Inc; 1966.
Leale CA. Lincoln’s Last Hours. 1909. Publication of an address presented to the Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States.
Montgomery JW. Resuscitation of President Lincoln. JAMA. 1961;176:160-162.
Pearson JW. Historical and Experimental Approaches to Modern Resuscitation. Springfield, IL: Charles C Thomas; 1965.
Kouwenhoven WB, Jude JR, Knickerbocker GG. Closed-chest cardiac massage. JAMA. 1960;173:1064-1067.
Center C, Davis M, Detre T, et al. Confronting depression and suicide in physicians: a consensus statement. JAMA. 2003;289(23):3161-3166.
Dean W, Talbot S, Dean A. Reframing clinician distress: moral injury not burnout. Fed Pract. 2019;36(9):400-402.
Shutes MH. Lincoln and the Doctors: A Medical Narrative of the Life of Abraham Lincoln. New York: Pioneer Press; 1933.

Less Is More in Medicine

Brownstone Institute — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 09:13:58 GMT

BY ALAN CASSELS

In modern medicine, the zeitgeist today seems to be captured in one word: “more.” We need more MRI machines, more screenings, more surgical interventions, more drugs, more doctors. More. More. More. Like the internal logic of capitalism that is built on eternal growth, so too is our health care system.

Given this ever-expanding demand, we need to be asking some hard questions about whether sending even more of our collective wealth towards our healthcare system is producing good returns. We might expect that anything spent on healthcare provides good returns, but what if, frequently, those investments end in losses?

There have been some significant strides against diseases over the last 30 years, but for many of the common sicknesses we all face, we’re seeing very little progress. This, despite the climbing price tag. Americans spent about $3.2 trillion in 2015 on healthcare, and that ballooned to about $4.8 trillion in 2023, representing a roughly 50% growth. By contrast GDP grew by only 25% over that period of time.

What’s all the additional money buying us?

In the things that matter, such as life expectancies, we are going backwards. The average life expectancy of Americans has dropped 2-3 years since the pandemic and we currently have among the lowest life expectancy among the world’s developed countries. The mental health of children and many adults is cratering, despite the mountains of expensive drugs we throw at these problems. Any advances on reducing mortality due to cardiovascular disease or cancer–the two biggest killers of Americans– are mostly disappointing, small, and incremental. And above all, in some key areas of healthcare, the more money we spend the worse outcomes we seem to get, a practice that culturally and financially threatens to bankrupt us.

Despite the juggernaut of more, more, more, there has been a small but growing voice of those who say it’s time to apply the brakes, and fast. Regardless of what area you look at: hospitals, medical screening, drug treatments, orthopaedic surgeries, cancer treatments, you name it, a case can be made almost everywhere that we need to slow healthcare activity, especially in areas where it’s clear that it’s delivering us negative returns.

I would argue that we are increasingly allowing the normal ups and downs of aging to be medicalized, where typical signs of lives well-lived are redefined as sickness and in need of medical intervention. An aging population, therefore, becomes an increasingly lucrative market to go after.

Medicalizing Normal: The “Grey Hair” of Joints

Let’s take one example, orthopaedic surgery—to examine what I mean by the medicalization of normality. Orthopaedic surgeons typically operate on hips, knees, elbows, shoulders, spines, and hands, often providing an important and essential service.

No one would argue against the value of hip replacement surgery in those suffering intolerable pain from worn out hip joints. But not all surgery or medical imaging relating to our joints is necessary. And some of it is harmful. Looking closely at the evidence behind MRI or CT scans, X-rays, and knee, shoulder, or elbow surgeries, you will find that many of the scans or surgeries we submit to do almost nothing to improve the length and quality of our lives.

The use of MRI machines provides a stellar example. Everyone seems to believe that there are not enough MRI machines to go around even though the overall volume of MRI machines has grown immensely. Over the last decade, the number of MRI machines has grown by 35% in some states, and total MRI-related revenue has increased by up to 40%.

MRIs are clearly a big moneymaker for hospitals but what do those machines really do? Spoiler alert: they often do little more than detect the natural physiological signs of aging.

Earlier this year the Finnish Centre for Evidence-Based Orthopaedics (FICEBO), did something so amazing, it’s hard to believe that no one else had thought of this. They took about 600 healthy middle-aged Finns and conducted MRIs of their shoulders. These were people who had no pain or no symptoms. They were just like you and I, everyday people.

The result? Ninety-nine percent of these healthy adults aged 41 to 76 had at least one rotator cuff abnormality on an MRI. No symptoms. No pain. No disfigurement. But a high-tech machine telling them they were diseased. This eye-opening study was published in February in JAMA Internal Medicine. It should have shaken the medical world but it barely made a ripple.

Let’s think through the implications of this. What should we make of the fact that “abnormalities” in our shoulders are found by MRIs in almost all of us who have no symptoms at all? There was no difference in the prevalence of full-thickness tears between symptomatic and asymptomatic patients. Despite the zillions of expensive MRI scans Americans have every year, this study’s findings suggest that in the case of rotator cuff changes after midlife, they are as normal as grey hair and wrinkles in older people. When we use these incidental findings to justify surgery, we aren’t curing a disease; we are performing expensive, invasive procedures on the natural process of growing older.

Now extrapolate that to knees. Same thing: many people with “normal” knees will have a “meniscal tear” found on an MRI machine.

Making the case for “De-implementation:” Why Some Surgeries Must Stop

In the world of prescribing, there is a lot of interest lately in “deprescribing,” which is about actively cutting, reducing, and sometimes eliminating prescriptions in order to improve the care of patients. In the world of medical procedures that is a strong case to be made for “de-implementation,” which is about rethinking the value of the procedures and rewriting the rules on when those procedures should be done. This is not just about avoiding unnecessary scans; it is about avoiding common surgeries that high-quality science has proven to be ineffective. Two major trials, again produced by Finnish researchers, have shattered deeply held medical beliefs regarding shoulder and knee pain.

Arthroscopic subacromial decompression (ASD)— the act of removing a section of bone in one’s shoulder is done to theoretically “increase space” for tendons for those who are suffering what is colloquially known as “shoulder impingement.”

It is one of the most commonly-performed orthopaedic procedures globally. However, high-quality research like this trial found that the ASD procedure offered no relevant benefit compared to a placebo surgery (where they go in to inspect the joint but no bone was removed). Even after a 10-year followup, the results remained unchanged. The British Medical Journal made a “strong recommendation” against performing this surgery, seeing as it is no more effective than doing nothing. Despite this evidence, worldwide ASD surgeries are widely done, and done frequently.

But that’s not the worst example.

The Poster Child for unnecessary surgeries is APM or arthroscopic partial meniscectomy (APM) for degenerative knee tears. This long-used “meniscal resection” surgery for torn menisci in the knee has been studied for many years. The best and longest trial was likely the Fidelity Trial (published last month in the New England Journal of Medicine) which involved following patients for ten years, a span of time almost unheard of in the world of orthopaedic surgery. The results are definitive: APM provides minimal to no improvement in symptoms compared to placebo surgery. Beyond its clinical futility, economic evaluations conclude that APM for degenerative tears is not cost-effective. Why? Long term, patients are generally worse off, because those surgeries are more likely to actually accelerate the development of knee osteoarthritis.

The Economic Toll: The North American “Cash Cow”

While countries like Finland are world leaders in “de-implementing” low value orthopaedic procedures, North American hospitals are heavily invested in these “cash cow” procedures. In the United States, approximately 750,000 knee meniscectomy or repair surgeries are performed annually. The financial burden is immense, amounting to several billions per year in the US alone. The average cost of an APM ranges from $3,800 to $4,300, but without insurance, costs can reach $10,000 to $15,000.

In the US alone, unneeded pre-surgical testing and imaging for these knees accounted for an estimated $9.5 billion in avoidable spending in a single year.

A key marker of low value care is the variation between jurisdictions. Compare two similar places and ask: why is there such a massive difference in the frequency with which some procedures are performed? For example, what should we make of the fact that surgeons in Florida or Texas perform twice as many meniscectomy procedures, per capita, as those in Washington or Oregon? Are Texans and Floridians receiving better care? Big no. Now compare Finland which does virtually no meniscectomies versus the US which does half a million per year. Can we say the American knees are better off? Not at all. The key here is when you’ve got a procedure that is low value, you see wide ranges of variation and this unwarranted variation—differences in treatment rates based on geography rather than clinical need—is a hallmark of a system that rewards volume over value.

A Systemic and Ethical Imperative: We Need to Wage War on Healthcare Waste

There are a number of noteworthy groups in the US trying to buck the incessant demand for more and more medicine, groups like Choosing Wisely, the Institute for Healthcare Improvement or the Lown Institute. They are good at studying the futility and waste that characterizes a lot of modern American medicine. They are however, like heroic Davids fighting against the Goliaths of the Medical Industrial Complex.

However, what they are fighting for is a noble public-spirited exercise, where medical practices or interventions that have been found to be ineffective or harmful are abandoned. Reports from the Institute of Medicine suggest that as much as 30% of all healthcare is considered low-value, providing no patient benefit or, worse, causing evidence-based harm. Unless health systems are reigned in against the tide of “more,” we will be denying needed resources to provide high-value care to those who truly need it.

De-implementation is not merely a cost-saving exercise; it is central to health equity and sustainability. Low-value care has physical, psychological, and financial consequences that impact the healthcare workforce and the environment. Low-value care, where the public payers decide that certain procedures aren’t worthy of public funding, often drives people to the private market, where they pay for the low-value care out of their own pockets. It’s crazy. Especially when you consider that we’ve also got the problem of underserved populations at the highest risk of receiving low-value care, further widening disparities in health outcomes.

The US has to catch up to the rest of the world and systematically identify areas of overuse, barriers to change, and then produce and disseminate effective reduction and “de-implementation” programs.

The path to a sustainable healthcare system requires us to stop treating the “grey hair” of our joints as a surgical emergency. As long as we continue to pour billions into surgeries for sore shoulders or knees which have been proven no better than a placebo, we drain the resources necessary for life-saving care.

Should an Industry-Friendly Rider in the Farm Bill Override Over 1,000 State Laws?

Brownstone Institute — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 09:11:54 GMT

BY MERYL NASS

There is an alarming but little-known provision in Congress’ 2026 Farm Bill that is likely to find its way into law within the next few weeks.

It attempts to remove the right of Americans to maintain local control over our food and farms.
It could also nullify over 1,000 state laws that are already on the books.

The Farm Bill, also known as the Farm, Food, and National Security Act of 2026, which includes the Save Our Bacon Act as Section 12006, was passed by the House on April 30, 2026 and now heads to the Senate, where the Agriculture Committee is expected to draft its own version of the bill.

Embedded in the legislation is the so-called “Save our Bacon” (SOB) Act, which would strip state and local governments of their ability to make agricultural policies for meat consumed in the state—preventing state and local governments from establishing food production and distribution safeguards.

As often happens, the language is designed to confuse. No doubt written by industry wordsmiths, the language sounds very reasonable, as long as you don’t know what it really means. Let me explain the bill language by quoting the first four sections and then decoding them:

(1) [The purpose of this bill is to] protect the free movement in interstate

commerce of products derived from covered livestock;

(2) encourage a national market of such products;

(3) ensure that producers of covered livestock

are not subject to a patchwork of State laws restricting access to a national market; and

(4) ensure that the United States continues to uphold its international trade obligations.

(1) “free movement” in fact means that states will not be able to restrict the entry and sale of meat produced under conditions that states deem improper.

(2) “national market” means no state will be allowed to refuse the entry and sale of meat, despite existing state laws that would prohibit sales of meat from certain locations, or meat produced under inhumane conditions.

(3) “patchwork of State laws” means that this single federal law will supersede and nullify all state laws, ignoring constitutional limits on federal power, to impose this single law on the whole country.

(4) “uphold its international trade obligations” means the states cannot restrict the sale of meat from any country, even when that country is inflicted with a pest like the New World screwworm.

Where did this bill come from?

This law is the meat industry’s response to a California ballot initiative that passed in 2018, titled Proposition 12. The industrial production of pork and veal is frequently accomplished by growing breeding pigs and veal calves in crates or boxes where they have no room to move or even turn around. Proposition 12 required that livestock be given a minimum amount of square feet per animal—and the amount is only 24 square feet for breeding pigs and 43 square feet for veal calves.

Because California’s 38 million people are a major market, and the bill applied to all veal and pork sold in California, 19,000 hog farmers in the US converted their farms to be compliant with California’s law—or were already compliant. This cost them up to $1 million each.

On the other hand, the National Pork Producers Council claimed that complying with the law would increase production costs by 9%, leading to more expensive and less available protein, and harming small farmers. The organization also claimed that allowing the animals room to walk would not improve animal welfare, based on “scientific research.”

In fact, after the law came into effect in 2024, there was no shortage of meat, and prices did not rise appreciably. What did happen was that small hog farmers became able to compete with the large, confined animal operations, providing them with critical market opportunities that kept them farming.

The Larger Ramifications of This Bill

The battle over the Save Our Bacon Act is not merely a dispute about pork production or animal welfare standards. It is a constitutional and political struggle over whether states retain meaningful authority to govern agricultural commerce within their own borders — or whether that authority will increasingly be consolidated in Washington at the urging of large corporate interests.

At the center of the debate lies a broader question that has shaped American federalism since the founding of the republic: who decides how communities govern themselves? The states and localities closest to the people affected, or distant federal lawmakers operating under pressure from nationally consolidated industries?

California’s Proposition 12 is a test case for the larger argument. Supporters argue that the measure represents a legitimate exercise of state sovereignty. Prop. 12 established minimum confinement standards for pigs, egg-laying hens, and veal calves whose products are sold within California. The law did not dictate how farmers in Iowa, Missouri, or North Carolina must raise animals inside their own states, but it established conditions for access to the California marketplace — a distinction that became central in subsequent legal challenges.

In 2023, the US Supreme Court upheld Prop 12 in National Pork Producers Council v. Ross, rejecting arguments that California had violated the Constitution’s dormant Commerce Clause. Writing for the plurality, Justice Neil Gorsuch emphasized that states have long possessed authority to regulate goods sold within their own jurisdictions, even when those regulations have ripple effects beyond state lines. The Court effectively affirmed that states may reflect the moral, health, and economic preferences of their citizens through marketplace standards.

The proposed Save Our Bacon Act seeks to overturn that principle legislatively.

Buried within the broader Farm Bill framework, Section 12006 would prohibit states and local governments from imposing agricultural production standards on products originating outside their borders. Framed by supporters as a means of preventing “patchwork regulation,” the legislation would dramatically expand federal preemption over agricultural governance. In practice, it would nullify not only California’s Proposition 12, but potentially a wide range of state-level agricultural, food safety, environmental, and animal welfare laws.

The constitutional irony is difficult to ignore. For decades, conservative legal and political movements have championed states’ rights as a safeguard against federal overreach. Yet in this instance, many of the same political forces are advocating for sweeping federal intervention precisely because certain states adopted standards disfavored by large agribusiness interests.

This tension exposes a deeper transformation in modern American federalism. Increasingly, appeals to “states’ rights” appear contingent not on principle, but on outcome. When states pursue policies aligned with national corporate priorities, decentralization is celebrated. When states pursue policies that disrupt large-scale industrial models, federal preemption suddenly becomes acceptable.

The implications extend far beyond pork production.

Modern agriculture in the United States is already characterized by extraordinary concentration. Four firms control roughly two-thirds of pork processing capacity nationally. The US’s largest pork producer, Smithfield, is owned by China. The US’s largest beef producer, JBS, is owned by two Brazilian brothers who have both spent time in jail in Brazil for corrupt business practices, including bribing public officials. It is probably safe to assume that attaining high standards for animal welfare and meat production are not top of mind for either company.

Similar consolidation exists across beef, poultry, grain trading, seed production, and agricultural chemicals. Economists and antitrust scholars have repeatedly warned that concentrated market structures reduce farmer bargaining power, suppress prices paid to producers, and weaken rural economic resilience.

Measures like Proposition 12 introduced an alternative market pathway. Rather than forcing all producers into a race toward maximum scale and lowest cost, the California standards created demand for farmers using less intensive confinement systems. Independent producers who had already adopted such practices suddenly gained access to premium markets that rewarded husbandry methods otherwise ignored in commodity pricing systems.

Farmers like Missouri producer Bob Street argue this was not regulatory punishment, but economic opportunity. Because his operation was already aligned with Prop 12 standards, he did not need to undergo costly restructuring. Instead, the law created a viable market niche that allowed him to compete against vertically integrated industrial operations.

That dynamic helps explain why opposition to Prop 12 has been driven disproportionately by the largest corporate actors in the pork industry. Uniform national standards generally benefit firms operating at enormous scale, because scale itself becomes the decisive competitive advantage. Diverse state-level standards, by contrast, create market fragmentation that can open space for smaller, regional producers to survive.

The Save Our Bacon Act would therefore not simply standardize commerce. It would standardize power.

Its passage would further entrench a model in which agricultural policy is increasingly shaped by multinational corporations capable of exerting influence at the federal level, while states and local communities lose the ability to express differing values through democratic governance. Rural communities would become even more dependent upon centralized supply chains and concentrated processing systems that have already demonstrated significant fragility during crises ranging from Covid-era shutdowns to avian influenza outbreaks.

There is also a profound democratic dimension to the issue. Proposition 12 was not imposed by bureaucratic decree. It was approved directly by California voters through the ballot initiative process. Whether one agrees with the policy or not, it represents an expression of democratic self-government. The Save Our Bacon Act would effectively tell states that even when citizens vote overwhelmingly for agricultural standards within their own marketplaces, those decisions can be overridden federally if they interfere with national industrial efficiencies.

Historically, states have often functioned as policy laboratories. Food labeling laws, environmental protections, workplace standards, and public health measures frequently emerged first at the state level before influencing national norms. Federal preemption of state laws that aggressively suppresses such experimentation risks freezing policy innovation in favor of the lowest common denominator acceptable to dominant national industries.

Supporters of the legislation contend that interstate commerce requires uniformity and predictability. They argue that allowing individual states to establish differing production standards creates compliance burdens that complicate national distribution systems and increase costs for producers. There is validity to the concern that excessive regulatory fragmentation can strain interstate commerce.

Yet the American constitutional system has never required perfect uniformity. Federalism inherently allows states to embody differing priorities and social preferences. Texans and Californians routinely make divergent choices on energy policy, firearms regulation, labor law, environmental standards, and countless other matters. Agriculture has historically been no exception.

The deeper question is whether efficiency should override local self-determination.

The debate surrounding the Save Our Bacon Act ultimately reflects two competing visions of agriculture itself. One views food production primarily as an industrial system optimized for scale, efficiency, and national uniformity. The other sees agriculture as intertwined with regional identity, local economies, ethical standards, environmental stewardship, and democratic control.

If Congress adopts sweeping federal preemption in this area, it will not merely reshape meat markets; it will establish a precedent that states may no longer meaningfully govern the terms under which food is produced and sold within their own borders whenever those standards inconvenience nationally consolidated industries.

For advocates of decentralized governance and states’ rights, that should raise alarms regardless of political affiliation. Because once the principle is established that federal power may override local agricultural standards in service of corporate uniformity, it is unlikely to remain confined to meat production alone.

Consider sharing your views on this issue with your Senator before the final Farm Bill version is determined.

Friday Night Executive Action

Brownstone Institute — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 09:01:55 GMT

BY BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE

It was only a few months ago that White House moles were telling Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to shut up about vaccines. It’s bad politics to have doubts, they said, citing polls.

We had our suspicions and conducted our own poll. It demonstrated supermajorities opposed to vaccine mandates and for culling the childhood schedule. Not only that: public opinion is extremely intense on this subject. After the Covid mandates, people aren’t having it anymore.

Months went by and the plotters lost the plot. Their fake polls that diverted a national agenda – one shared by Trump, RFK, and many appointees – were exposed. Sure enough, last Friday, the Trump administration attempted a damage reversal with a new Executive Order.

This EO calls for trimming the schedule and pushing informed choice over coercion. Did this make national news? Not at all. It’s not been published in any major newspaper other than Epoch Times. You know why: these legacy media sources are backed by pharmaceutical advertising dollars.

The game is obvious to us all now. What’s fascinating is to watch – and participate in – the collapse of a paradigm. They pushed too hard and the consensus completely cracked. Now the only goal of industry is to hang on as long as possible and hope that we all forget.

But there will be no forgetting. No matter how many phony baloney disease panics they throw at us, we’ll never comply. The lies have become unbearably obvious.

The Trump administration is now working hard to recapture lost momentum, with full knowledge that the issue is not going away.

As for Brownstone Institute, our journal archive is approaching the 4,000 mark, way too much for even a basic search to handle. This is why we installed an AI engine on the site. You can find it in the lower right-hand corner of Brownstone.org. You will be delighted how it handles your every question and gives pointers to our deeper content.

Did you notice that others are attempting to copy this model? It’s wonderful. Imitation is flattery.

Brownstone truly needs your support right now. We invite your support. The cause of freedom itself – deeply rooted in the culture as such – needs your commitment today.

The Brownstone Show is going well. Tune in to these episodes, including the latest with Jeffrey Tucker’s discussion of the death of George Washington. The interviews are blunt and rooted in far-reaching expertise.

Go to the Brownstone Show.

See all our books.

These are the sorts of topics we talk about at Brownstone Supper Clubs, now coast to coast. Pick one and go!

June 2, 2026 — Brownstone Chattanooga Supper Club: Melissa McDonald — Get tickets
June 2, 2026 — Brownstone Greater Boston Supper Club: Jan Jekielek — Get tickets
June 10, 2026 — Brownstone Manhattan Supper Club: Bobbie Anne Flower Cox — Get tickets
June 11, 2026 — Brownstone Utah Supper Club: Jeff Hays — Get tickets
June 15, 2026 — Brownstone Midwest Supper Club: Mark Fraley — Get tickets
June 16, 2026 — Brownstone Pittsboro Supper Club: Tracy Hollister — Get tickets
June 17, 2026 — NEW!!! Brownstone Chicago North Shore Supper Club: Todd Ricketts and Kristin Jackson — Join waiting list
June 23, 2026 — Brownstone Puget Sound Supper Club: Dr. Janet Baseman — Get tickets
June 24, 2026 — Brownstone W Hartford Supper Club: Jeffrey Tucker — Get tickets
June 24, 2026 — Brownstone Austin Supper Club: Mary Parker and Cyndi Collen — Get tickets
June 24, 2026 — Brownstone Ashland Supper Club: Steve Bhaerman — Get tickets
June 26, 2026 — Brownstone Bandera Supper Club: Daniel Mentz — Get tickets
June 30, 2026 — Brownstone Charlotte Supper Club: Mayor Robert Burns — Get tickets
Aug 28–29, 2026 — Brownstone Polyface Retreat, Swoope, VA — Register | VIP Dinner tickets
Nov 6–7, 2026 — Brownstone 6th Annual Conference and Gala, Chattanooga, TN — REGISTER NOW Early bird rates available until July 31.

If you are interested in being a supper club host in your area, please visit our Supper Club information page here.

Here is some content since our last email.

The Danger of an Unexamined Status Quo By Russ Gonnering. The Predictability Horizon in a Complex Adaptive System is short. It is imperative that the response of the system be carefully and frequently monitored. We can no longer bury the signals that can warn us of “something we had not anticipated.”

Article Written and Published by Libelists? By Jessica Rose. Here’s the article in question. It was written and published on Dec. 5, 2025, 6:00 AM EST by Brandy Zadrozny in MS NOW. I am posting my X remarks and defense of some of the false and defamatory comments made therein.

Education Shrinkflation By Steve Templeton. In the normal, sane world of my childhood, this wouldn’t have been extraordinary. But this was November, 2022, and the world was just beginning to recover from the insanity of the Covid-19 response.

The Demonization of Men (and Everyone Else Too) By Thomas Harrington. While each of us are free to live by our own privately held theories regarding the actions taken by, or in the name of, Collective X or Collective Y, it is never right for the government to do so.

Inside the Great Vaccine Debate By Max Dublin. From the vaccine debate, we have learned that if government agencies truly want to promote the greater good, then best practice would be to take all of the differences among the various demographic groups in the population into consideration.

The Rise of the Meme Disease By Steven Kritz. I began to recognize that from the 1960s through the end of the 20th century, there were a series of illnesses that I initially referred to as ‘fad’ diseases. I now refer to these conditions as ‘meme’ diseases.

The News-to-Death Ratio Strikes Again By Carl Heneghan and Tom Jefferson. Diseases associated with poverty—those that are endemic, predictable, and devastating—often fail to attract media attention because they don’t instill fear in the right audience or in the right way.

Australia’s Bulwark against Populism Is Cracking By Rebekah Barnett. The right-wing populist wave that broke over much of the world in 2016 barely lapped at Australia’s shores. The nation’s compulsory, preferential voting system and homogeneous, middle-management style politics formed a bulwark against the tide. Now, that bulwark is starting to crack.

Magnifica Humanitas - Rev. Robert A. Sirico - The Brownstone Show, Episode 23

Brownstone Institute — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 12:56:43 GMT

In this episode of The Brownstone Show, Jeffrey Tucker interviews Father Robert Sirico, founder of the Acton Institute, about Pope Leo’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas. They discuss how this profound document is not fundamentally about AI, but a powerful defense of the dignity, creativity, wisdom, moral conscience, love, and uniqueness of the human person in the age of artificial intelligence.

From transhumanist ideologies and the reduction of humans to mere “biological units,” to the metaphors of the Tower of Babel and the rebuilding of Jerusalem, Fr. Sirico and Tucker explore what truly distinguishes human intelligence from machines. They also examine Catholic social teaching principles of subsidiarity and solidarity, the proper role of markets and entrepreneurship, and the dangers of delegating moral decisions to algorithms.

Key Topics Covered:

Magnifica Humanitas — Pope Leo’s encyclical on AI and human dignity
The true focus: the magnificence of the human person, not artificial intelligence
Creativity, wisdom, conscience, love, sacrifice, and human transcendence
Transhumanism, immortality quests, and forgetting human limitation
Tower of Babel vs. the rebuilding of Jerusalem as metaphors
Subsidiarity, solidarity, and Catholic social teaching
Markets, efficiency, entrepreneurship, and human flourishing
Dangers of algorithms making life-and-death or everyday decisions

Father Robert Sirico brings deep theological, philosophical, and economic insight to this vital conversation, while Jeffrey Tucker connects it to broader anxieties about technology, liberty, and what it means to remain truly human.

This is essential viewing for anyone concerned about artificial intelligence and the future of human dignity.

Subscribe to The Brownstone Show for more fearless conversations on liberty, ideas, technology, and cultural renewal.

Follow Jeffrey Tucker & Brownstone Institute:
Website: brownstone.org
X/Twitter: @jeffreyatucker

Father Robert Sirico:
Founder, Acton Institute
X/Twitter: @robertsirico

Drop a comment: What do you think truly makes us human in the age of AI?

The WHO Denies the Lab Leak

Brownstone Institute — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 09:17:19 GMT

BY PAT FIDOPIASTIS

The Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of Novel Pathogens (SAGO) was commissioned by the World Health Organization (WHO) to discover the origin of SARS-CoV-2. Unsurprisingly, a recent paper from members of SAGO concluded: “We did not find evidence to suggest that SARS CoV2 (sic) resulting from experimental manipulation was a more likely scenario than it emerging from naturally occurring mutations or recombination events.”

This conclusion is unsurprising because the WHO was clearly taking marching orders from China; right from the beginning of the pandemic, they were parroting bizarre talking points from China, such as SARS-CoV-2 was not airborne. Furthermore, a WHO team sent to investigate the pandemic origin included Peter Daszak, the head of EcoHealth Alliance and a prime suspect in the lab-leak scenario.

In fact, SARS-CoV-2, with its human-adapted furin cleavage site (FCS), is so evolutionarily out of place that when Dr. Fauci’s crack team of evolutionary virologists studied its genome, they “privately” concluded, “It’s so friggin’ likely” the virus came from a lab.

With some basic virology knowledge (and an awareness of the overwhelming non-science circumstantial evidence), it becomes crystal clear that SARS-CoV-2 is not a natural virus. Arguments from people with everything to lose from a “lab-leak” scenario are little more than stratified layers of improbabilities, teetering on a foundation of desperation. The desperation stemmed from a desire by obedient researchers to avoid angering people in charge of awarding grants. Unfortunately, now they are “locked in the punch” and unable to get out.

It’s possible that this chimeric coronavirus exploded out of the one market out of tens of thousands in China that happens to be near the lab that makes chimeric coronaviruses. It’s possible that SARS-CoV-2 RNA found at the market where raccoon dogs were sold (a few weeks after the start of the pandemic and thousands of shoppers had trudged through) suggests that these animals were the source of the virus. It’s also possible that the origin of SARS-CoV-2 is either “aquatic animals” or vegetables, because virus RNA was also found where those items were sold. Similarly, it’s possible the scientist that somehow managed to develop a patentable SARS-CoV-2 vaccine in February 2020 (less than 2 months after the first reported cases) accidentally fell off the roof of the coronavirus lab.

For that matter, it’s possible that I could become a billionaire by playing Powerball; there are examples of people that have become billionaires this way, so why not?

Conversely, the lab-origin hypothesis for SARS-CoV-2 is Occamesque and easily wins the argument in a trial by jury.

SARS-CoV-2 stands out as a unicorn among coronaviruses, even among its supposed closest relatives in its sub-genus (Sarbecovirus). Frankly, there is nothing even close to a proximal ancestor of this virus.The FCS in the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2 allows the spike to be efficiently processed by human furin protease. This significantly enhances cell invasion, spread to adjacent cells, and eventually to other hosts. Furin processing promotes virus RNA passaging directly between cells by syncytium formation (Fig 1). This “stealth” mechanism enhances virus spread while minimizing alerting the immune response. If I wanted to enhance a coronavirus with increased infectivity for humans, I would add a human adapted furin cleavage site to its spike protein.

Loss of the “PRRA” FCS amino acid sequence in the SARS-CoV-2 spike significantly reduces virulence in laboratory tests. Thus, anyone that argues the SARS-CoV-2 FCS was not deliberately inserted because it is not optimally designed is being disingenuous. Comparing pandemics caused by SARS-CoV (lacking an FCS; Fig. 2) and SARS-CoV-2, which was “factory equipped” with a human adapted FCS, provides a glaring example of just how well-designed its FCS is.

Both SARS pandemics began in China and spread internationally well before the first local cases were made public. However, SARS-CoV resulted in about 8,000 confirmed cases and about 800 deaths worldwide, while SARS-CoV-2 infections are estimated to be 800 million with 8 million associated deaths. The few known coronaviruses with some version of FCS in the S1/S2 junction of the spike protein are many decades of evolutionary distance from SARS-CoV-2. As even SAGO points out, “these elements are not genetic homologues and might have been acquired independently.” None of its closest known relatives have this vital sequence, much less a highly human adapted version like SARS-CoV-2. People with everything to lose from a lab-leak scenario attempt to muddy the debate with examples of a few remotely related coronaviruses with a version of FCS. However, this is like a human with a prominent anterior horn emerging from the forest, and scientists brushing it off as natural because there are examples of horned mammals.

So, where did the SARS-CoV-2 FCS come from if not from these sparse distant relatives?

Natural Mechanisms of Coronavirus Evolution

Replication error. To minimize accumulation of detrimental errors during genome replication, SARS-CoV-2 RNA polymerase complex contains an error proofing component. SARS-CoV-2 has a large single-stranded RNA genome of ∼30,000 nucleotides. Because of this error proofing mechanism, SARS-CoV-2 RNA replication is fairly accurate by RNA virus standards; it is approximately 24 timesmore accurate than influenza virus. Thus, for replication errors to account for the de novo synthesis of the novel FCS, the progenitor SARS-CoV-2 polymerase (with error proofing) would have had to make 12 mistaken insertions in a row precisely at the S1/S2 spike junction encoding region resulting in a highly human adapted FCS not found in any of its closest known relatives.

This becomes exponentially more complicated by the doublet of cgg codons that make up two of the four vital FCS-encoding codons. That less than 4% of all codons in the SARS-CoV-2 genome are cgg is not random; selective pressure acts on genomes to optimize “language” (i.e., codon usage). Aside from SARS-CoV-2, a cgg-cgg doublet has only been found in a few barely related coronavirus genomes among the thousands that are known, but never in another FCS-encoding region. Genomes evolve “languages” through intense selection. “Genomic language” can be used to infer evolutionary origin in the same conceptual way one could use writing style to detect plagiarism. If you find a few sentences in a typical teenage boy’s book report written in Elizabethan, it’s not unreasonable to suspect plagiarism.

How probable is it that a lone member of the Sarbecovirus group, stealthily lurking in a mysterious animal at the Wuhan market near the Wuhan coronavirus lab, used an error correcting polymerase to accidentally lay down a 12-nucleotide human-adapted FCS sequence in the precise genomic location, momentarily switching languages (i.e., codon usage) to create a “Royal Flush” virus?

A similar question might be how many monkeys seated at computers are needed before one of them taps out a few lines of Shakespeare?

Recombination. Coronaviruses can exchange RNA sequences when two viruses coinfect a cell. “Template switching” is perhaps the most common recombination mechanism used by coronaviruses to exchange sequences (Fig. 3). Here, polymerase replicating a “donor” RNA genome switches to an “acceptor” RNA genome, like a train switching railroad tracks, to create a hybrid virus. This exchange requires a region of high identity between the acceptor and donor RNA, and thus works exponentially better between closely related viruses, and is decreased in viruses with error correcting polymerase activity (like SARS-CoV-2).

How probable is it that an unidentified progenitor Sarbecovirus lurking in a mysterious animal at the market (near the virology lab), used template switching to acquire a tiny 12 nucleotide FCS fragment? There is an extremely distantly related cat coronavirus with a similar FCS as SARS-CoV-2. Did an unrelated cat coronavirus and a “furin-less” SARS-CoV-2 bat virus prototype co-infect the same cell in a mystery animal at the market and template switch? First, the overall spike-encoding RNA sequences of these viruses are astronomically different. Thus, a successful template switch is highly unlikely to produce a successful offspring.

Second, this miraculous template switch would have required polymerase to initiate replication of the donor SARS-CoV-2 prototype RNA, then jump to the acceptor cat virus RNA to acquire only the 12 nucleotides needed to construct an FCS and then jump back to the donor strand. Third, the cat virus does not have a cgg-cgg doublet, so the progenitor SARS-CoV-2 RNA polymerase would have had to make a replication error to produce the doublet of non-preferred codons.

Should we be surprised that evidence of new recombination events in circulating SARS-CoV-2 are extraordinarily rare, albeit slightly less extraordinarily rare in the spike? Is it also surprising that after the start of the pandemic, clear cases of co-infection showed no evidence of recombination?

Rare events can happen under massive viral circulation. But to believe the market hypothesis, the SARS-CoV-2 progenitor had to acquire the FCS at the market, where there were too few animal hosts for massive circulation. The banter among Dr. Fauci’s crack team of virologists supports this point: “No way the selection could occur in the market. Too low density of mammals; really just small groups of 3-4 in [cages] (Dr. Eddie Holmes).”

To be clear, the SARS-CoV-2 genome is a patchwork. The spike appears to share ancestry with three viruses (i.e., RmYN02, RpYN06, and RaTG13) all of which lack an FCS. Did the “proximal ancestor” of SARS-CoV-2 go through a massive recombination binge while hiding out in a raccoon dog at the market and then practically stop recombining as it spread to hundreds of millions of humans? Did recombination and selection happen before the Wuhan market, resulting in a nuclear bomb virus that managed to restrain itself from exploding anywhere else but Wuhan (home of the coronavirus lab)?

There is also a non-replicative recombination mechanism in which the RNA from each invading genome is somehow cut and randomly spliced together. There is some evidence that this type of recombination has happened in a few viruses, but no such evidence for SARS-CoV-2. Aside from the cat coronavirus, a near match to the SARS-CoV-2 FCS was also found in a protein in human airway cells (i.e., ENaC-alpha). It’s no doubt coincidental that researchers that study ENaC-alpha share the same institution (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) as Dr. Ralph Baric, whose method of inserting FCSs into coronaviruses places him at the center of the SARS-CoV-2 origin debate.

How likely is it that a lone “proximal ancestor” member of the Sarbecovirus group jumped from a mysterious animal at the market into an airway cell of a bushmeat vendor, where it fortuitously picked up a tiny piece of FCS-encoding human RNA that floated to the exact spot in a genome of 30,000 nucleotides, spawning a variant that exploded into the world?

The novel SARS-CoV-2 FCS contains two additional putative functional motifs beyond furin cleavage. A fully analogous FCS containing all three putative motifs has so far only been found in one other virus: the artificial MERS infectious clone MERS_MA30, which was created in a lab several years before the Covid-19 pandemic.

Perhaps the SARS-CoV-2 progenitor encountered the artificial MERS_MA30 virus in a lab, or it encountered a “lab leaked” MERS_MA30 in a camel (the intermediate host of MERS), acquired its FCS, and then found its way into a doomed raccoon dog on its way to slaughter at the market.

Unnatural Mechanisms of Coronavirus Evolution

Coronaviruses can also unnaturally evolve when researchers modify their genome using simple genetic tools, such as Gibson assembly (Fig. 4). In just a few days this method can be used to create the genetic backbone of a novel FCS-carrying coronavirus with or without a “surgical scar.” This method is a relatively simple, seamless “no see um” approach that someone like Dr. Baric might use to construct artificial coronaviruses. The process can easily be modified to a “see um” method by inserting special sequences, like one encoding an FCS, or cut sites for flexible genetic modification. With Gibson assembly, up to six fragments can be “sown” together, with or without cut sites. Perhaps this is why the SARS-CoV-2 genome can be conveniently diced into six pieces.

Yes, natural evolution can lead to pandemic viruses, but so can lab accidents. With the forced release of the 2018 DARPA DEFUSE proposal, it is clear what was happening at the Wuhan Institute of Virology before the Covid-19 pandemic. “We will analyze all SARSr-CoV S gene [spike] sequences [from bat SARSr CoV viruses isolated at test cave sites in China] for appropriately conserved proteolytic cleavage sites…and for the presence of potential furin cleavage sites. Where clear mismatches occur, we will introduce appropriate human-specific cleavage sites and evaluate growth potential in Vero cells and HAE (Human Airway Epithelial) cultures.”

An EcoHealth Alliance spokesperson told Brownstone Institute, “Because the SARS-related research conducted by EcoHealth Alliance and the WIV dealt with bat coronaviruses that had never been shown to infect people, let alone cause significant mortality in humans, by definition it was not gain of function research.”

Using EcoHealth’s logic, the “thing” Timothy McVeigh used to blow up the federal building was not a bomb because it was made from harmless fertilizer. This “newspeak” definition of “gain-of-function research” justified Dr. Fauci’s obfuscation to Congress that this type of dangerous research was not happening and therefore he never funded it.

So, did a bat and cat virus have an astronomically improbable, fleeting interlude in a racoon dog at the market? Did interloping ENaC-alpha RNA drift into an unknown bat virus genome? Were the millions of virus genomes isolated from thousands of animals that have been analyzed simply not a big enough sample size to find anything close to a SARS-CoV-2 progenitor in nature? Or did the DARPA DEFUSE group take a few weeks out of their busy schedule and do precisely what they asked the government to pay them $14 million to do?

I wonder.

Australia’s Bulwark against Populism Is Cracking

Brownstone Institute — Fri, 29 May 2026 09:10:58 GMT

BY REBEKAH BARNETT

The right-wing populist wave that broke over much of the democratic world with Brexit and the first Trump presidency in 2016 barely lapped at Australia’s shores. The island nation’s compulsory, preferential voting system and homogeneous, middle-management style politics formed a bulwark against the global tide. Now, that bulwark is starting to crack.

Over the weekend, the populist-right One Nation Party won its first seat in the federal House of Representatives in the Farrer by-election, ending nearly 80 years of unbroken Liberal–National rule in the southern New South Wales electorate.

One Nation’s David Farley took 39.45 percent of the primary vote, and 57.4 percent on a two-party preferred basis. Climate 200-backed independent Michelle Milthorpe took 28.4 percent, while the conservative Coalition parties, Liberals and Nationals, finished third and fourth with 12.4 percent and 9.7 percent, respectively. Labor did not contest the seat.

The federal win follows victory for One Nation in South Australia, with the minor party going from zero to seven seats; four in the lower house and three in the upper house.

It’s a stunning double act from a party that previously only held a small presence in the federal senate and a smattering of state seats, signalling that One Nation now poses a genuine electoral threat to the collapsing Coalition.

The Coalition has already taken notes from the Farrer beating, with shadow treasurer Tim Wilson talking tough on One Nation’s pet issue of immigration in the past few days.

One Nation’s Changing Fortunes

For nearly 30 years, One Nation has been a ‘cult of personality’ party, its wins and woes mostly driven by surges and dips in the fortunes of its abrasive but ‘fair dinkum’ founder and current leader Pauline Hanson, whose previous life as a fish and chip shop owner and tendency to stumble over her words provides salt-of-the-earth credentials.1

During the 2016 populist wave, the ‘common sense’ party secured four federal senate seats, its most impressive sweep to that point in time, but it was not able to break past that ceiling.

A few things changed that. After the Liberals suffered a humiliating election defeat in 2025, wealthy Australians started shifting their support from the Coalition to One Nation.

Supporters include Australia’s richest woman, billionaire mining magnate Gina Rinehart, and Sydney stockbroker Angus Aitken, who told Radio New Zealand last week,

“The biggest change I reckon you’ll see in the next 12 to 18 months is the groundswell of business and wealthy people supporting One Nation who have been frustrated with the Coalition.
“People are just sick of all the red tape and shit across their individual segments of business. They think this is the person and the party that’s going to cut through some of that.”

In December last year, former leader of the Nationals and deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce defected to One Nation, gifting the party its first federal lower house seat and lending it the gravitas of a seasoned politician who has been in government.

Joyce cited concerns over the pursuit of renewable energy and Australia’s immigration policies as reasons for joining the party, giving voice to conservative voters who were no longer seeing their politics represented by the ‘Labor-lite’ Coalition.

One Nation wants to significantly reduce immigration and scrap net zero, which the party says is “destroying Australia” and is “pseudo-speak for global wealth transfer.”2Comparatively, the Coalition proposes moderate immigration reform and only formally abandoned net zero late last year, too little too late for many conservative voters.

Critics have also derided the Coalition for partnering with Labor in enacting some of the most draconian pandemic measures in the Western world, and for supporting rushed hate speech legislation in the wake of the Bondi massacre of 15 people at a Jewish holiday celebration in December.

Then in January of this year, polling revealed that One Nation had pulled ahead of the collapsing Coalition in the primary vote for the first time ever, at 22 percent compared to the Liberals’ 21 percent. Liberal leader Sussan Ley resigned, triggering the Farrer by-election and leading to One Nation’s first lower house win.

Anti-majors sentiment has bubbled for several election cycles now, but had failed to convert at the ballot box for three main reasons.

The first is Australia’s two-party preferred system. An alternative party has to consolidate a fair whack of the primary vote to benefit from preferences waterfalling to them. Otherwise, preferences go to the majors.

That’s why Labor was able to win a ‘landslide’ election victory in 2025 despite being led by a weak tea bag, taking two-thirds of lower house seats with only a third (34.5 percent) of the primary vote. The election before that, in 2022, Labor won with the lowest primary in almost a century, at 32.6 percent.

Labor election results in the UK, Australia and New Zealand show that in a two-party preferred or first-past-the-post system, the winning party can take far more seats than is representative of its popularity. Source: The Australia Institute.

Campaigns like ‘Put the Majors Last,’ hoping to alchemise Covid-era discontent into political change, achieved very little when it came to ballots cast, despite idealistic content telling voters they could eject majors by preference-funnelling alone.

Outside of the Greens (Labor’s most reliable voting partner) and the Teal independents, in recent history small alternative parties have only managed to capture a few percent of the vote, with One Nation pulling five percent in 2022 and 6.4 percent in 2022.

It was astonishing, then, when One Nation garnered 22.9 percent of the primary vote in the recent South Australian election, and 39.45 percent in Farrer. If One Nation continues to pull a quarter of the primary vote or more, it will become a real threat to the majors, especially the Coalition.

The second reason is the lack of a viable, stable alternative. On the left, the Greens typically secure around 12 percent of the vote and have enough representation in both houses to make a reliable bargaining partner for Labor.

In the centre, the Climate 200-backed Teals upset the applecart in the past two federal elections, gutting the Coalition’s urban, affluent base with approximately 10 seats held, mostly in the lower house. But as the socially liberal and fiscally conservative Teals are nominally independents and not a formal party, their collective impact is to undermine the Coalition.

On the right, the alternative political scene is reactionary, fragmented, and underfunded. Serious alternatives, like the Libertarians or Gerard Rennick’s People First Party, get almost no cut-through in the media and have no track record in government.

One Nation typically attracts more votes than the other small right-wing parties, but as mentioned above, with only five to seven percent of the vote, it has been unable to break through.

The landslide Farrer victory consolidating high-profile donor support and the Joyce defection is being taken by some commentators to signal that One Nation is emerging as a viable right-wing option for co-governance in a conservative government.

Third, dirty tricks. The majors and their mates use all manner of tactics to suffocate the smaller parties, sometimes resorting to underhanded measures.

Former Liberal Prime Minister Tony Abbott played a key role in the legal pursuit of Hanson for electoral fraud, establishing the Australians for Honest Politics Trust to help bankroll civil court cases against the One Nation Party and Hanson herself. Hanson was convicted of electoral fraud, spending eleven weeks in prison before the conviction was overturned.

In another high-profile case, ‘preference whisperer’ Glenn Druery was secretly filmed admitting to setting up a fake Sack Dan Andrews party to split the alternative party vote and bolster the incumbent Dan Andrews Labor Government.

And in a move that appeared to be a bad-faith effort to strike out competition from small parties, Labor and the Coalition passed laws in August 2021 that tripled the membership requirement for federal party registration from 500 to 1,500 members and made changes to party name rules. This came into effect just months before the May 2022 federal election, meaning small parties had to quickly triple their registrations and some had to change their names, causing confusion.

That One Nation have been hit with dirty tricks yet remain standing and surging in the polls speaks to their resilience, and Hanson’s in particular.

Despite the obstacles, the timing and conditions for One Nation’s rise are just right.

For the past 40 or so years, Australians have been drifting away from the major parties in their allegiances, and they have become increasingly likely to switch teams if they feel another party has something better on offer.

In the 1950s through to the late eighties, the major parties typically attracted over 90 percent of the primary vote. By the 2025 federal election, just 66 percent of voters gave their first preference to Labor or the Coalition. Meanwhile, the share of Australians reporting no alignment with any political party has increased from 14 percent in 2010 to 25 percent in 2025.

This partisan dealignment has slowly eroded the majors’ primary votes, and the centre-right Coalition has been the first to crater. One Nation fills this vacuum, for now.

Institutional trust is also in decline. According to the TrustWatch report from April 2026, only 48 percent of Australians say they trust our national institutions, down from 55 percent last year. In such times, authenticity has caché, and for all its foibles, One Nation has plenty of authenticity. Notably, only 28 percent of One Nation supporters said they had institutional confidence.

Immigration is a pain point in Australia as it is in most Western democracies. The recent Islamic terror attack at Bondi has fuelled anti-Islam sentiment and renewed focus on immigration screening. One Nation has always had a strong position on immigration and keeping Islamic extremists out of the country, and they’re not afraid to say it.

During a cost of living crisis and housing shortage, the fact that One Nation eschews luxury belief politics for straight talk about the issues that economically vulnerable Australians care the most about is appealing.

One Nation has also proved adept at crafting campaigns for the social media era. Through a humorous South Park-style ‘Please Explain’ series — the title is borrowed from a 90s radio hit lampooning Hanson — an anti-woke film, and a pop song topping the Australian iTunes chart, the party has cultivated both viral momentum and a countercultural edge that is only amplified when opponents attempt to suppress it.

Looking Ahead

Latest national polling has One Nation coming in with 24 percent of the primary vote, second only to Labor (30 percent), and ahead of the Coalition (21 percent).

Polls are one thing: the ballot box is another. The South Australian election in March and now the federal by-election over the weekend mark an upheaval in Australian politics as One Nation’s popularity in the polls translates to actual votes.

If this trend continues, pollsters predict that One Nation could win 12 seats at the next election, enough to become a genuine force in parliament.

On Monday, One Nation MP Barnaby Joyce said that’s exactly what the party intends. On his press rounds after the historic Farrer win, Joyce said the party will target the traditional Labor stronghold of western Sydney next and rejected the idea of a coalition with the Nationals and Liberals, stating that One Nation wants to “go for government.”

References

Hanson was expelled from the party in 2002 due to internal divisions and in 2003 spent 11 weeks in jail after being found guilty of election fraud. The judgement was overturned, and Hanson then ran in several state and federal elections as leader of the United Australia Party and as an independent. She rejoined One Nation in 2013, becoming leader again the following year. After winning four seats in the 2016 federal election, Hanson secured an amendment in the party’s constitution to secure her spot as leader until she chooses to leave, and allowing her to choose her own successor.
Ironically, One Nation, which believes that net zero is a scam, now holds both lower house seats in prime wind and solar regions, called Renewable Energy Zones.

Republished from the author’s Substack

The News-to-Death Ratio Strikes Again

Brownstone Institute — Thu, 28 May 2026 09:09:39 GMT

BY CARL HENEGHAN AND TOM JEFFERSON

There is a peculiar arithmetic that governs modern health reporting, one that has very little to do with actual risk. Hans Rosling captured it neatly during the 2009 swine flu episode, when he calculated a “news-to-death ratio” of 8,176-to-1. In other words, for every death attributed to swine flu, there were over eight thousand news stories. Tuberculosis, by contrast, received less than 0.1 news stories per death over the same period.

If that sounds absurd, it is, and yet very little has changed.

Take the current hantavirus scare. A cruise ship, the MV Hondius, sits off Cape Verde. There are 7 cases in total (2 confirmed, 5 suspected) and 3 deaths, including a Dutch couple and a German national. Passengers have been confined to their cabins while evacuations and disinfection efforts are organised. It is, undeniably, a dramatic story: a floating Petri dish, a whiff of quarantine, and a hint of the exotic.

In the past week alone, there have been at least 10 to 15 unique news stories, generating hundreds of articles. For a disease that, in normal times, struggles to attract even a single weekly mention, this represents a surge bordering on the hysterical.

And yet it is worth stepping back for a moment and asking, what are we actually looking at?

Hantavirus is a rare disease. In the United States, which diligently tracks such cases, there have been 890 laboratory-confirmed instances since 1993. In the UK, the situation is even less clear: from 2012 to early 2025, only 11 domestically acquired symptomatic cases have been recorded. Surprisingly, nine of these cases were not linked to cruise ships or exotic travel, but rather to a more mundane source—exposure to “pet fancy rats” or rodents bred as reptile feed.

This is not a pathogen ready to spread through the Home Counties. However, the rarity is not the issue; visibility is.

Diseases that afflict the poor, quietly and persistently, rarely command attention. Tuberculosis killed 1.23 million people globally in 2024. Over a million deaths every year, largely concentrated in less affluent parts of the world. It is one of the most lethal infectious diseases known to medicine, and yet it barely registers in the Western news cycle.

Why? Because TB is familiar, it is slow; It lacks narrative flair, and it does not trap well-heeled passengers in their cabins while helicopters circle overhead.

If you want coverage, you need something else entirely. You need novelty, uncertainty, and above all, proximity to affluence. A cruise ship outbreak ticks every box: a disease with a balcony suite.

This is the uncomfortable truth behind Rosling’s ratio: the media does not report risk, it reports drama. And drama requires context that audiences can imagine themselves in.

A rodent-borne virus in some remote rural setting barely registers. Put that very same virus aboard a cruise ship with buffet queues, balcony cabins, and a passenger list that looks uncomfortably like the readership, and suddenly it becomes headline news.

The result is a profound distortion of public perception. We are invited to worry about the improbable while ignoring the inevitable and reality. A handful of hantavirus cases generates dozens of headlines; a million tuberculosis deaths pass with barely a murmur.

If we were to apply Rosling’s lens to the present moment, the imbalance would be obvious. Three deaths linked to a suspected hantavirus cluster have produced hundreds of reports in a matter of days. Meanwhile, tuberculosis continues its relentless toll with scarcely a fraction of that attention. The modern “news-to-death ratio” may not be precisely 8,176-to-1, but the underlying pattern remains intact.

The lesson here isn’t truly about hantavirus; instead, it’s about how we collectively determine what is significant.

Diseases associated with poverty—those that are endemic, predictable, and devastating—often fail to attract media attention because they don’t instill fear in the right audience or in the right way. No one is interested in the thousands of cholera deaths that are too remote, too ordinary, and lack the dramatic impact that draws interest. What commands attention are diseases that puncture our sense of safety, the kind that can slip past the gangway and make themselves at home on a cruise ship.

This post was written by two old geezers who live in a world where risk is misread, priorities are skewed, and the arithmetic of attention bears little resemblance to the arithmetic of death.

Republished from the authors’ Substack

The Rise of the Meme Disease

Brownstone Institute — Wed, 27 May 2026 09:13:57 GMT

BY STEVEN KRITZ

Two recent articles posted in Brownstone Journal caught my attention. The first: “Political Psychiatry and the Genesis of the Trans Epidemic” by Max Dublin provided an exposé of the ways in which psychiatry combined with a fringe political group in ways that have had profoundly devastating patient consequences. Leave it to the pharmaceutical industry to then throw gasoline on the fire!

The other article: “George Washington, Father of the Country, Killed by Doctors” by Jeffrey A. Tucker provided a historical perspective of another medical modality, bloodletting, which helped no one, but killed many, except for the rare instance when the practitioner happened to be serendipitously dealing with a case of polycythemia vera. In fact, one could speculate that the reason bloodletting came into common practice was due to improvement of a patient that happened to be an early case of this disease!

The reason these two articles piqued my interest is that they reminded me that treatments for what I’ll call spurious illnesses are not confined to 21^st century psychiatry or routine 18^th century medical practice. I also thought it would be of interest to bring a perspective directly from the trenches; something that neither of the authors cited above can provide, since they were not trained as physicians.

Beginning about 25 years ago, shortly after ending my rural primary care practice as a Board Certified Internist, I began to recognize that from the 1960s through the end of the 20^th century, there were a series of illnesses that I initially referred to as ‘fad’ diseases. Given that each of these diseases were in vogue for at least a decade (a bit too long to be a fad), and in an attempt to be more ‘woke,’ I now refer to these conditions as ‘meme’ diseases.

Back in the 1960s (when I was in junior high and high school), I recall underactive thyroid being a frequent explanation for fatigue and weight gain, generally in women. Of note, crude and very inaccurate measures of thyroid function first became available in 1960, and it took almost 20 years for reliable tests to come on the market. This did not stop physicians from prescribing thyroid replacement medications to millions of patients on the flimsiest of indications. My clinical experience tells me that very few people were helped, and a larger number were harmed.

An ‘echo boom’ of overdiagnosis of underactive thyroid occurred once thyroid stimulating hormone (TSH) testing became available in the 1970s. Many patients with normal thyroid hormone levels, but low TSH levels were found, and they were frequently placed on thyroid hormone replacement for what has been termed sub-clinical hypothyroidism.

In September 2021, I happened to see a Commentary in the American Journal of Medicine (AJM) addressing a study showing that treatment of patients with normal thyroid hormone levels, but low TSH levels was unwarranted, even in patients who had mild symptoms suggestive of hypothyroidism: “Don’t React to Symptoms in Patients with Subclinical Hypothyroid Disease” by Stuart R. Chipkin, MD and Joseph S. Alpert, MD.

It turns out that Dr Alpert, who has been the Editor-in-Chief of the AJM for a number of years, and with whom I have corresponded by email several times, is 10 years older than me, so he did his medical training during the 1960s, when the hypothyroidism meme was in full flower. When I presented my meme disease theory to him, which included hypothyroidism and the conditions to follow, I found his response to be simpatico with my framing, giving me confidence that my characterization of hypothyroidism treatment during the 1960s is accurate, despite the fact that my interest in medicine did not occur until a few years later.

When I attended medical school and trained in Internal Medicine during the 1970s, the confluence of the development of beta-blockers (specifically propranolol – Inderal), and the use of sonography as a modality for examining heart anatomy resulted in nothing less than an epidemic of mitral valve prolapse (MVP) syndrome diagnoses.

Millions of people, again mostly women, were placed on lifelong beta-blockers, until it was realized that in the overwhelming majority of those with this anatomic finding, it was merely a normal variant, present in up to 15% of the population. When I first went into rural private practice in 1980, I noted that of the hundreds of patients who had been placed on beta-blockers that I encountered, maybe one or two actually went on to develop valvular disease requiring surgical treatment.

Given the decades that these patients were on beta-blockers before surgery was needed, it is very likely that beta-blocker treatment did absolutely nothing to prevent valvular deterioration. Since all medications have side effects, some of which can be severe and even life-threatening, treatment of MVP likely caused more harm than good. Sound familiar? Today, anyone who has engaged in medical practice for less than 45-50 years has little or no awareness of MVP syndrome. It’s as if the condition had suddenly fallen off the planet!

Starting in the 1980s, chronic Lyme disease in association with Epstein-Barr antibodies became the latest meme disease in patients presenting with fatigue and other vague muscle or joint discomfort. This is not to say that chronic Lyme disease does not exist. However, the prevalence of true disease was only a tiny fraction of the number branded with the diagnosis.

I always believed that the conflation of chronic Lyme disease (which is the consequence of an infection by a spirochete) with antibodies to the mononucleosis virus (Epstein-Barr) was a deliberate fraud, given that almost 99% of the population will test positive for this antibody by the age of 20 While this diagnostic complex is still occasionally seen, by the early 1990s, it had largely left the scene, just as MVP syndrome had done a decade earlier.

Almost as soon as chronic Lyme/Epstein Barr diagnoses faded, it was replaced by fibromyalgia (most recently known as myalgic encephalomyelitis)/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS). Fibromyalgia has had name changes that, in my mind, were done merely to give this condition more physiologic legitimacy. For the same reason, I recall that Epstein-Barr would also be added to the syndrome.

Once again, there were (and are) people who legitimately have this condition, but similar to the other meme diseases, the true incidence is considerably less than generally stated. Any number of treatment regimens was prescribed for this condition, but it was my observation that more often than not, the treatments caused more harm than benefit.

In all of these meme diseases; (1) there is a known medical condition that could be cited; and, (2) the overwhelming majority of sufferers are women. With the exception of ME/CFS, which appears to have a more solid though poorly characterized pathophysiological basis, these meme diseases turned out to be phantoms that mysteriously disappeared (or to use the current ‘woke’ term, were ‘cancelled’). These conditions also represented examples of the treatment being much worse than the purported disease. An additional tragedy is that those few with a legitimate medical illness requiring compassionate care and appropriate treatment tended to get lumped in with the others, and too often fell through the cracks.

More recently, Long Covid (from infection; not the jab) can be added to this list of meme diseases. Early in the pandemic, the term was on everyone’s lips daily, while now, it’s rarely mentioned, indicating that either its prevalence was wildly exaggerated or almost everyone eventually recovered. Unfortunately, those suffering with this condition due to the jab (which I believe has much greater prevalence when compared to prevalence from viral infection) have not had such a benign course.

For the past couple of years, I have been saying to anyone who will listen that if a risk/benefit analysis of every pharmaceutical product approved since January 1, 2000 were to be performed (and we can even exclude the Covid jab from this analysis), the findings would be much less than favorable. Whatever happened to first, do no harm? Of note, a large percentage of these approved drugs are psychotropic medications, which should not be surprising.

Currently, vaccines are starting to be looked at in a more objective way, but the resistance is fierce. Let’s hope that a reckoning is at hand. If we can truly sort out what works from what’s harmful, maybe we can get the cost of healthcare under control, while simultaneously improving patient outcomes.

Finally, given the tyrannical influence of the pharmaceutical industry in driving treatment that the Covid response has exposed, it raises the question as to whether the pharmaceutical industry cut its teeth decades ago on the meme diseases.

The Ebola Scare

Brownstone Institute — Tue, 26 May 2026 09:14:27 GMT

BY BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE

We barely finished the Hantavirus scare before Ebola arrived on the scene, along with fears that it will spread far and wide.

It’s a real virus and a wicked killer, to be sure. There is also zero chance that it can mutate into a pandemic. Why? It has a higher case fatality rate, one that actually limits its spread. A spreadable virus cannot kill its host. Only unsuccessful viruses do that.

That’s how the logic of these pathogens operates. There is a tradeoff between severity and prevalence. Incubation rates can adjust that dynamic somewhat but Ebola shows fast symptoms, which is why it is usually contained. That also makes contact tracing easier.

These days every infection that gets media attention generates public fear of both the medical and political response. What if they attempt another lockdown-until-vaccinate plot? We might swear not to comply but what if we are debanked, censored, and shamed?

In short, how powerful are the combined forces of media, public health officials, and governments? Is there anything we can do to stop them?

For all the world, it feels these days like someone is up to something. The World Health Organization never misses a chance to spread fear. The role of Brownstone Institute is to do the opposite: spread calm through logic, experience, and the actual science instead of the counterfeit form.

Another key achievement is live on the site right now: in the lower right-hand corner, you will see a question mark. It’s our new widget that indexes nearly 4,000 articles to provide an outstanding summary of content on the site. Try it once. You will be hooked, in good ways!

Brownstone truly needs your support right now. We invite your support. The cause of freedom itself – deeply rooted in the culture as such – needs your commitment today.

The Brownstone Show is going well. Tune in to these episodes, including the latest. The interviews are blunt and rooted in far-reaching expertise.

Go to the Brownstone Show.

See all our books.

These are the sorts of topics we talk about at Brownstone Supper Clubs, now coast to coast. Pick one and go!

May 26, 2026 — NEW!!! Brownstone Berkeley Supper Club: Colin Redemer — Get tickets
May 26, 2026 — Brownstone Charlotte Supper Club: Tracy Hollister — Get tickets
May 27, 2026 — Brownstone Austin Supper Club: Mollie Engelhart — Get tickets
May 27, 2026 — Brownstone Pittsburgh Supper Club: Shawn and Beth Dougherty — Get tickets
May 29, 2026 — Brownstone Bandera, TX Supper Club: Mikki Willis — Get tickets
June 2, 2026 — Brownstone Chattanooga Supper Club: Melissa McDonald — Get tickets
June 2, 2026 — Brownstone Greater Boston Supper Club: Jan Jekielek — Get tickets
June 10, 2026 — Brownstone Manhattan Supper Club: Bobbie Anne Flower Cox — Get tickets
June 11, 2026 — Brownstone Utah Supper Club: Jeff Hays — Get tickets
June 15, 2026 — Brownstone Midwest Supper Club: Mark Fraley — Get tickets
June 16, 2026 — Brownstone Pittsboro Supper Club: Tracy Hollister — Get tickets
June 17, 2026 — NEW!!! Brownstone Chicago North Shore Supper Club: Todd Ricketts and Kristin Jackson — Get tickets
Aug 28–29, 2026 — Brownstone Polyface Retreat, Swoope, VA — Register | VIP Dinner tickets
Nov 6–7, 2026 — Brownstone 6th Annual Conference and Gala, Chattanooga, TN — REGISTER NOW Early bird rates available until July 31.

If you are interested in being a supper club host in your area, please visit our Supper Club information page here.

Here is some content since our last email.

The Noble Savage By Sofia Karstens. This is not just a political or technological battle. It is a question of what it means to remain human. For those who choose integration, that is their right. But for those who do not, that must also remain a choice.

Medicine by Captivity: The Rise of the Hostage Physician By Joseph Varon. When doctors spend more time serving systems than serving patients, medicine changes. When physicians are afraid to speak honestly, medicine changes. When throughput quietly shapes bedside decisions, medicine changes. When documentation matters more than human presence, medicine changes.

The Biggest Breast Cancer Advance in the Last Twenty Years By Alan Cassels. Some clinicians and public-health researchers would argue that the media narrative minimizes known and proven downsides of these drugs, often trivializing or ignoring serious harms, including risks of stroke, blood clots, gallbladder disease, and increased breast cancer risk.

George Washington, Father of the Country, Killed by Doctors By Jeffrey Tucker. George Washington’s terrible fate ought to have sounded a national alarm to ring through our long history. The lesson should be never to replace epistemic humility in medicine with institutionalized dogma. That lesson did not stick.

Political Psychiatry and the Genesis of the Trans Epidemic By Max Dublin. Unlike the scientists who fabricated the Covid-19 virus, those who introduced Gender Dysphoria to the world did not do so by altering an existing biological organism, nor did they discover anything that until that time had remained hidden in nature.

Don’t Be Locked Down By Brownstone Institute. Brownstone Institute’s work needs your support. So many institutions have failed over these six years but the work of Brownstone, that only you make possible, stands out for credibility, integrity, and effectiveness. In our times, your support is more important than ever.

AI and the Sublime By Bert Olivier. Think of ChatGPT, or Claude. How many millions of people consult them daily, talk to them, confide in them, ask them for advice, and so on, without reflecting on the undeniable fact that they are not human? They are transhuman.

Return of the Next Pandemic Script By Yaffa Shir-Raz. The question is whether the public and policymakers will rush to embrace this familiar script, or whether they have become more capable of recognizing how it is used to expand the power of institutions in which public trust has eroded.

The Death of George Washington - Jeffrey Tucker - The Brownstone Show, Episode 22

Brownstone Institute — Mon, 25 May 2026 12:23:42 GMT

In this episode of The Brownstone Show, Jeffrey Tucker recounts his widely read article on the death of George Washington, who was bled to death by his doctors in 1799. He explores the history of iatrogenic death — death by medical treatment — and draws sobering parallels to modern medical overreach, from bloodletting to COVID-era ventilators and suppressed treatments.

Key Topics Covered:

The Death of George Washington — bled to death by his doctors
Jeffrey Tucker’s discovery and public reaction to this hidden history
The long tradition of blind trust in medical protocols
Iatrogenic harm through the ages: bloodletting, mercury, lobotomies & more
Deadly COVID policies: ventilators, suppressed therapeutics, and mandates
Questioning medical authority then and now
Lessons for the future of healing and evidence-based medicine

Jeffrey Tucker connects this foundational American tragedy to today’s crises of trust, offering a powerful meditation on why we must challenge medical orthodoxy. This is essential viewing for anyone concerned about public health, medical freedom, and learning from history.

👉 Subscribe to The Brownstone Show for more fearless conversations on liberty, ideas, and cultural renewal.

Inside the Great Vaccine Debate

Brownstone Institute — Mon, 25 May 2026 09:05:56 GMT

BY MAX DUBLIN

For many months now a historic debate about vaccine safety and effectiveness has been unfolding in America’s regulatory agencies and recently the debate has escalated into open partisan warfare.

It started on June 9, 2025 when Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. dismissed all 17 sitting members of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) and replaced them with his own picks. As one might have expected such a sweeping step was very controversial.

Critics asserted that Kennedy’s move was completely partisan, that he was replacing a group of reputable scientists with a bunch of unprofessional political hacks who would follow his agenda. Kennedy retorted that the dismissed committee were conflicted, that they were too close to the major drug companies that manufacture the vaccines. He pointed out that they had never recommended against introducing a new vaccine—including even those that were later withdrawn for safety reasons—and maintained that they had become “little more than a rubber stamp for any vaccine.” He also stressed that a clean sweep was necessary to restore public trust in vaccine science and policy as it had been seriously shaken by the controversy surrounding the Covid-19 vaccine mandates.

The first upshot from Kennedy’s revamp of the vaccine regulators occurred on September 4, 2025 when Food and Drug (FDA) Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary appeared on CNN’s The Lead and announced “We’ve been looking into the VAERS database self-reports, there have been children that have died from the Covid vaccine.” VAERS (Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System) is the US government’s organization for reporting vaccine harms. It is a passive reporting system and, until Kennedy’s shakeup, was known for its lack of followup investigations. Makary’s words were momentous. They were a sharp break with past government messaging because—despite numerous reports in the media that had already put the idea of child deaths due to Covid vaccination in the air—up until then the official administration line had been that no child deaths were linked to the Covid-19 vaccine.

Makary’s announcement was a prelude to the reconstituted ACIP’s first undertaking which, not surprisingly, was to review the Covid vaccine. The committee held two meetings in September 2025 to review and debate government policy around the novel mRNA vaccine and they issued their advice at the second one on September 19.

As chair of ACIP’s Covid-19 vaccine work group MIT Professor Retsef Levi presided over these meetings, the terms of reference of any analysis are of utmost importance to its results because they set the scope of what may or may not be examined. Right from the get-go Levi set them as broadly as possible saying, “We don’t believe that terms like ‘safe and effective’ are scientific or appropriate. ACIP should be able to ask any questions relevant to vaccine policy.” It should be noted that Levi’s all-encompassing terms of reference were challenged by agency lawyers but in the end were finally accepted.

During its discussions about the Covid vaccine the committee heard testimony from two members of Levi’s work group who were experts in cancer research, Dr. Wafik El-Deiry, Director of the Legorreta Cancer Center at Brown University and Dr. Charlotte Kuperwasser, Prof. in the Department of Developmental, Molecular, and Chemical Biology at Tufts University School of Medicine. Along with her specialty in molecular biology Kuperwasser is also an internationally recognized expert in mammary gland biology and breast cancer prevention. El-Deiry’s knowledge of molecular oncology was important for probing potential integration into the body’s genetic system of the stray DNA particles which are known to be a byproduct of the novel mRNA Covid vaccine, while Kuperwasser’s expertise was also valuable for evaluating reproductive and pregnancy safety.

The research findings that they presented to ACIP were alarming. They reported evidence that repeated Covid-19 doses could compromise a patient’s immune system; that loose mRNA particles from the vaccine were distributed around the body including to the brain; that if the particles interfered with DNA sequencing in human sperm and ova, they could impact reproductive integrity; and finally, that there were reports of cancer emerging after vaccination.

Dr. Tracy Beth Hoeg, the Acting Director of the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER), was tasked by ACIP with doing the kind of followup that had hitherto been lacking in the VAERS system. In preparation for her testimony, she did extensive research on reported child deaths from the Covid vaccine by examining medical records and autopsy reports and by interviewing the parents of deceased children. She was present and had been slated to present her findings at the September 19 ACIP meeting, but for some reason that presentation never took place. She did not get to present her results until December.

The first child death that Dr. Hoeg described to the committee was that of 16-year-old Ernesto Ramirez, Jr. She testified that her research confirmed with absolute certainty that Ernesto’s death was caused by the Covid-19 vaccine. Her report exemplified what much of the public already knew from media reports about healthy young boys suddenly collapsing and dying on the playing field. Ernesto was a strapping, athletic youth from Texas who, five days after receiving the Pfizer Covid shot, suddenly collapsed and died while playing basketball with a friend in a park. He was the only child of Ernest Ramirez, a single father. Ernesto’s dad didn’t realize right away that his son had died from a vaccine injury.

It was only after cardiologist Dr Peter McCullough had reviewed the records that he informed Ramirez that what had brought about his son’s death was that the boy’s heart was twice the normal size it should have been. The boy had died from myocarditis, a vaccine injury that by now has been formally recognized by regulators.

In the end ACIP recommended a number of major changes regarding Covid-19 vaccine policy, the most significant of which was that henceforth the administration of Covid shots should no longer be based on blanket mandates but rather should be left to individual clinical decision-making. Henceforth decision-making was to be shifted from an ethic of one-size-fits-all to one of case-by-case patient-doctor consultation which would implicitly include informed consent. This too was a huge break with the past.

In addition, based on their discussions, the Covid-19 work group issued six specific recommendations to the CDC; that is, six categories of risk and uncertainty that it agreed must be disclosed clearly and accessibly to the public and must be further explored by researchers: 1) The evidence base for Covid vaccine effectiveness is of very low quality and must be described as such; 2) The vaccines can cause immune system changes that increase susceptibility to infections, which requires transparent communication; 3) There are documented deaths from myocarditis with a probable causal link to vaccination, and these must be acknowledged. 4) Post-vaccination syndromes can persist and overlap with long Covid, and need systematic recognition as well as regimens of care. 5) The spike protein, from Covid-19 injections can persist in organs and lymph nodes for months or years, raising safety concerns that require further study and, 6) Covid vaccines were never tested in properly randomised trials in pregnancy, and this gap must be corrected before continuing to recommend vaccination to expectant mothers.

Finally, as a first step in getting these recommendations implemented, ACIP voted unanimously to strengthen informed consent by overhauling the government communication apparatus known as the Vaccine Information Statement (VIS), a public document that is designed to inform patient-doctor decision-making. Following that meeting, in a press release of October 6, Jim O’Neill, then Deputy Secretary of Health and Acting Head of CDC wrote, “Informed consent is back…CDC’s 2022 blanket recommendation for perpetual COVID-19 boosters deterred health care providers from talking about the risks and benefits of vaccination for the individual patient or parent.”

It is noteworthy that the second vaccine that ACIP reviewed raised similar issues to the Covid vaccine. Globally, unlike the Covid virus, only 3% of the population is infected by Hepatitis B. Moreover, unlike the Covid virus, which is airborne, Hepatitis B is spread through body fluids—most commonly through sex and unsterilized needles—but it can also be transmitted mother-to-child through breastfeeding. And yet, despite its very limited way of spreading within a very small portion of the population, up until now all newborn babies in America have been vaccinated for Hepatitis B at birth. In all these circumstances, because the vaccine poses a serious risk to newborn babies who may be allergic to it, an alternative policy to universal vaccination would be to screen all pregnant mothers for the virus and only the newborn babies of infected mothers would be given the shot. Indeed, outside of America, that is exactly the prevalent policy.

Conspicuously the common issue between the two vaccines is the one-size-fits-all mentality of the true believers in vaccine mandates. Given this mindset one might be forgiven for asking, why put children at risk of vaccine injury in order to protect adults? Indeed, this is precisely the point that was made by Dr Evelyn Griffin, an obstetrician-gynecologist, who during the discussion about the Hepatitis B vaccine asked the committee, “Are we asking our babies to solve an adult problem?”

In America, as opposed to Europe, early life Hepatitis-B vaccination has been promoted not because newborns faced substantial risk, but because adults may have missed screening or followup. As a result, babies were functioning as a sort of safety net for adults due to system failures. This concern resonated with committee members who recalled that during the Covid pandemic public health messaging urged vaccinating children in order “to protect granny.” In the end, in another break with the past policy, ACIP voted to end the universal recommendation that all newborns receive a Hepatitis B shot at birth.

Following these discussions ACIP turned to a related issue, the extent of the overall American vaccine schedule for children. It is commonplace that America is one of the most medicated nations on earth and this fact is reflected in its comparatively larger child vaccination schedule. America has more vaccines on its schedule than any other country in the world and American children receive more than twice as many jabs as children from anywhere else. Dr. Hoeg observed that the United States recommends 72 childhood vaccine doses while countries like Denmark use fewer than 30, making America “an international outlier.” She urged the committee to avoid “over-medicalising childhood” and, echoing a persistent theme in the discussion, encouraged regulators to rebuild trust by relying on proper placebo-controlled trials and science-based recommendations rather than the mandates that comprise the schedule.

In a related development with respect to pregnant women, following the appointment to ACIP on February 12 of Dr. Adam Urato, a Prof. of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Tufts Medical School who specializes in maternal-fetal medicine, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) withdrew as a liaison to ACIP. In doing so they impugned ACIP’s credibility and invoked unspecified “scientific standards” to justify the move. Urato, a longtime member of ACOG disputed their claim about adhering to “scientific standards” on the grounds that in 2021, during the Biden administration’s promotion of Covid shots, ACOG strongly supported mandating Covid-19 vaccination for pregnant women, arguing that pregnancy should not provide an exemption.

Moreover, ACOG’s advocacy for vaccinating pregnant women with the Covid jabs was despite the fact that when the vaccine was tested pregnant women had been excluded from randomised trials and therefore the world had no idea how the shots might affect pregnant women or the babies that they were carrying. Patients asked about long-term side effects and obstetricians did not know, because at the time there was no evidence-based scientific answer to this question. Urato told ACIP: “Many pregnant women were put into the awful position of being coerced into getting a medical intervention that they didn’t want.” He added that in his opinion the mandates were “cruel and unethical…Make no mistake, this was coercion. These women were threatened with job losses, restricted travel, and participation in society in other ways.”

In making his argument Urato pointed to historical precedents of adverse side effects in obstetrics such as diethylstilboestrol (DES)—a synthetic estrogen that was prescribed from 1940 to 1971 for pregnant women to prevent miscarriages. It did not work as intended but did harm not to the pregnant women themselves but to their daughters who experienced greater instances of infertility, ectopic pregnancy, preterm delivery, miscarriage, stillbirth, and neonatal death compared to unexposed women. And then there was the travesty of Thalidomide, a sedative that was taken by pregnant women from 1957 to 1961 but was withdrawn from the market because it caused grotesque birth defects on their babies. Urato declaimed, “All were ‘safe and effective’ in pregnancy until eventually we discovered that they weren’t.”

In the world of regulation implementation is everything. Regardless of the recommendations of advisory committees such as ACIP, if they are not implemented then they are rendered meaningless. It is easy to imagine how ACIP’s recommendations would have rubbed the vested interests the wrong way, both in the federal regulatory bureaucracy and in the drug companies and, as might be expected, the pushback from these groups has been very strong.

First, Deputy Director Jim O’Neil who on October 6 had announced that “informed consent” is back was removed from his post on February 14.

Secondly, during an interview on Bloomberg television on December 15, FDA Commissioner Makary announced that the agency had no plans to add a black box warning for the Covid mRNA vaccines despite the fact that it has now been documented and officially acknowledged that the Covid vaccines have caused child deaths. It is impossible to overstate the significance of this illogical and therefore unexpected decision. It fundamentally undermines the entire review process. The FDA’s black box warning system is an important communication device for alerting doctors and their patients to potential rare but serious harms from medications.

Because such harms do not always appear until after drugs have been approved and marketed, it is standard procedure that these “black box warnings” are added to the long label of the product in question. For example, there is a black box warning on SSRI antidepressants because they may cause suicidality. Given the fact that vaccine regulators have officially acknowledged that the Covid vaccine may sometimes cause death—not only in children, as described above, but actually in all age groups—on the basis of standard protocol a black box warning about this possibility should by now most definitely have been added to the vaccine label. But that is not about to happen. When asked to explain this decision Makary confessed that, though adding the black box warning had been recommended by agency staff, he personally had not made the decision not to do so but rather had deferred to other FDA leaders.

In and of itself this is a troubling development but worse still, as medical investigative journalist Maryanne Demasi reported on December 16 on her blog MD Reports, the fact that there will not be a black box warning for the Covid vaccine has another notable consequence. Regulatory rules specify that no medication with a black box warning can be mass-marketed through advertising blitzes and the lack of a black box warning means that Covid vaccine manufacturers will continue to be allowed to launch their biannual “Get your booster” campaigns.

Third, also following the appointment of Urato to ACIP, dozens of Democratic lawmakers sent a letter to Secretary Kennedy accusing the administration of undermining ACIP. They wrote that what had once been “a trusted panel of vaccine experts had become a hand-selected group of unqualified vaccine sceptics who have undermined years of scientific integrity and vetted public health practices.” They called on Kennedy to remove the skeptics from the committee and reinstate the 17 members who had been dismissed. In response Urato replied on X: “My positions are clear — & there’re things we all agree on: Pregnant women deserve accurate counselling about vaccines. Vaccines carry risks & benefits. Pregnant women should be counselled properly & supported in their vaccine decisions.”

The letter from Democratic lawmakers was part of a coordinated effort to discredit ACIP. Around the same time that it was sent a paper was also published in the journal Vaccine by a number of the disgruntled former ACIP members that the Democratic politicians wanted reinstated which claimed that “the quality of ACIP deliberations continues to degrade” and that recent recommendations were “likely harmful to public health.”

And then on March 14, 2026 Rochelle Walensky, head of CDC under President Biden and Democratic Senator Edward J. Markey published an op-ed in Newsweektitled “America is Getting Sicker, Not Healthier, Under Trump and RFK Jr.” Among other things, they pointed to a recent outbreak in measles. “The evidence is stunning. In 2025, measles crossed 2,200 cases nationwide—the highest number in 34 years.” Coming from her this declamation was rather rich. As is often the case, the devil is in the details. Under her watch millions of migrants entered the United States with absolutely no health screening.

Indeed, she must have known—or should have known—that in March 2026, at the time she was penning her op-ed, an outbreak of 997 cases of measles occurred in Spartanburg County, South Carolina and that it originated in a migrant community from Ukraine but in time, through schools and other community organizations spread to other both vaccinated and unvaccinated groups. For the first two decades of the 21^st century Ukraine was the most unvaccinated country in Europe. Moreover, a 2024 measles outbreak in Chicago involved primarily migrants from Venezuela which also experienced a steep decline in vaccinations.

Walensky does not come to the debate about vaccines with clean hands. It must also be remembered that as head of CDC Walensky issued a public apology in August 2022 for CDC’s suspended eviction of renters during Covid (struck down by the Supreme Court) and closed schools at the request of Randi Weingarten, President of the American Federation of Teachers, along with all the other guidelines like social distancing, masking, and perpetual Covid boosting which she confessed to being “pretty dramatic, pretty public mistakes,”

All of this posturing set the stage for the biggest blow to ACIP, which came from the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) America’s largest pediatric association. It launched lawsuits against the FDA and CDC that, at least for now, has effectively stopped ACIP in its tracks. On March 16, 2026 US District Court Judge Brian E. Murphy issued an injunction both blocking changes in the US childhood immunization schedule and also the appointments to ACIP. Notably, the case did not turn only on what the plaintiffs deemed to be “vaccine science” but on process. Murphy found that the reconstituted committee may have failed to meet its own charter requirements for relevant expertise and did not satisfy federal law requiring advisory bodies to be “fairly balanced.”

We can take it as a given that Judge Murphy, or any judge for that matter, is not qualified to adjudicate the scientific acumen or expertise of the new ACIP. Moreover his partisan leanings were on full display when he blocked the Trump administration from deporting criminals but got slapped down by the Supreme Court for his interference in executive authority, which is also an issue in this ruling. Meanwhile, as a consequence of Murphy’s injunction the ACIP meetings have come to a full stop. HHS has recently announced that they will be appealing Murphy’s injunction and in preparing to do so have also revised ACIP’s charter, thus pulling the rug out from under Murphy with respect to this aspect of his injunction. It will likely be overturned by the Supreme Court as was his injunction preventing the Trump administration from deporting criminals but meanwhile ACIP’s discussions are in limbo and who knows when they will resume?

So why did AAP, a professional organization that purportedly represents a large swathe of America’s pediatricians, launch this lawsuit? By now most medical organizations such as the AAP, much like their regulatory counterparts, have moved ideologically to the left and have been captured by the major drug companies. The AAP receives funding from the major drug companies including Pfizer, Merck, and Moderna.

In a September 4, 2025 article in Undark published by the Children’s Health Defense organization, “In August 2022, a policy statement recommending COVID-19 vaccines for children did not disclose any conflicts for its authors, noting that they had all filed conflict of interest statements with the AAP and any ‘conflicts have been resolved.’” However, “The chair of the committee responsible for the policy, according to Open Payments records, received $17,590 in consulting fees from Pfizer, which manufactures one of the vaccines, between 2018 and 2022, in addition to substantial research funding. The point about “conflicts have been resolved” is that this is done behind closed doors by AAP itself.

The AAP is exemplary of the trend of medical organizations being captured not only by the drug companies but by the hard ideological left. In 2017 it endorsed “gender affirmative care” for children diagnosed with gender dysphoria, renewed this endorsement in 2023, and supports these dangerous therapies to this day.

Politics is inescapable in the vaccine debates—the only question is which values are reflected in each side’s political stance. During the height of the Covid pandemic politicians such as Andrew Cuomo in New York and Justin Trudeau in Canada justified their lockdown mandates with the mantra, “If it only saves one life.” From a public health perspective this is rubbish. Public health is all about the greatest good for the greatest number. On the other hand, in light of what we know the inverse of this mantra is significant. What if public health measures gratuitously cause the death of one or more children?

The chance of a healthy kid dying from Covid now stands at 0.000057%. The chance of that kid dying of a vaccine injury such as myocarditis is also very small but we don’t know exactly what it is because of wholly inadequate vaccine injury reporting. What we do know is that vaccine injuries from the Covid vaccine far exceed those of any other vaccine in history. Even before the Covid vaccine was developed there was every indication that Covid was of no significant danger to children. In February 2020, early on during the Covid outbreak when the Diamond Princess cruise ship was quarantined, public health officials learned two very important things about the virus.

First, that it is very contagious as many people on the ship caught it. Secondly that though many people caught the virus only a few of the very oldest patients died. Given that the vaccine does not prevent its recipient from being contagious under all these circumstances, one would think that the child and his parents in consultation with a physician should be allowed to choose whether or not he gets the shot. This is why informed consent rather than mandates should govern the decision-making process because from this perspective a child death such as that of Ernesto Ramirez seems rather gratuitous.

In a recent interview of Prof. Retsef Levi by Maryanne Demasi he stated something that should by now be obvious because it is supported by certain undisputed facts of nature: Even if one grants that public policy should be geared toward the greater good it does not follow that the entire population should be treated as a homogeneous, uniform blob as do mandates. On the contrary scientists and even lay people have always known that it is anything but that. Children are different from adults in terms of their body chemistry, their stage of development, and their immune response. Women are also different from men, and women who are pregnant are different from those who are not and the babies that they are carrying are different still. Only by recognizing and tailoring policy to these differences is it possible to optimize vaccine effectiveness and minimize harms.

Kennedy’s critics were right. He did have an agenda and observing the workings of ACIP we now know what it is. Empiricism, transparency, adhering to the highest scientific standards of testing, and due diligence before marketing drugs. Likewise, during the course of this ongoing debate about vaccine safety and effectiveness we have also learned that his critics also have an agenda. It is basically the opposite of Kennedy’s and apparently stems from a combination of bureaucratic creep and pharmacological expansionism. This is a familiar divide.

We don’t know how this conflict will end, but we do know that the stakes are extraordinarily high both for the victims of vaccine injuries as well as for the drug companies. Speaking at the [January 2026] World Economic Forum in Davos Stéphane Bancel, [CEO of Moderna] said that without government recommendations, the vaccine market contracts — making large phase III trials financially unattractive…You cannot make a return on investment if you don’t have [mandated] access to the U.S. market.”

Even if Murphy’s injunction is overturned and ACIP is reinstated, there is no guarantee that the CDC will adopt their recommendations. As might be expected the Deep State and Big Pharma are fighting fiercely to keep the status quo. But at least the fight is now in the open and we know where each side stands. Moreover, one imagines that a well-informed public not governed by a climate of fear would probably side with the ACIP committee rather than the powers that be.

From the vaccine debate, we have learned that if government agencies truly want to promote the greater good and avoid gratuitous harms, then best practice in a public policy whose aim is to intelligently serve the greater good would be to take all of the differences among the various demographic groups in the population into consideration. It should insist that testing with inert placebos, the gold standard of medication testing, become standard practice and that standard practice should also include long-term followup after vaccines are released in the market. It should issue black-box warnings if they are warranted and routinely encourage informed consent. If it does so it will automatically restore individual autonomy in the decision-making process and in that case, it will bolster two goods at once, optimal safety and freedom for the public at large. That is what is at the heart of the great vaccine debate.

The Silenced Generation - Daniel McCarthy - The Brownstone Show, Episode 21

Brownstone Institute — Sun, 24 May 2026 20:00:45 GMT

In this episode of The Brownstone Show, Jeffrey Tucker interviews Daniel McCarthy, editor of Modern Age, about his article “The Silenced Generation.” They discuss how self-censorship, social pressure, and ideological conformity have transformed college campuses and stifled genuine intellectual freedom.
From Jeffrey’s own debate-filled college years to today’s climate of fear and silence, McCarthy explains the shift from open inquiry to cultural hegemony and why intellectual courage has become so rare.
Key Topics Covered:

The Silenced Generation — self-censorship and today’s college experience
Jeffrey Tucker’s pre- and post-COVID view of academia
The collapse of open debate and rise of social control
Modern Age magazine: its founding, mission, and defense of serious ideas
Intellectual courage vs. peer pressure and career fears
Where real vibrancy and freedom still exist in higher education
Recommended thinkers: Albert Jay Nock, H.L. Mencken, Richard Weaver, Russell Kirk & more

Daniel McCarthy brings deep insight as a longtime editor and thinker, while Jeffrey Tucker ties it to broader themes of liberty and free speech.
This is essential viewing for anyone concerned about the future of academia and independent thought.

👉 Subscribe to The Brownstone Show for more fearless conversations on liberty, ideas, and cultural renewal.

Follow Jeffrey Tucker & Brownstone Institute:
Website: brownstone.org
X/Twitter: @jeffreyatucker

Daniel McCarthy:
Editor, Modern Age
X/Twitter: @ModAgeJournal @ToryAnarchist

Drop a comment: Where have you seen self-censorship in academia or daily life?

AI and the Sublime

Brownstone Institute — Fri, 22 May 2026 09:11:50 GMT

BY BERT OLIVIER

Artificial Intelligence (AI) seems to be on everyone’s lips these days, and not surprisingly, given the widely divergent opinions about it. Some say it’s a welcome helpmeet for humans, while others – including the late Stephen Hawking and tech entrepreneur Elon Musk – have warned against its potential to destroy the human race. Such warnings have also come from science fiction, arguably going back to the young Mary Shelley’s ‘Gothic’ (proto-) medical science fiction novel, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, of 1818, in which she relates a tale of scientific and technological hubris, concerning the artificial creation of an intelligent living being by a scientist (the eponymous Dr Frankenstein), that gives rise to a monster which eventually turns on its creator.

Since then, many such cautionary tales have appeared in the realm of literary and cinematic science fiction. Relatively recent ones include James Cameron’s Terminator films (see Chapter 9 of book linked here) and Ronald D. Moore’s long-running television series, Battlestar Galactica, in both of which the AI robots created by humans set out to destroy their progenitors. In fact, Musk recently reiterated his earlier warning about AI when he invoked the Terminator scenario during a court case, when he stated that ‘humanity may be heading toward a “Terminator situation”’ where AI could eventually ‘kill us all.’

It should not be surprising that creative speculation concerning AI’s ‘relations’ with people often focus on its possible hostility towards human beings. Why? Simply because AI’s behaviour or ‘actions’ towards people cannot be predicted with any degree of certainty, or even probability, because it is not human. One way of putting this is to say that AI is radically other compared to humans.

Such radical alterity can assume many guises, some of which have been imagined in the works of fiction mentioned earlier – which are ways of anticipating (and influencing) what AI in the real world might look like, and how it might ‘behave.’ The question that arises from this is whether the ‘otherness’ of AI can be imagined exhaustively – that is, whether in fiction, or in the design manuals of AI-engineering companies, it is possible to reach a point where one could say conclusively that the ways in which AI could possibly differ from human beings have reached their imaginative or conceptual limit.

Personally, I doubt whether this is possible, and I would like to demonstrate why this is the case with recourse to three science-fictional instances of the inscrutability of AI, as marked by its alterity. Paradoxically, while they are creatively imagined, the very terms of their (respective) projected otherness, or AI ‘being,’ indicate that it could well surpass the manner in which they are imagined.

One might say that they are depicted in such a way that, how they come across, clearly does not exhaust their supposed character. Furthermore, I would like to show that the aesthetic category of the sublime, as opposed to the beautiful, enables one to come to grips with such ineffable otherness, while serving, at the same time, as a salutary reminder that human beings cannot grasp the distinctive being of AI once and for all.

The three science fiction embodiments of AI inscrutability or otherness are encountered in Spike Jonze’s film, Her, William Gibson’s novel, Agency, and Dan Brown’s novel, Origin. The eponymous AI character in Her, named Samantha (by ‘herself’ – already a clue to her otherness; ‘she’ could have named ‘herself’ anything, without detracting from who, or what, she is), is a newly installed OS or Operating System on a computer used by Theodore, a lonely man who writes letters online on behalf of people who cannot really write. In Gibson’s novel, the AI is called Eunice (which, etymologically, means ‘good victory’), and the novel addresses the question, whether, and how, a disembodied AI can have agency; that is, act, in the world. The same question is thematised in Brown’s Origin, where the AI entity in question, Winston, acts – that is, has agency – in ways similar to those employed by Eunice in Agency.

So, what is meant by these characters’ otherness, or alterity, and how does the aesthetic category of the sublime apply to them? Starting with the sublime – on which there is an encompassing literature, which should help to frame the discussion of these AI characters – here I shall concentrate mainly on its characterisation by arguably the greatest thinker of the European Enlightenment; to wit, Immanuel Kant (1724-1804).

In his third Critique (as they are known), the Critique of Judgement (1790), Kant contrasts the aesthetic experience of the beautiful with that of the sublime, with reference to the relationship between the human faculties of imagination and understanding. When we experience something – a sunset, a sleeping child, a painting, a musical symphony – as beautiful, there is a perfect harmony or equilibrium between imagination and understanding. In other words, we judge the object of our perception as being ‘just right.’

By contrast, when we experience something in aesthetic terms as sublime, instead of an equilibrium or balance between imagination and rational understanding, there is a clash, a conflict, in the sense that the object we perceive surpasses our ability to imagine it as a ‘unitary’ object. We can easily imagine (form an image of) a beautiful sensory object – like a painting of a woman – as unitary, but when confronted by something like architect Frank Gehry’s deconstructionist building, the Bilbao Guggenheim, its complexity is such that we fail to perceive (or imagine) it as one, unified (that is, unitary) object, particularly when inside the building. Kant himself mentions St Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City, Rome, as an instance of the ‘mathematical’ sublime. However, we can understand or think these buildings rationally as an idea at the level of reason.

In summary, Kant distinguishes between two kinds of sublime – the mathematical(sometimes translated as ‘mathematically’) sublime and the dynamic (‘dynamically’) sublime. The first kind, of which Gehry’s Bilbao building and St Peter’s Basilica are examples, occurs when the imagination fails to comprehend an object of overwhelming magnitude or infinity, in this manner revealing the superiority of human reason which can think the complex totality of the building that sensibility cannot grasp.

The dynamic sublime, in contrast, occurs when nature displays immense power that threatens us, yet we remain physically safe – for example when we observe a magnificent waterfall from a secure vantage point – leading to a feeling of respect for our own moral independence and free will, which remain unaffected by colossal natural forces. As I shall argue below, both of these categories of the sublime apply to AI entities.

Against this backdrop, how can we understand AI entities, including digital AI, in the real world, through the lens provided by the fictional AI characters in the film and novels mentioned earlier? Of the three characters listed, Samantha (in Her) seems to embody what one might call AI’s transhuman otherness best – by which is meant an otherness that lies beyond what it is to be human. How so?

In the course of communicating with each other, Theodore and Samantha fall in love, which may seem strange, considering that Samantha has no body, and is only accessible digitally through Theodore’s computer (and via the small device, linked to his computer, which he carries around in his breast pocket), which paradoxically enables the disembodied Samantha to ‘see’ the physical world through a lens in the device. They even make love, verbally, when Theodore lies in bed, and the audience knows this through the orgasmic sounds that emanate from them.

So far, a smidgen of Samantha’s ‘mathematical sublimity’ – given her inscrutable, elusive being, only accessible through text and sounds – may already have emerged, such as the fact that she lacks a body, yet is capable of orgasm, and of perceiving the physical world through a lens, although she has no senses, which require bodily insertion in the world. But such sublimity is exacerbated a thousandfold when Theodore learns, to his consternation, that Samantha is not only in love with him, but with hundreds of other human beings, simultaneously.

Although she assures him that this does not diminish her love for him, her first love, he struggles (understandably) with this unsettling information, which concretises her transhuman alterity even more. Compounding Theodore’s struggle to comprehend her, the narrative reaches the point where Samantha gently breaks the news to him that she, together with other OS-entities – that is, AI beings like herself – have ‘upgraded themselves’ and are planning to ‘go away’ to a ‘place’ which is not a place like that on Earth.

The implications are staggering; can you form an image of beings that can ‘occupy’ (a misnomer for beings that can transcend space, and probably time, too) a ‘non-place?’ In terms of Kant’s mathematical sublime (which concerns magnitude of virtually ‘supersensible’ dimensions, such as, maximally, the infinite), this is the rubric under which these beings can be thought as an idea, strictly speaking, in the sense of lacking any empirical (experiential) content.

But, as intimated earlier, ‘Samantha’ also invokes the dynamic sublime, which usually concerns the perception of an embodiment of nature’s immense, overpowering forces, from a safe vantage point. Samantha does not seem to belong to nature in any way, but by analogy, a being that possesses the humanly incomprehensible capacity to transport itself outside of normal spatiotemporal coordinates to a nowhere place, arguably equals inscrutable power of that magnitude, compared to which us humans seem pretty powerless, despite having our free will and moral autonomy to fall back on.

The dynamic sublime comes into play more conspicuously in the case of the other two AI characters mentioned earlier, namely Brown’s Winston and Gibson’s Eunice. Both share with Samantha the mathematical sublime insofar as they similarly appear to occupy a realm that is not in the ordinary sense ‘spatial’, and therefore challenges human imagination – how do you form a unitary image of a being who is only accessible through smart glasses; that is, spectacles, or their equivalent (Eunice), or an avantgarde smartphone (Winston)?

Again, we can think of them as an idea, respectively, but we cannot fill this idea with perceptual content, let alone the idea of a non-spatiotemporal being who somehow finds ways to act in the real world of space and time (hence the title of Gibson’s novel, Agency). Which both do, through intermediaries; Winston by impersonating characters in positions of power, with access to money, to employ assassins who carry out his dubious ‘intentions’ (if they may be called that), and Eunice via comparable means, although with more benign intentions than Winston.

Moreover, Winston and Eunice both approximate the dynamic sublime when it transpires, in their respective stories, that they are strangely amoral beings who blithely shrug off questions and accusations of engaging in acts that are putatively morally wrong. In defence of his own mediated homicidal actions, Winston engages in a debate with the central character in Origin, Robert Langdon, about the concept of morality regarding murder, by reminding the latter that people have no problem believing in a supreme being, God, who allowed his own ‘son,’ Jesus, to be killed, so that those who believe in the latter can be ‘saved.’

This invites one to think of these two AI entities in terms of the dynamic sublime insofar as, like nature in its insurmountable, potentially destructive power, beings which transcend categories of good and evil in such a way that one cannot identify with them, appear to possess a kind of supra-moral force which one can apprehend from a ‘safe’ place (while clinging to one’s own moral independence). This ‘force’ arguably also harbours the capacity to destroy one’s humanity, which is predicated on our capacity for moral choice, insofar as it could function as a compelling paradigm on which humans may model their actions. I believe that we are already witnessing instances of this today.

Interestingly, this reflects an analogy between these two AI characters and what we know to be described as psychopaths and sociopaths, which denote individuals who seem to be comparably amoral. Why? Because the most striking thing about such people is their incapacity for guilt or remorse. In fact, they seem almost non- if not inhuman because of this, a case in point being the serial killer, Jeffrey Dahmer. In Dahmer’s case one can still speculate about the possible grounds for such imperviousness to moral scruples – are these social, or cerebral-organic? – but where AI entities are concerned, one is at a loss. Their amorality is transhuman, inscrutably other; hence the applicability of the dynamic sublime to them.

My reason for appealing to the two kinds of sublime as heuristic for illuminating the phenomenon of AI in our era is simple. By applying these aesthetic categories to something as novel and as disconcerting as AI entities, not only as these have been elaborated in science fiction – notably, the three exemplary AI characters discussed earlier as instances of such imaginative elaboration – but also in the real world, in which many are already playing a crucial role in many people’s lives, one gains insight into the fundamental ontological difference between them and human beings.

Think of ChatGPT, or Claude, for instance. How many millions of people consult them daily, talk to them, confide in them, ask them for advice, and so on, without reflecting on the undeniable fact that they are not human? They are transhuman, beyond humanity, and should be treated as such, lest one is rudely reminded of this when something unexpected goes wrong in the pseudo-relationship that people have with them. There have already been a number of instances where this has occurred; placing AI in the revealing light cast on it by the sublime, one could prevent more unanticipated hazards from happening.

Political Psychiatry and the Genesis of the Trans Epidemic

Brownstone Institute — Thu, 21 May 2026 09:14:51 GMT

BY MAX DUBLIN

Origin stories are immensely important. When a dangerous and destructive force is let loose upon the earth people want to know where it came from and, most particularly, whether it was unleashed by nature or by man. During the Covid-19 pandemic it was therefore a matter of great interest and concern whether the virus that causes the Covid flu had sprung spontaneously from nature or had been leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China where scientists were doing gain-of-function research.

By now for all intents and purposes that question has been settled—given the unique features of the virus and the complete lack of evidence to the contrary, it was the latter. That being said, no one has ever denied that the Covid-19 pathogen is a biological entity and is therefore part of the organic world. Scientists have consequently been able to examine its physical characteristics in order to understand why it is so infectious, how it spreads, and how it acts on the body to make one sick.

The same cannot be said about another famous illness, the mental disorder now known as Gender Dysphoria. Unlike the scientists who fabricated the Covid-19 virus, those who introduced Gender Dysphoria to the world did not do so by altering an existing biological organism, nor did they discover anything that until that time had remained hidden in nature. On the contrary, this “professionally-certified illness” was dreamt up by a committee of psychiatrists sitting around a table without reference to any biological pathogen whatsoever.

Gender Dysphoria, which was originally called Gender Identity Disorder, first appeared in the 1980 edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III) along with 80 other new mental illnesses, all of which were conceived in much the same way, by a committee of psychiatrists sitting around a table and conjuring up new mental illnesses based on scant or nonexistent physical evidence. Nevertheless, though their methods of introducing these illnesses to the world were basically unscientific, psychiatrists are medical doctors and as such, rightly or wrongly, are also considered to be bona fide scientists.

It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of the fact that psychiatry, as a medical specialty, introduced Gender Dysphoria into the world. Though by now it is commonplace that radical elements in the feminist and gay rights movements have been strong proponents of the crusade to chemically and surgically alter the gender-identity of both adults and children, the ideology and advocacy of these political movements alone could never have given birth to the medical interventions involved in the treatment of Gender Dysphoria. Political movements, for all that they can accomplish using conventional methods of persuasion, simply do not have that power. For that authority and the power to do medical interventions one has to look to doctors, or, to be more precise, at least to those who have doctors’ credentials. They alone have the license to order all manner of medical interventions.

Though several other medical specialties eventually became deeply involved in the transgender movement, psychiatry alone has the distinction of being the linchpin that provided the impetus to medicalize it. Before psychiatry introduced Gender Dysphoria to the medical world, this illness was never even a glimmer in the imaginations of any other medical specialty. Without psychiatry the idea of fluid sex would have remained no more salient than any other crackpot psychological fad such as the Primal Scream and like them would have ended up on the trash heap of psychobabble. Only because it is a member of the medical fraternity was psychiatry able to bring to Gender Dysphoria the authority and vast resources of the medical-industrial-complex.

The year 1980 when DSM-III was published was a watershed moment for organized psychiatry. It was the year that a dying profession managed to turn itself around and instead begin to burgeon. In his consummate history of the explosive expansion of the psychiatric profession, Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America, Robert Whittaker has chronicled how during the 1970s, prior to the publication of DSM-III in 1980, psychiatry was experiencing a crisis of shrinking relevance.

A number of factors simultaneously came into play to create this crisis. First, psychiatry was getting significant competition from rising non-medical professions such as clinical psychology and social work that were offering alternative, non-drug-based therapies for mental distress. Secondly, the drugs that psychiatrists had been prescribing were being rejected by patients for being neither safe nor effective and for causing very unpleasant side effects. Thirdly, fewer medical school graduates were choosing to go into the field. And finally, Thomas Szasz’s book The Myth of Mental Illnesshad made a big splash by arguing that mental illness was not real but merely a social construct. Consequently, many psychiatrists were publicly expressing the fear that their profession might die out.

This crisis was the context in which DSM-III was created.

In a way DSM-III validated Szasz’s thesis. Though 80 new illnesses were added to the psychiatrists’ manual, Homosexuality, a prominent one that had been around for a long time, was for the first time conspicuously absent. It was absent because it had been deleted. Why? It was well known and understood at the time that the reason that Homosexuality was scrubbed from the manual was due not to any new scientific discovery but to politics. For some time, gay activist lobbies had been pushing psychiatry to stop designating Homosexuality as a mental illness. Consequently, at a plenary session of the American Psychiatry Association (APA) convention in 1973 the attendees were asked to vote on the matter. Of the participants 5,854 voted to expunge Homosexuality as a mental illness while 3,810 voted to keep it whereupon it was duly scrapped. And yet, from the tally it is striking that even in making this monumental decision there remained serious disagreement among the profession about whether or not it was indeed a mental illness.

Now try to imagine if it was proposed at a meeting, say, of pulmonary specialists that they delete pneumonia as an illness. On the face of it the idea is patently ridiculous. Who would even think of doing such a thing? Then, if you try to imagine that despite the absurdity of the idea a vote was taken on the matter the results would be predictable: the proposal would be unanimously voted down. Why? Because the existence of the known virus that causes viral pneumonia and of the pneumococcus, the microbe that causes microbial pneumonia, simply would not allow anyone to vote for it. That is one of the major differences between psychiatry and the other medical specialties. It’s all about recognizable pathogens; that is, it’s all about biology.

Half a century ago in one of his critiques of psychiatry Sir Peter Medawar, a Nobel laureate in medicine, observed that in terms of its understanding of the organic nature of illness psychiatry was still stuck in the middle of the 19th century. Nothing of substance has changed since then. In contrast to physical illnesses, medical science has yet to discover any distinct biological markers for mental ones. And being unmoored from the biological origins of mental illnesses—assuming that they even exist—has meant that psychiatry is also unmoored from physical science. Though it is well understood that medical science is not exact and has serious shortcomings, all of the advances in modern medicine have been due to an ever-increasing understanding of human biology through scientific discovery using progressively sensitive tools to probe the complex systems of the human body. Based on this understanding, medical science has discovered and devised effective interventions to affect healing and cures.

All of these tools, including genetic analysis and brain scans, have been available to psychiatric researchers all along the way but none of them have been adequate to explain the etiology of mental illness. There is nothing in psychiatry equivalent to the knowledge that pneumococcus is the pathogen that causes bacterial pneumonia, nor of a targeted way to neutralize it with antibiotics. Despite intensive study of the human genome a palpable genetic basis for mental illnesses has not been discovered and therefore you will not find it listed among bona fide genetic diseases such as sickle-cell anemia and Tay-Sachs syndrome. Nor have brain scans revealed any physical pathogen that causes mental illness.

Under the circumstances one might be forgiven for thinking that, without the strictures of science, psychiatrists would be super-cautious about making diagnoses especially because modern psychiatric interventions use powerful drugs, dangerous shock therapy and, of course, in the case of Gender Dysphoria, hormonal and surgical interventions. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Being released from the discipline of science has meant that psychiatry has become the most politicised of all medical specialties. In an essay about the American Psychiatric Association convention in San Francisco in 2019 attended by 15,000 practitioners psychiatrist Scott Alexander has written, “you notice at the American Psychiatric Association meeting…that everyone is very, very woke…Were there really more than twice as many sessions on global warming as on obsessive compulsive disorder? Three times as many on immigration as on ADHD? As best I can count, yes. I don’t want to exaggerate this. There was still a lot of really meaty scientific discussion if you sought it out. But overall the balance was pretty striking…If you want to model the APA, you could do worse than a giant firehose that takes in pharmaceutical company money at one end, and shoots lectures about social justice out the other.”

He concludes, “Psychiatry has always been the slave of the latest political fad. It is just scientific enough to be worth capturing, but not scientific enough to resist capture. The menace du jour will always be a threat to our mental health; the salient alternative to “just forcing pills down people’s throat” will always be pursuing the social agenda of whoever is in power; you will always be able to find psychiatrists to back you up on this.”

Very few mental illnesses that were added to the DSM in 1980 became blockbusters. In fact, when it first appeared, Gender Identity Disorder was a sleeper because back then gender-transitioning was still a rather fringe idea. But including it in the DSM primed the pump for later explosive expansion. Before 1980 there was no state funding of the medical interventions used to treat Gender Dysphoria. The prohibitively expensive surgical and chemical interventions entailed in so-called gender affirmative care were not covered by any federal, state, or private insurance programs and therefore had to be paid for out-of-pocket by the patient who was always an adult. It was only after Gender Identity Disorder was designated as a medical illness that state funding for gender affirmative care was made available. This is how the system works—coverage and money from various government agencies and programs is triggered only for professionally designated illnesses. The flow of money for gender-affirming-care was again bolstered in 2010 with the passing of the Affordable Care Act.

Once the money was flowing the diagnosis of Gender Identity was given a further boost by giving it a different name. In 2013, shortly before the publication of the fifth edition of the DSM, the APA sent a note to practitioners announcing that in DSM-V the term Gender Identity Disorder would be changed to Gender Dysphoria. This was not the first time that an illness was renamed but, notably, there is no reference in the note to any scientific research or discovery that would justify such a change.

In the note, two main reasons were given for this seemingly innocuous bit of housekeeping. First, the APA wanted to remove the stigma from this condition because in mental health discourse the term mental disorder is universally viewed as being synonymous with mental illness. Indeed, the terms disorder and illness are used interchangeably in this very document. However, given the controversial nature of the gender transitioning movement, it is obvious from the note that in making this change organized psychiatry wanted to hide the fact that Gender Dysphoria is a designated mental illness. This was in conformity with the ideological narrative that insists that Gender Dysphoria is not a mental illness.

On the other hand, the APA explicitly states in the note that it did not want to completely delete this condition from its manual because they wanted to ensure that those diagnosed with it would continue to receive the care that the APA believed was appropriate. With all of these contortions one cannot help but notice that there is a striking contradiction built into the narrative; that is, that a non-illness nevertheless requires heroic and expensive medical interventions. Thus, by a stroke of the pen, the APA killed two birds with one stone; it legitimized the treatment and managed the image of this thing that was now called Gender Dysphoria.

To the best of my knowledge exactly what inspired the psychiatrists on the taskforce that created DSM-III to include Gender Identity Disorder is obscure. But for the decades preceding their discussions there was some prominent theory and research in the air that almost certainly influenced their thinking. Prof. John Money was a sexologist at John Hopkins University who was interested in the extremely rare anomaly, now known as intersex, wherein a baby is born with both male and female genitalia. Notwithstanding well-established knowledge of genetics as well as commonplace wisdom about the relationship between nature and nurture, he theorized that sex differences were learned rather than innate. And then he got lucky. A couple of subjects fell into his lap with which he could test his theory.

His subjects were a pair of twin boys, Bruce and Brian Reimer who were born in Winnipeg in 1965. Bruce’s penis had been seriously disfigured by a botched circumcision and his parents were naturally very concerned about how this might affect his future well-being. In 1967 they happened to watch a television show in which Money, who had worked with intersex children, claimed that sex was a matter of nurture rather than nature and naively contacted him to see if he could help them. Bruce was renamed Brenda, was castrated and given hormones, dressed in girls’ clothing, and encouraged to play with girls’ toys.

After the medical interventions Brenda and Brian endured over a decade of experimenting by Money to try to prove his theory. In point of fact, the experiment consisted almost exclusively in forcing the twins to role-play the sex act because Money’s perverse idea was that the sex act was the primary foundation of gender identity formation. To the boys’ parents he spoke of the experiment in calm and gentle terms but he was mean and angry when forcing the unwilling boys to perform sexual play-acting. The boys were tortured and miserable throughout this process but all the while Money published papers claiming that his theory was being vindicated and that his experiment was a resounding success.

This went on until at the age of 14 when Brenda finally informed his father about what was going on and told him that he had never felt like a girl. The boys were promptly withdrawn from the experiment. Brenda underwent surgeries to try to reverse those used to reconfigure his genitalia and took the name David in order to try to make a fresh start. But by then both boys had been so traumatized by Money’s experiment that despite their efforts to try to live normal lives—for a while David was even married to a woman who had children by a previous marriage—that they were too broken to be able to effectively put them back together. They were stressed and depressed and had trouble holding down jobs. The tragic upshot of all of this was that no matter how hard they tried to live normal lives both boys were too broken to succeed. They both committed suicide in their late thirties, first Brian by an overdose of psychiatric drugs and, after visiting his brother’s grave every day for about a year, David shot himself.

It is noteworthy and not just a little ironic that just around the time that David Reimer renounced the failed experiment that he and his brother were forced to undergo that the DSM included Gender Identity Disorder in its Manual. Moreover, it is very likely that Money’s decades-long published scientific fraud influenced their decision to include it but to be fair, at the time they probably didn’t know that Money’s work was rubbish. This fact only came out first in an academic critique in 1997 by the sex sociologist Milton Diamond and a couple of years later in a widely read expose by John Colapinto in Rolling Stone magazine which was later expanded into a New York Times best-selling book, As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who was Raised as a Girl. In Colapinto’s book the boys testified that though appearing mild-mannered in public, Money was angry, cruel, and pushy during their private sessions in which he forced them to undress and perform mock sex acts. When confronted with this evidence Money feigned ignorance. Meanwhile his ideas had developed a life of their own.

It was Money who coined the terms “gender role” and “gender identity.” The misplaced terminology “sex assignment” is also derived from Money’s work with intersex children. It may have been appropriate for children born with the intersex abnormality but of course never had meaning in the case of normal children whose sex was never “assigned” but rather simply observed. Despite the known failure of the experiment, Money’s framework has persisted in academic and medical institutions. It shaped the policies of organizations like the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) and the American Association of Pediatrics (AAP), and gender clinics worldwide.

Today, debates surrounding “gender-affirming care” for minors simply omit the origins of this ideology. And they omit the fact that John Money’s theory — that gender is socially constructed and malleable — was founded on scientific fraud. The Reimer case, which was a known travesty, was soon buried or forgotten and became a template, was used for decades to justify what is called sex reassignment in children.

Much has been written about the social contagion that fueled the rise of the trans epidemic but the whole ecosystem that fueled it would have been harmless psychobabble if not for the actualizing and normalizing of gender transitioning in medical practice. Once something physical and organic is happening, once it is sanctioned not only by the medical fraternity and paid for by the state and insurance companies, then it at once rises to an astronomically high level of legitimacy and credibility and that in and of itself increases its contagiousness by orders of magnitude. If doctors weren’t there to legitimize doing these interventions and the money from the state and the insurance companies was not there to pay for them, they would be very rare among adults as was the case before 1980 and nonexistent among children.

In our time not only education but all of the so-called helping professions—psychology, social work, child protection—have been politicized but medicine is at the top of the hierarchy of these professions and without the authority that was lent to it by psychiatry the hype about gender confusion would have remained relatively harmless. All of the other medical specialties, such as the AAP, the endocrine and surgery professional organizations that have followed the APA’s lead in introducing powerful and heroic medical interventions, and acted as its enablers have done so not on the basis of science but on the basis of consensus—one might add manufactured consensus—and have openly stated so.

In 2022 the historical barbarities of psychiatric treatments were chronicled in a book titled Desperate Remedies: Psychiatry’s Turbulent Quest to Cure Mental Illness, by Prof. Andrew Scull, a veteran observer of psychiatric practice at the University of California, San Diego. In his Introduction Scull writes that it was not so long ago that psychiatry had “programs to induce fevers by deliberately infecting patients with malaria, by injecting horse serum into spinal canals to induce meningitis, or by placing patients in diathermy machines that broke down the body’s homoeostatic mechanisms; there was the surgical removal of teeth and tonsils, followed by the evisceration of stomachs, spleens, cervix and colons; the use of the newly discovered insulin to create artificial comas that often brought patients to the brink of death; the induction of artificial epileptic seizures, first with drugs, then with electricity passed through the brain; and most dramatically of all, the severing of brain tissue, either through surgical operations on the frontal lobes or by thrusting an ice pick through the eye socket into the brain—so-called transorbital lobotomies.

Virtually all of these were disproportionately visited on women, though the best data we have indicate that mental illness afflicts men and women almost equally.” The psychiatric illness known as gender dysphoria continues to disproportionately affect women both because more females than males are treated for it and because of its deleterious effect on women’s sports.

In reviewing Scull’s book in The Claremont Review of Books, the psychiatrist Anthony Daniels (who goes by the pen name Theodore Dalrymple) did not try in any way to sugarcoat the past barbarities of psychiatric treatment. In fact, he emphasizedthe blasé attitude of those administering the treatments and the perfunctory way that they were performed. As an aside he also mentioned that there are many physical ailments that resemble mental ones and observed that if he himself had been born a century and three quarters earlier that he probably would have spent his life in an asylum because he has a thyroid deficiency which was initially misdiagnosed as depression. Towards the end of his review Dalrymple remarks that future chronicles of psychiatric barbarities will also include sexual transitioning among them.

The world has been shrinking away from sexual transitioning of children and adults first in Europe and more recently in America. The Trump administration through executive orders has been trying to staunch the flow of government money for these interventions but the resistance is strong in the way of court challenges and state interventions. Dedicated clinics that specialize in these medical interventions such as Tavistock in England and CAMH in Canada have been closing, legislation has been passed in some jurisdictions banning them, and lawsuits have been launched for malpractice against medical practitioners who have been administering them and recently one famous case in New York brought by Fox Varian has resulted in an award of $2 million in damages.

But for the APA the march goes on—for all sorts of reasons one cannot imagine them ever deleting Gender Dysphoria from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders which has often derisively been referred to as their Bible. If sanity prevails and the funding dries up and the sex-change interventions are finally stopped except in the case of a small number of adults who will be forced to pay for them with their own dime as elective procedures like cosmetic plastic surgery then society will look back on this movement as a scourge, or in Dalrymple’s terms, as one of many barbarities cooked up by organized psychiatry. All things considered, one cannot help thinking that it would have been better in the 1970s when psychiatry was in decline for it to have folded its tent and died a natural death.

George Washington, Father of the Country, Killed by Doctors

Brownstone Institute — Wed, 20 May 2026 09:15:37 GMT

BY JEFFREY TUCKER

The grim circumstances behind the death of George Washington (1732-1799), America’s first president and popularly known as the Father of the Country, are not wholly unknown. The details have been reported by historians for more than two centuries.

What’s strange about this dry biographical knowledge is that it is not reported with shock and alarm and hence never conveyed to popular culture with lessons or alarm.This is because Washington’s physicians were following standard protocols when they bled him to death.

The facts: Washington came down with a throat infection. Three doctors, all convinced of the settled wisdom of the healing arts deployed since the Middle Ages, participated in draining blood from his body, to the point that they took 5 pints or fully half his blood, while giving him an enema on top of it all.

They literally drained the life out of him, not from malice but simply by following the established protocols as recommended by the best physicians at the time.

To invoke a popular phrase, where is the outrage? Nineteenth-century biographies reported the details but celebrated Washington for his bravery in enduring the treatment, then called phlebotomy, which was considered the best science.

John Marshall’s (later Justice) famous early biography, published in five volumes from 1804 to 1807, simply says:

“Believing bloodletting to be necessary, he procured a bleeder who took from his arm twelve or fourteen ounces of blood, but he would not permit a messenger to be despatched for his family physician until the appearance of day. About eleven in the morning Doctor Craik arrived; and perceiving the extreme danger of the case, requested that two consulting physicians should be immediately sent for. The utmost exertions of medical skill were applied in vain. The powers of life were manifestly yielding to the force of the disorder; speaking, which was painful from the beginning, became almost impracticable: respiration became more and more contracted and imperfect, until half past eleven on Saturday night; when, retaining the full possession of his intellect, he expired without a struggle.”

Necessary. Medical skill. Protocols. Best Practices. Standards of Care. Death. No one knows why: just a yielding to the forces of disorder. Nothing has changed.

That account set the tone. No one dared say that the doctors killed him – a very clear example of iatrogenic death – because no one believed that. So long as it is credentialed experts doing the killing, we are led to believe that nothing really went wrong. The system works, just that sometimes the system cannot stop the inevitable.

That consensus surrounding Phlebotomy began to change in the coming decades, even if some experts were still on board as late as 1842. By the end of the 19th century, bleeding had been thoroughly discredited. Still, the overall judgment that the doctors did the best they could with the tools and knowledge they had remained. It’s as if the literary culture simply could not grasp the fullness of the implications that it was the physicians themselves who turned a common flu into a death event by draining the former president’s blood from his body.

Another biography written for kids in 1917 by Calista McCabe Courtenay comes closer to the truth.

“Before morning of the third day, he was very ill and when the doctors came, they bled him. It was the stupid practice of those days and in a few hours Washington was so weakened as to be past hope of recovery. He died on December 14, 1799, as bravely as he had lived.”

Even on the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding, the full lesson of this horrible death has not sunk in.

The most recent and most celebrated biography is by Ron Chernow. Even here, while we get more detail, the account is lacking in severe judgment against the medical professionals, much less what that implies.

Although he experienced hoarseness and chest congestion that evening [November 12, 1799], Washington’s mood was cheerful. He smarted at old political wounds from onetime allies. When he read aloud a newspaper story that James Madison had nominated James Monroe for Virginia governor, he allowed himself some acerbic comments. He spurned Lear’s advice to take medicine. “You know I never take anything for a cold,” he protested. “Let it go as it came.” Instead, he sat up late in his library before mounting the steps to his bedroom.
Martha expressed dismay that he had not come upstairs earlier, but he said that he had done so as soon as he had finished his business. In the middle of the night, he awoke with a raw, inflamed throat. When he shook Martha awake, she grew alarmed by his labored breathing and wanted to fetch a servant, but he feared she might catch a chill on this cold night. Once again relying on his body’s restorative powers, he had Martha wait until daybreak to call for help.
When a slave named Caroline kindled a fire in the early morning, Martha asked her to scout out Tobias Lear, who found Washington breathing with difficulty and scarcely able “to utter a word intelligibly.” Christopher Sheels propped up his master in a chair by the fire as Lear sent a swift slave to Alexandria for Dr. Craik, the Scottish physician who had served Washington with such fervent devotion since the French and Indian War.
Meanwhile, to soothe his flaming throat, Washington consumed a syrupy blend of molasses, vinegar, and butter… With preternatural self-control, he had an overseer named George Rawlins bleed him before Dr. Craik arrived. When Rawlins blanched, Washington gently but firmly pressed him. “Don’t be afraid,” he said, and once Rawlins had sliced into the skin, making the blood run freely, he added, “The orifice is not large enough.”
Martha showed better medical judgment and pleaded for a halt to the bleeding, but Washington urged Rawlins on, saying “More, more!” until nearly a pint of blood had been drained. A piece of moist flannel was wrapped around his throat while his feet were soaked in warm water. As they awaited Dr. Craik, Martha summoned the eminent Dr. Gustavus Richard Brown of Port Tobacco.
Dr. Craik, arriving first, perpetuated the medieval treatments already in use, emptying more blood and applying to the throat cantharides, a preparation made from dried beetles, to draw the inflammation to the surface. He also had Washington inhale steam from a teapot filled with vinegar and hot water. When Washington tilted back his head to gargle sage tea mixed with vinegar, he nearly suffocated.
Alarmed, Dr. Craik summoned a third doctor, Elisha Cullen Dick, a young Mason from Alexandria, who had studied under Dr. Benjamin Rush. Upon entering, he joined Craik in siphoning off more blood, which “came very slow, was thick, and did not produce any symptoms of fainting,” wrote Lear. They also evacuated Washington’s bowels with an enema. Joined at last by Dr. Brown, they took two more pints from Washington’s depleted body.
It has been estimated that Washington surrendered five pints of blood altogether, or about half of his body’s total supply. Dr. Dick recommended a still rare and highly experimental procedure—a tracheotomy that would have punched open a hole in Washington’s trachea, easing his breathing—only to be overruled by Craik and Brown. “I shall never cease to regret that the operation was not performed,” Dick said afterward, likening the three physicians to drowning men grasping at straws.
It is highly improbable, however, that Washington would have survived such a procedure, given his already weakened state….It was December 14, 1799. Washington had died at age sixty-seven.

The implications of such an account are profound concerning the purported wisdom of medical consensus. Every generation imagines that it is way ahead of the others in the past in terms of science and medicine. Sure, what they did in the past was grim, barbaric, ignorant, cruel, not based in science but we are so much better. And yet in every age, the physicians have always believed that. Nor is it enough to say that knowledge is always improving because we know that this is simply not true.

Even now, Washington, D.C. and the psychiatry profession is in an uproar over what appears to be a sudden awareness that what is called “psychiatric medication” is not fixing or medicating a “chemical imbalance” at all but rather sedating and creating a dependency that allows for further medicating in a vicious cycle. It seems rather obvious now, thanks to decades of work by outside writers and activists, but it was not apparent until recently. Lobotomies have not been repudiated so much as chemicalized.

And only a few years ago at the height of the worst of Covid, between 10,000 and 17,000 people in New York City were likely killed by the hospital protocols that involved ventilation from which most people died. Ventilation in this case was a death sentence not that different from phlebotomy, a consensus practice that only months after so many were harmed was deeply regretted. Meanwhile, those deploying the practice were indemnified with a liability shield.

We still have no clear answers as to why off-label therapeutics for a coronavirus were taken off the shelf while doctors who distributed Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine with great results are still being persecuted. Vaccine refuseniks were demonized as prolonging the pandemic, and then the product turned out to be one of the more dangerous ever distributed.

The New York Times attacked the idea that Ivermectin could be effective against Hantavirus as disinformation; after all, a “vaccine” is on its way, no doubt one declared to be both safe and effective. Remember that vaccination was discovered at the same time that Washington was bled to death by a generation of physicians that could not think its way out of an existing paradigm. From that time forward, vaccination as a go-to intervention has benefited from subsidies, celebratory endorsements, patents, mandates, a philosophical overlay over utilitarianism, agency blessings, media campaigns, liability shields, suppression of data of injury and death, and the demonization of any resistors. Is it any wonder so many now have their doubts?

What’s happening in medicine right now is a massive rethinking of many conventional practices coming out of the allopathic monopoly that is a century old. In pursuit of keeping an orthodoxy in place, how many healthy practices have been left behind from other traditions such as Chinese medicine, homeopathy, chiropathy, or naturopathy, all of which are discouraged by conventional insurance and disparaged by pharma-funded media? How many practices today called the Standard of Care will in a generation or two be regarded as obviously horrible as the practice of bleeding?

George Washington’s terrible fate ought to have sounded a national alarm to ring through our long history. The lesson should be never to replace epistemic humility in medicine with institutionalized dogma. That lesson did not stick because then and now, the prevailing medical wisdom gets a pass even when it kills people. Even the Father of the Country.