It’s Happening!
Brownstone Institute’s annual conference and dinner is now ready for registrations!
It is a gathering of Brownstone Institute scholars, writers, researchers, fellows, and supporters in historic downtown Dallas, Texas, with panels with experts, talks, socializing, and learning with friends from around the world. You are invited to join us.
Date: November 4, 2023.
Place: Omni Hotel, Dallas, Texas (a 4-diamond property)
The civilization-wide trauma of these three years have impacted every aspect of our lives. This is the event for frank discussions about the past, present, and future. No more silence! Register here.
The panelists during the day include Aaron Kheriaty, David Bell, Bobbie Anne Cox, Julie Ponesse, Jennifer Sey, Jay Bhattacharya, David Stockman, James Bovard, Debbie Lerman, Jeffrey Tucker, Pierre Kory, and additional medical doctors, epidemiologists, lawyers, economists, and others associated with Brownstone, along with journalists and other researchers.
Our special guest and dinner speaker this year is Brownstone Institute Senior Scholar, Ramesh Thakur. Ramesh is a former United Nations Assistant Secretary-General, and emeritus professor in the Crawford School of Public Policy, The Australian National University. The dinner is black tie optional and cocktail/formal.
Meanwhile, our monthly supper club is bursting at the seams. The next meeting is April 19, and will feature Debbie Lerman, the powerful researcher who first discovered the role of the national security state in the Covid response. For that you can register now.
Here is some content since our last email:
Don’t Let Them Memory-Hole This BY JEFFREY A. TUCKER. The tellers of tales can write stories but they cannot invent their own realities. There will be no restoration of liberty, rights, and truth until we come to terms with what happened, why, and how to prevent it in the future. Playing along with this conspiracy of silence surrounding a policy that effectively blotted out every advance in human rights since the Magna Carta is a disastrous error that could lead to the entrenchment of a new dark age.
Reflections on the Triduum: Can the Darkness Turn to Light? BY REV. JOHN F. NAUGLE. Three years ago I felt the depth of the darkness which had entered the world, and I was moved to choose defiance in favor of the light. This brought my path to be part of the good work being done here at Brownstone. A Happy Easter to all, and let us continue the good fight against weaponized fear which seeks to prevent us from experiencing our highest goods.
Congress Has a Leverage Point on Pandemic Policy BY DANIEL HOROWITZ. Unlike the PREP Act and the other emergency pandemic powers, this one is set to expire at the end of September. In other words, absent any action, PAHPA and all its authority to wage biomedical warfare are finished, thereby providing House Republicans with tremendous leverage to clip the agency’s wings. How can Republicans move on from this disaster and reauthorize the agency that is responsible for the worst tyranny in American history?
Visit the US by Sea or Land If Not by Air BY GWENDOLYN KULL. The vaccine requirement for foreign travelers may be one of the most ineffective and capricious “public health” policies ever created. It still exists to the detriment of binational families kept apart by its draconian prohibitions and at a cost of billions of dollars in revenue to the US economy while not having any effect on preventing disease.
Machiavelli and the Globalists: Why the Elites Despise Independent Thought By David McGrogan. If it turns out that the population is not so vulnerable after all, and men, women and families can improve themselves and their communities without the aid of the state, then the entire structure upon which the edifice of raison d’État rests becomes radically unstable. This is at least part of the reason why these movements are so frequently smeared and traduced by the chattering classes which are so reliant themselves upon the state and its largesse.
WHO Guidance on Shots for Kids Contradicts Fauci By Ian Miller. There was never any data suggesting that young healthy children should receive the COVID vaccine. But agencies and advisors like Fauci likely caved to political pressure from terrified liberal parents and media outlets, who demanded the ability to vaccinate their children.
Salute to Swedes for Standing Up to Project Fear By Thorsteinn Siglaugsson. While almost everywhere else people cowered in their homes, schools were closed, mask mandates the norm, the Swedish went on with normal life. The panic that had gripped the rest of the world left Sweden mostly untouched. The pseudo-science of ‘stopping the virus’ by masking people and locking them up didn’t affect the policies of the Swedish Public Health Agency, and despite defamation and even death threats, Chief Epidemiologist Anders Tegnell never swayed. ‘Judge me in a year,’ he said in an interview with Unherd in July 2020.
Beware Catastrophizing Climate Models and Activists By Ramesh Thakur. The final common element is the subordination of state-based decision-making to international technocrats. This is best exemplified in the proliferation of the global climate change bureaucracies and the promise—threat?—of a new global pandemic treaty whose custodian will be a mighty World Health Organisation. In both cases, the dedicated international bureaucracy will have a powerful vested interest in ongoing climate crises and serially repeating pandemics.
Media Is to Blame for Covid Vaccines’ Wall of Infallibility By Adam Creighton. At the very outset, compelling entire populations to take a scientifically novel vaccine, produced on a political timetable, against a disease that for the bulk of people was a bad cold, was a highly questionable policy, arguably trashing traditional medical ethics about informed consent.
They Hit the Pause Button and the Music Stopped By Jeffrey A. Tucker. Society is not a machine that anyone can control. It has no pause button. Attempt to treat it as if it does and you end up creating something distorted and possibly terrible, certainly the end of material and cultural progress but probably something much worse. It was utter folly for anyone to imagine that what they thought they were doing should ever be done. It is even more egregious that so many played along when they should have refused the pause.
A Unifying Theory of Evil By Haley Kynefin. Many of us can recognize the results of evil intuitively: evil causes vast human suffering; revokes our sense of human dignity; creates an ugly, dystopian, or disharmonic world; destroys beauty and poetry; perpetuates fear, anger, distress and terror; causes torture and bloodshed. Nevertheless, there are always some people who seem to remain ignorant of its presence — or, incredibly, see specific visceral atrocities as justified and even good.
The Suffering of the Innocent By Michael J. Sutton. We need to hear from the victims of Covid Hysteria if we seek real change. If we believe in freedom, we will start listening to those who have cried in the wilderness, walked in the darkness, and suffered in silence. The rest is background noise.
Why Legislators Should Reject the WHO’s Proposals for Pandemics By David Bell. The WHO’s funding arrangements, its track record, and the perverse nature of its proposed pandemic response should be enough to render these proposed agreements anathema in democratic States. If implemented, they should make WHO unfit to receive public funding or provide health advice. The international community can benefit from coordination in health, but it would be reckless to entrust that role to an organization clearly serving other interests.
The Structural Privilege of Elite Law Students By Phil Talbot. In 2021, 87% of Stanford Law students graduated with big law positions or federal clerkships (a near-guarantee of subsequent big law employment) in hand. Clients pay over $500 an hour for fresh graduates, thanks to a cartel-like hiring apparatus that constrains law firm recruiting in the name of prestige. Most of them receive these job offers after just one year of law school, leaving them ample time to engage in campus activism.
Opposition from Left Journalism By Gabrielle Bauer. Within days of the pandemic’s inception, criticism of lockdowns and other restrictions became conflated with right-wing politics. This put lefties in a bind: if they didn’t support the restrictions, they might be mistaken (the horror!) for a conservative—or worse, a soldier in Orange Man’s army. They latched onto the mask, the left-wing answer to the MAGA hat, as a badge of their political allegiance.
Democracy Under Stress in America and India By Ramesh Thakur. For decades, the US has tried to export and universalise bedrock American values like the rule of law, civil liberties, political freedoms and democratic practices. Now it is internalising some foreign policy vices like selective justice against unfriendly regimes while running protection for friendly ones.