They’re Coming To Take You Away

Overlords are plotting very dangerous strategies for control

After three years of hell, we might all be older but we are also much wiser. 

We’ve learned how fragile our rights are. We’ve learned about the administrative state and the industries that control it. We’ve found out the real ambition of the powerful: they shut us up, made us obey, forced us to take their meds, closed businesses, restricted travel, tracked and traced everything we do, censored science, and turned society into a quarantine camp. 

Now they want to sweep it all under the rug. We cannot allow that to happen. 

We’ve observed as never before the connections between the silos: public health, economics, medicine, science, privacy, rights, public morale, trust, and freedom itself. Departing from good sense in one area risks everything else, the combination of which constitutes what we call civilization. 

We’ve also learned about the power of information. It has been citizen resistance, bolstered by awareness, all over the world, that has beat back the hegemon. And no, the influencers that made this happen are not getting credit. The ruling class has never been so angry, or determined to retain their power and position. 

No question that these are times of tremendous upheaval and also rebuilding. 

Brownstone Institute has survived and thrived throughout, despite unrelenting attacks. We’ve done it thanks to your help and also by sticking with what we do best, which is earnestly striving to publish truth while supporting others who do the same. If you would like to help with our work with a continuing or one-time donation, you can be part of the solution. Thank you so much for all of your support! 

The book Fear of a Microbial Planet by Steve Templeton is still doing very well. It’s the book that can revive clarity on essential matters of infectious disease. How we wish we had this book three years ago! But it is here now and ready to make a massive difference for the future. 

In addition, we’ve now published Treason of the Experts by Tom Harrington. It’s a white-hot rebuke of the vast swath of the intellectual class that betrayed all its principles over three years. The author has his colleagues figured out in ways that reduce the Ivory Tower to rubble. The book is a treasure. 

Want to join us for our next Supper Club in Connecticut? It’s on the 17th of this month. Register here. Also you can register for our big conference and gala November 4 in Dallas, Texas. 

Here is some content since our last email:

Whatever Happened to the Healing Power of Positive Thinking? By Seth Smith. How did belief in the natural healing power of the body and mind get replaced by hysteria, panic, iatrogenesis and a fanatical reliance on Big Pharma? What black hole did all the hippies and granola-types fall into, the people I spent much time with as a kid, while helping my mother at our local food co-op? 

Biden’s Sham Compassion for His Covid Persecution Victims By James Bovard. The Biden administration will end the vaccine mandate for health care workers on May 11. But don’t expect politicians and bureaucrats to honor the “First, Do No Harm” rule in the future. Inside the Beltway, federal edicts will likely continue to be “close enough for government work” to sane health care policies.

The Illusion of Consensus By Rav Arora and Jayanta Bhattacharya. The project of science calls for rigor, humility, and open discussion. The pandemic has revealed the stunning magnitude of the political and institutional capture of science.

They’re Coming To Take You Away By Michael Lesher. When the monolithic narrative that is all they have been taught lies in ruins, they will replace it not with a rational, informed alternative – for they will know of none – but with whatever satisfies the rage of a population that realizes, too late, that it has been hoodwinked.

The Problem of Lost Knowledge: Antibiotic Edition By Jeffrey Tucker. All of this adds up to a grim picture of mass but often preventable deaths, all because the system did not work to incorporate the previously existing wisdom we learned from a century earlier. We needed merely to rely on the known information gathered from previous periods of history. The system utterly failed and for reasons having to do with regulatory capture and mass panic. Instead, they embarked on a population-wide experiment that created an unfathomable amount of suffering. And they still haven’t admitted it. 

The Trouble with the Center By Mark Oshinskie. The Japanese say that “The nail that sticks up will be hammered down.” The unwillingness to question the many absurd, destructive mitigation measures reflected a fear of being ostracized or labeled “an extremist.” Passive Americans were far too willing to placate the actual extremists who supported locking down a country, closing schools and testing, masking and vaxxing everyone.

Dr. Walensky’s Dishonorable Acts By Ian Miller. Even as the pandemic fades, the CDC and the administration have now realized they hold immense power over Americans’ daily lives. Huge numbers of individuals, influential corporations and administrators will outsource their decision-making to CDC recommendations. No matter how ineffective people like Walensky have proven to be.

My Transition from Nuclear to Covid By Ramesh Thakur. The case for nuclear weapons rests on a superstitious belief of magical Realism in the utility of the bomb and the theory of deterrence. The extreme destructiveness of nuclear weapons makes them qualitatively different in political and moral terms from other weapons, to the point of rendering them virtually unusable. Like the emperor who had no clothes, this might well be the truest explanation of why they have not been used since 1945.

The Specter of Human Extinction  By Bert Olivier. A new genre in philosophy made its appearance not too long ago. It is called ‘extinction theory’ or the ‘philosophy of extinction,’ and as the name indicates, it is predicated on the real possibility that the human species may cause the extinction of what it means to be human and that it may actually become extinct as a species.

What Good Comes from Gain-of-Function? By Thomas Buckley. Though almost all lab-based scientific research and advancements carry at least a tiny element of risk, nothing like the level of terminal, global, and trans-generational risk of GOF has – to the public’s knowledge – been undertaken since the Manhattan Project and the study of radiation. And even that had very specific, very probable, and very real and tangible benefits (useful for “pure” or basic science, ending World War II, power generation, nuclear medicine, etc.) that GOF cannot begin to claim.

Time to Read War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy By John Tamny. Toward the book’s end, Tolstoy wrote that “To imagine a man without freedom is impossible except as a man deprived of life.” So true. Imagine if Tolstoy had lived to see what his beloved country had been reduced to. The free-thinking libertarian would have been horrified, all the while well aware of why what became the Soviet Union imploded. Do-gooder types and self-regarding politicians (a redundancy, obviously) break things with poverty and blood-soaked battlefields the result. War and Peace makes this all very clear.

America Will Never Give Up Its Ideals  By Jeffrey A. Tucker. The cultural crisis and the pandemic of loneliness, not to mention the mass wave of substance abuse and depression, reflects the country-wide shock that all our fundamental ideals could so easily have been swept aside for a cockamamie central plan that trampled on everything we believe in and have always practiced however imperfectly. It felt like an invasion of the body snatchers, nowhere better symbolized than with vaccine mandates that most intelligent people knew we didn’t need even if they were safe and effective, which they were not.

Like a Tweet, Lose Your Job  By Brownstone Institute. Free speech is more than a slogan. It must be an operational reality for everyone. It can be closed down by forces other than edicts from government. It can be suppressed also by arbitrary private actions that reflect regime priorities. Ever more workers and especially intellectuals today work in an environment of fear that leads to self-censorship.

Covid-Era Haiku By Mark Oshinskie. Many see the game / But won’t say so publicly / Emperor’s New Clothes

Fauci’s Never-Ending Victory Tour By Pierre Kory. Anthony Fauci’s legacy is one of narcissism and power. The glorification of his massive ego trumped any scientific or medical data. His policies were giveaways to the pharmaceutical industry, which helped burnish his image and crush dissent. He saw his opportunity for the spotlight and seized it. Now, rather than admit mistakes, Fauci is intent on revising history. Unfortunately for his legacy, we’re all living with the consequences of his hubris, and they are impossible to overlook.