Mask Up, Stay Indoors, Cancel Everything

Where have we heard this before?

Mask up, cancel everything, stay indoors, and listen to public-health authorities. Pay no attention to any misinformation. There’s another emergency this time born of climate change. 

It’s like clockwork. One goes, another comes. It’s the model. And they will keep deploying it so long as they can. 

There’s a reason why there haven’t been any real apologies. It’s because they aren’t sorry for the last three years. The new normal is to stay in a constant state of fear. There will be no end to this until the people demand one and real changes are made. 

And make no mistake: those who dissent are being targeted now, and ever more aggressively. Still, there can be no backing down. Just the opposite. Rights and freedoms must never be given up and must be defended. 

We are extremely pleased that Maryanne Demasi has joined as a fellow for 2023. Of everything Brownstone does, this program could be the most valuable and unusual. We look at merit and need and provide a real lifeline and freedom to write and research, as much as possible, in these emergency times. It’s a quiet program with a massive impact. It’s also a scalable program based entirely on resources provided by donors. Currently we have 8 fellows but we could expand that if it becomes possible. You can certainly help! 

Another of our fellows, Dr. Simon Goddek, joins us on June 14th for our supper club. You are welcome to come listen to him and meet. 

Will we see you at Porcfest in two weeks? Brownstone has all day, every day, talks and discussions. You can meet our Fellows and hear talks by top medical professionals, economists, and others. 

See all our events here. 

Here is some content since our last email:

Europe’s Digital Services Act Puts Free Speech at the Mercy of Eurocrats By David Thunder. The Digital Services Act is an endless maze of complicated regulations worthy of a team of lawyers. Seeing as I don’t have a budget to hire a team of lawyers, I decided to skim through the Act for myself. It does not make for pleasant bedtime reading, not only because it is a morass of complicated legalese, but also, because what hides behind this legalese is an attempt by EU politicians to get social media platforms under their thumb

Fifteen Great Books for Summer Reading By Steve Templeton. So you’re going to the beach this summer, but have already finished the light and airy Fear of a Microbial Planet (why haven’t you left a review, by the way?), and for some strange reason you haven’t had your fill of fear and germs, so you are wondering what else to read.

Atlantic Council Takes Up the Censorship Sword by Andrew Lowenthal. Why would such a group all gather specifically around the question of “disinformation”? Is disinformation truly at such a level that it requires bringing together the world’s most popular author with military and intelligence leaders, the world’s biggest PR company, journalists, billionaires, Big Tech and more? Or is this work to build the case that there is a disinformation crisis, to then justify the creation of a massive infrastructure for censorship? A glimpse of the agenda offers clues.

How the Department of Treasury Got Involved in Censorship By Aaron Kheriaty. The Department of Treasury also coordinated with CISA to censor information that undermines “public confidence” in “financial services” and “financial systems”. Consider: if you raised questions about our banking system or the behavior of the Federal Reserve on Twitter or Facebook, the government was attempting to censor this information. This is a truly Orwellian monster operating under the flimsy excuse of protecting the “national security” and the “safety” of Americans. If you aren’t sufficiently alarmed yet, you should be.

The Failure of Lockdowns: IEA Speaks By Brownstone Institute. “Numerous misleading studies, driven by subjective models and overlooking significant factors like voluntary behaviour changes, heavily influenced the initial perception of lockdowns as highly effective measures. Our meta-analysis suggests that when researchers account for additional variables, such as voluntary behaviour, the impact of lockdowns becomes negligible.”

Nothing Like This Ever Happened Before By Yuri Biondi. A leader or an expert who claims he can fix everything, if only we do exactly as he says, can prove an irresistible force. We do not need to confront a bayonet, we need only a nudge, before we willingly abandon the nicety of requiring laws to be adopted by our legislative representatives and accept rule by decree. Along the way, we will accede to the loss of many cherished civil liberties—the right to worship freely, to debate public policy without censorship, to gather with friends and family, or simply to leave our homes.

The Death of the Authentic Left By Toby Rogers. The left political project now is just kitsch, a toxic mimic of its former self, deployed by the ruling class to enslave the world. The question is, why are so few people on the left able to see this? Naomi Klein, Noam Chomsky, and Michael Moore, to name a few, should have been able to spot the Covid psyop in about 5 minutes. Instead they became rabid cheerleaders for fascism.

And Now the Problem of Exploding Hand Sanitizer By Justin Hart. Compounding the issue was the challenge of dealing with hazardous waste. Disposing of sanitizer should be treated with the same caution as other hazardous waste, but the process is expensive and tedious. This daunting task was magnified by several fires involving vast quantities of unsellable hand sanitizer across the country in the past year.

The Silencing of the Experts By Thorsteinn Siglaugsson. As Kant explained in 1784, the silencing of the experts drives the loop of immaturity, preventing enlightenment. We must therefore ask ourselves, what if this spell was broken? How much closer would we be to an enlightened society? How safely would we be removed from entangling ourselves in those invisible chains, preventing us from living a full life, as truly autonomous and enlightened individuals?

The Destruction of Language as Tool of Power  By Thomas Harrington. It’s currently very fashionable in certain circles to talk about emotional resilience. What no one seems to talk about is cognitive or intellectual resilience, and how under the pressure of the semantic literalists it is being torn to pieces before our eyes. Language is a wonderful and amazingly complex tool that, if properly honed, allows for the perception and expression of nuanced understandings of the world, and from there, the imaginative creation of new hopes and possibilities.

The Plan: Lock You Down for 130 Days By Jayanta Bhattacharya. Imagine the early days of the next pandemic, with public health and the media fomenting fear of a new pathogen. The impetus to close schools, businesses, churches, beaches, and parks will be irresistible, though the pitch will be “130 days until the vax” rather than “two weeks to flatten the curve.” When the vaccine finally arrives, the push to mass vaccinate for herd immunity will be enormous, even without evidence from the rushed trials that the vaccine provides long-lasting protection against disease transmission.

Twenty Grim Realities Unearthed by Lockdowns  By Jeffrey A. Tucker. If you haven’t changed your thinking over the last three years, you are a prophet, indifferent, or asleep. Much has been revealed and much has changed. To meet these challenges, we must do so with our eyes wide open. The greatest threats to human liberty today are not the ones of the past and they elude easy ideological categorization. Further, we have to admit that in many ways the plain human desire to live a fulfilling life in freedom has been subverted. If we want our freedoms back, we need to have a full understanding of the frightening challenges before us.

How the Medical Industry Burned Its Trust Capital By Robert Blumen. Reputation and trust is a bit like capital. The opinions that peers and customers have about a person, institution or business is earned over a long time through honesty, reliability.  Consistent virtuous action is a form of investment.

Discovery Is the Covid Regime’s Greatest Fear By Brownstone Institute. All indications are that the judicial system will favor a final and clean decision for free speech, even if that only comes at the hands of the Supreme Court at a much later date. That does not fix the continuing problem now and does not guarantee that government and business will not continue this in the future. But at least for now, there is some reason for hope that the Bill of Rights is not entirely dead.

One Health: Subverted, Corrupted, and Ruined By David Bell. In the end, mad ideologues collapse under the weight of their own deceit and the shallowness of their dogmas. The earth-mother religion of a corrupted One Health and the feudalist ambitions of its priests will be no different. We should not fear public health or a holistic view of the world. They are ours and can be a force for good. Rather, we should expose the hollowness of the people who would subvert them, driven by their own greed and barren ideologies.

The High Cost of Shattering Sensible Boundaries  By Thomas Harrington. Boundary-setting, and with it the transmission of trans-generational knowledge and the ability to calculate one’s true emotional proximity to others, are essential elements of a healthy culture. For reasons having a lot to do with the Baby Boomer generation’s tendency to often flippantly dispense with time-tested cultural knowledge in the name of “progress” and or “liberation,” many children have been deprived of an opportunity to gain these valuable skills.