Brownstone is the Target

It's a demonstration of influence and reach

“It looks like you guys are doing excellent work,” said the consultant on the phone. 

“How so?”, we replied. 

“I say that because they are coming after you hard right now.”

Indeed, it is true. There is a flurry of attacks. And it promises to get more intense in the coming days and weeks.

You see, the junta that gave the country and world the pandemic response are hopping mad. They utterly failed. Everyone knows it. Rather than admit it and move on, they are doubling down. On everything. 

They are defending not just closures and masking but also even wide use of ventilators and shot mandates that segregated our cities. They have to, however ghoulish it may seem. 

Two successive presidential administrations were involved, along with the corporate, media, and tech empires, funded not only by taxpayers but also huge gifts from big pharm and private philanthropy. 

The entire caper was a massive operation with many moving parts. The opposition was tiny and now centered at Brownstone institute with massive public reach. It’s made an enormous difference. But that also makes this institution a prime target. 

Can you help us today? Many people depend on our commentary and analysis, which is reprinted and available all over the world. Our fellows program has been the essential lifeline for so many. We are truly grateful. 

It’s the business we have chosen so we have no right to complain about attacks. But we still need support. 

Take a look at our publications and you can see why we are a target. Treason of the Experts by Tom Harrington is an Amazon bestseller. Fear of a Microbial Planet by Steve Templeton utterly destroys the scientific basis for the policy response that ruined so many lives. 

Here is some content since our last email:

How Major Media Suppressed My COVID Journalism by Rav Arora. This is why traditional left-versus-right paradigms are obsolete. Many “conservatives” bought the public health propaganda wholesale while a number of traditionally progressive thinkers — such as Russell Brand, Matt Taibbi, Jimmy Dore, and Glenn Greenwald (regardless of their personal medical decisions) — vigorously objected to Covid mandates on the basis of foundational, societal principles.

The Covid Censorship Requests of Australia’s Department of Home Affairs By Andrew Lowenthal. The Australian stereotype of mocking self-important authorities was tepid at best during the crisis, and what questioning of authority did take place appears to have been quickly memory-holed by the spell-checkers-turned-fact-checkers at the Department of Home Affairs “Extremism” team. With each passing day, Idiocracy is looking more and more like prophecy.

Why Economic Cost Was So Seriously Neglected By Per Bylund. Economic illiteracy is an important part of the explanation of why there was such broad acceptance of the pandemic policies. And also why there was very limited skepticism among common people. Had they understood economic reasoning, they would have been inoculated (if you excuse the pun) against being deceived by experts. They would have been able to see through the promises and would have asked the necessary questions.

Fall of the Experts By Steve Templeton. The pandemic opened the curtain to expose the folly of expert worship. Experts are just as fallible and prone to biases, toxic groupthink and political influence as anyone else. This recognition might make people uneasy. However, it should also force a sense of responsibility to search for the truth despite what the experts might say, and that’s a good thing.

The Triumph of the Ulterior Motive  By Thomas Buckley. No longer would it speak truth to power, but it would speak lies on behalf of the powerful and psychologically justify that shift by trying to convince themselves they were doing so for the right and proper good of the nation and the world when in fact they were doing so for base and selfish reasons.

It’s Not Really About the Data  By Gabrielle Bauer. To prevent a repeat of the Covid debacle, we need to draw on principles that transcend the contours of a particular virus, like the above-mentioned freedom of assembly, bodily autonomy, and the right to provide for one’s family. As an online acquaintance—a man of the cloth—recently put it, “Would you want to live with the knowledge that you are alive today because thousands of families have lost their means of survival?” Well, no, I would not.

The Illusion of Republicanism By Michael Esfeld. The open society is also dependent on a positive narrative of freedom and self-determination. As an open society, however, it must be open in terms of how – and thus by which values – this narrative is justified. That is to say, it has to accommodate a pluralism of narratives which agree in the conclusion of implementing in society the moral obligation for every person to respect the right to self-determination of every other person.

A Warning to Those Who Seek Power By Alan Lash. Over the past three years, Power has hurt or ruined the lives of millions. It seems to have taken over many of our institutions: government, health, education, banking, and the media, all to negative effect. And the whole time all the people with authority in those institutions thought they were the ones in charge.

WHO to Govern the Health of the World? By Ramesh Thakur. This is the stuff of bureaucrats’ dreams: the legal authority to declare an emergency and the power thereafter to commandeer resources for oneself from sovereign states and to redirect resources funded by the taxpayers of one country to other states. The Covid years saw a successful bureaucratic coup that displaced elected governments with cabals of unelected experts and technocrats who lorded it over citizens and intruded into the most intimate personal behaviour and business decisions.

Sorry, This Is Not Going Away  By Jeffrey A. Tucker. Maybe this book by the Covid Crisis Group hopes to be the last word. This will never happen. We are only at the beginning of this. As the economic, social, cultural, and political problems mount, it will become impossible to ignore the incredibly obvious. The masters of lockdowns are influential and well-connected but not even they can invent their own reality.

What Would We Do Without the FDA and EPA? By Joel Salatin. What’s the first thing corporate executives say when their bad behavior and actions are discovered?  “We complied with all government licenses.”  What if they had to face their deeds by themselves?  And what if they knew thousands of eyeballs were watching them, from people who couldn’t be wined and dined, bought off and cajoled?  Bad corporate executives never get punished.  But let some poor farmer put a backhoe in a mud puddle, and he loses his farm.  Or some vitamin therapy genius find an answer to a disease and the system beats him into oblivion.

College Administrators Need to Admit Wrongdoing and Beg Forgiveness By Mark Oshinskie. Traditionally, college commencement addresses are corny or grandiose exhortations for grads to devote their lives to serving others. But this year, commencement speakers should show self-awareness and focus on how badly they and their peers have failed their students and an entire generation of young people during the past 38 months. They need to apologize profusely, specifically and at length.

The Truth about Randi Weingarten and the School Closures By Jennifer Sey. In reality, Weingarten did everything in her power to keep schools shuttered; she just pretended that she wanted them open. She had a direct line to Rochelle Walensky, the Director of the CDC, and interjected impossible-to-meet guidelines about what was necessary to re-open schools “safely.” Emails obtained through the Freedom of Information Act in May 2021 revealed that the AFT lobbied the CDC and suggested language for the agency’s federal reopening guidance.

The Battle Against Inflation Is Nowhere Near Won By David Stockman. In a word, American fiscal governance is broken and broken badly. Owing to the Fed’s massive monetization of the public debt over last several years Washington has lost all sense of the economic costs and consequences of massive borrowing. And that’s because there has been no “crowding out” and no spiraling interest rate signals from the bond pits of the type which historically kept Washington pols close to the fiscal straight and narrow.

The Power of Public Health Agencies Must Be Curbed By Jayanta Bhattacharya. Now that states are moving to restrict public health powers, public health authorities face a choice that will decide whether the public will ever trust public health again. They can fight a partisan political battle against these laws, and the collapse of public trust in public health will continue apace. Or they can gracefully accept limits to their power in light of their pandemic failures.

Justice Neil Gorsuch Speaks Out Against Lockdowns and Mandates  By Brownstone Institute. “Since March 2020, we may have experienced the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country. Executive officials across the country issued emergency decrees on a breathtaking scale. Governors and local leaders imposed lockdown orders forcing people to remain in their homes.” ~ Judge Neil Gorsuch

Downplaying the Adverse Effects of Boosters By Eyal Shahar. Downplaying. That has been a handy weapon against anything that threatened the official Covid narrative. Downplaying skeptical voices, downplaying uncertainties, downplaying contradictory data. I recently described a typical example of the latter from Denmark. Here is another one, from Israel, which gives us a dual opportunity.

The Triumph of the Pseudocrats By Bret Swanson. The growing realization of comprehensive pseudo-elite bankruptcy will spur new generations of leaders in and out of government. They will replace the pseudocrats and earnestly recommit to basic American ideals of excellence, honesty, pluralism, and growth. They will launch multiple peaceful revolutions in culture, economics, media, business, science, technology, and foreign policy. If so, our democracy might yet recover and thrive.

Pfizer’s New Woke Face  By Rebekah Barnett. It is also likely that some mutual back-scratching is at play in Pfizer’s support for the Voice. The Australian Government did Pfizer a solid when it signed off on secret Covid vaccine contracts that the public is not privy to, provisionally approved the under-tested shots despite glaring reasons not to, and purchased stocks in gross excess, resulting in massive wastage. Now, it’s Pfizer’s turn to add value to the Australian Government’s agenda. As previously mentioned, the sitting government is leading the YES campaign for the Voice referendum.

The Hospital Protocol Killed Their Loved Ones and They Want Justice By Stella Paul. When the federal government sent $9,000 to Patty Myers to pay for her husband’s funeral, she got angry. “I didn’t want to take a penny. It felt like hush money, like they were paying me to keep quiet about how my husband died in the hospital.”

Why Do Friends of Freedom Dread the World Economic Forum? By James Bovard. Last week, Elon Musk appointed Linda Yaccarino as the new CEO of Twitter. She has excellent political connections. In 2021, she partnered with the Biden administration to create a Covid-19 vaccination campaign. Free speech activists howled over Yaccarino’s appointment as Twitter boss because she is an Executive Chair with the World Economic Forum (WEF). Here’s the story on WEF, sparked by their most recent annual meeting.

The Covid Consensus: This Book Is Essential  By Debbie Lerman. For all the Paul Krugmans out there, who believe lockdowns and vaccine mandates were not only necessary but also had more positive than negative consequences, The Covid Consensus provides a sobering wake-up call. If we do not band together to dismantle and replace the structures of authoritarian capitalism that determined the pandemic response, we will face a dire future indeed.

Life Is Scary and the State Makes It Worse By Mark Oshinskie. People should have eaten well and exercised outside and understood that immune systems are highly effective. They should also have seen how many life experiences they were giving up—or making others give up—by foolishly supporting quackish “mitigation” measures. Hiding in your home or wearing a mask were never going to crush a virus.

Vitamin D: Everything You Need to Know By Simon Goddek, Robin Whittle. Inadequate vitamin D3 intakes result in most people having a 1/10 to 1/2 of the 25-hydroxyvitamin D their immune system needs to function properly. This is relatively easy to attain with proper supplementation, and is necessary to suppress COVID-19 severity, transmission and deaths. However, most doctors and immunologists are unaware of – and uninterested – in the research which shows how important this is.

The Marvelous Mr. McNeil By Randall Bock. For nearly 50 years, the quintessential New York Times reporter, Donald G McNeil, Jr. “did it all:” from copy boy to foreign correspondent to science reporter; ultimately to global health linchpin: his career successes symbiotically intertwined with his most frequently quoted domain experts, former NIAID- and CDC- chiefs, Drs. Anthony Fauci and Tom Frieden; trading access for placement. Then came Covid.