The Age of Fallout
The Covid controls exacerbated and speeded up the undeniable reality that mainstream American educational institutions are in an advanced stage of collapse.
BY BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE
A dispute emerged last week concerning H-1B visas from abroad. The debate struck a nerve because it revealed something true and terrifying: American students are not being prepared for technical fields. After all, their schools were shut down for up to two years, then participation became contingent on shot compliance. DEI has already wrecked staffing in many educational institutions.
The Covid controls exacerbated and speeded up the undeniable reality that mainstream American educational institutions are in an advanced stage of collapse. No public intellectual with a job puts it that way but it is true. After all, New Jersey just eliminated its proficiency exams…for teachers!
The future of learning in the US centers on homeschooling, alternative private schooling, and disciplined focus among the small minority of young people whose brains haven’t been entirely eaten by TikTok, Instagram, and psych drugs.
For parents, this means a dramatic change in values, away from highly leveraged two-earner households back to smaller dwellings, frugal spending, scrupulous accounting, and close attention to family, community, and faith. Many have come to realize this but the transition is a painful one.
The defenders of the status quo can object all they want but there is no doubt where the final verdict on the Covid period is headed. To make the point, Brownstone Institute just published A Comprehensive Failure: The Effectiveness of Lockdowns, Masks and Vaccination Programmes vis-à-vis Mitigating Covid-19 by Martin Sewell, a highly regarded evolutionary psychologist and computer scientist who taught at Cambridge University. This is a keeper simply because it leaves no stone unturned.
Many friends and associates are now headed in Washington, D.C., for an experiment in what can be achieved by way of fixing what happened and making sure that nothing like this can ever happen again.
The Philadelphia supper club is on January 9 and features none other than Brownstone Founder and President Jeffrey Tucker! We hope to see you there.
We have a new location for supper club! It is Bloomington, Indiana. The date is January 13!
The West Hartford, Connecticut, supper club this month focuses on MAHA transition with Leland Lerman, who serves on the correspondence committee. The date is January 15.
Here is some content since our last email:
Capturing the Counterculture By Josh Stylman. What record labels achieved manually in hip-hop—identifying, redirecting, and commodifying authentic expression—would become the template for digital control. Just as executives learned to transform street culture into profitable products, algorithms would soon automate this process at global scale.
Health and Health Care: A Common Pool Resource? By Russ Gonnering. Could this be the impetus to establish a vertically and horizontally integrated Community of Practice for Health Care Professionals, providing them with the tools for self-organization and self-governance Ostrom noted were the hallmarks of successful management of Common Pool Resources?
The Limits of Transactionalism By Thomas Harrington. When was the last time you talked with a young person about what it means to live a good life as it is conceived of outside the parameters of economic gain or the game of acquiring reputation chits?
H-1B Visas: A Lesson from Canada By Laura Rosen Cohen. “Temporary” programs in Canada and America rarely benefit their existing populaces. Here’s hoping the incoming Trump administration takes heed of Canada’s abject failure to rein in its permanent “temporary” population and reins in the policies that impoverish the native citizenry.
Manufacturing Dissent By Josh Stylman. Institutional credibility must be earned through rigorous analysis rather than assumed through authority. As Kennedy approaches real institutional power, expect these attacks to intensify—a clear signal of just how much the guardians of our manufactured consensus have to lose.
Australia’s Misinformation Bill Is Dead…for Now By Maryanne Demasi. This unexpected move is said to be the final nail in the coffin for the bill that intended to grant the media watchdog unprecedented regulatory powers to oversee digital content and determine what is ‘misinformation.’
Read Between the Lies: A Pattern Recognition Guide By Josh Stylman. Once you recognize this pattern of deception, two questions should immediately arise whenever major stories dominate headlines: “What are they lying about?” and “What are they distracting us from?” The pattern of coordinated deception becomes unmistakable.
Planes Are Designed to Fly Level By Joel Salatin. As a pilot, you can’t anticipate when a rising tower of air develops. But when the rudder and flaps return to neutral, and you just let the plane do its thing, it actually moves through the complexity easier than intervening.
The Media’s Deception of Parents By John Klar. USA Today offered a lie in an article titled No, Vermont ruling doesn’t allow schools to ‘force-vaccinate’ kids / Fact check. But of course it does – there is no possible alternative legal interpretation of the case.