The Walls are Closing In

How many articles have you read that connect current economic sufferings with the covid policy response? If you have read one or several, it is likely from Brownstone Institute. 

Brownstone.org has emerged as the most important research center to draw the connections between public health, science, economics, law, culture, and policy. Millions of readers like you share the content regularly. And it is making a difference. 

The connection between lockdowns, shortages, and inflation should be obvious but oddly it is rarely mentioned in the mainstream press. Why? Theory: most writers are still in the mode of pretending that the covid response was perfectly rational. It was not. It achieved nothing good and massively disrupted life. 

Now the bill for the folly has come due, and takes many forms. Among them are inflation, crime, educational losses, and a tremendous loss of trust. The next stages are really up to us: will we dig ourselves deeper or start the healing?

This is why the Brownstone Institute needs and values your support for our work. We do not take government largess. We do not run ads. We do no corporate quid pro quos. We survive the old-fashioned way, by depending on your appreciation and generosity. Without it, our work would come to a halt. Instead, we hope to expand for the long run battle ahead. 

So thank you! 

Here are some items from this past week. 

The Children We Call Our Leaders BY DONALD BOUDREAUX. Social engineering appears doable only to those persons who, seeing only a relatively few surface phenomena, are blind to the astonishing complexity that is ever-churning beneath the surface to create those surface phenomena. To such persons, social reality appears as it does to a child: simple and easily manipulated to achieve whatever are the desires that motivate the manipulators.

What Is the Value of a Covid Test?  BY ALEX WASHBURNE. If you tested yourself on a random day when you had no symptoms, your one test would probably say “You’re Negative,” and that wouldn’t change your behavior at all. Such a negative test used with a low pretest probability of being positive is like firing a bullet haphazardly into the fog, long before you see the whites of your enemy’s eyes with a low pre-shot probability of hitting anyone. 

Wearing a Mask During Indoor Exercise Can Be Fatal BY CARLA PEETERS. Participants wearing masks reported marked discomfort, such as feeling hot, humid, and breathing resistance and claustrophobia with higher exercise intensity. While other researchers could not measure significant detectable differences, these signs need to be taken seriously.

The Mass Betrayal of Trust  BY JEFFREY A. TUCKER. The world that the lockdowns and mandates, and all that is associated with them, unleashed is dark, corrupt, duplicitous, dishonest, dangerous, tribal, and pervaded with nihilism and a loss of moral clarity and a resulting criminality both public and private. How easy it turns out to be to shatter trust, to disable a functioning social order, to spread corruption from person to person, institution to institution, to the point that the center no longer holds!

Lockdowns Does Not Depend on the Lab Leak Theory BY MICHAEL SENGER. Part of the problem is that much of the evidence refuting the lab leak theory comes from scientists on the political left, who’ve so thoroughly debased themselves on this subject. It’s testament to the CCP’s dark sense of humor—riddled throughout the response to Covid—that they were able to convince the left it was woke to support the even-more-ridiculous theory that Covid came from some poor Chinese shopkeepers in Wuhan’s Huanan market selling pangolins.

Signs of Increased Non-Covid Mortality BY JOSH STEVENSON. Second-order effects on mortality were not measured in real time like SARS-COV2 cases. Why? What we measure matters. What we don’t measure might actually just matter even more. Months and years later we are still accounting for how the Covid-19 response disrupted life and cost lives in many other ways we simply chose to ignore.

The Milgram Experiment Restaged, with Millions of Real Victims BY THOMAS HARRINGTON. These Milgramite “experimenters” and “teachers” knew exactly what they were doing. Indeed, many of them, like our President, clearly relished initiating and firing up a “stick-it-to-your-family-and-friend” movement among us. 

Sorry, Kids: We Were Wrong BY BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE. The road to healing and rebuilding ahead is still long, but as a first step we must take responsibility, admit that we have lost our way, and ask our children for heartfelt forgiveness. At the same time, we must direct massive resources toward our children in order to repair the harm of the past two years, in both the socio-emotional and the educational spheres.

I Cannot Believe It’s Come To This BY STACEY RUDIN. We’ve never lived in Texas, in fact I’d never even been to Texas when we finally decided to bail out of New Jersey, during “Omicron.” Before that, I don’t think my husband thought I was serious about moving. But my intuition had been telling me for months, many of them, that this wasn’t the place for me. I feel betrayed. 

The Delusional Ideology of Mask and Booster Mandates BY IAN MILLER. There is no explanation that justifies these mandates. But those in power no longer need explanations or justifications, just the support of a willing media and political class captured by a delusional ideology.

French President Macron: “Vaccinate Everything That Can Be Vaccinated” BY ROBERT KOGON. “Vaccinate everything that can be vaccinated,” Macron said, “because we avoid the virus. That’s the best response for unburdening the healthcare system and having a healthy population. So, we’re going to continue to work on this aspect.”

Compassion Unhinged: The Robespierres of Lockdownism BY DAVID MCGROGAN. For the Robespierres of lockdownism, the object of pity became those “vulnerable” to Covid, and set against this “more touching calamity” the needs of other classes – chiefly children and the poor – were held to count for little. Indeed, the members of those classes could be visited with all manner of cruelties given the bigger goal the lockdown proponents hoped to achieve.

The Foegen Effect: How Mask Wearing Can Make You Sick BY ZACHARIAS FÖGEN. The reason for this is what I call the Foegen effect: deep re-inhalation of condensed droplets or pure virions which were trapped in the mask as droplets can worsen the prognosis. Each of these steps has been documented in the literature.

When Believing the Health Authorities Requires Denying Obvious Realities BY THORSTEINN SIGLAUGSSON. With every excuse we accept, with every denial we echo, every misguided action we support, we entangle ourselves more and more deeply; by each step, we take a higher stake in the narrative, and the higher it gets, the more fiercely we defend our parallel set of truths; the harder it becomes to break away and accept reality.

Legacy Media Pushes the Mask Mandate: The New Zealand Case  BY J.R. BRUNING. This media are not the arbiters of truth. They are tamed and compliant, and overly-dependent on opinion-based Op-eds while lacking resources, media freedom guidelines, and a public interest culture to ensure that they sniff out hypocrisy, contradiction and the missives of power.

CDC Wants Its Covid Regime Made Permanent BY JEFFREY A. TUCKER. What the CDC pushed on the country, even the world, was without precedent. The resulting disasters are everywhere present. At minimum we should expect the CDC to cease and desist, and certainly not entrench and codify. That the latter is taking place reveals what a long struggle lies ahead. 

Uses and Abuses of the Defense Production Act BY JORDAN SCHACHTEL. These are emergency powers granted to the executive with a precedent for being enacted during an actual war. These powers allow the president to compel private companies to work with the government on developing material goods that are supposed to be used for national security purposes. 

False Messaging Forever: The WHO’s Plan for the Future  BY DAVID BELL. Despite its massive internal contradictions, disproportionate cost, coercion, and requirement for its promoters to live obvious lies, COVAX and the entire mass-vaccination paradigm has created a strong model for success of the wider pandemic preparedness project. If truth in public health can be so readily dispensed with, and those working in the field so willingly corralled, the potential for milking the public’s trust and desire for safety presents unprecedented potential for profit. 

The Unbearably Predictable Prattle of the Boston Globe BY THOMAS HARRINGTON. The retreat into fantasy of our self-proclaimed betters in “cultured” cities like Boston, with “progressive” papers like the Globe is unsustainable. Though most of them are blissfully unaware of it, their penchant for aggressively imposing their delusions on the broader public is robbing them, and the institutions in which they toil, of the social capital acquired of several generations of mostly earnest work.

A Short History of the Testing Debacle BY JAMES BOVARD. Federal health agencies have had more blunders than practically anyone expected during this pandemic. The least that Uncle Sam can do is get out of the way of private efforts to help Americans recognize the risks in their own lives.

Was It the Pandemic or the Response? BY JOHN TAMNY. No doubt some remember “drop the bag at the doorstep,” “no knocking on the door,” “don’t ring the doorbell” lest the working-class germs of the delivery persons remain. It all raises a question about what people did to maintain their figures amid all the binge-watching, eating, and advertising of their doings on social media.

Elections Won’t Fix This  BY JEFFREY A. TUCKER. Uprooting the entrenched, arrogant, hegemonic, and unaccountable administrative state that believes it operates with no limit to its power is the great challenge of our time. The public is probably nowhere near aware of the full extent of the problem. Until voters themselves figure it out, the politicians will have no mandate even to test a solution. 

A Helpless People, Weary and Traumatized BY THOMAS HARRINGTON. The trauma is greatly diminished when we stop, breathe and, to the best of our ability, fearlessly catalog the injuries we have suffered, ask who authored them, and, if relevant, what made so many of us acquiescent to these assaults upon our dignity and well-being. 

Fauci Goes to Princeton BY MARK OSHINSKIE. Fauci delivered a self-revealing meta-message to college grads: when your work product sucks, gaslight and resort to name-calling and PC demagoguery. His stated concern about misinformation is painfully ironic, as it comes from someone who has lied his way through the past two years and, according to peers, many years prior.

The Myth of the Disease-Ridden Red States BY JOSH STEVENSON. The entire proposition is just silly. The concept of innate differences in populations is a well established consideration for those who study population health. One might think that our nations most prestigious newspaper might require their top writer to consult with population health experts or even an actuarial scientist in order to obtain a more informed perspective and give the data more rigorous analysis.