The investigations are heating up. This is because the true source of the current crisis has become undeniable. It was kicked off in the shocking lockdowns of 2020. Everything else follows from there, including the health crisis, the economic meltdown, the breakdown in labor markets, the profitability squeeze, the educational catastrophe and more.
Making the connections is not hard. Finding venues who can and will speak honestly about them is another matter. And that is why Brownstone Institute has become such a hugely important source for reporting, research, reporting, and inspiration to find a better way to manage social, political, and economic affairs.
Here is some content this week that you might have missed.
The Pentagon Owns Its Recruiting Crisis BY P. MICHAEL PHILLIPS, PH.D. In short, the Pentagon’s stubborn adherence to its Covid protocol is breaking faith with its once loyal base. And the longer they dig in, the smaller that base will become.
The WHO’s Reckless Disregard for Truth BY DAVID BELL. It is time the WHO explained what it is doing. Whilst seeking greater powers to declare and manage future disease outbreaks, it is demonstrating that the organization is unfit for that purpose.
Now We Know What It’s like To Live Among Lunatics BY MARK OSHINSKIE. Day after day, week after week, month after month for 28 months, I heard people invoke the shibboleth, and parrot the mantra: “Pandemic!” Uttering this magic word was intended to justify any disruption of normal life, to excuse the failure to fulfill a wide range of personal responsibilities and to foreclose any reasonable discussion/dissent that might support the conclusion that the orchestrated, opportunistic overreaction to a respiratory virus was a complete, avoidable, government and media-made meltdown.
They Thought They Were Free BY JOSHUA STYLES. The men and women of Germany in the 1930s and 40s were not unlike Americans in the 2010s and 20s—or the people of any nation at any time throughout history. They are human, just as we are human. And as humans, we have a great tendency to harshly judge the evils of other societies but fail to recognize our own moral failures—failures that have been on full display the past two years during the covid panic.
The 2014 Template to Export Lockdowns BY MICHAEL SENGER. The significance of this pro-lockdown campaign in 2014 can’t be overstated. Even among lockdown skeptics, the widely-held view is that the world essentially bumbled into lockdown in 2020. Although China’s global lockdown propaganda campaign utilizing tens of thousands of bots in virtually every language and dialect across the world is well documented, moderates have argued that this campaign merely represented China celebrating its own “success” against Covid—whether real or not—rather than any premeditated plan to export lockdown as policy.
Worth It? Risks and Benefits of Child Vaccination Against Covid-19 in Iceland BY THORSTEINN SIGLAUGSSON. The researchers followed the outcomes of all children diagnosed with Covid-19 during the study period. They found that infections in schools were rare, no child was hospitalised with Covid-19, and none had severe symptoms. This study supports the results of a large Swedish study conducted in 2020 on nearly two million children.
The Censorship of Covid Science: Three Examples BY EYAL SHAHAR. It is not easy to show censorship by a small series of rejected letters. Rejection messages contain only boilerplate text, and editors are protected by an obvious argument: They need to make difficult choices, given many submissions.
“Expert” Narratives Are Collapsing BY IAN MILLER. For years, the media, “experts” and politicians have created narratives that mask mandates don’t work in the US because of lack of compliance.
The Day Anthony Fauci Wrecked American Freedom BY JEFFREY A. TUCKER. Fauci demonstrated at that press conference special knowledge of a fine print that not even the president of the United States had seen. He was itching to read it. Did he have a hand in its creation? Most certainly. And what about the typesetting? Are we really supposed to believe that it was an accident that the text with the devastating material was so small as to be barely visible whereas the large text featured mostly common hygiene tips?
A Pandemic of the Triple Vaccinated BY RAMESH THAKUR. Public health officials can talk and dissemble all they want about the baselines for comparisons and pretend to possess great sophistication in their understanding of the current state of the disease. They still cannot spin their way out of the hard data.
Hope Springs Eternal…with Some Effort BY JULIE PONESSE. It’s taken a long time to get us to where we are and it will take a comparable amount of time and effort to rebuild what we’ve lost. We can make the rational choice to hope for a better future. And we can take little steps toward that future by choosing hope right now.
Zev Zelenko, Physician and Moralist BY JEFFREY BARRETT. One can only hope a counterrevolution will take place, a Great Reawakening, that will lead Westerners back to the core principles of both genuine science and the faith tradition that inspired Zev Zelenko to become a great doctor and an even greater human being.
Dictatorship Chic BY JEFFREY A. TUCKER. The great debate between democracy and dictatorship, between freedom and despotism, between a government by the people and a government imposed upon the people is here at last. I’m glad for the clarification of terms. They are saying the quiet part out loud: they want dictatorship. All partisans of freedom should similarly stand up and say the loud part even louder: we tried life without freedom and found it intolerable. We are never going back.
Why Do We Adore Dogs and Despise People? BY THOMAS HARRINGTON. Our culture’s current obsession with the allegedly “human” qualities of dog, has a lot to do with our generalized retreat from the difficulties of finding enduring comfort and wisdom—and the foundational key to both, dialogue—with the always complex humans around us. That this widespread retreat from what Sara Schulman calls “normative conflict” had an awful lot to do with enabling the assaults on human dignity and freedom committed in the name of controlling Covid.
No Farmers, No Food, No Life BY CARLA PEETERS. More negative pressure on farmers and the food system is asking for a catastrophe. The immune system of many people, especially children, has lost its resilience and has weakened too far with high risks for intoxication, infections, non-communicable and infectious diseases, deaths and infertility. Dutch farmers, of whom many will face a cost of living crisis after 2030, have drawn the line. They are supported by an increasing number of farmers and citizens worldwide.
Delete the K in Monkeypox BY ROBERT MALONE. Tedros made the declaration despite a lack of consensus among members of the WHO’s emergency committee on the monkeypox outbreak. It’s the first time a leader of a UN health agency has made such a decision unilaterally.
The Long Knives Are Out for Elon BY PAUL FRIJTERS, GIGI FOSTER, MICHAEL BAKER. The hounds have been released on Elon and that they won’t be called back because overt rebellion must be seen to be punished, lest he try again or others are encouraged by his example. But Elon has successfully powered through a lot of threats already, and seems to have locked in many new political alliances that can help tide him over during threats like those he presently faces. If he now lays low enough, he will eventually be forgiven.
The Day Fauci Reversed Course: February 27, 2020 BY WILL JONES. What drove each of these people to get behind the closing down of society as the ‘solution’ to a respiratory virus? We can largely see now who did what and when. What’s mainly missing is the why.
Revisiting Georges Canguilhem in a Pandemic BY NARUHIKO MIKADO. That attitude, requiring us to spend our intellectual resources to an extent that may be comparable with that to which Canguilhem exerted his intellect in writing The Normal and the Pathological, will exhaust us. But we must remember that is precisely what we adults should do.
Mozart, Mediocrity, and the Administrative State BY JEFFREY A. TUCKER. While the story is fiction, the moral drama here is real and affects the whole of history. Every highly productive person – we don’t even have to speak of geniuses here – often ends up surrounded by resentful and mediocre people who have too much time on their hands. They use whatever limited talents they have to plot, confound, confuse, and ultimately wreck their betters. The demand to “comply” is always the watchword: it’s a tool of destruction.
Articles of Inquiry: The Role of Media BY SCOTT MOREFIELD, JORDAN SCHACHTEL, JEFFREY A. TUCKER. This report reviews the main issues that require investigation, cites examples of the bias and censorship, presents a timeline of pro-lockdown media coverage, and suggests an agenda for more extensive investigation. The authors hope this report can serve as a useful guide for a deeper look into this unprecedented use of media power to shape the pandemic response.