The Grim Truth
Do people have any idea of the scale of Covid-era government expansion? Leviathan took a gigantic leap toward full-scale tyranny. It’s not gone back.
BY BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE
Do people have any idea of the scale of Covid-era government expansion? Leviathan took a gigantic leap toward full-scale tyranny. It’s not gone back.
The federal budget is still $2 trillion above trend, and that’s in addition to the $8-trillion plus pillaged in the name of health. Government debt and deficits ratcheted dramatically upwards far beyond trend.
The scale of Covid-era government expansion, just by the raw numbers alone, exceeds that which occurred in the Iraq War, Cold War, Vietnam War, World War II, the New Deal, and the Great War.
And yet among all the major crises that have attacked rights, people are still in denial about what happened and why.
We live in a different world today than five years ago, with liberty, property, freedom, and health all deprecated. The new normal is less civilized, less prosperous, and less free.
Meanwhile, the coalitions working to fix the problems are inciting rage among incumbent powers to the same extent they are frustrating the base for going too slowly.
Brownstone Institute is generally ahead of everyone in focusing on the core problems. Government investigators are barely getting going, and also have vast amounts to hide. The mainstream media doesn’t care. Nor does most of academia and the corporate and medical sectors.
This is because they all participated. They are all incentivized to look the other way.
This is a massive problem. We have published many books on this topic that we count on you to distribute. You won’t find them in airport bookstores. We also count on your support to continue to support the truth-tellers.
It’s nearly a sure thing that our Polyface Farm conference September 12-13, 2025, will sell to capacity. We advise getting tickets early. Registration will shut down at some point. Many of the hotels that are listed on the Polyface page are full, but there are still plenty of other hotels in the Staunton area that have availability.
The Midwest Supper Club welcomes Brownstone Institute Fellow Bret Swanson on Monday, June 9th. Bret will talk about how the Internet unleashed expertise and scrambled the brains of the experts, as well as how artificial intelligence will amplify the Internet’s power for good and ill. Get tickets here.
On Wednesday, June 25th, the West Hartford Supper Club welcomes reporter and famed star of Epoch TV Jan Jakielek, who will share insights on what it is like to be in his position as a voice of clarity with independent media, and what he has learned over the last several years in his role. Get tickets here.
The Greater Boston Supper Club welcomes Selena Fitanides on Tuesday, July 1st. Selena is a Massachusetts-based, constitutional rights attorney focused on free speech, religious freedom, and due process rights. She’ll talk about Unconstitutional Information Control during the Covid Operation. Get tickets here.
Here is some content since our last email.
Innovative Health Financing Mechanisms for Advancing Pandemic Preparedness: ‘Huge Untapped Potential’ or False Advertising? By REPPARE. Innovative financing looks to be yet more false advertising for global health financing reform, where its ‘huge untapped potential’ mainly lies with how to further promote vested interests at the expense of comprehensive global public health.
Nearly Everything That We’ve Been Told about Genes and Autism Is Wrong By Toby Rogers. Currently, genetic research is soaking up the vast majority of autism research funding and preventing more effective prevention strategies from emerging. This appears to be a reflection of the political power of biotech firms to shape the research agenda.
When Ideas Become Too Dangerous to Platform By Maryanne Demasi. TED became a gatekeeper of permissible opinion, enforcing orthodoxy behind the smokescreen of “community guidelines.” For a platform that once prided itself on promoting bold thinking, TED’s censorship of Foster’s talk is a moment of institutional retreat—and intellectual cowardice.
Can the Tyranny Be Soft-Landed? By Jeffrey Tucker. Every regime that inherits that kind of disaster of the last five years is necessarily going to be squeezed between the legacy regime and populist movements. In these cases, the status quo usually proves irresistible but with disastrous consequences later.
My Talk at the MAHA Institute Roundtable in Washington By Meryl Nass. I wanted to emphasize many of the changes we have been seeing over the past few years: a new strange environmentalism, the energy revolution, the food revolution, the new financial system with CBDCs, the pandemic pathogen library.
To Outrun the Complacent Class By Bret Swanson. Exponentially-growing communications bandwidth and data transparency empowered regular people and helped expose dysfunction among many existing “experts.” A tsunami of social media also generated confusion, not least among the experts themselves, leading to, in Gurri’s words, a “crisis of authority.”
Peter Daszak’s Smokescreen Attack on Dr. Bhattacharya By Randall Bock. Calling Bhattacharya anti-science is absurd. Erstwhile Stanford professor and co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, Bhattacharya has consistently championed evidence-based public health, advocating for open scientific debate over dogmatic policies.
Covid-19 Vaccine Reform Is Moving Slower Than Many Had Hoped By Maryanne Demasi. Prasad’s new framework has halted low-risk approvals unless backed by RCTs. Yes, the mRNA platform is still alive—and still fiercely protected—but reform was never going to be easy. And it was never going to come all at once.
My Forthcoming Book on Healing Modern Medicine By Aaron Kheriaty. I am very much looking forward to the release of this book. The narrative is sustained by harrowing clinical stories from my medical training. It also contains my proposed path forward for reforming the house of medicine.
Did the Feds Label You a Covid “Violent Extremist?” By James Bovard. The House Weaponization Subcommittee warned in 2023 that “the FBI appears to be complicit in artificially supporting the Administration’s political narrative” that domestic violent extremism is “the ‘greatest threat’ facing the United States.”
Anthony Fauci Gets Demolished by White House in New Covid Update By Ian Miller. A new White House official page points out exactly where Fauci and the public health expert class went wrong on Covid. The website ends with a rebuke of the public health establishment and the Biden administration’s efforts to censor.
Never Forget Their Excuses for Lockdowns By John Tamny. Shamefully and tragically, some of the foremost organizations and individuals devoted to liberty sat out the tragedy and seemingly defend their inaction to this day by hiding behind medicine, science, and a lack of information. The excuses are wholly insufficient.
Our New Normal is definitely our New Abnormal. For those who value freedom, does anyone think we have MORE freedom than we did five years ago or 20 years ago? Who is the “threat” to our freedoms? Which government?
I covered some of the same points in my recent piece, “The Vital Importance of ‘controlling the narratives.”
https://billricejr.substack.com/p/re-the-vital-importance-of-controlling
Note: I tried to cross-post this article and share with my subscribers, but couldn’t do it. I get this message:
“This post could not be recommended.”
This is about the fourth time in two or three weeks where I couldn’t share an article via the Substack cross-post.
UPDATE: I tried again to cross-post this article and on the fourth attempt, it seems to have gone out to my subscribers (I think).