BY ALAN CASSELS

View original article at Brownstone.org.

Well, well, look here. In its June 2026 update the venerated OED or Oxford English Dictionary, finally added the ‘new’ word, fearmonging. It explains fearmongering as “the action or an act of spreading fear or alarm among the public, esp. by exaggerating the dangers associated with a political, social, or economic issue; alarmism.”

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Thank goodness, the dictionary has caught up to our society’s most pernicious habit; that is, using fear to sell anything. Especially when it comes to our health.

Here we find the most destructive aspect of fearmongering, ie: trying to convince normal, healthy people we are “abnormal” or “sick,” and fundamentally changing the way we think about ourselves. The marketing of fear often drives people to their doctors, and to the inevitable prescription pad, with predictable results: people getting unnecessary, sometimes harmful drugs for natural, normal phases of life.

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The grift goes wide and deep. Many influencers and physician-educators have financial ties through sponsored content or brand partnerships, sometimes pushing lines of supplements, telehealth services, books, or their appearances on the speaking circuit. Sadly, information about who funds them to say what they say is not always straightforward and the top social media posts about certain drugs or therapies often obscure their potential conflicts of interest (e.g., selling related products/services).

We know that many of these campaigns are backed by medical specialists or social media influencers, wedded to their theories and pushing whatever to cash in on all the fear. Those campaigns are about ‘moving product’ by subtly convincing millions of healthy people that their bodies are broken, dysfunctional, deficient, and decaying. I’ve written these words before but they are worth repeating: fearmongering is an assault on our collective soul and the theft of wellness for which we all pay a high price.

Full-On Menopause Mongering

We can see fearmongering everywhere, but the most brazen current example is the full-frontal assault on menopause. If you’ve read a newspaper or scrolled through social media lately you might be asking yourself: Why the heck is everyone getting worked up about menopause? Are hot flashes taking over the planet? Are women really as angry as the media portrays them to be? And the drugs: who do you believe about whether the drugs will help or harm you?

These are good questions, focusing on a condition that every woman—our mothers, grandmothers, great-grandmothers and so on – went through, back to the dawn of time. The fearmongering today bypasses the fact that most women who arrive at the end of their periods get through this phase without serious discomfort or suffering. For some, it’s a big “meh.” Others might be helped by what’s on offer but they have to swim through a sea of corporate-sponsored fearmongering messages to get there.

The key theme in most of the media stories is that women’s needs are unmet, many of them are deeply suffering and they all need to be considering MHT (Menopausal Hormone Therapy) in order to live their best lives. By the way, MHT is the new way hormones are branded, which used to be called HRT (hormone replacement therapy). Same stuff, different wrapping, carrying less baggage of the HRT horrors of the past.

In the mainstream media you’ll find oodles of journalists in love with a story like this, featuring female suffering, emancipation, and empowerment in one tight little bundle with enough frilly gift wrapping to hide pharma’s fingerprints. The dangers of hormones haven’t changed, only the marketing of those dangers has.

This might have been kicked off by a story, “Women Have Been Misled About Menopause” in the New York Times Magazine, (Feb 1, 2023) a long-form essay which barely camouflages a shameless bit of salesmanship, setting the tone for so many other media outlets to follow. It aims to correct those who are still being ‘misled’ by outdated ideas about the dangers of hormone therapy, mainly breast cancer, also asserting that there are more “updated” interpretations of the alleged dangers of these drugs.

A newer New York Times article from last month (June 15, 2026) claims “Millions of Women are Left Out of Menopause’s Moment” and further cements the hormone marketing by telling the sorry tale of those women who are totally FOMO because they are at a higher risk of breast cancer and therefore shouldn’t dip their toes into the hormone pool.

Menopause mongering got a huge bump a while back when the US FDA reversed a 20-year-old black box warning of the dangers of hormone therapy and many media outlets (NPR, Slate, Nature,) jumped on the bandwagon and leapt into covering the issues related to the removal of black-box warnings on HRT. Note to file: Black boxes are the most serious warnings applied to approved pharmaceuticals. The manufacturers fight like hell not to get a black box on their products, and when there is one there, they fight like hell to have it removed, regardless of whether their arguments are warranted. In this case, they won.

The official FDA/HHS announcement was titled: “HHS Advances Women’s Health, Removes Misleading FDA Warnings on Hormone Replacement Therapy.”

Pure unadulterated marketing. The science behind why those black box warnings of blood clots, cancers, and strokes didn’t change, so why remove the black box? Yet here you have a senior FDA official saying: “The removal of the black box warning, based on the best science and data, is an incredible step forward to empower millions of women to live longer, healthier lives.”

You can read about how disempowering it is to bamboozle women about the dangers of hormones in my last Brownstone article on this issue, where I report that the sudden stopping of hormone replacement therapy 20 years ago resulted in the biggest drop in breast cancer rates in the US ever.

But. But. But….Didn’t you hear that there is a huge “unmet need” that has to be fulfilled? That essentially is the thrust of the media’s take over the last two years on this very topic.

A sample of this includes Nature’s January 2025 article: “The new science of menopause: these emerging therapies could change women’s health” and Slate’sNovember 2025 Article “How Did Perimenopause Get So Popular?” This article made lots of hay out of the little sister of menopause, “perimenopause” which cranks up the fearmongering while aiming it at younger and younger women. In the words of the marketers (and Kramer from Seinfeld), you don’t sell the steak, you sell the sizzle. And there’s nothing better to seed a market than to tell younger and younger cohorts of women what kind of special hell will await them when their periods are over. That’ll get them positively tripping over each other to get to their doctors for their hormone prescriptions.

One of the brighter stars among the media stories of menopause was a piece this January in STAT News “How the perimenopause movement is hurting women,” which is, as far as I can tell, one of the only stories bothering to delve into the real harms of hormone therapy. Today women are being more and more exposed to promotional messages and downplaying the harm of a product we know increases risks of breast cancer, regardless of patients’ age or the formulation.

Added to this collection are pieces in Time, Forbes, Vogue, The Atlantic, focusing on the “Menopause Industry Boom” and the way celebrities are onboard with selling the idea of menopause as a “wellness opportunity” rather than just a medical event.

Here you see fear being sold in almost every conceivable space in the world of menopause. There is the fear of missing out, the fear of the drugs, the fear of the suffering, and the fear of the alternatives. There is the fear that doctors won’t take a woman’s hot flashes and night sweats seriously, there is the fear of consequences in the workplace and women fearing career discrimination because of what menopause is doing to them, and there is the fear of their bodies not being attractive or sexual in a way they are used to. Fear everywhere.

Women might feel that they are being betrayed by their ovaries, while also being shoveled hefty amounts of psychology, and “wellness” products including the pills, creams, and pricey interventions like it’s the end of femininity.

There is a price tag to all of this, not just in the vertigo women might feel in the menopause marketplace, but in what it might cost them. Estimates are that the global menopause market is worth around $16–18 billion per year, but that is projected to grow to $24+ billion by 2030–2033. Suffice to say there is a lot of grift to be found in the medicalizing and medicating of menopause.

Pharma’s influence is pernicious and ubiquitous, even if it doesn’t seem that obvious to the casual observer. Drug companies have their hands in medical societies, research organizations, and educational/ marketing campaigns that shape narratives. Many of us would assert that the current pro-HRT renaissance (emphasizing a hormone’s benefits while downplaying the known and serious harms) is partly driven by industry-friendly messaging, even if direct-to-consumer ads for hormones are rare.

Except for patented alternatives. Here’s the fearmongering again, this time to subtly promote “non-hormonal” menopausal drugs. On February 11, 2024, Astella’s newly approved menopausal drug, Veozah was advertised on the biggest billboard in the world, at Super Bowl LVIII. Astellas aired a 60-second commercial for Veozah just before kickoff, featuring a tagline “Fewer Hot Flashes, More Not Flashes.”

Pushing Veozah (fezolinetant) as a non-hormonal treatment might seem clever, but it acts to further medicalize hot flashes, which for many women are trivial and are often dealt with quite effectively without drugs. The worrisome side effect profile of Veozah would make one think twice about this medication costing between $500 to $700 a month. In a year-long trial, the most common adverse reactions were pain, diarrhea, insomnia, back pain, and hot flashes. Go figure. Drug-induced liver injury is the real worry, and the elevation in liver enzymes means that women need to have baseline liver tests repeated at 3, 6, and 9 months. All this for some mild symptom relief. Hope the risk of liver failure was worth it.

Everyone’s Talking Empowerment (But Nobody’s Doing It)

Thankfully we no longer refer to menopause as an “estrogen deficiency disease,” a corporate-sponsored tagline if there ever was one. But we still have a long way to go.

Much of the commentary and media reports today focus on how to deal with the symptoms of menopause, which assert that doctors are basically missing in action when it comes to menopause, and that patients need, more than anything, “empowerment.”

What an old-fashioned thought that is: you mean women should ignore all the junk science, pharma marketing, and menopausal grifters out there and just follow their own intuition? Sounds like what Grandma would have done.

There are no glib and easy answers to all the menopausal marketing surrounding us, but perhaps the least offensive summary I’ve seen was a March 2024 article published in the medical journal, the Lancet, called “An empowerment model for managing menopause.”

While obnoxiously heavy on the “hormonal remake” theme, there are some key points worth noting. Particularly, menopause isn’t a disease; it’s a life phase for women who live long enough. The symptoms often come in miserable bundles — hot flashes, ruined sleep, low mood. Patients face it and doctors have to deal with it and they should do so beyond the default reflex which is a script for hormones and a pamphlet.

While no one can argue against respecting the clichés of “evidence-based” options and “shared decision-making,” we can’t forget that “evidence-based” often means whatever specialists push and what’s easiest to prescribe. In this case, hormones, or MHT as they’ve rebranded it. For those who say menopause is a normal life stage rather than a pharmaceutical marketing opportunity, the menopause salespeople and other grifters are singing loudly, “Don’t be Cruel.”

The Lancet, similar to most vocal menopause specialists, insists that MHT is the only thing that fixes both hot flashes and genitourinary symptoms (while providing some small level of reduced fractures). No doubt the pills are convenient, especially for the industries and guidelines which favor a one-stop pill solution.

At the end of the day if “true empowerment” is possible, the experience of menopause for many women could be better. They don’t need more pills or lotions, though some may be helped by these. They need good information, respect, and above all, agency.

Qualitative work done in the UK shows menopause is “simultaneously normal, devastating, identity-shifting, and liberating,” which is to say, all over the map. Something this complex cannot be solved with clinical one-liners and fancy treatment algorithms. At the same time misinforming women as to the actual benefits and long-term harms of hormones is not cool, especially when that advice is delivered with a big dose of white-coated confidence, amnesia, and hubris.

The Lancet article manages to get to the heart of the issue: helping women manage symptoms is important, but medicalizing every aspect of menopause can be downright harmful.

Thankfully the Lancet does give a shout-out to a practical way for women to regain the kind of agency many of them want: CBT or cognitive behavioural therapy has shown some level of benefit. It reports that “for symptom clusters such as hot flashes, disturbed sleep, and depressed mood, RCTs show that CBT is effective.”

How? Well, this makes me recall the work of the philosopher Viktor Frankl, who wrote Man’s Search for Meaning. His main message is that although you can’t always change your circumstances, you can choose your attitude toward them. That’s a helpful perspective to adopt when facing many of life’s challenges. If CBT helps women learn about their symptoms, accept them, and help them develop ways to cope with them, that might go a lot further than the flotsam washing in on a tidal wave of fearmongering.

Back to Frankl for a second. He wrote that finding meaning in life is the primary human motivational force. The ability to find meaning through work, love, and suffering could always be seen as a way forward. Many women seeking some kind of help for this particular transition in their lives have both time and options on their hands. They can, if they choose, go forward and demand to be taken seriously, without succumbing to the sharp end of the menopausal marketing machine.

Let’s sing an ode to menopause, wrapped up in a little rhyme.

Or hum a wistful song for wombs that’ve clearly done their time.

Let’s make a plea for all life’s stages, as all things must finally pass,

And let’s expose the grifters’ motives, with a bit of snarky sass.

Let’s not forget the lying, their fearmongering shrill notes,

Let’s ask the specialists why we should trust their clean white coats.

Let’s put the lie to cringy brags of pharma’s innovative growth,

Let’s look at how we trampled the sacred Hippocratic oath.

Let’s not forget the central thing, the one essential theme,

That flies far further than the mongers’ wicked meme.

That within a single woman her fate is hers and hers alone.

And she needs freedom’s will to act on what is felt and known.

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BY BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE

Did you see the news? Likely you did not because it has yet to hit the headlines, if it ever does. Senator Rand Paul has released the personal diaries of Anthony Fauci as he wrote them from 2020-2022. They are tremendously revealing of a man obsessed with image, busy from morning to night daily with media appearances.

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He was not reading the journals or pre-prints. He was not following the data. He was not consulting other actual experts. His was a full-time media job, one he had never been assigned. He just took it upon himself, while gradually ramping up his recommendations from stay safe to panic to keep everything closed as long as possible.

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Was it really the case that society had to be wrecked in order to control a respiratory infection? Many had doubts. Fauci had none.

You see in these diaries how he became intensely political over time. He began with an appreciation for Trump because Trump liked him. By the end of year one, he had become a crusader for lockdowns and shot mandates while demonizing anyone who disagreed with him as being “far-right.”

It was a transformation amidst a level of media hagiography rarely seen in our times. He took note of every t-shirt, bobblehead doll, cupcake with his face, and revelled in the adoring crowds everywhere he went. He came to believe that any attacks on him, any criticism of him, was nothing short of an attack on science itself. He said so in interviews.

It appears now that the wheel of fortune has turned for this man who experienced a level of celebrity rivalled by Hollywood stars of yesteryear. The storms were already gathering as Biden left office. He was granted a pardon even though he was under no investigation and faced no real possibility of prosecution.

Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky stayed on the case, gathering millions of documents of all communications of Fauci and all his associates. In anticipation of a hearing this week, in which Fauci has been subpoenaed to appear, the Reading Room has released many of them. They include detailed notes on how the staff of NIH lobbied for many paid awards to be given to Fauci.

This should be fascinating to watch. Don’t expect contrition. Expect amnesia. Even if nothing comes of the hearing, we now have many thousands of pages of documents to at least know more about how and why this happened to our country and to the world.

Knowing is an essential first step to reform. As of now, the pandemic plan for this country remains what we saw: lockdown until most of the population is vaccinated. Nothing has changed about that but it must change. A shift in the public perceptions concerning Fauci’s role is an essential step.

Alongside this grand theater, the cause of freedom is threatened on multiple fronts. Flock cameras have invaded our communities in order to further build the control grid. The courts are blocking vaccine exemptions even for the Amish. States are getting tougher with mandates.

It feels like a real turning point. We either plunge further into tyranny or make a sharp turn toward freedom. You know where we stand.

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.

Friday, July 31st is the last day to order Polyface Retreat tickets with regular registration. After that date, only late registration will be available. Get your tickets today!

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. Our low amount of spending on development means that what you contribute goes to programs that matter.

The Brownstone Show is thriving. Tune in to these episodes, including the latest with Walter Kirn. The interviews are blunt and rooted in far-reaching expertise.

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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.

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Here is some content since our last email.

The Diaries of Anthony Fauci: 2020-2022 By Brownstone Institute. Senator Rand Paul released the full diaries of Anthony Fauci, the former head of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the leading voice of the Covid response during the most critical time in US history in the 21st century.

GenderSpeak: Weaponizing Gender Against Sex By Wendy McElroy. Words should not be propaganda that blocks thought; disagreement is no crime. And sex is reality, while gender is not. The concept and the word “gender” should be abandoned by people who respect either accuracy or truth.

The Hinge of History That Was 2020 By Brownstone Institute. Senator Rand Paul’s (R-KY) efforts to compel honesty from Anthony Fauci, and Senator Ron Johnson’s (R-WI) indefatigable efforts to chronicle shot harm (they knew the risks), are both deeply honorable. But they are only the beginning of necessary efforts.

The Future of Free Speech By Aaron Kheriaty. Freedom of speech is an integral aspect of freedom, grounded in the human capacity to adhere to truth through persuasion rather than imposition. While truth is objective and independent of the knowing subject, it can only be received by the subject freely.

The Great Menopause Grift By Alan Cassels. The grift goes wide and deep. Many influencers and physician-educators have financial ties through sponsored content or brand partnerships, sometimes pushing lines of supplements, telehealth services, books, or their appearances on the speaking circuit.

The Money Printers Fueling Socialism’s Rise By David Stockman. An economy this top-heavy with paper wealth – as the poor and middle class get destroyed with persistent inflation, slow growth, and unstable labor markets pervasive with dropouts – is not sustainable. It’s not capitalism but rather corruption by the printing press.

The Reflex to Prescribe By Joseph Varon. Perhaps the greatest measure of clinical maturity is not the confidence to prescribe, but the confidence to refrain. The highest expression of medical judgment is not knowing which medication to choose. It is recognizing, with knowledge, when no medication is necessary.

Cycles of Enthusiasm, Reversal, and Revival in Medical Practice By Alan Cassels. It’s hard to generalize, but when reversals are based on better quality evidence, we should presume they’re in the public interest. However, when they are based on manufacturers pushing for a new market and other invested agencies, can we be sure?

Who Is Really in Charge of Public Health? By Maryanne Demasi. The report ultimately lands on a clear position: that governments should take responsibility for public health decisions—how risks are assessed, how trade-offs are weighed, and how responses are chosen.

Congress Forces NIH to Reverse Policy By Paul Thacker. The White House is finalizing Trump’s plan to deal with dangerous gain-of-function virus research as laid out in a May 2025 executive order. The new policy will take a risk-based approach to determine whether a pathogen study will be funded.

How the American Republic Became a Managerial State By Bruce Pardy. The United States was the land of the free. Limited government. Checks and balances. Separation of powers. The Bill of Rights. But America has instead become a managed society. Its government dominates its people. How did it go wrong?

Has Automation Stolen What It Means to Be Human? By Jessica Rose. This automation of human work poses a real existential crisis. Giving up these wonderful ritualistic habits that translate to being able to eat that day, or being with our loved ones, has led us nowhere but isolated and dependent.

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BY AARON KHERIATY

View original article at Brownstone.org.

Freedom of speech is an integral aspect of authentic freedom, grounded in the distinctively human capacity to adhere to truth through persuasion rather than imposition. While truth is objective and independent of the knowing subject, it can only be received by the subject freely.

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We can contrast this with a thinly grounded notion of freedom as merely a pragmatic expedient to “get along” in a pluralistic society in which we assume that truth is more or less unattainable. In this thin form of liberalism, when it no longer appears the optimal empirical solution to maintain social comity or stability, freedom of speech will be easily abandoned. We have seen this dynamic play out in Western societies in the past decade, where elites now frequently insist that censorship is necessary to “protect democracy” from the populist rabble.

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Principled freedom that encourages the shared discovery of truth must always exclude violence against ideas. Such force reduces individuals to mere means and undermines the possibility of honest persuasion. Instead, public authorities should only intervene to prevent persecution or the propaganda of “truncheon arguments”—that is, various forms of coercion or incitement to violence—while permitting the open expression of opposing views, however controversial.

The late Italian Catholic philosopher Augusto Del Noce illustrates this by insisting that even ideological adversaries, such as Fascists, should be permitted to voice their bad ideas (which they were not permitted to do in Italy immediately following World War II): “Let the Fascists also support their idea of violence if they so wish; we will fight them with arguments, and the task will not really be too difficult,” Del Noce confidently asserted. He warned that forcefully suppressing false speech only breeds underground myths and perpetuates defeated ideologies, as seen in the posthumous “Mussolini legend” that arose in the climate of postwar Italian censorship.

Among the central problems with censorship is this: the prohibition on pronouncing certain things often makes them seem true even when they are not. Better to allow falsehoods to be voiced and refute them with arguments than to forcefully silence them before they can be spoken.

Recovery of enduring principles on which to ground freedom of speech is essential as we face new challenges from the advent of enormously powerful digital technologies and global platforms of communication. Discovery in our Missouri v. Biden case revealed extensive coercion of digital platforms by the White House, the Surgeon General, the CDC, and other federal agencies to flag, suppress, deboost, or remove online content and accounts—via direct pressure, algorithmic changes affecting thousands of posts, or the actions of suborned third parties. This “censorship-industrial complex” targeted critics of the government’s preferred Covid policies, election integrity, abortion, gender ideology, foreign policy, and other issues of public importance.

As the appellate court noted in our case, given the vast reach of new digital technologies, the scope and scale of this censorship had no precedent in prior free speech cases in the US. In the words of the district court judge, what our case uncovered was arguably the “worst violation of free speech in United States history.” Previous cases of censorship by overzealous government officials typically dealt with one-time offenses: a single article suppressed, a few paragraphs struck from a book, a journalistic story killed before it saw the light of day. But what we saw in our age of social media was entirely new, facilitated by the powerful reach of advanced digital technologies: government action censoring tens of thousands of ordinary Americans hundreds of thousands of times.

For many Americans like me who were on the receiving end of this, such actions felt very personal: every citizen with a Twitter or Facebook account became a potential “newspaper editor” or “journalist” targeted for suppression by government speech police. Often this censorship was done by identifiable political actors, as when the White House’s director of digital communications Rob Flaherty browbeat a senior executive at Facebook into submission, as I described in detail in a Wall Street Journal piece co-authored with one of our lawyers in the case. In that instance, documents we obtained on discovery implicated an identifiable government official who could be held accountable and brought before the bar of justice.

However, much of the government censorship was far more subtle and indirect. More often, it did not require a detectable person flagging a specific post or account for censure. In the US, the First Amendment bars government from engaging in viewpoint-based censorship, while the state-action doctrine bars government from circumventing constitutional strictures by suborning private companies to accomplish forbidden ends indirectly, which also occurred. Our case revealed that in some circumstances, government pressure resulted in social media platform’s changing their algorithms and terms of service in order to automate and conceal the process of government-sponsored censorship.

In this regime, those silenced may not even realize that they are being censored, as the algorithm simply limits the reach of their posts such that it is impossible for them to spread organically or “go viral” and accrue influence. In the new context of digitally mediated censorship, subtle algorithmic manipulation can create an illusion of free speech while effectively controlling the reach and impact of communications online.

If an investigator or journalist asks X or Facebook to see its algorithm, the company will not be able to produce it, for the coding has been outsourced to thousands of programming consultants, each of whom are responsible for only one small piece of the entire puzzle. This produces opaque means of information control with no clear locus of moral agency or accountability. Censorship goes underground, where it is governed by machines, which, unlike human officials, cannot be challenged in court or held to account.

The future of censorship will involve outsourcing most of this work to AI. With large language models now capable of digesting and synthesizing enormous swathes of online speech, our ability to communicate in the digital realm will soon be controlled by invisible yet immensely powerful bots. Even if government actors are prevented from censoring online, and even if we beat back the egregious EU Digital Services Act and other authoritarian mechanisms of state-sponsored censorship, private companies with vested ideological interests, armed with the tools of advanced AI, will remain a serious hazard to free speech.

This global threat from powerful private actors may prove to be every bit as severe, and considerably more powerful, than government-sponsored censorship. (For reasons that go beyond the scope of this article, my own view is that under US law these platforms should be treated as common carriers rather than editors of content, which would mean that private companies or their algorithms could not suppress constitutionally protected forms of speech.)

We are witnessing emerge in real time this pervasive and tenacious machinery of power, propaganda, and technological control. The response will require vigilance, legal precedents, and structural reforms to allow for open online discourse in our digital future.

This piece is adapted from my Foreword to the forthcoming volume, Truth, Freedom of Speech and Modern-day Censorship (En Route Books, 2026).

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BY IAN MILLER

View original article at Brownstone.org.

We’re now rapidly approaching the six-year anniversary of “15 Days to Slow the Spread.”

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That policy has to have been one of the most disastrous in world history, created by “experts” who took all established pre-pandemic planning documents and tossed them out the window at the first opportunity.

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It was a policy based on inaccurate reports out of China, which claimed that their lockdowns effectively stamped out transmission of Covid-19 within a matter of days.

It was a policy that ignored solid research – from established epidemiologists like Dr. Jay Bhattacharya – which found that the coronavirus had already spread much more widely than previously realized.

It must be noted forever that lockdowns and the associated mask mandates, vaccine passports, and school closures continued in some places for several years. The ramifications of those wretched policies will be quite literally endless. It’s not an exaggeration to say that lockdowns, our policies, and responses have quite literally changed the course of world history.

One would think that there would definitely be a concerted effort to understand whether such policies were effective or not. Whether approaching respiratory viruses with authoritarian crackdowns on businesses and schools was necessary to save lives.

Yet six years later, there’s unfortunately very little interest in examining those questions. And when you understand the data from Sweden, you will see exactly why.

Study on Swedish Approach to Covid Shows Lockdowns Didn’t Work

A study published in PubMed examined the Swedish approach to Covid policy, relative to its European counterparts, primarily because Sweden did not rely on lockdowns in response to the pandemic, but instead used “voluntary and sustainable mitigation recommendations,” the study says.

Despite a “majority of Swedes” supporting those policies, “this approach faced rapid and continuous criticism.”

That criticism came primarily from public health figures such as, surprise, surprise, Dr. Anthony Fauci, who criticized Sweden repeatedly for going against the herd.

“You’ve compared us to Sweden, and there are a lot of differences,” he said during a Senate Committee hearing in September 2020. “But compare Sweden’s death rate to other comparable Scandinavian countries. It’s worse. So I don’t think it’s appropriate to compare Sweden with us.”

“If you look at Sweden, they are in some trouble,” Fauci claimed on Good Morning America in late 2020. “They are starting to see that their death rate is much higher than the surrounding countries of Norway, Denmark, and Finland…They’re starting to see now that they’re having to rethink some of the things they did.”

This was, of course, not true. They did not “rethink” their strategy of light touch recommendations over lockdowns. And comparing Sweden exclusively to its neighbors is an absurd misdirection that no other country was subjected to. But Fauci, obviously never one for honesty or intellectual integrity, represented many public health figures who were anxious to see Sweden fail.

Yet as this research shows, reality was precisely the opposite.

The study explains that Sweden received criticism for “not legally enforcing mask-wearing in public spaces,” as well as keeping schools open and “being too permissive” with its policies. All the things that we were told were necessary to stop Covid and save lives. The researchers tested these statements using excess mortality data and stringency indices to compare Sweden across the whole of Europe, not just its neighbors.

They chose excess mortality because, unlike Covid specific measurements, it’s less subject to bias, differences in testing, and counting, and individual definitions of Covid-caused outcomes. It also accounts for deaths that “could potentially be indirectly attributed to the negative effects of strict lockdown measures and the overall strain on healthcare systems, leading to reduced access to healthcare for other diseases, among other factors.”

Turns out that what they discovered was that Sweden vastly outperformed the rest of Europe from 2020-2022, with outcomes that were remarkably similar to the other Nordic countries.

“Among 42 European countries, the cumulative excess all-cause mortality from January 2020 to December 2022 ranged from 46 (Luxembourg) to 1,080 (Bulgaria) deaths per 100,000 inhabitants, with a median of 351/100,000,” they write. “In Sweden, the excess mortality rate of 158/100,000 was among the lowest, ranked 37th among 42 countries, and not very different from other Nordic countries: Norway (129), Denmark (97), and Finland (228).”

So why did Sweden underperform in 2020 relative to their neighbors? Likely due, as the study explains, to “mortality displacement due to low all-cause mortality in 2019,” as well as “poorly organized older adult care structures.”

What does this mean? Essentially, there were significantly fewer deaths from all causes in Sweden in 2019, meaning there were more extremely elderly people alive in 2020 that were susceptible to severe outcomes from Covid. This is reflected in the massive age gradient with Covid-associated deaths. In Sweden, “~40% of the COVID-19-associated deaths were among patients in nursing homes,” the study says, “and 67% of all COVID-19 deaths were among individuals above 80 years of age, representing 10% of all deaths in that age group.”

For younger age groups, Covid was mostly a non-issue. “COVID-19 deaths below 50 years of age represented only 1.2% of all COVID deaths, including 21 individuals below 20 years of age, mostly with underlying co-morbidities, representing 1% of all deaths in that age group.”

Effectively, Covid ravaged extremely elderly people, while those under 50, despite the lack of mask mandates and lockdowns, saw very limited impact.

Sweden’s Lack of Lockdowns Led to Better Outcomes

Equally important, they examined the “stringency index” for countries across Europe, then made a data table comparing that stringency to excess mortality from 2020-2022. Effectively, how strict were a country’s policies, and how much did that matter to reducing excess mortality?

Turns out, there’s a definitive, resounding answer which this chart demonstrates perfectly. Countries are plotted based on their stringency index, the x-axis, and excess mortality, the y-axis. The line demonstrates the trend in mortality rates, and there’s virtually no relationship between the severity of policy and preventing excess mortality.

The R-squared, effectively the relationship between stringency index and excess mortality, is just 0.14. The closer to 1, the more related stringency is to outcomes. This is 0.14.

Countries like Italy and Spain were some of the strictest when it came to lockdowns and mandates, yet ranked near the top in excess mortality rates. The UK, Portugal, the Netherlands and others were significantly more stringent and also had demonstrably worse outcomes. Denmark was the second least strict country and had the best outcomes, at least in this examination.

What does this tell us? Well, put simply, Fauci was wrong. Sweden did not underperform relative to its neighbors. It did significantly better than the rest of Europe, and of course, the United States. Lockdowns and stringency were not related, whatsoever, to reducing excess mortality. They never mandated masks, one of his chief policy recommendations, and outperformed other countries like Germany which imposed N95-level mandates for months on end.

This is a clear repudiation of the lockdown model. Which is precisely why Sweden’s example is deliberately being ignored today.

Because learning the actual results of these historically bad policies requires humility, accountability, and honesty, all qualities that many in public health are truly incapable of possessing.

Republished from the author’s Substack

BY JESSICA ROSE

View original article at Brownstone.org.

I want to begin this article by reminding everyone reading it of the old parable of the man fishing alone on a beach. It goes something like this, more or less.

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There’s a man fishing alone on a beach with a single simple fishing pole. Another man walks up to him and asks him why he doesn’t buy a boat to fish because then, he could catch more fish. The fisherman responds by saying: “Then what?” The passer-by then says in a matter-of-fact way: “Well then you could buy an even bigger boat and catch even more fish with the money from selling all of that fish!”. The fisherman responds by saying: “Then what?” The passer-by confounded that the fisherman does not seem to understand what he is telling him balks: “Then you could retire and hire others to do the fishing for you!” The fisherman responds by saying: “Then what?” Even more confounded, the passer-by says: “Then you could have more time to spend doing what you love!”

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The fisherman looks at him. And waits. For understanding. The passer-by then comprehends perhaps for the first time in his life that the long and often exploitative path to simplicity is pointless. The fisherman, even with all of the money in the world would be doing precisely what he already was doing.

Here’s a more “well-known” version if you like.

One day, a wealthy businessman (or investment banker, in some tellings) was vacationing in a small coastal village in Mexico. He watched as a lone fisherman rowed his little boat back to shore with just a few large fish. The businessman complimented the fisherman on the quality of the catch and asked,

“How long did it take you to catch those?”

“Only a little while,” the fisherman replied.

“Why didn’t you stay out longer and catch more?” the businessman asked.

“I caught enough for my family’s needs today,” the fisherman said.

The businessman pressed on:

“But what do you do with the rest of your time?”

The fisherman smiled and answered, “I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take siestas with my wife, stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine and play guitar with my amigos. I have a full and busy life.

”The businessman scoffed. “I’m a Harvard MBA – I can help you. You should spend more time fishing. With the extra money, buy a bigger boat. With the bigger boat, catch even more fish, then buy several boats and build a fleet. Cut out the middleman, sell directly to processors, open your own cannery. Control production, processing, and distribution. You’d eventually move to the city, expand to other locations, run a growing enterprise.”

The fisherman listened patiently, then asked, “And how long would all that take?”

“Fifteen, maybe twenty years,” the businessman replied.

“And then what?” the fisherman asked.

The businessman laughed. “That’s the best part! When the time is right, you announce an IPO, sell your company stock to the public, make millions – become very rich!”

“Millions… and then what?” the fisherman repeated.

“Then,” the businessman said triumphantly, “you could retire! Move to a small coastal village where you could sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take siestas with your wife, stroll to the village in the evenings to sip wine and play guitar with your friends.”

The fisherman looked at him quietly for a moment, then smiled and said, “But that’s exactly what I’m already doing.

”The businessman stood there, speechless, as the simple truth sank in: the fisherman was already living the very life the ambitious man dreamed of achieving – after decades of grinding pursuit.

Pretty good summary on my part from memory.

I was walking today and knew that I had to write up some of the thoughts I had about automation being the key to the demise of what it means to be human.

To be connected. To work hard. To truly earn. To truly learn.

It got me thinking about one of the first examples of automation that was actually a really neat idea: the water wheel. Water wheels and similar devices appeared as early as the 1st century BC (or possibly earlier in rudimentary forms) among the Greeks and Romans, used for grinding grain. These harnessed flowing water to drive machinery continuously without constant human input, representing early power automation in industry. Similar water-powered trip-hammers existed in ancient China over 2,000 years ago.

The most commonly cited earliest true example of automated control – a self-regulating feedback mechanism – is the improved water clock (clepsydra – comes from Ancient Greek meaning to pipette [neat eh, Kevin?]) invented by the Greek engineer Ctesibius around 270–250 BC in Ptolemaic Egypt (Alexandria).

Ctesibius added a float regulator to maintain a constant water level and flow rate, preventing the clock from speeding up or slowing down as the vessel emptied. This made it the earliest known feedback-controlled mechanism, a foundational principle of automation (similar in concept to a modern toilet’s ball-cock valve).

Earlier simple water clocks existed (as far back as ~1500–1400 BC in Egypt during the New Kingdom, or even ~16th century BC in Babylon/Egypt/Persia), but they were passive timers without self-regulation.

There were also automatons, if we want to include those. For example, back in ~400 BC, Archytas invented the first self-propelled flying device called the Flying Pigeon.

I guess there are subdivisions of automatic devices that can be split based on function. Some devices help and are “non-invasive” in terms of imposing on the human part of humanity. Some devices are quite “invasive” in this same way.

Many – if not all – devices made in the last century fall into the latter subdivision. I think of these as inflictions upon humanity masquerading as “convenience”, as opposed to devices that make our human lives better. Many examples exist and play a daily role in our human lives today.

1. Single-serve pod coffee makers: Ah yes! The promise of instant coffee without that brewing hassle! Only problem is what you actually get is mediocre taste, generation massive plastic waste, ingestion of microplastics and likely forever chemicals, high cost per cup relative to traditional methods, and most importantly, the removal of the simple ritual of making coffee that many find relaxing or social.

2. Smartphones: How many times a day does someone on one of these dumb devices almost bumps into you? How many people do you see on the daily who are literally in phone-land – more akin to zombies – than engaged with nature or others. With constant notifications and app ecosystems, they automate communication, information access, navigation, and entertainment into one device for seamless convenience! The only catch is that they contribute to addiction, reduced attention spans, social isolation, anxiety, poorer sleep, and less presence in real-life and social interactions.

3. Robotic vacuum cleaners: Why vacuum or sweep when you can off-shore that duty to a robot! They handle floor cleaning autonomously so you “don’t have to”. But guess what? They require more setup/maintenance than promised, miss spots, create noise/annoyance, and don’t replace the satisfaction or light exercise of manual vacuuming, perhaps even as a family activity, eliminating yet another social interaction. But hey, you get yet another gadget to charge and repair.

4. Microwave ovens: Ah yes. Where would we all be without being to speed up heating of forever plastic/endocrine disrupting nightmares that are TV dinners? But hey, isn’t that the ultimate convenience? Guess again! This encouragement of ingesting ultra-processed ready meals to save you time also reduces home cooking skills/pleasure, alter social family meal rituals, and shift food prep away from shared or mindful preparation toward solitary, rushed eating. Not very social or human-like behaviour.

And now we get to the real winners in our list.

5. Smart home devices and always-on assistants: Oh man where do I start with these? Automation of climate control, lighting, music, shopping lists, etc., for effortless living! Why wouldn’t you want to not take the time to get up off your ass and turn the thermostat yourself when a computer can do it for you! I am being sarcastic, of course because all of these so-called smart devices foster dependency, privacy erosion (constant listening), more screen/time fragmentation, and a subtle loss of basic self-reliance or analog comforts. Loss of self-reliance. Isolation. Loss of social structure.

6. Automatic/self-checkout kiosks and app-based ordering: Welcome to the new world where all you have to be able to do is use your index finger to have all of your shopping needs fulfilled! No more actually having to walk to the grocery store or market! No more having to talk to other people at the market! No need to go slow! Ingest! Ingest! Ingest! Consume! Consume! Consume! They’re so awesome aren’t they? Speeding up transactions by removing cashiers and human interaction. Stupid humans: so error prone and slow! But hey, guess what? These apps and self-checkouts also increase frustration (computers never make mistakes – wait, is the printer not printing again?), reducejobs/social contact, and turn routine errands into impersonal, glitch-prone experiences that feel more alienating, than efficient.

I could go on and will (you know me), but these examples are sufficient for now. Notice how in every single example, there is an inherent de-socialization component baked in. Hmm. Is this to ensure that our lives are made more convenient, or is this something more insidious? Having said that, I want to stress how deeply disturbed I am every single day that these things are being demanded by humans.

No demand; no supply.

Why are we demanding these things? Do people really and truly believe that these idiotic things make their lives easier/better? Where does the line get drawn between convenience and relinquishing self-sovereignty? Does this line get drawn? Have we not opted into slavery?

Why are supply chains even a thing? The only supply chain that any human used to need is the line from their own goat to fresh cheese.

This automation of human work, to me, poses a real existential crisis that is the root reason why we are “where we are” today as a society. Giving up these wonderful ritualistic habits that translate to being able to eat that day, or being with our loved ones, or sleeping well from a day of hard work, has lead us nowhere but isolated and dependent.

I want to end this short pokey piece on a positive and inspiring note. I would love it if everyone would watch Maynard J. Keenan’s 4-part mini-movie series called: The Art of Work. It speaks deeply to what I am writing about here. Maynard gets it. He just, does it.

“I do what I do because I enjoy it. Just, in general, DOING. Whether I am relevant or not I think is… irrelevant.” Sigh.

I adore this man. Jess loves MJK. 🙂

I think I will leave it at this and simply hope that this article is shared profusely and that perhaps, even one person will wake up from their digital slumber as a result of reading it.

Notice that I didn’t even touch on AI or human-replacing robots: the ultimate automation enforcing a permanent vacation from human-ation.

Be like the man alone fishing on the shore and never succumb to the lie that the act of DOING is something that needs to be sped up or removed from the human equation.

DOING is not far from BEING.

Love and light.

Republished from the author’s Substack

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BY BRUCE PARDY

View original article at Brownstone.org.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. The United States was the land of the free. Limited government. Checks and balances. Separation of powers. The Bill of Rights. But America has instead become a managed society. Its government dominates the lives of its people. How did it go wrong? Lots of bad steps helped to transform the American republic into a managerial state. Here are eleven of the moments that sent the ship off course.

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Residual Powers: The “Necessary and Proper Clause”, 1788

The first American constitution, the Articles of Confederation, didn’t last long. Written in 1777 but not fully ratified until 1781, the Articles created a weak federal government. It had a legislature but no executive or judicial branch. It lacked the power to enforce laws or raise money to maintain a military. Under it, the individual States ran the show. Under Article 2, the federal government had only those powers “expressly delegated” to it. In 1787, the Constitutional Congress scrapped the Articles to start again.

But opinions split. Federalists such as Alexander Hamilton wanted a stronger central government. Thomas Jefferson warned that centralized power represented a threat to the liberty of the people and the autonomy of the States.

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The second constitution, the one that stuck, was ratified in 1788. Section 8 of its first Article enumerated the powers of the federal government. “The Congress shall have the power to …” But was the list exhaustive? Did the federal government have only those powers expressly delegated, as in the Articles of Confederation? Or did the new constitution give the federal government open-ended, residual powers? Clause 18 of Section 8 contained the most important clue. It authorized Congress to make all laws “necessary and proper” to executing its mandate.

“Necessary and proper” could have meant essential to fulfilling its responsibilities in those areas explicitly listed. But according to Hamilton, the clause gave Congress the authority to pass laws that it regarded to be in the national interest. When Hamilton proposed the creation of a national bank to deal with Revolutionary War debt, a power not listed in Article 1, President George Washington eventually agreed.

The Tenth Amendment, passed in 1791, could have put the genie back in the bottle. Powers “not delegated to the United States by the Constitution,” it reads, “nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” That could have meant the federal government had no residual or implied powers. But the section omits the key word: expressly. Article 2 of the Articles of Confederation said the federal government had only those powers expresslydelegated. The Tenth Amendment does not use that word. The “necessary and proper” clause delegates powers to the federal government that are not express but implied. That clause is the federal government’s blank check. Had the Tenth Amendment said “expressly” delegated, it might have altered the course of American government.

Untouchable Civil Servants: Pendleton Act, 1883

Almost a hundred years later, in 1881, President James A. Garfield was assassinated by one of his own campaign workers. An angry attorney from Illinois named Charles J. Guiteau shot him in the stomach. Jeffrey Tucker tells the story:

[Guiteau] was furious because he believed, due to his work for the [Garfield] campaign, that Garfield would give him a job in the new administration. But none was forthcoming. It was revenge. Garfield died of the wounds months later. It was a shocking thing. Congress immediately got to work figuring out how to prevent the next assassination. They had the theory that they needed to end the system of patronage in government so that way people wouldn’t get mad and shoot the president. Not a very good theory but this is how politics works. The result was the Pendleton Act that created a permanent civil service. The new president, Chester Arthur signed the bill in 1883. It was done: the administrative state was born.

Under the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act, certain federal civil servants would no longer serve at the pleasure of the president. The Act initially applied to only about 10 per cent of the positions in the federal government, but its coverage grew rapidly. Today the president cannot appoint or dismiss most federal government employees. But the Pendleton Act and its successors did not end cronyism in the federal service. Instead, it shifted appointment powers from the president to the heads of departments and agencies.

In a republic, the power belongs to the people, if not directly, then at least through their elected representatives. The Pendleton Act legislated the opposite idea: government employees are not subject to the approval of the people’s president. If the president does not have the power to appoint and dismiss, how do the people? The answer is that they do not.

Medical Hegemony: The Flexner Report, 1910

It might seem odd to include a report about medical schools in this list. But in 1910, a report on medical education helped to not just transform but capture the medical system in North America. ”Medical Education in the United States and Canada” was written in 1910 by Abraham Flexner. The Carnegie Foundation commissioned it. The American Medical Association (AMA) supported it. John D. Rockefeller funded it. Flexner’s ostensible mandate was to enquire into the quality of medical education. His report savaged medical institutions that were not based on allopathic science and pharmaceutical drugs. It attacked their legitimacy, reputation, and funding. Many were forced to close. Rockefeller arranged millions of dollars in grants to medical schools, research facilities, and hospitals that embraced the report’s recommendations.

Allopathic medical treatment came to be regarded as the only legitimate kind of medical care. Alternative approaches to healthcare, such as naturopathy, homeopathy, and osteopathy, were marginalized. The medical profession became a cartel. Competition for the pharmaceutical industry was stamped out. The Flexner Report helped to create a top-down, standardized system of healthcare in North America. Institutional authority, not patient autonomy or informed consent, was its dominant feature. Governments and professional bodies enforce that system to this day. More than a century after the Flexner Report, Covid-19 policies would reflect its principles and confirm its lasting influence.

Professional Expert Class: Woodrow Wilson and the Federal Reserve, 1913

The Pendleton Act weakened political control over rank-and-file federal employees. Woodrow Wilson, sometimes called the first progressive president, took things a step further. Long before he became the President in 1913, Wilson published an essay called “The Study of Administration.” In it, he asserted that in a complex society, government administration should be regarded as a professional discipline. Public officials are an expert class in pursuit of the common good. They should be allowed to operate above the political fray.

When he came to office, Wilson put this theory into practice. Congress had already established the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) and Board of General Appraisers, whose heads could not be removed except for cause. Through legislation and executive orders, Wilson created more federal agencies with the power to act independently. Among them were the Federal Reserve and the Federal Trade Commission. The Federal Reserve, created in 1913, wasn’t just a government bank, but a policy and regulatory institution. With extensive powers including the ability to set interest rates, regulate banks, and act as lender of last resort, the Federal Reserve acquired the mandate to manage the economy.

In 1935, in Humprey’s Executor v United States, the Supreme Court confirmed that commissioners of independent agencies could be dismissed only for cause, removing them from direct presidential control. That precedent stood until June 29, 2026, when the Court overturned Humphrey to allow President Donald Trump to fire Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter from the FTC without cause. The majority opinion found that the FTC exercises executive power. Therefore, said the judgment, its commissioners are subject to removal at the pleasure of the President, in accordance with the separation of powers established in the Constitution.

Funding the Managerial State: Income Taxes and the 16th Amendment, 1913

Before 1913, only death was inevitable. The federal government had levied income taxes before, during the Civil War. But the Supreme Court, in its 1895 decision in Pollock v Farmers’ Loan & Trust, insisted that federal income taxes had to be “apportioned among the states,” as the First Article of the Constitution states.

That meant that taxes collected from a state with five per cent of America’s population were limited to five per cent of the total tax revenue. That prevented the federal government from taxing American citizens on their individual wealth. The 16th Amendment, proposed in 1909 and ratified in 1913, authorized Congress to tax income without apportionment. Congress wasted no time in reinstating a federal tax on incomes over $3,000. The progressive federal income tax system was born.

Delegation: JW Hampton v United States, 1928

The US Constitution describes a strict separation of powers. In Westminster systems such as in the United Kingdom and Canada, the same people control the legislature and the government. In the United States, the legislative and executive branches are distinct. Congress makes laws, while the president runs the government to carry them out. For a while, courts gave this idea constitutional status. In 1892, in Field v Clark, the Supreme Court stated that Congress cannot delegate legislative power to the President. This nondelegation doctrine “is a principle universally recognized as vital to the integrity and maintenance of the system of government ordained by the Constitution.”

But it wouldn’t last. The Tariff Act of 1922 authorized the president to adjust tariff rates to equalize production costs between domestic and foreign goods. In 1928, in JW Hampton v United States, the Supreme Court decided that the statute was constitutional. Statutes could delegate rule-making powers, the court said, if they included an “intelligible principle” to guide government action. That was the beginning of the end for the nondelegation doctrine. It has not been used since 1935 to strike down federal delegation of law-making authority. Delegation of the power to make rules is the lifeblood of the administrative state.

Nanny State: FDR’s New Deal, Early 1930s

Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s solution to the Great Depression was the “New Deal.” Government would protect the economic well-being of its people. In exchange, it would decide what was best. That deal turned America’s burgeoning administrative machinery into a welfare state.

Under FDR, America’s longest serving president, the federal government did what it had never done before. It stimulated job creation, backstopped bank deposits, established welfare programs such as Social Security, and directed economic activity. Before the New Deal, even in the face of the growing discretionary powers of government bureaucracies, citizens largely fended for themselves. The New Deal changed the role of government. To this day, people expect governments to solve social problems and protect them from economic calamity.

Funny Money: Ending the Gold Standard

The gold standard protected the value of money. When fiat currency is tied to a finite physical asset, governments cannot print currency at will. Every dollar issued must be backed by the physical asset — gold — and be convertible by citizens and foreign governments. But the gold standard and the administrative state are incompatible. Wilson suspended the gold standard during the First World War to fund military expenses by printing money. FDR killed it domestically in 1933 by prohibiting citizens from owning most forms of gold, ending convertibility and devaluing the dollar. Richard Nixon ended international convertibility in 1971. When dollars are not pegged to the value of gold, governments can create new money out of thin air, producing inflation and diminishing the value of their compounding debts.

Regulating Private Conduct: The Civil Rights Act, 1964

Americans have a constitutional right to equal protection of the law, guaranteed in the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. Equal protection of the law means, in part, that laws and governments cannot discriminate between Americans by race, colour, sex or other personal characteristics.

But the Constitution limits governments, not the people. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, on the other hand, regulates the behavior of private citizens and companies. The Civil Rights Act was not the first federal statute to regulate private conduct by means of administrative tribunals. But the Civil Rights Act significantly expanded the use of federal bodies to enforce claims against private actors. It helped to legitimize the idea that governments should oversee citizen behavior and attitudes.

Human rights were conceived to protect citizens from state power. They prohibited arbitrary arrest, detention, and torture. But the Civil Rights Act and other modern human rights legislation compel private businesses and persons to toe the government’s vision of good behavior. They compel citizens to embrace select causes and identities. They outlaw personal preferences. Operate a bakery and consider gay marriage to be sacrilegious? You must bake the wedding cake, said the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act and its Civil Rights Commission.

In 2018, in Masterpiece Cakeshop v Colorado Civil Rights Commission, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the baker, but only because the Commission had shown open hostility to the baker’s religious beliefs, not because the civil rights law did not and could not require the baker to comply.

Deference: Chevron v Natural Resources Defense Council, 1984

Under the Constitution, executive agencies have no powers except what Congress grants them. This principle kept federal administrative agencies in check. Congress passed statutes that told them what they could do. Courts could review agency action to determine whether they were acting within those boundaries. Where those statutes were ambiguous or uncertain, courts had the power to interpret the limits of agency authority. Bureaucracies were fenced in.

But in 1984, the US Supreme Court changed that. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) had created a rule not explicitly authorized in its enabling statute. In Chevron v Natural Resources Defense Council, the Court held that the EPA could decide the limit of its own authority. If an agency’s interpretation of its own statute was reasonable, said the decision, courts should defer to the agency’s take. “Chevron deference” transferred power from Congress to the administrative state. Unelected officials obtained judicial benediction to decide the boundaries of their own powers. Agencies pushed those boundaries, asserting authority that statutes did not grant. Federal agencies became laws unto themselves. In 2024, in Loper Bright Enterprises v Raimondo, the Supreme Court overturned the Chevron decision, returning the authority to interpret ambiguous enabling statutes to the courts. Time will tell whether and to what extent the decision will curb the power of federal agencies.

The Managerial State’s Pinnacle Achievement, So Far: Covid-19

The government response to Covid-19 was a policy train wreck. One senseless diktat followed another. Close your business. Keep your kids home from school. Stay out of the park. Don’t gather in church. Wear a mask to go into the store. Take a vaccine to keep your job. These edicts eviscerated civil liberties. They destroyed businesses, cancelled jobs and education, tore families apart, and devastated people’s health. Society unraveled. And yet, the administrative state excelled beyond its wildest dreams. It succeeded in subordinating all other interests – personal, political, commercial, institutional – to its priorities and directives. The Covid regime has been its pinnacle achievement, at least so far.

The United States Constitution was revolutionary. “A republic,” Benjamin Franklin is reported to have said, “if you can keep it.” They couldn’t. The seeds of the nation’s downfall are in the document itself. The Constitution does not prescribe an administrative state, but nor does it prevent one. Instead of a republic governed by the rule of law, America is now planned, directed, and supervised. Broad discretion in the hands of a technocratic managerial class has become the foundation of American government.

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BY JOSH STYLMAN

View original article at Brownstone.org.

A friend and I got into it recently. He’s smart, freedom-minded, and totally gets the danger of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC). Expiring money, programmable control, carbon budgets – he sees most of the expanding tyranny clearly. And yet he dismisses Digital ID as a distraction. When I try to make the case that digital ID is the gateway to the gulag in the metaverse, he demands I name ONE thing Digital ID gives the government that they can’t already do.

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My answer: it enables CBDC.

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Of course, governments have already encroached on our privacy and freedoms in ways our forefathers couldn’t have imagined. But even with the creeping surveillance state, the government can’t fully implement programmable currency without authenticated identity on every transaction. They’re components of the same beast. Digital ID is the authentication layer, while CBDC is the currency that runs on top of it.

Stop Digital ID and you prevent CBDC from being built at any scale that matters.

The institutions driving this, the usual suspects including the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) and the United Nations, are quite explicit about their intentions. Their own documentation spells it out: digital identity is a requirement for centralized digital currency. And in case the documents aren’t clear enough, Agustín Carstens, the former GM of the BIS couldn’t have been more explicit about their goals:

“A key difference with the CBDC is that central banks will have absolute control on the rules and regulations that will determine the use of that expression of central bank liability, and also we will have the technology to enforce that.”

Perhaps we should take these institutions at their word?

When Enforcement Goes on Autopilot

What my friend is missing isn’t really about capability. The game has never been about what the government can do. It’s about the cost of doing it.

Right now, controlling what you buy, where you go, what you read – all of that requires boots on the ground. Investigations, warrants, real people making decisions. The friction is the protection.

Digital ID eliminates that friction entirely. What was once selective tyranny becomes universal tyranny. Code restricts transactions based on compliance status. No human oversight required.

Here’s an easy way to think about it: police can break into your home right now. Most people don’t lose sleep over that. Would they feel the same about automated drones entering every home simultaneously based on AI-triggered criteria? The capability itself isn’t the threat…the automation at scale is.

And for anyone thinking “the government already has my Social Security number and my phone tracks my GPS” – you’re missing the difference. Right now those systems are siloed – your bank doesn’t know what your doctor said, your DMV doesn’t know your browser history, etc. Digital ID is the interoperability layer – one key someone else controls – and can revoke. Five keys for five doors means losing one is manageable. One master key for everything means someone else decides whether you get in at all.

In 2021, getting into my own taproom legally required a vaccine card. New York City had rolled out some half-baked digital pass, but for the most part it was still paper back then. Still, it was obvious where this was headed. When I started warning friends, co-workers, the guy in the coffee shop – really, anyone who’d listen – that this was a dry run for digital identity infrastructure, that the compliance checkpoint they’d just accepted would eventually become programmable and permanent, most thought I was insane.

After getting tired of long emails and late-night rants, I started publicly documenting what I thought was coming. It was painfully obvious that centralized digital money meant rations, expiring savings, compliance-based access to daily life. A sort of digital cage. A few people in my life perked up, but most still scoffed.

Fast forward a few years and what’s being rolled out right now is exactly what I described – except ultimately, this system won’t just cover vaccines, it will define and govern all acceptable behavior.

So when I hear smart people wave away Digital ID because “the government can already track you,” it’s maddening. You’re stuck on what they can already do. They’re building something entirely new. It’s like watching speed cameras being installed on every block and saying “Well, they could already give me a ticket.” Sure, one decision at a time. Now imagine no human involved on any blocks, ever. The marginal cost drops to zero and the decision isn’t made by a person but by a line of code.

That’s a profoundly different category of power entirely. And after what we all lived through in 2021 – watching our neighbors accept a digital pass as the price of participation without blinking – we saw the compliance muscle is already trained. Covid was the Milgram experiment, the Stanford Prison experiment, and the Asch conformity test rolled into one and our species failed all three. The only thing missing then was the infrastructure at societal scale.

The Cover Story May Change. The Agenda Doesn’t.

Most Americans assume they’re exempt from this kind of thing. A few years ago, the majority of people I knew had no idea there were massive protests happening all over the world. It was partly because our media couldn’t be bothered to cover it, but also because we’re that insulated. And maybe that’s by design – because America was built on individual liberty in a way most countries weren’t, and that cultural resistance is exactly why they’re normalizing the infrastructure everywhere else first, then importing it here as “international best practice.” And we’ll sleepwalk right into it.

Make no mistake: if America accepts the authentication layer, the rest of the world loses its last permission structure to resist. Not to beat a dead horse, but we watched a trial run during Covid.

That’s why paying attention to what’s happening abroad isn’t paranoid, it may give us signal for what’s coming.

The UK’s Online Safety Act 2023 mandates age verification for social media platforms using “ID checks, AI, or age assurance technologies.” Prime Minister Keir Starmer is fast-tracking implementation – writing clauses into the children’s well-being bill to “enforce a ban quickly.” Leaked Cabinet Office meetings revealed ministers discussing Digital ID for every baby at birth registration. A parliamentary petition against mandatory Digital ID gathered nearly 3 million signatures. They’re building it anyway. Just a few days ago, Apple rolled out age verification for all UK users – ID scans or credit card checks to access certain features.

Brits tried to route around it with VPNs: usage more than doubled – from 650,000 daily users to over 1.4 million, according to a UK government report. The government’s response? Not to reconsider the ruling but to start discussing restrictions on VPNs. The ratchet only turns one way. Mandate identity verification. When people evade it, they restrict the evasion tools. Each “solution” requires more control.

One of my best friends, a police sergeant who lost his job after 24 years without missing a single day (the Cal Ripken of the NYPD), for refusing to comply with vax mandates – told me years ago that whenever we’re being told something is being done for our safety, alarm bells should ring. He was right. Remember “nobody’s safe until everybody’s safe?”

The cover story is always about protection. Protect the children, protect women from online misogyny. Lately it’s been all about protecting us from anti-Semitism and protecting us from Islamophobia. Scroll the news on any given day and both are being amplified in the same cycle.

It should go without saying – my intention isn’t to diminish anyone’s real feelings. Just last week I wrote about this at length in The Enemy Is Not Each Other. The fear is real, and the people experiencing it aren’t wrong to feel it. My argument is that the infrastructure being built to address those feelings is the cage. Every emotional trigger – real or not – becomes the justification for another identity checkpoint.

Australia passed its own age verification law. Kids are already bypassing it with fake birthdays and unregulated apps. Of course, this law won’t protect kids in any meaningful way, but it sure does build a new gatekeeper.

In Africa, Gates Foundation-funded biometric ID systems are rolling out under the banner of financial inclusion. The cover story changes by region – in this case, aid vs. protection. TikTok requires a government ID in Europe. Discord requires facial age estimation globally. As Fenigson put it: “It’s exactly the same. The only difference is that in the West, they just have to make more excuses so that people can swallow it easily.”

And America?

California signed AB 1043 into law – effective January 1, 2027, every operating system provider in the state must implement age verification. Not a bill. Signed law. Operating System-level identity verification baked into every device.

And that’s exactly what Mark Zuckerberg proposed under oath during his Congressional testimony on child safety. His “fix” was astonishing: have Apple and Google verify the identity of every smartphone user at the OS level, for every app. “Doing it at the level of the phone is just a lot cleaner,” he said. In plain terms: he deflects Meta’s legal liability while two companies already under antitrust scrutiny get deputized as identity gatekeepers for the entire internet.

Congress is writing the laws, while the tech CEOs are designing the system. Worth noting: just last week, a jury found Meta and YouTube negligent for harm to children in a landmark lawsuit, and in a separate case, Meta was ordered to pay $375 million for misleading users on child safety. So, the company that just lost two massive lawsuits for harming kids is now advising Congress on how to build the identity infrastructure for the entire internet. What could go wrong?

A bipartisan “Kids on Social Media Act” is moving through Congress. Florida introduced an App Store accountability bill that would force Apple and Google to verify the ages of all users and collect identifying data.

As Derrick Broze pointed out, the White House’s own National Policy Framework for AI, released in March 2026, leads with “Protecting Children” and calls on Congress to establish age-assurance requirements for AI platforms. The language is soft. The infrastructure it enables is the same. This isn’t a partisan project. Both “sides” are building it.

And in March 2026, more than 400 computer scientists from around the world signed an open letter warning that age-verification mandates enable censorship, centralized power, and loss of privacy – and that the systems could cause more harm than good. They’re describing the authentication layer. They just don’t call it that.

It’s Not Just Governments

You actually don’t need government mandates when corporations normalize biometric collection on their own. And increasingly, you don’t need to choose – the mandates are converging with initiatives from Big Tech and Big Banking, all built on the same infrastructure.

I’ve been making this point to friends who have insisted CBDC was off the table once the President said he wouldn’t build it. Sure, the US government might not – but what about JPMorgan Chase? Through public-private partnerships, private institutions can be steered into building the exact infrastructure the government just promised not to touch. What’s the word for that again?

In November 2025, Apple launched Digital ID in Apple Wallet enabling the ability for people to scan their passports, take selfies, complete “facial and head movements” for verification – and then their identities live on their phone. It has TSA acceptance at 250+ airports and can be used as driver’s licenses in 12 states and growing. Apple’s press release promises “additional Digital ID acceptance use cases to come in the future.” The scope is unlimited by design.

Recently, Discord announced “teen-by-default settings” rolling out globally to its 200 million users. To access age-restricted content or modify safety settings, users must complete “age assurance” – facial age estimation or government ID submission, of course. Discord launched this in the UK and Australia first, delayed the global rollout after backlash – not because they reconsidered their plan, but because users pushed back on implementation. It’s still coming, even if the timeline shifted.

The framing is always the same:

Apple: “security and privacy.” Discord: “teen safety.” Zuckerberg: “protecting kids.”

I’ve watched this play out in my own life. Friends who laughed at the idea of a social credit score in 2020 are now paying for Clear and TSA PreCheck – voluntarily handing over biometrics for the privilege of skipping a line. I don’t recall a public discussion about the ethical ramifications of this. It just became normal. That’s the compliance muscle doing its job.

And here’s the punchline: the databases don’t stay separate. They get sold, merged, subpoenaed, hacked. Discord’s age verification system already leaked 70,000 government IDs in a single breach. Unlike a password, you can’t reset your face. Once the infrastructure exists, there’s no doubt “if” it will connect to government systems – just “when.”

I’d argue there may be a second motive here that nobody in Congress bothered to examine during Zuckerberg’s testimony. As a student of online advertising for 30 years, I find this one fascinating: In a move that actually helped users for once, Apple blocked third-party tracking, letting users opt out of being followed across apps – which most did. Advertisers have been flying blind ever since, operating on educated guesses about who you are. Remember, Zuckerberg’s proposal puts identity verification right back at that same OS-level.

Identity verification at the operating system level fixes the ad industry’s problem overnight. Your real identity, confirmed at the device level, is attached to everything you do on the device. That means every data broker, every advertiser, every platform that currently operates on probabilistic identity matching gets handed a verified identity graph – courtesy of federal law. Lovely.

Zuck is hardly proposing a solution to surveillance capitalism…he’s proposing its next infrastructure upgrade. The kicker is that he’s asking Congress to mandate it.

And for anyone who thinks there’s a freedom-friendly version of this, look at Sam Altman’s Worldcoin, now rebranded as “World.” As an aside, I can’t think of a better name for this character than Alt-Man.

Worldcoin’s pitch is “Proof of Human” – a decentralized, privacy-preserving answer to AI-generated fakes. Legendary tech investor Marc Andreessen is endorsing it. On paper, it could even sound libertarian. The mechanism is iris scanning. You stare into a corporate-owned orb, it captures your biometric data, and you get a cryptographic ID that proves you’re human. They say the image isn’t stored – just a mathematical hash. But a unique identifier derived from your body is a biometric, regardless of what format it’s saved in.

Thirty-three million people have already scanned. The app now stores government-issued IDs too. And the recruitment started in the Global South – the same places MOSIP (a Gates Foundation-funded digital ID platform) is being installed. The entry point is AI safety. The infrastructure is the same.

But Who’s Building It?

Anyone in my orbit knows I’ve been yelling about the danger of CBDC for the last few years. Once they understood the components – programmable money, expiration dates on savings, control over what you buy and when – some people got it right away. But, most just brushed it off. As per usual, convenience for privacy. No big deal.

Now you’ve seen the infrastructure being installed across every continent and every sector. But who designed this? Gee, I wonder.

A few months ago, Bill Gates went on camera and told us. The stack: digital identity systems combined with digital financial switches. He named the components – MOSIP for identity, Mojaloop for payments. Called them both “necessary tools” for the future they’re building. Not two separate things. One integrated system.

Perhaps most disturbingly, the blueprint for this plan predates the crisis that normalized it. Texts from the recently released Epstein files show private discussions about digital identity infrastructure going back to as early as 2017. The correspondent? Dr. Melanie Walker – neurotechnology adviser to Gates, World Bank director, Gates Foundation deputy director, WHO adviser, and co-chair of the WEF’s Global Future Council on Neurotechnology. She was texting Jeffrey Epstein about creating “a new type of social security number, used for all types of identity, with health as a single use case.” Sayer Ji has documented the full DARPA connection in detail.

The strategy: “Start with health.” The vision: “The magic is to make all the systems communicate.”

In those same texts, Walker mentions that DARPA’s Geoff Ling and Raj Shah (USAID, now Rockefeller) both recommended her for Surgeon General. She tells Epstein that the heads of MGH, Cleveland Clinic, Hopkins, and Mayo are “all working together” – and that she told them about him. Epstein’s response? “Are they doing digital idea already? Do they have a lead or a strategy?”

This was 2017. Three years before vaccine passports made ‘showing your papers’ a daily reality for billions. The plan being deployed now was being privately discussed by people embedded in the Gates, World Bank, and DARPA networks years before any public health crisis made it politically viable.

Chatham House, the Royal Institute of International Affairs, published their framework for global digital platform regulation in January 2024. Whitney Webb has documented how the WEF’s Partnership Against Cybercrime pushes the same framework from the cybersecurity angle – tying every person’s internet access to a digital ID. The logic is simple: manufacture consent through crisis. The entry points consistently multiply and the destination never changes, no matter who is in power.

Remember what I said about international best practices? Well, the White House is promoting the SAVE Act – framed as election security – by pointing to India and Brazil’s biometric voter databases as the standard America should meet. Naturally, the bill lists REAL ID as the first accepted proof of citizenship. The entry point here may be voting, however, the infrastructure remains the same.

Hiding in Plain Sight

Christine Lagarde announced the European Central Bank’s timeline: pilot in 2027, full rollout by 2029. That’s not speculation, it’s their stated plan. And it’s not some long-term dystopian vision – we’re at the crossroads right now.

She’s not hiding the model. As Efrat Fenigson noted: “Christine Lagarde and the ECB say that China is the blueprint for their digital euro. They’re copying the ECNY, the Chinese central bank digital currency.” And what does China’s system require? Authenticated identity on every transaction. The blueprint is the authentication layer. It always was.

The West used to be the antidote. Now it’s copying the surveillance state’s homework.

There is no CBDC without Digital ID – not at any meaningful scale, not with enforcement features, not as a system of control. Every transaction requires authenticated identity. Every rule requires someone to apply it to. The authentication layer isn’t a convenience feature – it’s the control mechanism.

And yes, theoretically privacy-preserving alternatives exist. But stuff like zero-knowledge proofs and decentralized ID aren’t what’s being built, funded, or legislated. In fact, quite the opposite. What’s being rolled out is centralized, biometric, and state-adjacent.

Once built, it doesn’t get unbuilt. When in human history have those in power gained a capability and voluntarily given it back?

Anyone who has been paying attention over the last few years understands what I’m outlining isn’t science fiction. Canada famously froze bank accounts of truckers who protested vaccine mandates, as well as those who donated to their cause. China’s social credit system already restricts travel for people with low scores. PayPal published a policy allowing fines for “misinformation” – at their sole discretion – and only retracted it after backlash, claiming it was an error. The fine mechanism for intolerance stayed, naturally.

Those were manual, clumsy, one-off interventions that required human decisions, but imagine all of that happening automatically, instantly, attached to everything – your electric car, your kid’s ability to go to school, even your ability to buy a morning coffee.

Nobody targets you, nobody makes a decision, the transaction just doesn’t go through.

And there’s no one to appeal to, because there was no person involved in the first place.

If you want to see what the full stack looks like deployed on cleared ground with no legacy systems, there’s already a working model. The Substack writer esc – for my money, one of the more important voices around right now – has been documenting Gaza’s reconstruction in extraordinary detail. The GREAT Trust plan issues digital tokens to Palestinian landowners in exchange for land rights – ownership converted into conditional access on a programmable ledger. Kushner presented AI-powered smart cities at Davos: six to eight planned cities where, according to the trust’s own slides, all services and economy will be run through ID-based AI-powered digital systems. E-wallets have already been distributed to over 245,000 recipients – before the reconstruction has even formally begun. No cash. No anonymity. No interaction outside the system.

The architecture I’m describing in this essay isn’t theoretical. Gaza appears to be the laboratory. Unless it’s stopped, I suspect we can expect strategic deployment all over the world in the coming months and years.

What You Can Do

The system requires your participation to work. The catch is that this may also be its biggest weakness. It only becomes a cage when adoption is near-universal. In other words, when opting out means you can’t participate in daily life. When cash still works, and analog alternatives survive, resistance may be inconvenient but still livable. That’s why they need you to volunteer.

Don’t give it.

Use your passport to fly, pay cash wherever you can. Most importantly, resist Real ID compliance at all costs. They’re trying to eliminate friction so the more we can slow them down by adding it, the harder their plan becomes to implement.

For the detailed practical playbook – how to navigate banking, travel, and daily life outside the system – I’d point you to the work Catherine Austin Fitts and the Solari team have been doing for years. They’ve been busy mapping the resistance infrastructure while most normies are still debating whether any of this was real.

If we value the ability to live outside the reach of a technocratic government – one that takes elements of cancel culture, ESG, and surveillance and parlays them into a programmable monetary system controlled by the state – this is the hill to die on. Not because we’ll win every battle after – I’m pretty sure we won’t. However, losing this one makes everything else exponentially harder. Once the authentication layer is everywhere, every other control mechanism merely becomes a software update.

The cage isn’t locked. Not yet. My friend still thinks Digital ID is a distraction. I’m not sure I’ve convinced him yet. But I’m also not sure he’ll have the luxury of being wrong about this much longer.

Don’t help them build it.

Republished from the author’s Substack

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BY BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE

View original article at Brownstone.org.

Let’s begin with what we know with the proviso that much in this case has been shielded from public view.

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Andrea Shaw (23, of Payette, Idaho) has been indicted on two counts of first-degree murder by suffocation in the deaths of her 18-month-old fraternal twins, Dallas and Tyson Shaw. She is in prison now and faces a life sentence or possible death penalty for murder.

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The story begins on April 23, 2025, when the twins received three vaccines (Hepatitis A, flu, and DTaP) on the same day during a wellness visit. Andrea warned ahead of time that the father’s family has a history of negative reactions to the flu shot. The next day (April 24), the children developed diarrhea, lethargy, a low-grade fever, sunken eyes, and blue lips.

Shaw took them to the emergency room. They were diagnosed with a “post-immunization reaction,” given Tylenol and popsicles, and discharged. The symptoms continued in the following days and improved slightly by April 30.

On the morning of May 1, 2025, Shaw found the twins dead in their shared bed. Police responded around 11:30 a.m. to a report of a possible deceased child. Andrea was home alone. The police investigated this as a possible asphyxiation, i.e. murders.

Three days later, Shaw and her husband Nathaniel appeared in a Children’s Health Defense (CHD) interview, saying that the vaccines caused the deaths. They described the timeline and said police had suggested asphyxiation and possible postpartum blackout during questioning. How a person strangles children while blacked out is not explained.

In January of 2026, Shaw became the lead plaintiff in a RICO lawsuit against the American Academy of Pediatrics, alleging vaccine harm. The vaccine maker cannot be sued, of course, due to indemnification nor the doctors who administered the shots. That leaves the professional organization, which is largely funded by pharmaceutical companies. AAP functions as a pharma lobby.

Police supposedly conducted a 14-month investigation with assistance from other agencies (e.g., Idaho State Police Forensic Services). No public cause of death was released during this period. Autopsy details are withheld pending the criminal case.

On June 29, 2026, a Payette County grand jury indicted Shaw on two counts of first-degree murder, alleging she intentionally suffocated the twins (premeditated or during aggravated battery). They did this based on a lower level of evidence (probably cause) than is required in a trial (beyond a reasonable doubt). It is typical of such cases that the jury is presented a plausible scenario and timeline by experts and asked to accept it.

The grand jury deferred to the experts called by the prosecution.

On June 30, 2026, Shaw was arrested in Boise by Boise police. She had recently given birth and was breastfeeding a new child. She is now held on a $2 million bond in Ada County Jail, pending extradition/transfer to Payette County. On July 2, 2026, she was arraigned in Payette County Court. Her attorney stated that she denies the charges and that the state cannot prove them.

That’s all we know of the case. Here are the complete court documents we have thus far, none of which speak to any evidence of murder. The evidence we do have includes the fact of three shots each on one day, the resulting adverse reactions, the hospital’s judgment that it was vaccine injury, and the deaths one week later.

The case has garnered a level of press attention not usually associated with such a case. It’s been a barrage of news coverage. We have NYT, WSJ, Washington Post, CNN, USA Today, Epoch, ABC News, Independent, Newsweek, Gizmodo, Associated Press, Daily Beast, and so on.

All this attention suggests that pharma-backed media believes it has an ace in the hole, a clear case of a crime that the anti-vaccine movement wrongly believes is a case of vaccine death. The hope here is to humiliate the movement and use the case as paradigmatic of anti-vax fanaticism used to cover a terrible crime.

The frenzied attention comes following the shocking removal – not retraction but removal – of a 2021 paper on “Sudden Infant Death Syndrome” appearing in the journal Toxicology. The paper is “Vaccines and sudden infant death: An analysis of the VAERS database 1990–2019 and review of the medical literature” by Neil Z. Miller. You can still read the paper on ResearchGate while the final publication is deleted from view.

The paper analyzed reports of infant deaths (including those labeled as SIDS) from the US Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) database between 1990 and 2019. Miller reported that a large percentage (58% within 3 days and 75-78% within 7 days) of the deaths occurred shortly after vaccination. He suggested that the temporal clustering indicated a possible causal link between vaccines and SIDS, while also reviewing other literature and claiming infant deaths post-vaccination are often misclassified as SIDS.

This is hardly the only such report. The research connecting SIDS with vaccination is extensive – and has been a topic of public controversy for many years – though dogmatically denied by mainstream science. Indeed, infant deaths from vaccination have been documented in medical literature since at least 1933.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. sent a letter to the journal in question, noting how unusual the action was. “The notice of removal you issued had only two sentences explaining the retraction. Given the high levels of public interest in vaccine safety and a history of both overt and obscure pressure against the study of some of these topics, such a brief notice of removal is woefully insufficient.”

The deadline for an explanation is now passed. Did he respond?

Big Pharma has clearly stepped up its campaigns of covering up, smearing its critics, censorship, and otherwise skewing scientific debate in a manner that makes its products appear safe and effective while tolerating no evidence to the contrary. In July 2025, for example, Brownstone Institute published a memo from the pharma lobby BIO with a detailed plan to subvert any attempt by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., to hold the industry to account. What precisely is pharma covering up and how bad is it?

The case of the jailed Andrea Shaw and her now-dead twins is a deeply troubling one. All evidence we have points to another probable case of death by vaccine. Whatever evidence there is that she killed them will be presented in trial, along with discovery of all communications and whether and to what extent the American Academy of Pediatrics is involved. It bears watching closely.

We will likely see the usual parade. All of the best experts at the best universities will protect pharma’s position because that is what they have been trained to do throughout their careers, while the most informed dissidents might not be admitted at all. The media have financial conflicts of interest in reporting on this. The politicians who comment on this have financial conflicts of interest. There is never a moment in which the judge and jury are outside the epistemic bubble created by the pharmaceutical industry.

The reason Pharma feels confident that it can make an example out of Andrea Shaw is because they control the entire knowledge production process, from soup to nuts, in connection with vaccines. They would rather spend millions to convict Andrea Shaw – as a lesson to others who might come forward – than risk losing a case of racketeering.

It may very well be that the suspicions of police and prosecutors have merit and that Shaw will be found guilty by a jury of her peers. However, given what we have come to know about the sheer dishonesty and vindictiveness of big Pharma, and its many pay-to-play allies in the mainstream media, it would be irresponsible to not raise the possibility of a corporate-designed miscarriage of justice.

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BY BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE

View original article at Brownstone.org.

Conventional political philosophy has a blindspot over what turns out to be a crucial concept: the precise nature of the legal relationship between the human person and the regime under which he lives. In the US, we call this citizenship but how precisely is that different from the old-world notion of being a subject to a sovereign?

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Confusion over this issue led the majority in the Supreme Court decision in Trump vs. Barbara to overrule an executive order that challenged automatic birthright citizenship. Only a few years back, anyone who would have challenged this idea would have been considered some kind of civic heretic, despite how rare this legal right is in the world.

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Justice Clarence Thomas’s dissenting opinion was more than a passing disagreement. He penned a treatise of monumental importance to our time. He has completely reframed the distinctly American idea of citizenship as a two-way agreement between the person and the political community. It is not conferred by birth alone but also requires domicile, which means allegiance and the forsaking of other political loyalties.

Thomas’s mighty dissent, extracted in full at this link, is really for the ages and teaches this generation something substantial about our history. The purpose of the 14th Amendment was to admit blacks as full members of the polity. “Blacks were entitled to citizenship because they were Americans,” Thomas explains.

“They had no other homeland, owed no allegiance to any foreign power, and were subject to no other authority. They ‘fought and bled in the same battles,’ ‘gained and gloried in the same victories,’ and were ‘liable to be called upon to defend [America] in time of war’ alongside every other citizen. The Citizenship Clause thus guaranteed them the ‘dignity and glory of American citizenship,” so as to ensure that they would never be treated as second class under the law.”

They were not considered citizens simply because they were born here. This distinction has more significance than first appears. Thomas then explains the difference between the feudal concept of subjection vs. the free society’s understanding of citizenship. There is mighty meaning here, one that is central to the uniquely American understanding of the relationship between the people and the government – a topic that reaches to the core of who we are and what the Founders were attempting to do.

The majority in this case plainly reinvented a feudal concept that the Founders pledged their fortunes, lives, and sacred honor to overthrow. Did they know or understand what they were doing? Not likely.

The emergence of birthright citizenship turns the entire history of its head and introduces a notion concerning individuals and the state that is contrary to the entire American idea. For the majority of the court to do this – probably without understanding the implications – on the 250th anniversary of the Founding only adds to the insult.

He concludes: “The Court’s interpretation is not only contrary to the original meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment, it produces grotesque results. While foreigners who wish to immigrate lawfully must sometimes wait for many years, a child born here to a birth tourist is automatically a citizen.” He warns “the Court has made a mistake that will seriously affect the country’s future.”

Thomas’s full opinion is extracted here. Please circulate.

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BY JOSEPH MARINE

View original article at Brownstone.org.

A few months ago, I was one of several candidates under consideration for Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). While I did not make the final cut, I was honored to be considered for such an important position. The administration has nominated a highly qualified team to lead the CDC and I wish them well. The experience gave me the opportunity to reflect on what reforms I would like to see at the CDC as it faces a pivot point in the history of medicine and public health. Here are six themes that I see as most important and urgent.

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1. Develop a new ethical framework for public health practice. Too often during the pandemic, policies were justified by the intended effects with little attention paid to the means used to reach those ends. The Hippocratic Oathand its modern derivatives have served as that ethical framework for medical practice for over 2,000 years and they have made the health professions (until recently) one of the most trusted institutions in our society. Public health practice needs its own version and should adopt many of its principles, including:

   • Respect for individual rights: The US just celebrated the 250^thAnniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. America is the “Land of the Free and Home of the Brave.” Public health practice in the US must be consistent with our legal framework, traditions, and Constitution, including the Bill of Rights.

   • Subsidiarity: Problems are solved best by those closest to the problem. This idea has already been espoused by the CDC in its new priorities statement. The US is a vast and diverse country with over 50 state and territorial jurisdictions, each with its own constitution and separate police powers. A “one-size-fits-all” public health policy dictated by Washington or Atlanta will rarely be successful. While some public health leaders lamented lack of uniformity in the Covid pandemic response, federalism served us well and allowed states with less restrictive pandemic policies to lead the country away from the worst of other states’ policies. The current US measles outbreaks have also demonstrated that local public health officials with local knowledge are better able to gain the trust of communities affected by outbreaks to bring them under control.

   • Non-maleficence: Avoiding harm is a basic Hippocratic principle in medicine which was largely ignored during the pandemic. Former NIH Director Francis Collins has belatedly acknowledged that US pandemic leaders paid little or no attention to the massive collateral damage caused by policies focused exclusively on preventing every possible Covid infection. “First, do no harm” is a dictum which should apply to public health practice as well as medicine.

   • Consideration of expertise of others: Public health is also public policy, not just science. A public health program must include expertise in economics, childhood development, psychology, and other fields which are not part of formal public health training. Dr. Fauci famously disclaimed responsibility for understanding the economic and social consequences of pandemic policies as being outside his field of concern. This attitude is not acceptable in medicine or surgery, where practitioners are expected to fully understand the consequences of the treatments that they recommend. It should not be acceptable in public health practice.

   • Use of least restrictive means to accomplish public health goals. This is already an acknowledged principle of public health policy, but it was ignored during the pandemic in favor of a misguided “precautionary principle” and “swiss cheese-layered protection” approach that promoted maximalist policies in almost all circumstances. Restraint needs to be reapplied.

   • Rejecting fear-based messaging. We recognize that manipulating patients through fear is unethical in the practice of medicine. It should be also in the practice of public health. Fear brings out the worst in human nature. While a public in the grip of fear may be more easily controlled and compliant with public health guidance, fear in the long run erodes social cohesion and trust in leadership. Good leadership inspires courage and fortitude. During the pandemic, some surveys showed that members of the public overestimated their own risk of serious illness and death from Covid by a factor of 100 or more, yet there was little effort to combat this misunderstanding. The CDC should lead with courage and confidence and never with fear.

   • Acknowledging uncertainty. Science is not a set of immutable facts. Rather, it is a continuous and iterative process of hypothesis generation and testing to uncover truths about the natural world. All biomedical research studies in human subjects have flaws and limitations, and good scientists are careful not to draw overly broad or definitive conclusions, especially from studies of weaker design. When faced with uncertainty, public health leaders should always take the opportunity to say, “I don’t know, but here is what I think and why.”

   • Renounce and combat censorship. For the public to trust statements of public health officials, they must believe that contrary viewpoints can be publicly expressed and debated in the marketplace of ideas. Suppression of those viewpoints by government actors may feed public mistrust and may suggest that they are receiving an illusory consensus and propaganda rather than the best available information. A previous administration embraced the dubious idea that “misinformation” was a “public health threat” and a “leading cause of death.” The new public health framework must treat contrary viewpoints with respect and encourage open dialogue.

   • Free, voluntary, and fully informed consent for any medical or preventive treatment. This is a bedrock principle of medical ethics It must be reaffirmed in public health practice.

Accepting this new ethical public health framework should lead the CDC to renounce mass quarantine/lockdown as a tool of public health. While quarantine has long been accepted as a tool applied to specific individuals exposed to an infectious disease for a specific and limited period of time using the least restrictive means possible, it has never before been applied to an entire nation for an indefinite period of time. It is far too destructive, especially to the poorest among us, and it has proven to be ineffective as practiced in Western countries. It undermines public support for other necessary public health actions. Finally, even if it were theoretically effective, it is unethical under the new framework. In medicine, we do not perform unethical experiments on human subjects, even if they might “save lives.”

2. Learn the mistakes of the Covid pandemic response. When practicing medicine, it is not considered acceptable to ignore mistakes and failures. We analyze and learn from them. In surgical and procedural specialties, we use morbidity and mortality conferences, in which we do an extensive review of each case that went poorly or for which an error was identified. When a series of similar complications emerge or there is a poor showing on a quality metric, we do a root cause analysis. The CDC can lead this process of reexamination of the Covid response through grand rounds and seminars. There is too little of this happening on university campuses. The CDC could set the example for how to undertake this kind of reexamination, opening the door for more open discussion and debate in universities and other scholarly venues.

3. Embrace diversity in political viewpoints. A Washington Examiner column just before the pandemic showed that >99% of political donations from CDC employees went to one political party. That is a major problem. A CDC which is too biased toward one political philosophy or set of viewpoints will not be able sustain long-term public support. While 50% + 1 may serve as a successful formula for electoral politics, it is a prescription for failure in public health policy, which necessarily blends science with public policy. A public health approach which does not account for a range of political viewpoints will not be able to garner the broad public health necessary for successful implementation, particularly in times of crisis. CDC leadership must examine how certain political viewpoints have been systematically excluded from the CDC and the field of public health and work to broaden the base of political perspectives within the field.

4. Improve the rigor of science and data quality. The CDC has a long and storied history and tradition of public health science, but this reputation was badly damaged by Covid pandemic guidance based on weak studies, speculation, and politics. This included arbitrary 6-foot distancing rules, cloth face coverings for small children, overly restrictive school reopening plans, unscientific eviction moratoriums, and advice on the conduct of elections. The CDC needs to rediscover the best of its scientific heritage and steer clear of policies based in politics and not science.
   The CDC should take a leading role in overhauling the quality of evidence base for public health practice by calling out limitations of existing methods which appear designed to reach specific conclusions. Retrospective vaccine studies which do not sufficiently account for healthy vaccinee bias, fail to report clinically important outcomes, and lack sufficient negative controls may lead to erroneous conclusions that diminish public trust in vaccine recommendations. Randomized controlled trials of new modRNA vaccineshave been marred by selective reporting of results, exaggeration of treatment effects, understatement of risks, and failure to include meaningful clinical endpoints such as total mortality, hospitalization, and net clinical benefit in total influenza-like illness. The CDC could take an important role in examining study design methods used to make important public health decisions, leading us to a more robust evidence base.

5. Embrace nuance in public health guidance. The use of a graded class of recommendation and level of evidence is a standard practice for guidelines in cardiovascular medicine and many other medical fields. Recommendations are graded on their strength ranging from I – strongest, to IIb – equivocal. Recommendations are also graded on level of evidence ranging from A where there are multiple high-quality RCTs to C-EO which are based only on expert opinion. During the Covid pandemic, CDC guidance was overly dogmatic and prescriptive; one-size-fits-all. An action was either recommended or not, with no level of evidence given. While there is some value in simple clear messaging to the public, simplicity cannot come at the expense of truth. I have found in my own medical practice that patients can handle nuance and can be trusted to make prudent decisions, even when given conflicting information.

6. Put infectious disease in context and embrace MAHA. In most years, infectious disease barely makes the top 10 causes of death in the US but plays an outsized role in public health policy and practice. The Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement has questioned a medical and public health establishment that has focused obsessively on the prevention of a few rare infectious diseases while largely ignoring environmental root causes of declining population health. Reconciliation can come through embrace of the key elements of the MAHA movement and incorporation into public health practice and CDC policy. Building a healthier population is an important component of pandemic prevention and mitigation. The CDC has an underutilized National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion. The Center could be repurposed, reinvigorated, and redirected to facilitate this new preventive health agenda.

These are a few key themes for public health leaders at the CDC, schools of public health, and elsewhere to consider as we collectively strive to build reconciliation and recovery from the disastrous events of the past. Better policy must acknowledge past mistakes while striving to be forward-thinking and optimistic. I will be rooting for the new CDC leadership to succeed in this daunting and historic challenge.

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BY BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE

Five years, 4,000-plus articles, 22 books, dozens of fellowships, coast-to-coast supper clubs, weekly podcasts, 19,000 donors, and the right kinds of friends and enemies aplenty the world over.

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It’s an outstanding record for this little institute that could. Much of it stems from a drive to do things differently: small staff, mission focus, maximum efficiency, and a results-based orientation.

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A notable difference: we do not have what is called a development department. These are the teams in nearly every nonprofit that do nothing but raise the money. You know them all too well: give a bit and get hounded constantly for more. Such teams are very expensive and kept alive by raising what they spend. We never did that and do not plan to.

As a result, our financials indicate that we spend less than 2% on fundraising. You read that right. This compares to the usual pattern in nonprofits of spending 25-30% and more on getting money in the door. These numbers are shocking, and illustrate the merit of going about things differently.

The success here traces entirely to you, your courage, generosity, and trust in this work. Goliath is a beast so ferocious in our times that it takes this kind of dedication to make a difference. And that we are, without hectoring spam, robocalls, or book-length pitches in your mailbox.

One close advisor told us that the results are so spectacular that Brownstone Institute should be written up in the Harvard Business Review, if they actually cared about well-run nonprofits.

Lately, we have have taken some extremely controversial positions that have made Brownstone a top target of Big Pharma and the agencies and media venues it controls. We know this based on growing numbers of attacks on our digital properties and reputation. We know this game very well at this point. We are not going anywhere.

All that said, we must ask: Can you help us celebrate our five-year anniversary with a financial gift today? It is tax-deductible to the full extent permitted. It goes to support a growing network of independent scientists, journalists, researchers, and writers of all sorts, a true community dedicated to resisting the consolidated groupthink of our times.

In the interest of making our digital tools more accessible, we have 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.

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. Our low amount of spending on development means that what you contribute goes to programs that matter.

The Brownstone Show is thriving. Tune in to these episodes, including the latest with Joel Bowman on the front lines from Argentina. 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.

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

• July 16, 2026 — Brownstone NYC Supper Club: Stella Paul — Get tickets

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• Aug 28–29, 2026 — Brownstone Polyface Retreat, Swoope, VA — Register | VIP Dinner tickets Regular registration ends July 31.

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• Nov 6–7, 2026 — Brownstone 6th Annual Conference and Gala, Chattanooga, TN — REGISTER NOW Early bird rates available until July 31.

For questions about registering for any of our events, please contact us at services@brownstone.org.

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 Deeply Troubling Case of Andrea Shaw and Her Twins By Brownstone Institute. Andrea Shaw has been indicted on two counts of first-degree murder by suffocation in the deaths of her 18-month-old fraternal twins, Dallas and Tyson Shaw. She is in prison now and faces a life sentence or possible death penalty for murder.

The Authentication Layer By Josh Stylman. Even with the creeping surveillance state, the government can’t fully implement programmable currency without authenticated identity on every transaction. Digital ID is the authentication layer, while CBDC is the currency that runs on top of it.

The Day the Hospital Disappeared By Joseph Varon. Forty years ago I watched a hospital disappear. What emerged from its ruins was not simply the physician I would become. It was the understanding that fear is inevitable and the greatest privilege in medicine has never been avoiding catastrophe.

The Death of Reading By Ann Bauer. Academics refer to this period as the “reading revolution.” Reading was as much an indulgence as carnivals and music halls. And this habit lasted, in one form or another, until recently when reading for enjoyment started to tank.

How to Make the CDC Great Again By Joseph Marine. The experience gave me the opportunity to reflect on what reforms I would like to see at the CDC as it faces a pivot point in the history of public health. Here are six themes that I see as most urgent.

Subjects and Citizens: A Treatise by Justice Clarence Thomas By Brownstone Institute. The emergence of birthright citizenship introduces a nation concerning individuals and the state that is contrary to the entire American idea. For the majority of the court to do this on the 250th anniversary of the Founding adds to the insult.

The Reimbursement Code Monopoly Is a Threat to Health By Margaret Hampton. Healthcare in the United States is in a death spiral. Costs rise, chronic diseases consume 90% of healthcare spending, and millions of Americans feel trapped in a system that limits choice. Patients increasingly want insurance for a broader spectrum of care.

The Declaration of Independence at 250: What Does It Tell Us? By Clayton J. Baker. John Adams stated that “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Are we modern Americans composed of the stuff needed to save our Republic?

The Army ROTC Taught Me to Never Call Independence Day ‘The 4th of July’ By David Gortler. America was founded on a set of beliefs and convictions—what Thomas Jefferson described as self-evident truths that were proclaimed in the 1776 Declaration of Independence and then protected by the Bill of Rights and the Constitution.

Malflusiva and the Wheeking Guinea Pigs By Alan Cassels. The most infuriating part of the VRBPAC meeting was that the members actually acknowledged and discussed some of these concerns, but instead of postponing its recommendation, the committee simply recommended further studies be done after malflusiva’s approval.

A.J. Cronin on Medical Ethics By Russ Gonnering. We must form healthcare “Communities of Practice” that are composed of groups of vertically and horizontally integrated professionals. Those just entering, those in active practice, and those in retirement can utilize such a Community of Practice for the transfer of knowledge.

Accountability for the Vaccine-Injured: A Senator Steps Up By Christopher Dreisbach. That may become Senator Johnson’s greatest contribution, not simply exposing what happened, but demonstrating that the search for truth does not end when the headlines fade. For thousands of Americans, that renewed faith may prove to be the best medicine of all.

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BY ANN BAUER

View original article at Brownstone.org.

Picture it. You’re lucky enough to live in the late 19th century. Van Gogh is wandering around the Netherlands painting haystacks and stars. Spiritualism is everywhere: séances, mediums, table-turning, and seers who communicate with the dead. Some dude named PT Barnum is criss-crossing America with this crazy melange of traveling circus and sly hoaxes. There are side shows and peep shows, theatrical extravaganzas in every town. Ragtime is just taking hold.

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And for the first time in the history of man, books are available to the everyone with a few ha’penneys to rub together. The print industry has exploded, becoming more systematized, and better at shipping. Suddenly, even ordinary people can read – in their parlors, at saloons and libraries, and after dinner, once the harpsichord recital is done. Novels are everywhere: Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, George Eliot. In France, Victor Hugo. The Russians? They’re producing metric tons of pages. Tolstoy, Dostoevsky. People are inhaling these stories, 900 pages at a time.

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Academics refer to this period as the “reading revolution.” Reading was as much an indulgence as carnivals and music halls. People didn’t HAVE to read, they GOT to read. They did it ostentatiously and with zeal. And this habit lasted, in one form or another, until recently when reading for enjoyment started to tank. Blame the Internet and social media and our fractured attention span. Blame Oprah, who in her quest to ‘get people reading’ promoted one title and focused every English-speaking woman’s attention on it, to the exclusion of every other book on the planet.

But the real culprit, if you ask me, is politics. When identity and partisanship become your defining feature, when you adhere to rigid ideas and philosophies – and fear anything that challenges your beliefs – reading becomes dangerous. All those random ideas floating around? Problems that have no easy answers? Bah! Who needs that?

So here’s where we are: reading for enjoyment has fallen by 40% in the past 20 years. And despite bullshit feel-good essays about how we’re not really reading less, it just seems that way – and online influencers who hawk the classics without a single specific detail about plot, theme, or character – literacy in every single cohort is falling off a cliff. Publishing is becoming narrower, more ideological, and preachy. The books that face out in shop windows reinforce pat answers instead of asking hard questions. And the world seems smaller, because it is.

Séances, circuses, live music, theater, art…they’re all on the decline. Instead we have performative costumed protests and Netflix shows that are contractually bound to restate their plot three to four times for the benefit of distracted viewers.

And original stories, with unique characters built word-by-word and impossible quests and existential messages? These days, you cannot give them away. To wit: my friend Christina Dalcher, author of Vox and Master Class, has a new novel called Lexecution that I have read and loved. She is offering it in sections – for FREE – on X (a work that would cost ~$27 in hardcover) and takeup has been less than pale.

LEX, as Christina calls it, is about a future (present?) British society where speech crimes are policed by drone. Authoritarian rule outlaws gendered words, adjectives that imply degrees of quality (it’s unkind to say, for instance, that a person is beautiful or smart, because it might injure those who are not), and all anti-government rhetoric. Children are enlisted, through the public schools, to report their parents for what they say. Re-education of offenders becomes a growth industry. Saira Rao, anyone?

Turns out LEX hit too close to real life, plus Christina was being punished – predictably – for counter-narrative things she’d said. First her agent and then a series of publishers backed out of negotiations to publish. Hence, she is putting this cutting and very real commentary online because the story’s the thing. It’s thought-provoking and necessary and what we need to read and discuss. She’s had fewer than 100 takers, which I will never understand.

Listen, I love this book. But also, I love Dickens and Tolstoy and – well, I dislike Austen, but I get that she had talent – and I want to return to the days of circus-like joy in reading. So I’m making this proposal, to those six of you who got to the end of my screed. I will personally lead a Zoom book club, for each quarter of “Lexecution” and would LOVE it if you’d join.

All you need to do is this: Subscribe to @CV_Dalcher on X, read the sections of “Lexecution” that she’s putting up, and send an email to ann@storyaliz.com with LEXECUTION BOOK CLUB in the subject line. I will add you to the list, set up a Zoom, and we’ll go from there? Deal!

If we get critical mass, I might follow this with a séance. You’ll have to fly in, but I guarantee it’ll be worth it. We’re going to bring the spirit of literature back.

Republished from the author’s Substack

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BY WENDY MCELROY

View original article at Brownstone.org.

The future of the United Nations (UN) is in play, largely because of its refusal to censure Iran—a member nation. In May, Secretary of State Marco Rubio reprimanded the UN: “If you’re telling me that the international community and hundreds of countries cannot rally behind that, then I don’t know what the utility of the UN system is.”

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Severing all ties to the UN could require an act of Congress, but the US is moving in this direction. On February 4, 2025, Executive Order 14199 directed the US to withdraw from 31 UN organisations. A great deal hinges on how highly Rubio still prizes America’s permanent seat on the UN Security Council which comes with a veto.

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The UN is often viewed as an ineffectual bureaucracy that occasionally does some good. It is nothing so benevolent. Its origins may have been well-meaning, but the current UN has become what it claims to oppose. The US should leave the UN altogether and immediately, especially since its unjust policies are likely to get worse…and soon.

The UN’s Original Mission

The UN Charter (1945) opens,

WE THE PEOPLES OF THE UNITED NATIONS DETERMINED…to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women…

The Preamble of its Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) states,

Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,

Article 2 of the Declaration provides,

Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex…

‘All human beings are equal’ is the basis of Western justice, whether the equality is under nature, God, or law. Instead of pursuing equality, however, the UN is now a woke and corrupt actor that creates inequality and division. The UN’s financial malfeasance, the sexual abuse by field personnel, its demonization of the West…are well documented in the 104-page report From Watchdogs to Ideologues: How Politicized UN Rapporteurs Are Subverting Human Rights by the Geneva-based NGO UN Watch.

The UN’s demonstrated commitment is to social justice or a wokeness rooted in equity, not equality. Equity seeks the redistribution of wealth and power to those who are considered oppressed from those who are considered oppressors. Equity is the opposite of equality under the law.

Consider its treatment of men who clearly are not viewed as equal to women, as the UN’s mission claims. An obvious example is the prominent presence of the UN Women commission that claims to be “the global champion for gender equality.” The commission identifies its goal as ensuring “every woman and girl lives up to her full potential.” No mention of men or boys. No comparable UN Men agency, although males are included peripherally by recognizing a need to train them to oppose patriarchy. The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) explains,

UNFPA works with men and boys around the world to advance gender equality and end violence. These programmes are encouraging men and boys to abandon harmful stereotypes, embrace respectful, healthy relationships, and support the human rights of all people, everywhere.

Men face many of the same global problems as women, however, including poverty, lack of education, violence, disease and harmful stereotypes. Men also face unique problems, including male-only conscription, paternity fraud, false rape accusations, and longer sentences for the same crimes. Nevertheless, compared to the UN’s emphasis on women, men are virtually ignored. And deliberately so.

The UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) is considered by many to be the international bill of rights for women. Again, no comparable agency exists for men. The FAQ of one CEDAW branch speaks of substantive justice for women.

Substantive justice judges fairness by results rather than a process; it favors the equitable distribution of rights, not equal rights. CEDAW states, “The concept of substantive equality arose out of the recognition that formal equality may not be sufficient to ensure that women enjoy the same rights as men. An ostensibly gender-neutral policy, while not excluding women per se, may result in a de facto discrimination against women.”

Instead, in the name of equality, the UN discriminates against men. It denounces the “poison of patriarchy,” decries the manosphere, and discusses the anti-gender movement. The anti-gender movement is defined as groups with an agenda of harming radical feminist and LGBTQIA+ policies. Even questioning these policies or advocating parallel ones for men seems to be anti-gender.

Earlier, I stated the UN’s policies are likely to get worse and soon. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres steps down on December 31, 2026. The leading contender as his replacement is the aggressively woke Michelle Bachelet, who launched UN Women and served as its Executive Director from 2010 to 2013. After this, she acted as United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (2018 to 2022).

In between stints at the UN, Bachelet served two terms as President of Chile. A prominent member of the Socialist Party of Chile, she mandated 50% female representation in her Cabinet and instituted political quotas to boost women’s presence in government, as well as establishing a Ministry of Women and Gender Equality; again, no comparable Ministry of Men exists. And, again, the equality pursued was equity because it applied privileges to women.

While at the UN, some of the global initiatives championed by Bachelet included:

• Safe Cities Free of Violence Against Women and Girls to address sexual violence in public spaces. The word “sexual” is key. Even the U.N. admits men experience more physical violence in public (81%) compared to women (19%). It is not clear the rate at which men experience sexual violence, however, as men report such abuse at a far lower rate than women.

• Fund for Gender Equality to provide money exclusively to women to empower them at the grassroots level. Males can access other U.N. gender funds but only in order to dismantle gender inequality, not to empower themselves. Men are to act as gender allies and “agents of change.”

• Increasing Women’s Access to Justice in Post-Conflict Societiesto support transitional justice and women’s human rights in conflict and post-conflict zones.

Everyone has the right to discriminate peacefully on his own time and dime. But the UN is primarily funded by mandatory assessed and voluntary contributions from its member nations; that is, by tax dollars extracted from individuals, half of whom are men and many who are dissenting women, like me.

The good news: there are rumors of the UN’s financial collapse since some member states—most prominently the US—are withholding their contributions. The US alone owes $2.196 billion to the regular budget and $1.8 billion to separate peacekeeping operations, which amounts to about one-quarter of UN funding. Without it, the UN will be sorely diminished in status.

Good. And if the UN does collapse, then better.

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BY CHRISTOPHER DREISBACH

View original article at Brownstone.org.

Five years is a significant milestone in any chronic illness. People can endure extraordinary physical pain, financial hardship, and emotional suffering if they that believe recovery is just around the corner. Hope often carries them through.

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But after five years, hope itself begins to erode.

Savings have been exhausted. Careers have been interrupted or lost. Retirement plans have disappeared. Marriages have been strained by the relentless burden of chronic illness and caregiving. Medical appointments that once promised answers begin to feel repetitive and futile.

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Gradually, the realization sets in that life may never return to what it once was. Temporary hardship becomes permanent reality. When physical suffering is compounded by financial ruin, social isolation, and the loss of future expectations, despair can become overwhelming.

For thousands of Americans permanently harmed during the Covid-19 vaccine rollout, that five-year milestone is arriving now.

Over the past several months, a disturbing number of Covid-19 vaccine-injured individuals have either taken their own lives or survived suicide attempts. As a board member of React19, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting those injured by the Covid-19 vaccines, I have come to know many of these stories personally. These are not statistics. They are husbands, wives, mothers, fathers, sons, and daughters who believed that if they persevered long enough, help would eventually arrive.

For many, it never did.

What made their suffering especially devastating was not only the physical injury itself, but years spent feeling invisible. Many lost careers, homes, and financial security. Others depleted retirement savings or accumulated overwhelming medical debt. Almost all experienced some combination of disbelief, dismissal, and isolation. After years of being told their injuries were unlikely, unrelated, or simply impossible, many began to question whether anyone in authority would ever acknowledge what had happened.

Against that backdrop, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations’ recent interim report, Failure to Warn: How Federal Health Agencies Downplayed and Hid Myocarditis and Other Adverse Events Associated with the Covid-19 Vaccines, represents an important turning point.

Drawing on internal government records and documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, the report concludes that federal health officials delayed acknowledging vaccine safety signals, withheld important information from the public, failed to respond fully to Congressional oversight, and repeatedly placed concerns about preserving public confidence above full transparency.

For the vaccine-injured community, that public acknowledgment matters. For the first time, many who were dismissed for years can point to official government findings confirming that safety concerns existed, were recognized internally, and were not fully communicated to the public.

Yet transparency alone is not enough.

A report that documents misconduct but produces no consequences may satisfy historians, but it offers little comfort to those whose lives were permanently altered by the conduct it describes. Facts matter. Investigations matter. But they matter most when they lead to accountability.

Fortunately, Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI), the chairman of the Subcommittee, has made clear that this report is not the end of his work—it is the beginning.

Throughout the pandemic and the years that followed, Senator Johnson has courageously pressed federal agencies for answers, demanded documents, convened hearings, and, perhaps most importantly, gave Covid-19 vaccine-injured Americans an opportunity to tell their stories publicly. His message has remained remarkably consistent: transparency is essential, but transparency must ultimately be followed by accountability.

That accountability cannot stop with institutions.

Too often, government failures are blamed on agencies, departments, or bureaucratic systems, as though decisions simply emerged from the machinery of government. Institutions become shields behind which individuals disappear.

But institutions do not make decisions. People do. Government agencies did not conceal information. Individuals did. Government agencies did not ignore safety signals. Individuals did. Government agencies did not delay informing the public. Individuals did.

Every significant decision described in Senator Johnson’s report was made by identifiable people exercising authority and judgment. Accountability therefore requires more than institutional reform. It requires determining whether those entrusted with protecting the public fulfilled their responsibilities and, if they did not, whether they should face professional, civil, or criminal consequences.

For the vaccine-injured community, accountability is not about revenge. It is about affirming a principle fundamental to every constitutional republic: no public official is above responsibility, and every citizen deserves honesty from those entrusted with protecting public health. Simply put, it is about justice.

Certainly, justice cannot restore damaged nerves. It cannot erase years of pain, financial ruin, or shattered careers. It cannot bring back those who lost their battle with despair before recognition finally arrived.

However, the pursuit of justice can restore something that has been steadily disappearing over the past five years.

Faith. Faith that truth still matters. Faith that public service still carries responsibility. Faith that those who suffered were not forgotten.

That may ultimately become Senator Johnson’s greatest contribution, not simply exposing what happened, but demonstrating that the search for truth does not end when the headlines fade. For thousands of Americans who have waited five long years to be seen, heard, and believed, that renewed faith may prove to be the best medicine of all.

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BY RUSS GONNERING

View original article at Brownstone.org.

When I was a first-year medical student, I happened across The Citadel, a novel published in 1937 by A.J. Cronin, himself a physician. The following is from the review on Amazon:

The Citadel follows the life of Andrew Manson, a young and idealistic Scottish doctor, as he navigates the challenges of practicing medicine across interwar Wales and England. Based on Cronin’s own experiences as a physician, The Citadel boldly confronts traditional medical ethics and has been noted as one of the inspirations for the formation of the National Health Service. The Citadel has been adapted into several successful film, radio, and television productions around the world, including the Oscar-nominated 1938 film starring Ralph Donat, Rosalind Russell, Ralph Richardson, and Rex Harrison.

From the Wikipedia entry:

Cronin once stated in an interview, ‘I have written in The Citadel all I feel about the medical profession, its injustices, its hide-bound unscientific stubbornness, its humbug …The horrors and inequities detailed in the story I have personally witnessed. This is not an attack against individuals, but against a system.’

Reading this novel had a profound impact on me, and that impact has lasted up until today, more than 50 years later.

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Medical school always had its own set of peculiar struggles, as does everything. Certainly, Basic Training in the military is an eye-opener. What makes medical school unique is the profound contrast of the reality with the ideal. Like many students, perhaps most, I entered medicine with a deep sense of the magnitude of what I was doing. It had a “spiritual” element, almost as though I was entering a religious order and now would be taking on the mantle of responsibility that was more than just a job. I had read the Oath of Hippocrates and could sense the heavy responsibility that had been felt by the ancients and the duty that this road would take.

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It would serve no purpose to recount those years in detail. Suffice it to say that, like those of Andrew Manson, the protagonist in The Citadel, my experiences were intense. They ranged from the utter heights to the deepest depths. The mettle of my character was refined and amalgamated in ways difficult to fully understand, even now. I graduated having many of the same feelings described by Cronin in the interview referenced above. I was conscious of my own mortality. I understood what it was like to make mistakes, but over all of it I had a firm desire to really make a difference in a system that was filled with obstacles.

The worst aspects of medical education have improved significantly since the time I spent there. The 40-bed wards are gone. Attending physicians take a more active role in the care of patients. Medical students and resident physicians no longer spend an exhausting 80 hours or more a week in patient care. There are multiple safety measures in place for patients and those caring for them. Up until Covid, I thought that we had made real progress in things.

But those are the externals. Has the internal moral compass really changed? Yes, it has in many individuals, but what about collectively in our profession? Consider those who told their patients, “I would sooner watch you die than give you hydroxychloroquine.” Has their moral compass changed? What about the medical leaders who allowed patients to die without allowing them to try ivermectin, despite the pleas of their family? Did their moral compass change? Or those who treated the unvaccinated as lepers? What about the medical ethicists who advocated denying care to those unvacinated?

How about the late-night comic on this YouTube clip who advocated a similar policy? Or those in the audience of that comic who thought this was outrageously hysterical? True, he was not a healthcare professional, but the problems we see run very deep in our society as evidenced by the audience response.

Now it is known that the premise upon which those people based their discrimination against those not vaccinated was false. The mRNA agent did not halt transmission and may have even enhanced it by blunting the symptoms in some. Have any of them recanted and apologized? Perhaps that is the most egregious of their actions.

Or how about the governmental officials who promulgated the CARES Act and PREP Act that shielded those who denied this care? Although, in theory, willful fraud was excluded, this has never been tested. The Pharmacy Audit Assistance Service gleefully celebrated the extension of this act until 2029!

How about those leaders of academic medicine, presidents of medical organizations, medical school Deans, and Chief Medical Officers who went along with this? Did the governmental monetary compensation for following protocols play a role in these decisions? These were known at the time by some to be faulty, but their voices were ignored or chastised. Now it is clear to all, but has accountability been forthcoming? What about those who received no monetary compensation, but still went along with things they knew, or should have known, to be wrong? Why did they do it? Fear for their job? Probably for some, but not all.

What would A.J. Cronin say about our response to Covid? We don’t have to look hard at all, as the books and articles have already been written! Search on these authors to see: John Leake, Peter McCullough, Scott Atlas, Paul Alexander, Peter and Ginger Bregin, Harvey Risch, Pierre Kory, Robert Kennedy, Jr., Naomi Wolf, Alex Berenson, Robert Malone, Zev Zelenko, Mark McDonald, Sabine Hazan, Jay Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff, George Fareed, and Brian Tyson and many, many others. I apologize to anybody not listed, but in truth the list could go on for pages.

The point is we DID have individuals ringing the same bell that Cronin rang back in 1937. We had many courageous people who did what needed to be done and pointed out what Cronin highlighted in his interview quoted above:

Cronin once stated in an interview, ‘I have written in The Citadel all I feel about the medical profession, its injustices, its hide-bound unscientific stubbornness, its humbug…The horrors and inequities detailed in the story I have personally witnessed. This is not an attack against individuals, but against a system.‘

The Covid hysteria has ended, but the tangible effects linger and have not been adequately addressed. Three groups of people were involved:

• The victims

• The architects

• The enablers

The victims need restoration and compensation. Jobs need to be restored. Members of the military, hospital workers, and first responders need full reinstatement. Unfortunately, as documented in the upcoming Children’s Health Defense movie, Duty to Disobey, lasting damage continues. Perhaps more ominously, we still may not have seen the true repercussions of the mass administration of the mRNA agents on society. The loss of the integrity of the medical and scientific professions and the resulting effect on trust will take years, if not decades, to resolve.

Of course, for those who died needlessly, restoration and compensation are beyond possibility. So is restoration of the lost loves, years of education, lifetimes of work for a goal and so, so much that was wiped out for, what it turns out, no good reason.

The architects need investigation, prosecution, and if found guilty, punishment. But what about the enablers? Certainly, there is a continuum of enablers, and they need rehabilitation if possible. At one end of the spectrum are those who saw what was happening, knew it was wrong, but did not intervene out of fear of the personal costs. At the other end were those who were truly confused and could not imagine a medical and public health system would steer them wrong. How do we deal with these people?

We need to value critical thinking, courage, ethical behavior, and moral reasoning in those we accept into training in the health professions, and even more, in those who advance to leadership positions. The actual study of leadership needs to be a part of education in the health professions.

This should be by no means only a preparation for leadership IN medicine. We need to understand that a physician should not be a “treater of disease” but a “leader of patients!”

Are these the things we really value in selecting those for entry into and advancement within the medical profession? You be the judge:

The American Association of Medical Colleges (AAMC) controls every aspect of entrance into medical school. They control the development and administration of the Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) as well as the American Medical College Application Service (AMCAS), both of which are required for admission to medical school. They have a monopoly on medical education!

What do they value in applicants? They are very specific and outline this in The Premedical Competencies for Entering Medical Students. Those qualities soundgood. They sound like the qualifications we would all want in practicing physicians. However, one must dig a bit deeper to match the words with the meaning:

In 2026, as part of a continuing review of our programs, the AAMC updated the titles and definitions of “cultural humility” (now called “self-awareness”) and “cultural awareness” (now called “understanding others”) to better reflect the meaning of the competencies and the behaviors medical schools are looking for in future medical students. The competencies were last updated in 2022 to reflect current expectations for medical students.

The AAMC has had a strong commitment to DEI in medicine. This is from 2023:

Throughout the country, we continue to be challenged with misinformation, disinformation, and misguided anti-diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) actions that are confronting higher education and our academic medical institutions and that will harm the health of our communities. We want to underscore that the AAMC is here to support your efforts to lead in the name of diversity, equity, inclusion, and racial justice. Your commitment and dedication to this work is important, recognized, and lauded.

Has anything but the words really changed? Is the monopoly on medical education really committed to the value of critical thinking, courage, ethical behavior, and moral reasoning in those we accept into training in the health professions, and even more, in those who advance to leadership positions?

We must make a conscious effort to form healthcare “Communities of Practice” that are composed of groups of vertically and horizontally integrated professionals. Those just entering, those in active practice, and those in retirement can utilize such a Community of Practice for the effective transgenerational transfer of both tacit and explicit knowledge. We may be able to attempt to restore the soul to medicine, but unless and until there is a change in the structure of academic medicine, it will be left to the public and grassroots medicine.

A.J. Cronin has so much to teach us.

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BY BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE

American elites celebrated the semiquincentennial with gritted teeth and shaded maledictions of our history and nation. Ten states even declined to participate in the Great American State Fair, on pressure from political leadership. Other urban areas cancelled parades on grounds that it was too hot so people should stay home and stay safe.

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Heard that one before.

Regular people, in contrast, were trying their best to mark the occasion with renewed appreciation of the astonishing words of the Declaration of Independence. It’s a document that not only founded a nation; it reset political ideals for the world. That remains our moral barometer of freedom and justice.

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The half decade prior has challenged everything: the right to bodily autonomy, free speech, free association, and even the right to worship and seek education. It was a frontal attack on all our principles, and the fallout is still underway. It sparked a revolt that is not going away, no matter how much major media outlets pretend otherwise.

In contrast, Brownstone Institute has emerged as the go-to source for credible research and reporting, an actual independent voice. They are far too rare in our times and invariably under fire from the establishment.

In the interest of making this tool more accessible, we have 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.

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. We spend only 2 cents on the dollar for fundraising, which might be a world record for nonprofit organizations. That means that what you contribute goes to programs that matter.

The Brownstone Show is thriving. Tune in to these episodes, including the latest with Toby Rogers. 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.

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

• July 7, 2026 — Brownstone Chattanooga Supper Club: John Holler — Get tickets

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Here is some content since our last email.

The Declaration of Independence at 250: What Does It Tell Us? By Clayton J. Baker. John Adams stated that “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Are we modern Americans composed of the stuff needed to save our Republic?

The Army ROTC Taught Me to Never Call Independence Day ‘The 4th of July’ By David Gortler. America was founded on a set of beliefs and convictions—what Thomas Jefferson described as self-evident truths that were proclaimed in the 1776 Declaration of Independence and then protected by the Bill of Rights and the Constitution.

Malflusiva and the Wheeking Guinea Pigs By Alan Cassels. The most infuriating part of the VRBPAC meeting was that the members actually acknowledged and discussed some of these concerns, but instead of postponing its recommendation, the committee simply recommended further studies be done after malflusiva’s approval.

A.J. Cronin on Medical Ethics By Russ Gonnering. We must form healthcare “Communities of Practice” that are composed of groups of vertically and horizontally integrated professionals. Those just entering, those in active practice, and those in retirement can utilize such a Community of Practice for the transfer of knowledge.

Accountability for the Vaccine-Injured: A Senator Steps Up By Christopher Dreisbach. That may become Senator Johnson’s greatest contribution, not simply exposing what happened, but demonstrating that the search for truth does not end when the headlines fade. For thousands of Americans, that renewed faith may prove to be the best medicine of all.

The US Should Exit the UN By Wendy McElroy. The US alone owes $2.196 billion to the regular budget and $1.8 billion to separate peacekeeping operations, which amounts to about one-quarter of UN funding. Without it, the UN will be sorely diminished in status.

The NIH Emails By Maryanne Demasi. A cache of internal emails obtained from within the US National Institutes of Health has exposed years of strategic planning for future pandemics involving governments, foundations, international organisations, and pharmaceutical companies. The documents, stretching back to at least 2016, show that Dr Francis Collins, Director of the NIH from 2009 to 2021, was at the centre of these efforts.

FDA Leadership’s “Blind Spots” Lead to a Surge in Medical Device and Drug Recalls By David Gortler. The FDA possesses the legal authority, institutional framework, and technical expertise necessary to solve this problem. What is missing is leadership’s willingness to demand the standards that once defined American drug regulation and legacy records of a low number of recalls.

The Empathy Weapon By Josh Stylman. Frame the debate so that only one conclusion is possible, then demonstrate some sense of open-mindedness about how people arrive at that conclusion. Be empathic about the journey. Just never, ever allow the destination to be questioned.

Reclaiming the Third Space By Mollie Engelhart. Third spaces offer something many of us are now missing: identity flexibility. They are places where we are not reduced to our roles. We are simply human among other humans. Without that middle space, identity collapses inward.

From Healing to Harm By Joseph Varon. Arguably, the most critical question for medicine is, “How certain are we that our actions are justified?” The response to this question may determine whether medicine continues to honor its commitment to healing or shifts toward the exercise of power.

The Pandemic Plan Needs to be Torn Up By Jeffrey Tucker. The closest thing we have in this country to a pandemic plan is called the Pandemic Action Crisis Plan or PanCap. It remains the prevailing unclassified document. It posits stay-at-home orders, testing, track-and-trace, and the creation of countermeasures called vaccines.

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BY ALAN CASSELS

View original article at Brownstone.org.

I had a very good laugh a while back. A few actually. So many, they are worth sharing.

T’was in May of this year when the storied New England Journal of Medicinepublished a study about a new and novel influenza vaccine, designed to conquer the seasonal flu. Lucky for us, this new bit of medical innovation was made from the same sort of whizbang mRNA technology that went into the Covid vaccines produced by Pfizer and Moderna.

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Yippee. Clearly this new jab is designed for those who didn’t get the joke last time when a big corporation came looking for us carrying a syringe full of what-the-heck-is-that?

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But I digress. Even the premise of this vaccine study is like the setup to a stand-up routine, where you know that stuff is going to get weird fast. Soon you find some in the audience are busting a gut as others are looking befuddled and scratching their heads over which the joke flew.

For starters, the biggest warning sign of any study is its size. A big study almost always means a small effect. Yup. In this case, to show some sort of effect they had to cadge together a group of over 40,000 people over 50, randomly injecting them with the trivalent mRNA-1010 or a “different licensed standard-dose flu shot” and following them for about 6 months.

We’re all in the dark about what “mRNA 1010” is but rest assured that this “investigational messenger RNA (mRNA)-based vaccine encodes hemagglutinin glycoproteins from World Health Organization-recommended influenza strains.” That should make everyone start feeling all warm and fuzzy, thanking their lucky stars that the WHO is all over this.

Speaking of which, the backstory of the annual flu campaign, often led by the big infectious disease brains in Geneva, is typically marked by hefty amounts of flu-mongering and vaccine salesmanship. There’s science and there’s marketing but when we’re talking the good old flu, the twain shall never meet.

For the most concise breakdown of the study, we can turn to the good folks at ICAN (the Informed Consent Action Network) who sent a letter to FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) and cut to the chase:

Moderna’s new mRNA flu vaccine, mFlusiva was a joke, especially if you take “the science” behind it seriously.

Of the 40,000 people in this trial, those who got “Mal-flusiva” (do I get bonus points for coining the first nickname for this mRNA miracle?) reduced their absolute influenza risk by 0.8%. That’s right, it might help 8 people out of 1,000. Meanwhile 6.4% of recipients (64 out of 1,000) suffered severe reactions (pain, fatigue, weakness, headaches), at rates which were five times the rate of the standard flu shot.

But did it prevent deaths from the flu?

No, fool. It caused them. In the “Phase 3 Immunogenicity trial” of the new vaccine, five patients died (versus one in the standard shot group). Hard to put lipstick on that one.

What about cardiac risks? Ah, you have a good memory, grasshopper. Events such as fatal cardiac arrest and congestive cardiac failure—similar to what was documented in the Covid mRNA vaccine technology– was also a feature here.

What about cancer? Also, good catch. As to that issue, ICAN blithely noted the “growing body of peer-reviewed scientific literature that identifies potential biologically plausible oncogenic or tumor-promoting mechanisms and purported preliminary population-level cancer signals.” A little verbose, but ICAN’s suggestion is sound. Let me translate its substance: “Wouldn’t it be better to find out if these vaccines cause cancer before injecting them into everyone, instead of after?”

Oh Prudence, you’re such a stickler. Doing so would kill this new vaccine in its tracks so the committee, predictably, shot Prudence in the foot. Clearly these “peripheral” issues identified by ICAN can be dealt with after it gets on the market and used by everyone. Funny indeed.

Here’s the penultimate laugh: we tend to push flu vaccines on the older population, and residents of long-term care facilities because the risk of a flu spiraling into a fatal pneumonia is higher than normal. However, the vaccine’s effects among the frail and vulnerable over-65 population was not statistically significant. Basically: Malflusiva has been proven not to work among the population most needing it.

You can’t make this stuff up. Truth is stranger, and weirder, than fiction.

And here’s the last laugh. Given all the bad news of a huge, well-controlled study of this vaccine, the committee decided to give it the thumbs down and refused Moderna a license to market this vaccine in America. Wow, didn’t see that coming.

Nah. Just kidding. The committee gave fulsome lip service to the vaccine’s many drawbacks but approved it anyway. And the US federal government is going to shell out over a billion of your tax dollars so that we can offer it to every older person in America. We can study for any safety or efficacy outcomes later, because, well, that’s the American Way.

Cue the sound of Wheeking guinea pigs. According to PetMD.com, guinea pigs make a variety of expressive sounds, including a signature high-pitched whistle called a “wheek.” They are highly vocal animals, and their noises change depending on their mood and what they are trying to communicate.

The most infuriating part of the VRBPAC meeting was that the members actually acknowledged and discussed some of these concerns, but instead of postponing its recommendation, the committee simply recommended further studies be done after malflusiva’s approval.

Meaning, America’s most vulnerable seniors will once again be used as guinea pigs while the FDA takes years to figure out if the vaccine is actually harming people.

This publication was incredibly funny in a cringy kind of way. It’s like that older uncle, known for his politically-incorrect language and his effusive, swashbuckling storytelling where he’s relaying something particularly odiferous. You can’t help but laugh out loud but you equally can’t tell him to stop because you want to hear the punchline.

Wheeking indeed.

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• The failures of post-lockdown labor data and the “great demoralization” of the American workforce

• Jeffrey Tucker’s personal observations on collapsing participation rates for women professionals and adults over 55

• Toby Rogers’ four-factor framework: 1986 Vaccine Act, globalization/job offshoring + opioids, COVID lockdowns, and COVID shot injuries

• Links between the childhood vaccine schedule, autism/disability epidemic, and never-entering the workforce

• COVID lockdowns’ lasting damage to work ethic, small businesses, and generational socialization

• COVID mRNA shots, rising disability claims, myocarditis, cancers, and physical/mental health decline

• “Biological colonialism”: pharmaceutical-driven iatrogenic injury as a deliberate wealth-extraction model

• Epistemic capture — how Big Pharma controls knowledge production in academia, journals, media, and government

• Censorship, DDoS attacks on papers, retractions (including cancer-vaccine research), and attacks on dissident scholars

• Health insurance death spiral, predatory allopathic medicine, and the loss of personal health autonomy

• The CIA vaccine mandate lawsuit example and the question of who really holds power

• Lack of accountability, the “Plan Cap Adapt” document, and why reforms have stalled

• Comparisons to Lysenkoism and the collapse of truth-seeking in American science and medicine

Toby Rogers brings rigorous research from his groundbreaking dissertation “The Political Economy of Autism,” years of independent analysis, and fearless criticism of regulatory capture. Jeffrey Tucker connects these trends to broader themes of institutional failure, individual liberty, and the urgent need to build parallel systems amid collapsing structures. This is essential viewing for anyone concerned about America’s workforce crisis, rising chronic illness, pharmaceutical power, or the future of truth in science and medicine.

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

Follow Jeffrey Tucker (@jeffreytucker) & Brownstone Institute: Website: brownstone.org

Toby Rogers: Brownstone Institute Fellow
Substack: tobyrogers.substack.com (@uTobian)
Ph.D. in Political Economy, University of Sydney

Drop a comment: Have you or people you know left the traditional workforce? What role do you think vaccines, lockdowns, or health issues have played in America’s labor and health crisis?

BY JOSEPH VARON

View original article at Brownstone.org.

Medicine is fundamentally oriented toward healing. Physicians have cured diseases, alleviated pain, extended life expectancy, and expanded collective self-understanding beyond what was conceivable a century ago. Few professions have contributed more to human well-being. However, medicine also confers significant power. Physicians influence individual behavior, shape public policy, direct scientific research, and, particularly during crises, wield considerable authority within society. This power can be beneficial, yet it also risks transforming confidence into unwarranted certainty and rendering authority resistant to challenge.

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Power itself is not inherently dangerous; the greater risk lies in excessive certainty.

The most significant ethical failures in medicine rarely stem from malicious intent. More commonly, they arise from overconfidence, hasty decision-making, and the belief that challenging circumstances necessitate drastic measures. The transition from beneficence to harm is seldom abrupt; it typically unfolds gradually, propelled by good intentions and increasing confidence in one’s own judgment. Numerous troubling episodes in medical history were initiated by individuals who sincerely believed they were acting appropriately.

The authority of medicine is grounded in general trust. Patients disclose their most profound concerns to physicians, trusting that truth, compassion, and respect will be prioritized. Society grants physicians special privileges, with the expectation that their expertise will be exercised judiciously and with humility. Perfection is not expected; rather, honesty, acknowledgment of uncertainty, and a commitment to continual reassessment are essential. These responsibilities are foundational to contemporary medical ethics and research regulations.¹⁻⁵ Yet, uncertainty is uncomfortable.

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Uncertainty is broadly uncomfortable for patients, governments, the public, and physicians alike. During crises, this discomfort intensifies. Emergencies such as pandemics or wars generate a collective demand for definitive answers, even in the absence of sufficient information. Leaders may feel compelled to project confidence, while experts experience pressure to alleviate public anxiety. The inherent uncertainty of scientific inquiry can, under these conditions, become particularly difficult to tolerate.

In these situations, medicine faces a big risk: mistaking confidence for real knowledge.

Scientific progress is driven not by consensus, but by the continual questioning of established ideas, the challenging of prevailing norms, and the willingness to adapt in response to new evidence. Experienced physicians have witnessed the abandonment of once-celebrated treatments. Medical paradigms have shifted repeatedly; interventions once embraced have been discarded, and regulations once considered immutable have been revised. These changes do not signify failure; rather, they demonstrate the ongoing vitality of scientific inquiry.⁶⁻⁸

Science moves forward because of doubt, not because everyone agrees.

Throughout medical history, episodes abound in which certainty yielded to humility. Bloodletting persisted for centuries under the mistaken belief that its rationale was sound. Frontal lobotomy, initially regarded as a breakthrough and recognized with a Nobel Prize, was later discredited due to its harmful consequences. Hormone therapy for postmenopausal women was widely adopted until large-scale studies raised concerns about its safety and efficacy. Certain antiarrhythmic drugs, intended to prevent sudden cardiac death, were subsequently found to increase risk in some populations. Numerous critical care practices once deemed reasonable have since been revised or abandoned.

These stories do not mean science is incompetent. Instead, they remind us to stay humble. They show that our knowledge can change, and we should remember that we might not see the whole picture. Being willing to question ourselves is not a weakness in medicine; it is one of its greatest strengths.⁶⁻⁸

When physicians become convinced of their infallibility, significant risks emerge. Excessive certainty can gradually suppress intellectual curiosity, diminish openness to alternative perspectives, and reduce receptivity to novel ideas. Over time, leaders may disregard criticism, transforming constructive debate into perceived disloyalty and rendering uncertainty a subject to be concealed rather than discussed.

Crises make ethical challenges even more complicated. Emergencies change what we see as right and wrong. Things that once seemed extreme can suddenly feel necessary. Societies accept restrictions and actions that would have been unthinkable just months before. Sometimes these changes are justified because emergencies do require action. The real ethical question is not whether we should adapt in a crisis—we must. The question is where adaptation ends, and ethical erosion begins.¹,²,⁴,⁹

Historical evidence indicates that emergencies frequently concentrate power among a limited group and reduce opportunities for dissent. In times of crisis, themes of urgency, unity, and rapid action dominate discourse. While these responses are understandable, they can oversimplify complex issues, obscure uncertainty, and marginalize alternative viewpoints. Paradoxically, periods that most require wisdom and humility may instead foster overconfidence and increased centralization of authority.

History rarely announces the moment ethics begin to erode.

Ongoing controversies surrounding the Covid-19 pandemic underscore the continued relevance of these ethical questions. Recent allegations regarding Dr. Anthony Fauci, including research management, discussions about the origins of SARS-CoV-2, and collaboration with governmental and intelligence agencies, have provoked intense public debate concerning scientific authority, transparency, and accountability. These issues remain unresolved and are likely to persist as sources of contention among scientists, policymakers, and historians. The debate goes beyond any single individual. The central concerns are broader: How should scientific leaders communicate uncertainty? What responsibilities accompany significant influence over public policy? To what extent should research oversight be transparent? How should dissenting perspectives be addressed when evidence is incomplete? What safeguards are necessary when societies invest substantial trust in a small group of experts?

These questions transcend personalities.

The Covid-19 pandemic exposed longstanding tensions within medicine. Expertise remains essential, yet experts are fallible: they may disagree, models may prove inaccurate, and predictions may fail. Even well-intentioned policies can yield unforeseen consequences. The primary challenge is not to eliminate expertise, but to ensure that experts remain transparent, honest, and sufficiently humble to acknowledge the limits of their knowledge.

The pandemic also illuminated a further reality: contemporary medicine extends beyond clinical and laboratory settings. Scientific leaders now operate within a complex environment that includes governments, regulatory bodies, media, social media, industry, and international organizations. In this context, scientific decisions frequently carry significant political and social implications. Physicians and scientists in influential positions may find their impact extends well beyond the boundaries of medicine.

Such influence imposes extraordinary responsibilities.

The exercise of authority amid uncertainty requires honesty and intellectual humility. Public trust is reinforced not by the projection of infallibility, but by the candid acknowledgment of knowledge gaps. Leaders must remain open and humble when wielding power during uncertain times. Trust is enhanced when experts admit the limits of their knowledge, rather than feigning certainty. Most individuals can tolerate uncertainty if it is communicated honestly. However, trust erodes when advice is presented as definitive and later revised without acknowledging the evolving nature of knowledge. The rapid pace of scientific advancement often outstrips society’s capacity to fully assess its implications. Innovations in biotechnology, artificial intelligence, genomic editing, and high-risk biological research offer substantial benefits while simultaneously introducing new ethical challenges.¹⁻⁴,⁸,¹⁰

The issue is not whether scientific research should continue. It must. The issue is whether scientific capability and ethical wisdom advance at the same pace.

History suggests that they often do not.

Physicians and scientists possess ethical obligations that extend beyond technical competence. Knowledge, expertise, and intelligence alone are insufficient. The responsible exercise of power necessitates less quantifiable qualities such as sound judgment, humility, openness, and receptivity to criticism. Scientific leaders must remain open to scrutiny, particularly given the potentially serious consequences of errors.

Humility is not the enemy of expertise. It is its necessary companion.

Being humble means knowing that our knowledge is incomplete. It means accepting that mistakes can happen and that smart people can honestly disagree. What seems certain today might be proven wrong tomorrow. Most of all, humility means that leaders should always be open to being questioned.⁵⁻⁸ Every generation of doctors believes it is more enlightened than the last. In many ways, this confidence is justified because scientific progress has been remarkable. Yet history shows that each generation also has blind spots that only become clear later.

The purpose of medical history is not to equate contemporary practitioners with those responsible for past ethical failures. Such comparisons are unproductive. The more challenging lesson is that ethical problems often emerge gradually. They arise when certainty replaces curiosity, when dissent is viewed as problematic rather than integral to science, and when established protocols are bypassed in the name of urgency.

Every generation believes it will never repeat the mistakes of the past. History encourages caution.

The moral standards that emerged after the catastrophes of the 20th century—from the Nuremberg Code to the Belmont Report and the Declaration of Helsinki—were built upon a common recognition: scientific capability, however extraordinary, must always remain subordinate to human dignity, transparency, and moral restraint.¹⁻⁴

Given the considerable influence of medicine, substantial self-restraint is required. The primary challenge is not merely the acquisition of new knowledge or technological advancement, but the preservation of the wisdom necessary to apply these capabilities judiciously. A physician’s foremost obligation is not to personal ideas, reputation, loyalty, or consensus, but to truth, transparency, and respect for individuals.

The future of medicine may depend more on whether we stay humble and keep asking tough questions than on what we can do. Are we honest about uncertainty? Are we open enough? Do we accept being challenged? Have we become too sure of ourselves? Are we really listening to different opinions, or just trying to control them? Have we confused being an expert with being always right?

The physician’s first responsibility is not to be certain. It is the truth.

The progression from healing to harm is seldom driven by malice. More frequently, it is shaped by conviction, amplified by urgency, and enacted by individuals who are convinced of their own rectitude. The enduring challenge in medicine is not solely the acquisition of knowledge, but the preservation of humility to ensure that power serves humanity rather than becoming detached from it. The requisite courage for physicians extends beyond decisive action in crises; it encompasses the willingness to embrace uncertainty, invite scrutiny, and recognize that the preservation of ethical medicine depends less on confidence than on the continual practice of self-questioning.

Arguably, the most critical question for medicine is not, “What are we capable of doing?” but rather, “How certain are we that our actions are justified?” The response to this question may ultimately determine whether medicine continues to honor its foundational commitment to healing or gradually shifts toward the exercise of power divorced from the humility that has historically served as its moral compass.

References

1. Nuremberg Military Tribunal. The Nuremberg Code. JAMA. 1996;276(20):1691.

2. World Medical Association. World Medical Association Declaration of Helsinki: Ethical Principles for Medical Research Involving Human Subjects. JAMA. 2013;310(20):2191-2194. doi:10.1001/jama.2013.281053.

3. World Medical Association. Declaration of Helsinki. Ethical Principles for Medical Research Involving Human Participants. Ferney-Voltaire, France: World Medical Association; 2024.

4. National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research. The Belmont Report: Ethical Principles and Guidelines for the Protection of Human Subjects of Research. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare; 1979.

5. Pellegrino ED, Thomasma DC. For the Patient’s Good: The Restoration of Beneficence in Health Care. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

6. Pellegrino ED. The Virtues in Medical Practice. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

7. Popper KR. Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge. London: Routledge, 1963.

8. Jonas H. Philosophical Essays: From Ancient Creed to Technological Man. Englewood Cliffs (NJ): Prentice-Hall; 1974.

9. Shuster E. Fifty years later: the significance of the Nuremberg Code. N Engl J Med. 1997;337(20):1436-1440. doi:10.1056/NEJM199711133372006.

10. Resneck JS Jr. Revisions to the Declaration of Helsinki on its 60th anniversary: a modernized set of ethical principles to promote and ensure respect for participants in a rapidly innovating medical research ecosystem. JAMA. 2025;333(1):15-17.

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BY MOLLIE ENGELHART

View original article at Brownstone.org.

was reading an academic paper recently that made me pause. It was discussing something called the “third space” or “third place” and its quiet disappearance from modern life.

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I had never encountered the term before, but the more I read, the more I realized it was describing something many of us are feeling without having language for it. The paper was not simply sociological. It focused on the brain, on neurological health, and on how the loss of these spaces is affecting our sense of connection, safety, and belonging.

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As someone who is deeply interested in community and real human connection, this immediately captured my attention. I wanted to understand what the paper was actually talking about, especially for those who may not be familiar with the concept.

The idea is simple. The first space is home. It is where our domestic identity lives. Family, rest, intimacy, and routine. The second space is work. It is where we contribute, produce, and create value. The third space exists in between. It is the neutral, shared place where people gather informally, without obligation or performance. Historically, these were cafés, churches, town squares, barber shops, libraries, local diners, pubs, and markets. Places where you could show up, be recognized, and belong without needing to achieve or prove anything.

What struck me most in reading this research was how essential these spaces are for neurological health. The brain depends on low-stakes, embodied social interaction. Eye contact. Familiar faces. Casual conversation. Shared laughter. These interactions activate the part of the nervous system associated with safety and connection. They help regulate stress. They pull us out of constant vigilance and threat detection.

Third spaces also offer something many of us are now missing: identity flexibility. They are places where we are not reduced to our roles. Not just a parent. Not just a worker. We are simply human among other humans. Without that middle space, identity collapses inward. Life becomes dominated by home and work alone. The brain narrows. Thinking becomes more rigid. Anxiety and loneliness increase, even when we are constantly connected online.

As I sat with this, I realized something uncomfortable. Many of us, myself included, no longer have a third space. And in many cases, we have also lost the second space entirely.

I work from home. I live where I work. I host where I live. My domestic identity, my work identity, and my social identity are all compressed into the ranch. There is very little physical or neurological separation. The nervous system never fully resets. Home is no longer purely restorative, and work never truly ends.

In some ways, public speaking, conferences, and book signings have become my second space. When I travel, when I step outside the land, I feel that shift. But that realization led me to a deeper question. If I am missing a third space, how many others are as well?

And more importantly, can we intentionally create one?

I have always believed that land, food, and shared meals are powerful connectors. We have a ranch. We have a restaurant. We have a place where people come to eat, to gather, to feel welcomed. But this research pushed me to think more carefully. Is it enough to simply have a space? Or do we need to create containers within the container?

A true third space rarely happens accidentally anymore. It has to be designed with intention. It needs rhythm and consistency. It needs repetition without rigidity. Something that draws people out of their homes and into relationship. Something that says, this happens here, regularly, and you belong.

That is when the idea of monthly gatherings began to take shape. Regular events that build familiarity and trust. Spaces where people can show up, be seen, be heard, and engage in real conversations in the physical world.

I am deeply honored that the first of these gatherings is launching in partnership with Brownstone Institute and Jeffrey Tucker, who many readers will recognize from his writing at the Epoch Times. We are starting a supper club on the last Friday of every month with the intention of bringing back the third space, one table at a time.

In a recent conversation, Jeffrey shared something that stayed with me. At first, he admitted, he felt frustrated as more and more cities wanted to host supper clubs. It felt like dilution. But then he realized what was actually happening. This was an idea he was committed to giving shape, form, and real-world expression. Once he saw it that way, he understood it was not something to resist, but something to embrace.

I am grateful that our ranch gets to be one of the places where that commitment takes physical form.

I want to invite people to consciously create third spaces in their own communities. We live in a world where we are constantly told that emails, social media, and text messages count as social interaction. Part of the brain may feel temporarily stimulated by this, but it is not the same thing as nourishment.

There is something essential about being physically present with another person. A hug. A firm handshake. Looking someone in the eyes. Sharing space and time together. Our nervous systems know the difference, even if our culture pretends otherwise.

I will continue creating spaces for people to gather around different interests and commitments, with the hope that the offerings are appealing enough to help us step out of routine and back into community. But this cannot rest on one place or one table alone.

I invite everyone to do the same. Create these spaces where you live. And if you are not in a position to host, then at the very least, show up when someone else in your community is brave enough to create the opportunity.

We are starting in the cold and quiet season, with the hope that something living can grow throughout the year. But beyond any single event, what matters most to me is the larger truth this research revealed.

What could be more important right now than gathering? Than discussing society face to face? Than forming relationships that exist beyond screens and algorithms?

The disappearance of the third space has left people lonely, anxious, polarized, and untethered. Rebuilding it is not nostalgia. It is neurological. It is cultural. It is human.

This is where we are starting. Around a table. In a place where people are known. And with the hope that the third space can be reclaimed.

Republished from the Epoch Times

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