Let the Investigations Begin!

Three crucial news items:

1. On Monday morning, Brownstone posted a truth-telling interview with Congressman Thomas Massie of Kentucky. He has been an absolute hero throughout these 26 months of disaster. 

On March 27, 2020, he forced a quorum to physically appear in Washington, DC, to vote on the $2T CARES Act (suspiciously written in only one week). This prompted astounding amounts of hate against him. 

In this interview, Massie gives the behind-the-scenes account, and explains how this spending bill essentially operated as a bribe to the states to continue lockdowns for as long as possible. 

The entire interview is riveting and a good reminder of 1) how much we don’t know, 2) how much has been forgotten, and 3) what desperately needs to be investigated in order to get to the truth. 

2. Brownstone has just posted an 80-page tranche of emails from earlier in the pandemic response that gives a crucial look into the who, when, and why of all of this. It’s called the Red Dawn email list, and it had a big role in whipping up frenzy among health officials around the country. This is an essential document for investigators. 

3. And speaking of investigations, some top writers and scholars for Brownstone will soon meet at a weekend conclave to map out the issues that must be examined at all levels of society in all countries. This is an effort to avoid the forced amnesia that is being imposed everywhere today. The result will be three research reports that will serve as templates for a decade or more. 

Brownstone is doing the crucial research and education to make sure that we can connect the dots, discover the motivations, shine a light on the players who are trying to sneak away, and make sure we learn the right lessons, all for the sake of the future of civilization. 

We truly need your support in this work. 

Brownstone charges nothing for its articles and research, requires no logins, encourages reprints and translations, is not funded by ridiculous ads that you see everywhere, gets no money from governments and NGOs, and thus relies entirely on idealists like you to support this work. 

All over the world, the name Brownstone Institute is associated with intrepid commentary and high-end research. Too many institutions and individuals either sat out this debate or were on the wrong side of history. They want to drop the subject. We simply cannot allow this to happen. And you know why: they want to retain the powers to do it all over again. And they have every intention of doing so. 

And this is despite their astonishing failures. From soaring prices to the baby-food shortage to the mental-health crisis among the young, it all traces to disastrous policy decisions made possible by a culture that has forgotten fundamental principles. 

This cause is NOT hopeless. We have seen enormous progress, and Brownstone has inspired and driven much of it. We know how much you appreciate this. We are not going to stop. It is going to deepen. Our reach is broadening now. Many people around the world are relying on us. Which is to say that many people are relying on you to support this work. 

Please consider a generous gift today. We have a tiny staff and yet a massive impact, which means that every donation goes a long way. Thank you for all your past support that has made this possible. Let’s all work together for a better future, one without the draconian outrages that have characterized these past 26 months. 

This is the work of our lives and will be for many years. We very much welcome your help. You can give dollars or crypto here. For larger gifts and deeper discussions, drop us an email at services@brownstone.org 

Here is some recent content on Brownstone:

The New Rift Between WHO and China BY JEFFREY A. TUCKER. Despite Tedros’s censored words, it’s no wonder that Xi Jinping continues to feel vindicated and affirmed, and sees no real political danger in choosing his own power over the health and well-being of his people. Governments around the world still cannot muster the courage to make a full-throated and solid attack on zero-covid, for fear of the implications of such a concession. Nudges and hints, even from the WHO, will not do it. 

The Red Dawn Email Dump: February-March 2020 BY BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE. The gigantic mess called lockdown began with an email thread called Red Dawn in early 2020, based on the old movie about a Russian invasion of the US. You can read many, but not all, of the emails below. They were enormously influential in generating the necessary panic to kick their sadistic social experiment into high gear. The participants are listed at the top in this file assembled by the New York Times, and includes top officials at all levels plus intellectuals. 

Why Is an Entire Generation Ignorant of Cell Biology?  BY JOHN VELLARDITO. The Next Generation Science Standards have not only failed to achieve its purported goals, but deprived our students, and future voters, of the minimum knowledge and understanding required to engage in meaningful discussion of significant science-related topics of the day: COVID, the SARS-CoV-2 virus, immunization/vaccination, infectious disease transmission, genetic modification, human reproduction and embryology, sex determination, etc. 

The Culture of Devaluation, Destruction, and Devolution BY JEFFREY A. TUCKER. We shut down the world for a year or even two and during that time, the stock market boomed and money arrived in our bank accounts as if by magic. It seemed like government could do anything and nothing would break. Now we wake to a world in which breakage is everywhere. It turns out that governments have no magic wands to defy the realities of cause and effect in this world, and that applies to public health, economics, and culture too.

Is It a Crime to Be Exposed? BY JESSICA HOCKETT.  Any school or health department still pretending that Covid is deadly for healthy children – or that it’s possible to prevent the spread of a cold – is either self-interested or deeply deluded.

Why the Silence on Lockdowns? BY MICHAEL SENGER. They managed to destroy countless businesses, upend human rights, kill millions, cast hundreds of millions deeper into poverty, strain the mental health of billions, and transfer trillions of dollars in wealth from the world’s poorest to the very richest—all while failing to slow the spread of a virus that was subsequently confirmed to have an infection fatality rate under 0.2%.

The Political Hierarchy of Infection BY JEFFREY A. TUCKER. We preach non-discrimination, equality, and democracy, but when confronted with what seemed to be a potentially mortal threat to our health and lives, we reverted back to pre-modern forms, almost overnight creating a new caste system, shoving the lessers among us in front of the virus to keep the elites pure and clean. 

April’s CPI Codifies the New Age of Inflation BY DAVID STOCKMAN. At the commodity level, the global food index is still up by 28% versus prior year—a figure which may well accelerate substantially over the balance of the year if the soaring price of fertilizers leads to the predicted cutbacks of farmer applications and therefore materially reduced yields this fall.

The Supply-Chain Crisis Has a Cause BY JUSTIN HART. There is no Cliff Notes version of why we are experiencing these supply chain issues across the world. A host of influences have combined to create a massive disruption to every day life and the things we buy to sustain it. Primarily, however, the problem traces to the shutdowns from more than two years ago, which created unanticipated shortages that will likely get worse.

The Baby Formula Shortage Is Serious BY LAURA ROSEN COHEN. This shouldn’t be a left wing or a right wing thing. This shouldn’t be a Democrat versus Republican thing. Left wingers and right wingers all have babies and toddlers, and those babies, grandchildren of those of the political left and right, will be starving soon if our leadership doesn’t get its act together. 

The Inhumanity of Compulsory Virus Control BY PAUL ELIAS ALEXANDER. In the last week, some of the top spokespeople for lockdowns, and all that is associated with that policy of pathogenic control, have come out to defend them plus threatening more now that we are seeing seasonal increases in cases. It’s almost as if they have learned nothing. 

The Public Health Prophet We Did Not Heed BY AARON KHERIATY. Needless to say, we did not heed any of this advice in March of 2020. We instead forged ahead with lockdowns, masks, social distancing, and the rest. When faced with covid, we rejected time-tested principles of public health and embraced instead the untested biosecurity model. We are now living in the aftermath of this choice.

Why Won’t They Admit Failure? BY JEFFREY A. TUCKER. Looking back, there is nothing terribly surprising about any of this. It’s a consequence of safety culture, arrogant elites, and a belief that powerful, rich, and intelligent people can manage the world better than the rest of us. We’ve been here many times in history, and it has always foreshadowed a long period of suffering. 

The Point of Masks: To Cause Alarm BY MICHAEL SENGER. The reason American kids were forced to cover their faces for six hours every day was “that it causes alarm in the other person and so you stay away from each other… But did the mask really help them? Did the mask keep the virus out? Almost certainly not.” Garrett always knew, but continues to support muzzling them anyway.

The Dangers of Compelled Belief BY DONALD BOUDREAUX. To establish their utopias, enemies of liberalism will never hesitate to squelch free expression. We liberals, therefore, must forever be ready, understanding the power of words, to challenge with our own words these assaults on freedom of expression and on open, peaceful discourse and debate.

The Pathogenic Excuse for Attack Liberty: An Interview with Naomi Wolf BY BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE. Naomi Wolf, author of The Bodies of Others, assesses the future of human liberty after catastrophic Covid policies and what they mean for human rights. She is interviewed by Jeffrey Tucker, Brownstone Institute.

It’s Not Over. It’s Just Begun BY NAOMI WOLF. To have a free society we have to have a history, and in this major historical moment, we had a massive betrayal of the social contract — a betrayal committed by millions. The social contract cannot be re-knit without public accountability, confrontations, and even condemnation. 

Desperation and Despotism in Shanghai BY JOE WANG. While the CCP engages in active censorship of the misery Shanghai’s residents are currently experiencing, there are both immediate and long-term economic, psychological, and health consequences from this zero-COVID policy that may reverberate around the world.

Governments Giveth and Taketh Away BY JEFFREY A. TUCKER. It shows that: we were rich! And then suddenly we were not. They gave us lots of money! Then they took it all away by taking away a huge slice of the purchasing power of that money. If there is a case for mass outrage, this is it. Sadly, most people cannot figure this out. It is opaque and the lines of cause and effect are too complicated for the Tiktok generation.