The Corruption of a Generation of Rebels

Remember "Question Authority?"

Well, it was great while it lasted. 

The judge in Missouri v. Biden stopped federal agencies from working with social-media companies to censor. Then the Biden administration appealed. On Friday, the injunction was stayed pending a ruling by a higher court. . 

The good guys may eventually win – we must! – but liberty should work this way. It should be secure and unquestioned, not subject to the wild exigencies of biased and captured judges. 

So it has been since the horrible lockdowns of 2020. All rights and freedoms have been in question. Of course they had to go after free speech itself. 

You follow Brownstone Institute because we fight this right daily and shed light on the ruling class plans for our lives. And this week, we’ve shed a lot of it. 

You will appreciate what we’ve been publishing. We know it has been effective: the phony fact checkers have been bombarding us with emails all week! There are many people out there who despise our very existence. 

That’s why we value your support for our work. You have been very generous and we cannot thank you enough! 

Supper Club is on, this time featuring a book-signing party with Thomas Harrington. Join us on July 19th. Also, have you registered yet for our Dallas conference and dinner on Nov 4? We are working on the program now, and it is going to be very special. 

Here is some content since our last email:

“I Am the Regulator!”: EU Commissioner Warns Social Media to Censor After French Riots By Robert Kogon. “L’Etat, c’est moi” – “I am the state” – Louis XIV is supposed to have said. And in a contemporary echo of that famous phrase, EU Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton repeatedly stressed on Monday that “I am the regulator” when lambasting social media networks for “not having done enough” during the recent French riots and threatening them with sanctions, including even banishment, if they should remain similarly inactive after August 25.

The Weakening and Corruption of an Entire Generation of Rebels By Mark Oshinskie. Americans shouldn’t kid themselves: they aren’t smarter or more willing to ask questions than were their “white bread/Levittown/” 1950s’ counterparts. To the contrary, the past 40 months show that, despite perceiving themselves as well-informed independent thinkers, Americans are more vulnerable to propaganda and less willing than ever to question media/government narratives and PC slogans.

Ill-Gotten Gains Is What Politics Is All About by Micheel Baker. As the title suggests, the book tells the story of how networks of individuals in government and the private sector, referred to collectively as “James” in the book, collude to divert into their own pockets as much as half the wealth of the country from ordinary Australians, collectively named “Sam.” 

An Obituary for Andrew Daniels, Not His Real Name By Richard Kelly. Dante’s conception of Hell finds the sinners, many of whom he knows as contemporaries, being subjected to eternal punishments which perfectly, exquisitely, justly fit the crimes. Schadenfreude on steroids. It seems somehow wrong to imagine modern day characters finding their own special place to spend eternity. Wrong, but irresistible. Delicious.

A Primer on Our Methods, and the Significance of UCoD Swapping By Aaron Hertzberg. Since these death certificates have the ICD codes applied by the CDC, we can compare the ICD codes to the text descriptions of the CoD’s on the death certificates. This enabled us to search for death certificates where the UCoD condition assigned by the CDC didn’t match the UCoD condition listed on the death certificate, specifically where the mismatched UCoD assigned by the CDC was U07.1 (covid).

How Long Will the Lies Persist? By Thorsteinn Siglaussson. First we were told they would stop the spread, that there would be two shots, that they wouldn’t be mandatory. Then that more shots would be needed, that those unvaccinated were responsible for the continued spread, even as it turned out how the vaccines in fact increased the spread. We could go on and on.

I Am a Tree and We Need to Ban Leaves By Thomas Buckley. In the recent past, much of the press has at least tried to somehow shoehorn in an element of possible truth – or at least make things matters of opinion so anything could be true – to their culturally caustic efforts. In this case, they’re not even trying because it is impossible: the thousands of pages of depositions, emails, phone logs, and other records show exactly what happened, when it happened, and why it happened.

The End of the Freedom to Travel By Gwendolyn Kull. Recent history and current events clearly demonstrate that it is no longer a question of “is this possible” but a question of “when.” We the People must hold our public servants accountable. We must not let them strip us of our freedoms by complying when asked, “Papers, please.” We must not let division creep in under the guise of public health when We the People are healthier together. Vax passes must not pass.

The Great Covid Laundering Scheme by Aaron Hertzberg. The thesis explores how the CDC has been systematically misclassifying covid as the UCoD on death certificates that clearly list a different condition as the Underlying Cause of Death, or where covid was obviously not the UCoD even if it was technically listed in the position of the UCoD by the coroner or ME who filled out the death certificate. The CDC does this by entering the ICD code for covid – U07.1 – as the UCoD even though the death certificate itself lists a different condition as the UCoD.

As the US De-racializes, Australia Moves to Re-racialize the Constitution By Ramesh Thakur. Permanently codifying racial grievance into the Constitution will guarantee it is weaponised sometime in the not too distant future by activists making increasingly radical demands and stoking resentment and backlash. If approved, the Voice will not mark the end of a successful process of reconciliation but the beginning of fresh claims for co-sovereignty, treaty and reparations, using the constitutional voice as the enabling mechanism.

Santa Clara University Students Must Take Covid Vaccines or Withdraw By Lucia Sinatra. Given that the emergency is officially over, and the shots have proven to be both ineffective and in some cases harmful, now more than ever, SCU must defend the science and ethics behind their refusal to drop them. In the absence of such transparency, we are left to assume that Osofsky, along with SCCMA and SCCPH, must be using SCU students as mere pawns to achieve their unscientific and authoritarian vaccination goals and quotas.

Guess What Is Keeping the US Economy Afloat by Paul Frijters, Gigi Foster, and Michael Baker. With no commensurate increase in the demand for money, the expansion in money supply created by American money-printing leads to all existing dollars buying fewer goods than before the money-printing. Nobody sends a bill: the tax just happens, with every clank of the government printing press. Doubling the amount of money in circulation via the printing press, and then giving the printed money to the government to buy stuff with, is basically the same as the government taxing half of private-sector income and buying stuff with it.

The WHO Is a Real and Present Danger  By David Bell. The only real question is whether, and how, this society-wrecking pandemic train can be stopped. The public health professions want careers and salaries, and will not intervene. They have proven that in previous manifestations of fascism. The public must educate themselves, and then refuse to comply. We can just hope some of our supposed leaders will step forward to help them.

Best-Selling Author Michael Lewis Pens CIA Covid Propaganda By Debbie Lerman. The terrifying takeaways from this analysis are: First, that what Lewis is hiding – or trying to divert attention away from – is the massive CIA involvement in the Covid response. Second, that the intelligence and national security leaders who were in charge of the Covid response did not just censor information that contradicted their narrative; they also recruited widely trusted voices – including internationally renowned authors – to disseminate their propaganda.

What It Means to Lose Trust  By Christine Black. Competing truths may be difficult and devastating to accept, as we have been enduring in the last few years, but the pain and cognitive dissonance are most certainly survivable, as survivors of childhood sexual abuse and assault survivors can attest. We may even transcend and thrive, be strengthened, and become guides for others.

How a Highly Effective Vaccine Turns Into a Mediocre Vaccine — or Worse By Eyal Shahar. The implication of the “healthy vaccinee” phenomenon — when estimating vaccine effectiveness — is called confounding bias. A naïve comparison of Covid mortality in vaccinated people and unvaccinated people, even if age-adjusted, is grossly misleading because the latter have higher risk of death to begin with. At least part of their higher Covid mortality, if not all, has nothing to do with not being vaccinated. They are simply sicker people.