Triumph of the Apocalyptics

Where does Brownstone stand?

Brownstone Institute will never relent in its focus on the primacy of freedom and human rights, regardless of the crisis at hand. Indeed, every crisis is deployed or at least abused as an excuse to put all else on the back burner. We saw this with Covid, and we’ve seen this happen since the ghastly attacks in Israel. 

Now the world is on the verge of a lasting war. 

We are told daily and hourly that we need to forget all that has come before and adopt a single-minded focus on this one new crisis. If that happens, Goliath wins this struggle. 

We have made great progress on many fronts, including free speech, the depredations of pandemic planning, central bank digital currencies, surveillance technologies, and the hegemony of the administrative state generally, not to mention sorting out and seeking justice for the crisis that just supposed ended before the next one began. 

Even if the entirety of the research and opinion class moves on to a brave new world, one in which our memories last no longer than a few days, Brownstone cannot and will not. Civilization is under attack at all levels and in every way. It is up to this generation to do everything possible to save it for ourselves, our families and communities, our countries, and for posterity. Now is the time, before it is too late. 

This is why we ask for your support for this work. The tasks we want to undertake far outstrip available resources. Your gift helps us continue and expand this work in crucial times. If you agree that the times require focus, discipline, and deep commitment, we ask you to join us. 

We have a few more days before the hotel closes up for our November 4, 2023, annual dinner and gala in Dallas, Texas. Here is where we all meet to learn, forge new friendships, and plan the future. The timing is truly perfect for anyone who understands the stakes and wants to make a difference. You can register here. It might be your last chance. 

Our supper club welcomes Joshua Stylman on October 25. 

Here is some content since our last email:

The Triumph of the Apocalyptics By Jeffrey Tucker. Brownstone was founded in light of the above history to shine a light on higher ideals, not a Schmittian war between friends and enemies but societies of compassion, dignity, freedom, rights, and the exercise of human volition against all threats and uses of violence public and private. This is our guiding light now and always. Apocalypticism builds nothing; it only destroys. It’s the instantiation of the philosophy of The Joker. No nation and no community can survive it. 

On Death and Human Decency By David Bell. There was a time when the sanctity of human life, at least publicly, meant more in our society. We now live in a world different from that of 4 years ago. Though pre-2020 life was perhaps more murky underneath than many of us thought, three years of incessant official lying, institutionalized vilification, population segregation, and publicly sanctioned hate has taken its toll.

A Doctor Cannot Give his Professional Opinion? By Armando Simon. The authorities were wrong in every single aspect of the pandemic: the number of deaths, the number of deaths predicted, the lockdown, the masks, the faux-vaccine, the treatments, the medications, the collateral damage, the refusal to give treatment to the unvaccinated, the ethics. The covid fiasco and the resulting censorship and persecution will go down as one of the classic cases to be taught in medical schools for decades to come.

Dissident Doctors Versus Blundering Bureaucrats in Japan By Bruce Davidson. In a conformist society like Japan, individuals refusing to bow to the crowd stand out. That has certainly been true during the Covid panic. With the help of independent journalists, dissident doctors in Japan have been waging a battle for sensible medical practices about Covid and alerting the public to dangers.

Inflation and the Elephant in the Room By Thorsteinn Siglaugsson. It’s unlikely that the authorities did not know they were loading the inflation cannon. But instead of warning people, they were encouraged to max out their debts with low interest rates and new mortgages for the lowest earners. The complicity didn’t stop there.

The Dramatic Degradation of the Human Immune System By Carla Peeters.  To turn around the ongoing negative trend in health and life expectancy any forced ‘one-size-fits-all interventions’ that may cause a collapse of a weakened immune system need to be halted. Without any positive change in current public health policies, millions more adults and children will die from pneumonia and invasive pneumococcal disease in the next decades. No other infection can cause this number of deaths.

CBDCs: Ultimate Tool of Oppression By Laura Dodsworth. The jackboot and the sandal were graphic symbols of authority subjugating conquered peoples. If programmable CBDCs are introduced, your own digital financial footprint will be used to control you. The means of control change over time but the insatiable desire for total control remains constant.

Thousands of New Zealand Health Service Workers Secretly Exempted from Covid Vaccine Mandates By Rebekah Barnett. Senior officials and high-level specialists may have been more likely to secure exemptions, leading to the public perception that ‘elite’ workers were protected from mandates, while ‘replaceable’ workers were refused exemptions.

Origin of COVID-19: The Biggest Cover Up in Medical History By Peter Gotzsche. Science is about probabilities. When I consider the odds for the various possible explanations, I have no doubt that the pandemic was caused by a lab leak in Wuhan and that the virus was manufactured there. The cover-up of the origin of SARS-CoV-2 is the worst in medical history. This will stand as a pillar of shame in the coming centuries. 

Dr. Anthony Fauci’s Own “Gain-of-Function” by Randall Bock. This isn’t merely about the legacy of an individual but an urgent call for introspection and reckoning with the values and principles we hold dear as a society and a scientific community. The soul of science is at stake here, and the shadows cast by authoritarian tendencies threaten to engulf the vibrant, robust tradition of scientific debate and discourse, replacing it with a monologue of power and control.

Another Tacit Admission That COVID Mandates Were a Disastrous Mistake By Ian Miller. Pandemic restrictions were an unmitigated failure, and the evidence base against the politicians and “experts” who imposed them and demanded compliance continues to grow. And it raises some substantial questions about holding those responsible accountable for their actions. Especially as mask mandates return in certain parts of the country, with hints of more on the way.

The Rise of Pharma Fascism and the Ruination of the Commons By Toby Rogers. No Pharaoh, no king, no feudal lord, and certainly no political party has ever before claimed that they own the air and that the mere act of breathing by the citizenry was an assault that must be managed by a police state. Yet that is the central claim of Fauci and the public health bureaucracy and the idea that drives vaccine mandates, masks, lockdowns, social distancing, and the rest of the modern Fascist Pharma State.

The Dangerous Game of Gain-of-Function Research By Alex Washburne. The Fauci Paradox tempts us to allow scientists to regulate science, to Follow the Science and Trust the Experts, but trusting the experts can lead us to our doom as scientists are so prone to short-term ambitions and so limited in their knowledge of other human affairs and longer-term objectives of civilization that, given the opportunity, they are likely to open Pandora’s box.

A Booming Market for Medical Credentials By Steve Templeton. The insistence of bureaucratic uniformity to cut costs and cater to student wants at the expense of their needs will result in an ever-increasing number of young physicians that are not fully prepared to handle independent practice. It could take a long time to correct this problem, but it has to happen.

The High Stakes in the Legal Battle for Free Speech By Brownstone Institute. Rebuilding from the wreckage of Covid will require reclaiming those fundamental pillars of American society. The freedom to speak was not the first right earned by a people in revolt against ancient-world forms of statism but it might be the most essential. That’s why it is instantiated in the very first amendment to the Bill of Rights. If the regime can control the public mind, they can control everything else too. A loss here is a loss everywhere. 

A Dark Comedy About our Divided America By Charles Krblich. If you held Lucas’s persuasion, you will relive all the negative interactions you had with the people of Cole’s persuasion. You will be exposed again to the raw aggression, cruelty, and apathy that you found pervasive during the COVID Pandemic. You will find humor throughout the book for all of the characters. You will laugh out loud at the conclusion.

EU Digital Identity Wallet Pilots Roll Out Under the Radar By Stavroula Pabst. If rolled out hastily, the EU Digital Identity Wallets could ultimately have disastrous and lasting consequences for privacy and civil liberties. And, once implemented, it seems Digital IDs could be difficult to roll back even if unpopular, ultimately nudging people into a technocratic nightmare they cannot easily escape.

How to Cope in the Midst of Crisis By Richard Kelly. When we see no repentance but rather a continuation and escalation of the catastrophic policies that got us into this mess, it’s hard to continue to believe it’s just all one big mistake.

Nobel Winner Raised Safety Concerns About Only “Modestly” Effective mRNA Vaccines By Robert Kogon. Weissman specifically pointed to risks of autoimmune reactions and “pathological thrombus formation” – or blood-clotting – which have become all-too-familiar in the intervening years since vaccine rollout.

Safe, Smart, Special by Sinead Murphy. The effect of this conflation of safety and health, and of the attendant mass submission to technical solutions to identified health threats, is that our well-being is nurtured at the level of cohorts and not of individuals. When any one of us stays safe we increasingly acquiesce in the sacrifice of our individual welfare at the altar of one or other computer-modelled universal benefit, of which we can at best merely partake but which is fundamentally indifferent to our flourishing. 

The Costs and Casualties of Government’s Information Total War By Emily Burns. Government censorship reduces our society to just two groups of people: the censors and the censored. While it remains in place, the ranks of the censored will be ever-expanding as the censors require ever more censorship to ensure people continue to disbelieve their lying eyes.

A Solution to the Problem of Failed Public Schools By Rob Jenkins.The public schools in many (most?) parts of this country are indeed broken, and there’s no point in trying to “work within the system” to fix them. They’re too far gone. Meanwhile, our children are suffering. All children are suffering. Our only option is to bypass the “system” altogether, take matters into our own hands, and create our own schools, focused on excellence and open to everyone.