Elections Won’t Fix This

The carnage from lockdowns and mandates continues to reveal itself in failing conditions in economics, culture, education, and really every sector of life, not just in the US but the world over. 

Meanwhile, the political class is nowhere near owning up to what it has done, in cooperation with media and big tech. It’s the scandal of our times and Brownstone is dedicated to getting to the bottom of it. To support our work, go to donate. 

Here is some content from this past week. 

A Short History of the Testing Debacle BY JAMES BOVARD. Federal health agencies have had more blunders than practically anyone expected during this pandemic. The least that Uncle Sam can do is get out of the way of private efforts to help Americans recognize the risks in their own lives.

Was It the Pandemic or the Response? BY JOHN TAMNY. No doubt some remember “drop the bag at the doorstep,” “no knocking on the door,” “don’t ring the doorbell” lest the working-class germs of the delivery persons remain. It all raises a question about what people did to maintain their figures amid all the binge-watching, eating, and advertising of their doings on social media.

Elections Won’t Fix This  BY JEFFREY A. TUCKER. Uprooting the entrenched, arrogant, hegemonic, and unaccountable administrative state that believes it operates with no limit to its power is the great challenge of our time. The public is probably nowhere near aware of the full extent of the problem. Until voters themselves figure it out, the politicians will have no mandate even to test a solution. 

A Helpless People, Weary and Traumatized BY THOMAS HARRINGTON. The trauma is greatly diminished when we stop, breathe and, to the best of our ability, fearlessly catalog the injuries we have suffered, ask who authored them, and, if relevant, what made so many of us acquiescent to these assaults upon our dignity and well-being. 

Fauci Goes to Princeton BY MARK OSHINSKIE. Fauci delivered a self-revealing meta-message to college grads: when your work product sucks, gaslight and resort to name-calling and PC demagoguery. His stated concern about misinformation is painfully ironic, as it comes from someone who has lied his way through the past two years and, according to peers, many years prior.

The Myth of the Disease-Ridden Red States BY JOSH STEVENSON. The entire proposition is just silly. The concept of innate differences in populations is a well established consideration for those who study population health. One might think that our nations most prestigious newspaper might require their top writer to consult with population health experts or even an actuarial scientist in order to obtain a more informed perspective and give the data more rigorous analysis.

CDC Refuses to Post the Fix to Its Mask Study BY PAUL ELIAS ALEXANDER. The marque top level position that the CDC once held in the US and globally no longer exists. The credibility has fallen dramatically and this has a whole lot to do with COVID and how its leadership functioned in deceiving the nation by withholding important COVID information, repeatedly. 

The Politics of Natural Infection  BY JEFFREY A. TUCKER. Reflecting on this topic of exposure and immunity eventually leads a person to realize that we don’t need centralized control, coercion, and dictatorial power to manage a pandemic. Pandemics are unavoidable but they largely manage themselves while the best-possible outcomes rest with the intelligence of individuals informing choices based on their own risk assessment.

Mask Mandates at Tufts University: Wrecking Campus Life BY HARLEY CENTNER. Mask mandates have done their best to engender a school environment that is devoid of human connection and visible emotion; is this what we hoped for when mandatory masking went back into place in May 2021? The administration’s decision to renege on this transition indicates they are willing to forcibly mask everyone in perpetuity. For a policy that is ineffective at best and harmful to the mental health of many members of the university body, this is unacceptable.

White House Disinformation about Kids and Covid BY IAN MILLER. Jha has repeatedly spread misinformation about masks while overtly promoting vaccine passports and verification, and last summer claimed that “unvaccinated, unmasked folks” are the drivers of transmission, while ignoring that cases surged in highly masked and vaccinated areas like San Francisco. 

Justice Department Appeals to Get Masks Back on Airlines, Buses, and Trains BY ALEX WASHBURNE. Over a silly definition of “sanitation”, the CDC appears willing to gamble a pillar of our modern society’s constitutional law, a legal cornerstone of our executive agencies, and perhaps, should the CDC lose, its willingness to gamble will be precisely the reason why we can’t have that nice thing of Chevron deference.

Authoritarian Pandemic Policies: A Reckoning BY JOHN H.S. ÅBERG. Certainly, there must be something we can learn in preparation for the next virus ready to hold the world hostage. Or are we heading towards a sequel that bears almost plagiaristic resemblance to the current blockbuster? If there is one thing history has shown, it is that we often allow it to repeat itself irrespective of how devastating the outcomes were.  

When Will Our Sense of Security Return? BY MEGAN MANSELL. Our leadership keeps proving out how truly unprepared and incompetent they are in vastly different areas. Why aren’t we listening, as they warn us that it’s only getting worse, yet we continue to be so comfortably detached? The truth is that our leaders did this to us, under the advice of intellectuals who thought they knew better than everyone else. Now we live with the shocking fallout.

Inflationary Pressure Is Worse than They Say BY DAVID STOCKMAN. Food inflation coming down the pipeline of producer and consumer prices still has a huge head of steam. So as the “runaway inflation” issue takes front-and- center in the fall Congressional campaigns, the Fed won’t have any political leeway to pause, either.

How the Pandemic Response Changed My Thinking  BY JEFFREY A. TUCKER. What we really need is a system that is safe for freedom and human rights that protects those ideals even when the madness of crowds – or the arrogance of intellectuals or the lust for power of the bureaucrats – wants to scrap them. And that means revisiting the very foundations of what kind of world in which we want to live. What we once believed was a settled matter has been completely upended. Figuring out how to recover and restore is the great challenge of our times. 

Ethnocentrism and Political Intolerance: A Two Year Retrospective on the Pandemic Response BY ALEX WASHBURNE.  Across our vast, heterogenous human populations of the US, a policy or a public health message that works where you live may very well harm people who live somewhere else, who have different cultures, beliefs and values. As one size may never fit all, it becomes increasingly important for scientists helping a pluralistic world to avoid political monism at all costs, to deliberately create space for alternative ideas.

Why Did Intellectuals and Officials Celebrate and Copy China’s Lockdown Model? BY MICHAEL SENGER.  It’s long past time for intelligence personnel to start asking why health officials and media outlets have shown such credulity in using information from the world’s worst dictatorship.

Updated Johns Hopkins Study on Lockdowns Debunks the Fact Checkers BY THORSTEINN SIGLAUGSSON. Some readers may recall the media storm against this paper, driven by some self-proclaimed fact-checkers. The appendix not only debunks all the “fact-checkers” claims but the authors also demonstrate how they were based not on any understanding of the paper (in fact it looks as if the “fact-checkers” mostly never even read it), but rather on superficial and to a large extent irrelevant “criticisms”, repeated blindly by one “fact-checker” and one media outlet after another.

Mask Mandates Back in Philadelphia  BY DEBBIE LERMAN. This should be good news, especially for parents who have been worried about their children throughout the pandemic and teachers who have been worried about exposure to the virus at schools. It’s time to stop worrying. It’s OK to take the masks off.

After Summer, Europe to Target the Unvaccinated BY ROBERT KOGON. The European Commission’s April 27th documents thus clearly invoke a new rollout of the Covid-19 vaccination campaign in the fall, specifically targeting the hitherto unvaccinated and also children. Moreover, if the Commission gets its way – as it can be expected to – and the EU Digital Covid Certificate is indeed extended, they also raise the specter of this new rollout being combined with exactly the same coercive, discriminatory measures that turned Europe’s unvaccinated into social pariahs for much of the last year. 

The Loss of Trust Is Well Earned BY JEFFREY A. TUCKER. Human freedom is the public practice of not being trolled by the ruling class, which is forever telling us that life will be better once the most intelligent and most powerful among them are granted all trust to do with our lives and property as they see fit. When we decide that it ends, it ends. 

World Economic Forum Pushes Facial Recognition Technology BY JOHN MAC GHLIONN.  The dangers posed by digital IDs cannot be emphasized enough. As the researcher Brett Solomon—a man “who has tracked the advantages and perils of technology for human rights” for well over a decade—previously noted, the mass rollout of digital IDs “poses one of the gravest risks to human rights of any technology that we have encountered.”

The Corruption of the World Health Organization BY DAVID BELL. It appears the WHO’s staff are comfortable with ensuring the people they were charged to support are increasingly impoverished and their rights and health autonomy removed. They are not just resigned to the abandonment of basic public health principles and ethics, but actively working to undermine them.

The Grim Reality of Post-Lockdown Economic Trends BY DAVID STOCKMAN. In short, both the Wall Street and main street economies have been so badly roiled and distorted by lockdowns, the Fed’s money-printing spree, and Washington’s stimmy paloozas that a lot of stuff is going to “snap” as the Fed is forced into a desperate inflation-fighting mode.