Saving Truth, Saving Civilization
There are no rewards coming to dissidents these days. It’s all part of the great purge that is ongoing. Hitting people where it hurts is a highly effective way to mold political conformism.
BY BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE
A physician loses his license. A medical student is kicked out of school. An attorney is shoved out of her law firm. A journalist loses a long-time outlet. A professor’s department is abolished. An intrepid researcher is told to stop but won’t. A clinician loses all funding. A scholar is forced to leave the country because his wife rejects the mRNA shots.
These things are happening in real life in response to the crisis of our times. There are no rewards coming to dissidents these days. It’s all part of the great purge that is ongoing. Hitting people where it hurts – their careers, communities, and bank accounts – is a highly effective way to mold political conformism.
They have persisted in telling the truth anyway. Brownstone Institute, with eternal gratitude for magnanimous donors, has been well-positioned to help many of these people. The Fellows program provides community, encouragement, and financial support.
We have never exploited their personal stories for fundraising purposes, though it would have been easy to do so. Instead we have chosen the path of discretion in the face of tragedy.
Please know that every dollar you contribute to our work is achieving tremendous good in this world today. No, we cannot save civilization. But we can do our part to do the right thing when it matters. We very much welcome your partnership in this great task!
(By the way, we made an error in our last email. The supper club meets February 21st. That’s a Wednesday.)
Here is some content since our last email:
The Wheels of Life By Thomas Harrington. The bicycle is the ultimate freedom machine; cheap, reliable, and largely beyond the ever-creeping reach of regulating authorities. It doesn’t saddle you with debt, fuel costs, or garaging fees. And it keeps you fit besides. If they have any downsides, I don’t see them.
We Can’t Ban Our Way to a Better World By Charles Krblich. It is clear beyond any doubt that bans simply don’t work. I was a child during the “Just Say No” anti-drug campaign. Drugs were banned, and yet always available. Chicago has banned guns for years and yet has incredibly high gun violence. We banned smiles, playgrounds, and normal personal interaction for years in order to ban Covid and we still catch Covid.
How to Repair Our Post-Repentance Culture By Thomas Harrington. Maybe I’m blind to their existence, but outside the largely narcissistic and comfortably non-personal woke rituals of remorse, I see few institutional pressures in our culture for young people, or anyone for that matter, to undertake the serious and always consequential act of examining their behaviors in the light of moral principles. Just the opposite, in fact.
Room Filtration Didn’t Work Either By Jeffrey Tucker. Yes, you remember those days. Let’s say you have installed a new HVAC system. That’s good but it does not quite do the trick. You still must stay away from everyone. You have to mask up, outdoors even. You have to wash your hands constantly. You have to spray everything down with sanitizer. I mean, it seems like your whole life is consumed by fear of disease.
Disease X and Davos: This is Not the Way to Evaluate and Formulate Public Policy By REPPARE. To gain legitimacy, public health policy must be vested in institutions answerable to the public and based on reliable evidence. In the case of the recent World Economic Forum (WEF) venture in public health policy advocacy in Davos, neither of these measures of legitimacy were met. Also in question is legitimacy in the media coverage, where the basic tenets of journalism – questioning evidence, corroborating sources, providing context, and awareness of conflict of interest – seem to have gone missing.
Federal Court Judge Pulls Canada Back from the Brink By Bruce Pardy. The Canadian government’s use of the Emergencies Act was unlawful. The Trucker Convoy did not constitute a national emergency. So said a judge of the Federal Court on Tuesday. The decision may help to pull Canada back from the brink of authoritarian rule.
Did Pfizer-BioNTech “Placebos” Contain Empty Lipids? By Robert Kogon. The focus of my report was the discovery by the German professors that all but one of the “yellow” batches, which are almost entirely innocuous per the Danish data, had not been subject to quality control testing by the agency responsible for batch release throughout the EU: namely, Germany’s own Paul Ehrlich Institute (PEI).
President von der Leyen’s WEF Speech is Sheer Manipulation By David Thunder. Few would question the claim that artificial intelligence, bots, and various malicious actors can leverage social media and other digital “information highways” to confuse, disorient, and manipulate citizens. However, the President of the European Commission, like any smart politician, knows how to milk a crisis to expand her own power, and her January 16th speech at Davos was a tour de force in crisis manipulation.
Science-Totalitarianism Now Threatens Liberalism By Maximilien Lacour. Faced with the techno-scientification of everything, those of us wedded to the ideals of liberalism urgently need to recognise this threat. We need to recognise that though it is often useful, science cannot transcend the human condition. However much opportunity it brings, it cannot save us from being the limited, complex creatures that we are.
The DOJ Quietly Prosecutes the Covid Resistance By Brownstone Institute. There is no indication that the powerful will be held accountable for the damage they imposed. Instead, the Biden Administration has decided to target citizens who resisted its irrational edicts. The same edicts for which they insist they must be granted an “amnesty.” Such actions only increase the devastation from a disastrous policy response.
Did Liberalism Fail the Test of Covid? By Toby Rogers. I am completely obsessed with the question of whether liberalism failed in response to Covid. As I’ve written before, I think it is perhaps the most important question in the world right now. If liberalism failed then we are now seeking an alternative to liberalism. If liberalism did not fail (or was lynched) then perhaps we are seeking a return to liberalism (or the introduction of “true” liberalism for the first time). I believe that figuring out this question will provide a map to guide us out of the valley of death that we are currently in.
The ‘Re-Education’ of New Zealand Medical Doctors By J.R. Bruning. During 2020-2023, professional regulatory associations became de-facto wardens of the more authoritarian Covid-19 nation-states, which included New Zealand. The Medical Council of New Zealand (MCNZ) was one such body which, like a duck to water, moved firmly and swiftly to ensure that doctors complied with Covid-19 and vaccine policies, or face disciplinary proceedings and gag orders.
Did Fauci Slip While Under Oath? By Maryanne Demasi. Perhaps one of the more egregious admissions was Fauci’s failure to review grant proposals before signing off on them and apparently said he was unaware of whether NIAID had conducted any oversight of the foreign laboratories the agency had funded.
May the WEF Plot Suffer the People’s Resistance By James Bovard. Luckily, people still have freedom to scoff on social media (thanks in large part to Elon Musk). Maybe the next Davos confab will convince critics to cease referring to the “World Enslavement Forum.” Will the WEF cease fearing “runaway skepticism” with the same dread that old southern plantation owners viewed runaway slaves?
Who Will Deliver Justice to Our Service Members? By Gwendolyn Kull. While Pfizer and Moderna were testing rats in their labs, our government had their own guinea pigs lining up for the largest biomedical experiment the world has ever seen, except these were not test animals. These were our United States service members–our men and women in uniform.
Conspiracy Theorists Were Right About Climate Lockdowns By Bobbie Anne Flower Cox. What was Dictator Hochul’s, I mean Governor Hochul’s, reason for this lockdown of close to one million New Yorkers that live in Erie County? It was going to Snow!
Will We Ever Get the Truth? By Jeffrey Tucker. Donald Trump will certainly get the Republican nomination. With that the issue of truth and honesty about what happened on March 13, 2020, and beyond will likely not be pushed by the executive branch even if Trump wins.
When ‘Psychopathic’ is No Exaggeration By Bert Olivier. In sum, as far as I can judge, Bill Gates (and the same could be argued regarding Fauci and Schwab, to mention only two other candidates for this dubious honour) is a textbook example of a psychopath, as revealed in the many reports of his sayings and doings.