15 Days Become 1,141 Days

Certainly our liberties were flattened

It’s still a week away but the last vaccine mandates are being repealed, even for international visitors to the US. The emotions we all feel: elation and fury. 

A engaged couple we know, one Canadian and one American, have not seen each in other in real life for three years. A Brownstone fellow in Canada has not been able to come to our events. 

This is what became of freedom as 15 Days (to flatten the curve) stretched to 1,141 days. 

The powers they abused still threaten us. Yet we are surrounded by the devastation. It impacts on the culture, economics, science, education, media, and of course politics. The suffering is everywhere and so obvious, and the wealth transfers continue. Just this past weekend, government performed yet another bank bailout and fobbed it off as a mere acquisition. 

The crisis is nowhere near over. But the urgency to rebuild is upon us. Brownstone is doing everything we can with our resources to rescue writers, professionals, and experts from many fields, and putting together teams of thinkers as resources allow. 

We are still tiny in operations – we aren’t building a glass palace in D.C. – but huge in impact. Of course we are being called upon to do more. So many institutions have proven themselves to be captured, corrupted, or just plain incompetent. Now they are trying to sweep it all under the carpet, even as the World Health Organization is plotting with the original lockdown junta to centralize more. 

If you would like to help with our work with a continuing or one-time donation, you can be part of the solution. Thank you so much for all of your support! 

The book is Fear of a Microbial Planet by Steve Templeton is doing very well and we’ll soon have another book out, Treason of the Experts by Tom Harrington. 

Want to join us for our next Supper Club in Connecticut? It’s on the 17th of this month. Register here. Also you can register for our big conference and gala November 4 in Dallas, Texas. 

Here is some content since our last email:

The Meaning of Tucker Carlson By Naomi Wolf. He won’t let go of the memory of an America in which children were safe at school and parents decided what happened to their children. I, many, share this baseline value and are terrified that it is under attack. And he insists on patriotism, in a time of relentless propaganda and the bribery of elites that urges us all to drop national identities, cultures, borders, and even allegiances.

A Short History of Long Covid. Steve Templeton. Another strange post-COVID symptom—dubbed COVID toes—gained notoriety when NFL quarterback Aaron Rodgers joked about his broken toe being a result of his recent bout with COVID. Not surprisingly, media outlets took it seriously, with articles appearing all over U.S. media. Rodgers later had to clarify that it was only a broken toe, and not COVID-related.

BioNTech’s 30 Billion Reasons By Robert Kogon. The real winner in the Covid-19 vaccine sweepstakes is the German company BioNTech, not Pfizer. BioNTech made over $31 billion in Covid-19 vaccine profits on a 77 percent profit margin as compared to Pfizer’s just over $20 billion on the estimated 27.5 percent profit margin. So, BioNTech made 50 percent more profits on a nearly three times higher profit margin.

Proof that the Vaccines Were a Military-Backed Countermeasure By Sasha Latypova. “Whole of nation” is closely associated with “whole of government” terminology. Both present as feel-good ideas in plain text, but in fact these words signal a usurpation of power by the militarized executive branch of the government. Public private partnerships – so beloved by sellouts in academia, pharma, medicine and defense – are another closely associated term.

15 Days Finally Ends After 1,141 Days By Brownstone Institute. These days and for many months and years following, all the people involved in the pandemic response – not only government officials but media mouthpieces and Big Tech accomplices – will be rewriting history and hoping that everyone will forget the real history. They are trying to avoid accountability and save whatever vestiges of despotism that they can, while hoping to institutionalize the powers that made all of this possible. They cannot be allowed to win this struggle for essential rights, liberties, and truth.

Was this Deceptive Trade? Paxton v. Moderna  By Brownstone Institute. Suing vaccine makers is notoriously difficult by design. Alone among private producers, they are indemnified against nearly all harm thanks to government privilege. That makes them mostly off-limits for legal liability from vaccine injuries. Eliminate that provision and the companies would not likely even be in business at all, which tells you all you need to know. However, deceptive claims are a separate issue. Finally we might have here a perfectly crafted legal position to hold these run-amuk companies accountable.

An Authoritarian Death Meditation By Alan Lash. The Samurai faced real physical danger every day of their lives. It seems natural that they would develop a code to deal with death. Maybe we don’t need meditation for death. Maybe we need a meditation on the fear of authoritarianism, and thus garner the courage to carry on.

When I Lost My Sense of Claret By Thorsteinn Siglaugsson. For I lost my “sense of claret:” I couldn’t any more distinguish between a 2005 second growth Haut-Médoc and a 2019 cru bourgeoise Graves. Both smelled like sulphur, both tasted like watered-down fruit juice gone a bit bad: I couldn’t drink claret any more.

The Freezer-Truck Canard By Jeffrey A. Tucker. The excuse that we had to lock down because of freezer trucks does not hold water. The lockdown edict was issued on March 16, 2020, following the declaration of emergency on March 13, three days after Trump’s advisers convinced him to issue the lockdown. In that time, the funeral parlors and morgues closed too, as did most all medical services. The country was also in panic, which is not generally good for public health.

Where Have the Adults Gone? By Paul Frijters, Gigi Foster, Michael Baker. The last three years show us what happens when specialists are in charge. If you want to know whether it is a good idea to lock down a whole city, it helps if you can quickly see the many effects lockdowns will have among many different parts of the city’s population and economy. Only with a broad view of many factors do you have hope of making a reasonable judgment.

Lockdowns and Vaccines: Lessons from Denmark By Eyal Shahar. If the vaccines were highly effective against death, why was excess mortality in Denmark so much higher than in the previous flu year? Why was it so much higher than excess mortality in Sweden in the first pandemic year — without vaccines — when the virus was much more virulent than Omicron? Unlike Sweden, there was no “mortality deficit” to account for.

No, Washington Post, the Experts Were the Whole Problem By John Tamny. In 2020, rather than encourage the very wealth creation that has long been the biggest foe of death and disease (by far), panicky politicians quite literally chose economic contraction as a virus mitigation strategy. Historians will marvel at the abject stupidity of the U.S. political class, but not the Post’s editorialists or the authors of a report that the editorialists remarkably find insightful.

What Kind of Culture Are They Planning for you? By Thomas Harrington. Those who in this very moment are seeking to radically change our core conceptions of liberty and our relationships to our own bodies through their aggressive culture-planning have, so far, faced relatively little serious intellectual opposition to their efforts. This is mostly because the salaried inhabitants of universities and key institutions of culture, who under the implied rules of democratic liberalism are supposed to act as a critical check upon such efforts, have mostly failed to do so.

My Visit to the Artificial Land of Lies By Mark Oshinskie. Typically, government dysfunction and corruption have occurred behind the scenes. The effects of these failings have usually been sufficiently diffuse, and daily life was challenging enough, that such chicanery went unnoticed. But given American governments’ open, audacious dishonesty and crassly abusive actions during the past three years—after all of the propaganda, censorship, blatantly unconstitutional and life-wrecking lockdowns, closures, restrictions and mandates—trust is irretrievably broken for anyone who has paid attention. Any residual American reverence for their government and their capital is delusional and child-like.

Let a Hundred Schools of Thought Contend  By Michael Tomlinson. The establishment consensus on COVID-19 is built on sand and should be challenged. It arose from premature closure of the scientific debate, followed by suppression of contrarian evidence-based analysis. Dissidents include scientists, who are clearly not anti-science but are opposed to flawed science based on ‘low cognitive ability’ and confirmation bias in favour of establishment ideas. They are pushing for better science.

Meet the VLOPs! The EU Extends its Censorship Powers By Robert Kogon. The European Commission announced its first list of designated Very Large Online Platforms – or VLOPs – that will be subject to “content moderation” requirements and obligations to combat “disinformation” under the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA). As VLOPs, the designated services will be required “to assess and mitigate their systemic risks and to provide robust content moderation tools.”

The Censorship-Industrial Complex By Andrew Lowenthal. Big Media and Big Tech fell completely out of sync with material reality, smearing criticism that had previously been normal, and explicitly banning topics from social media such as discussion of a possible lab leak, or vaccines not stopping viral transmission. Polite society agreed with such bans, stayed silent, or even, as in the case of the Virality Project and its partners, led the censoring. A cadre of North American and European anti-disinformation elites meanwhile had been slowly convincing NGOs in Asia, Africa, and Latin America that their biggest problem was not too little but too much online freedom, the solution to which was more corporate and government control in order to protect human rights and democracy.

The Fight for Freedom is Not Over; It is Only Beginning By Michael J. Sutton. It is time to turn around and face the people we have condemned unjustly and unfairly. Current disclosures and revelations demonstrate conclusively that the state knew about the problems inherent in vaccines, they knew they were lying to the population about lockdowns, mandates, and passports, and they were complicit in a program of deliberate, calculated social manipulation and abuse. It is not surprising to me that many astute participants in this deceit have jumped ship, retired, or sought legal advice. Only the diehard fanatics remain to write their version of history.

The Washington Post Whitewashes the Covid Response By Bill Rice. The Washington Post’s Editorial Board just published a big article looking back at America’s Covid response. The editorial’s authors use a report from a team of “seasoned experts” to frame what America’s leaders did right and wrong in said response.