A Hellscape of Arrogance

The pattern is now all-too familiar. Some disaster strikes. On closer examination, it should have been anticipated. Not only that: prior terrible policy decisions made the mess inevitable.

BY BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE

The pattern is now all-too familiar. Some disaster strikes. On closer examination, it should have been anticipated. Not only that: prior terrible policy decisions made the mess inevitable. The jaw drops and the mind reels. 

Officials don’t admit what they have done. Instead, they make excuses and blame everyone but themselves. Incompetence and corruption make a clown show out of the response to the crisis. Then comes the resulting solution: transfer wealth, always from us to them. 

How many times have we been here? We've lost count. 

The horror of the fires of Los Angeles inspired deep sadness for the victims and a desperate public desire to help and to know how this came to be. Fire control has been a priority of civilized living since the ancient world. How could history’s richest and most highly educated population areas have failed so completely and so miserably?

We know: it was a litany of malfeasance that combined to create unimaginable horror in an otherwise idyllic setting. It is enough to shake even the most intransigent of the woke ruling class. Will they get the message? 

Meanwhile, Brownstone Institute enters the new year with energy and focus. We have set an impossible deadline to publish a blueprint for cutting $2 trillion from the budget, as written by David Stockman, Reagan’s budget director. The plan is to send it to every Senator and Member of Congress. If you want to help, please donate here. 

We have a new location for supper club! It is Bloomington, Indiana. The date is January 13! 

The West Hartford, Connecticut, supper club this month focuses on MAHA transition with Leland Lerman, who serves on the correspondence committee. The date is January 15. 

The next Philadelphia Supper Club will be on Wednesday, February 12. Guest speaker is Executive Vice President Nico Perrino of FIRE (The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.

Here is some content since our last email. 

To Survive Family Dinners By Thomas Harrington. Everyone knows that the multi-generational family table has, for centuries, been the prime site of socialization for society’s young. It is where they have learned to listen, pay attention, interpret body language, and acquire the art of storytelling.

Wildfires and the Hoary Hoax of a Burning Planet By David Stockman. The current raging California fires are largely a function of misguided government policies. Officials have essentially curtailed the supply of water available to firefighters, even as they have increased the supply of combustible kindling and vegetation which feeds these wildfires.

When the Solution is Tyranny, Be a Problem By Richard Kelly. What “Reaction” might cause a “Problem” for the tyrant when we consider the “Solution” that is the under-16 social media ban? “Problems” as such don’t even necessarily have to be related to the “Solution.” Just be a problem.

Big Pharma Continues to Hide the Truth By Harvey Risch. Medical ethics demand a balanced approach to every intervention, weighing potential benefits against potential harms. However, in the case of the Covid vaccines, federal agencies have chosen only to proclaim benefits.

Free Speech Win Down Under as Misinformation Bill Is Officially Binned By Rebekah Barnett. In a win for free speech advocates, the Australian Government formally abandoned its misinformation bill. The proposed laws would have forced social media companies to show that they were preventing the spread of misinformation and disinformation on their platforms.

Trump’s Populism in Historical Context By Robert Malone. One thing I can guarantee is that this administration will not be perfect and will not fulfill all of our hopes and dreams. But it may move the ball away from globalism, gender reassignment surgery, wokeism, DEI, ESG, and socialism.

Technocracy, Fear-Mongers, and the Conspiracy By Bert Olivier. Technocracy would go further than merely using technical means to govern people, such as surveillance equipment or armoured cars for crowd control; in the true sense of the word technocracy, devices such as AI-robots would be the means of governance.

Can DOGE Handle the Bureaucratic Imperative? By Thomas Buckley. The bureaucracy will have to slough off its meaningless bits, the parts that only communicate with other bureaucracies, and the fewer bureaucrats that are left around means the less chance they will invent new work for themselves.

The Cost of Facebook’s Now-Repudiated Censorship By Josh Stylman and Jeffrey Tucker. Meta’s dismantling of its fact-checking program – announced by Zuckerberg as a “cultural tipping point towards prioritizing speech” – reads like a quiet footnote to what may be one of the most staggering violations of fundamental rights in recent memory.

The Trump Administration Must Bring Moderna to Heel By Brownstone Institute. The extent of the cover-up remains unknown, but Moderna, headed by CEO Stéphane Bancel, disregarded federal law requiring companies to report “summary results information, including adverse event information, for specified clinical trials of drug products” to clinicaltrials.gov.

Congress’s Golden Opportunity for Reform By Christopher Dreisbach. As the swearing-in of the 119th Congress draws near, those of us suffering from debilitating adverse Covid-19 vaccine reactions, as well as our non-injured supporters, must prepare to push harder than ever before.

Nosferatu in the Wake of the Covid Experience By Jeffrey Tucker. Bram Stoker’s classic Dracula (1892) was written as a Victorian-style moralizing tale of sin and its consequences. The novel would become a bestseller largely due to its lascivious imagery and terrifying plotline that fed into every anxiety over morality, science, and public health, much less kick off a century and a quarter of vampire films.

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