Twelve Challenges for a Shattered World

We are faced with an awesome and intimidating crisis

Our lives are dramatically less free today than they were only a few years ago. That’s largely due to an epic onslaught of state/corporate power in the guise of public health. It shattered all of our lives. 

We look back in awe at the vast majority who went along with it, especially our “leading minds” who mindlessly echoed the propaganda every day for three years. They are still doing it and we are left with a vast number of big and small crises. 

Brownstone Institute has been a reliable point of resistance. It is now set to play a role of influence over the direction of change. It’s an awesome responsibility. We are tackling this through publishing, events, website reach, fellowships, and research. 

We are forging an alternative to the World Health Organization, and continue to face a need for an information alternative to the Food and Drug Administration. In addition, prospective fellows ready to help are emerging from everywhere. 

The big limitation we have right now is of course funding. We are doing what we can with the resources at hand but there is far more to do. This is why we ask for support. It goes directly toward improving the world…or at least calling out those who are wrecking it. 

After today’s links to the latest content, we reprint the entire article by our president who explains some of the issues facing us. 

The book Fear of a Microbial Planet by Steve Templeton is still doing very well. Meanwhile, Treason of the Experts by Tom Harrington is an Amazon bestseller. 

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:

Farewell Questions for Rochelle Walensky by El Gato Malo. If we would seek to have the agencies of public health act as something other than a marketing arm and apologist for the revolving door of Pharma with whom they seem to so regularly swap staff and sinecure then it must once more be turned to serve the public. It may do so only if it regains the public trust and such trust, once lost, may only be restored by asking the hard questions and diligently following the answers wherever so they may lead until we may understand what went wrong, hold the negligent or malefactors to account, and have the means to prevent this from happening again.

Ukraine as a Proxy War: Conflicts, Issues, Parties, and Outcomes by Ramesh Thakur. In a very real sense, Ukraine’s territory is the battleground for a proxy war between Russia and the West that reflects the unsettled questions since the end of the Cold War. This explains the ambivalence of most non-Western countries. They are no less offended by Russia’s war of aggression. But they also have considerable sympathy for the argument that NATO was insensitively provocative in expanding to Russia’s very borders. 

After Covid: Twelve Challenges for a Shattered World By Jeffrey Tucker. No question that the administrative bureaucracies would lock down again under the same or new pretext. Yes, they will face more opposition the next time and trust in their wisdom has fallen off a cliff. But the pandemic response also granted them new powers of surveillance, enforcement, and hegemony. The scientism that drove the response informs everything they do. So the next time, it will be harder to restrain them. 

Comparing Risks: The Right and Wrong Way by Anette Stahel. Scientists must stop making incorrect comparisons, and health authorities must stop claiming that the serious symptoms and injuries linked to vaccination are “very rare,” while at the same time omitting to inform that the risk of corresponding, infection-related afflictions in the unvaccinated state actually is lower.

A Failure to Disclose Competing Interests by Paul Bourdon. This is a story of an author who promoted COVID-19 vaccine uptake among adolescents while failing to disclose significant competing interests (e.g., his holding of an unrestricted research grant from Pfizer). This is also a story of a failure of the author’s publisher Nature Reviews Cardiology to enforce Nature Portfolio’s declaration-of-competing-interests policy.

Who Is Better at Raising Your Child, You or the State? By Mattias Desmet. Just as the state cannot trust the weighty job of parenting to parents, it cannot trust the job of childcare to childcare providers. They will therefore have to be subjected to strict protocols, as befits a good bureaucracy. And those protocols will be designed by experts who have scientifically determined which conditioning techniques lead to the best adapted little New Citizen.

Prozac Is Unsafe and Ineffective for Young People, Analysis Finds by Maryanne Demasi. Antidepressants like fluoxetine double the risk of suicide and aggression in children and adolescentso, they often lead to decreased quality of life, they cause sexual dysfunction in about 50% of users, and these harms may continue long after they try to quit. There seems to be no rationale for using fluoxetine in young people for treating depression – the new analysis concludes the drug is unsafe and ineffective.

University of Chicago Students Speak Out By Lucia Sinatra. For the past three years, students at the University of Chicago have been exposing the facade without intimidation or fear, and they just keep raising the bar. One week from today, students will be hosting academic and industry leaders to discuss “Academia’s COVID Failures”, and you cannot miss the livestream of this event.

The Four Pillars of Medical Ethics Were Destroyed in the Covid Response Clayton J. Baker, MD. Individual patients can and must affect change. They must replace the betrayed trust they once held in the public health establishment and the healthcare industry with a critical, caveat emptor, consumer-based approach to their health care. If physicians were ever inherently trustworthy, the COVID era has shown that they no longer are so.

How and Why the Intellectuals Betrayed Us Thomas Harrington. Will we renew our trust in the dignity, moral autonomy and inherent miraculousness of each individual human being? Or will we, in our absent-minded drift away from the only true sources of life and spiritual renewal—things like love, friendship, wonder and beauty—resign ourselves to the idea of living a new version of medieval serfdom, wherein our bodies and our minds are seen as, and used by, our self-appointed masters as a renewable resource for the execution of their megalomaniacal dreams?

School Closures in 2020/21: What really happened? By Josh Stevenson. At the time of this writing, school closures are still occurring, albeit much rarer than last year. I truly hope we can one day put politics aside and do what’s right for our future and for our kids.

A Brief History of Disease Hysteria By Bruce W. Davidson. Clearly the Covid panic is only the latest chapter in a continuing chronicle of corruption, exaggeration, and hysteria. For those who were observant and thinking for themselves, it was not a big leap to conclude that something very fishy has been happening in recent years too.

E-Verify Is Deeply Dangerous  By El Gato Malo. Do you really want to hand a tool this potent to government and trust that they will “only use it to do nice things”? Because that seems like a very bad bet.

The WHO Has Changed and Now It is a Threat By David Bell. We can meekly accept this new disease-obsessed world, some may even embrace the salaries and careers it bestows. Or we can join those fighting for the simple right of individuals to determine their own future, free from the false public goods of colonialism and fascism. At the very least, we can acknowledge the reality around us.

The Treason of the Experts: Foreword By Jeffrey A. Tucker. Prepare yourself for a real adventure, one that seems often more like fiction than reality. It is inconceivable that a book like this could have appeared only a few years ago. No one would have believed it if it had. But these are extraordinary times and they require extraordinary and brave minds to operate as tour guides, as with Dante and Virgil. The treason of experts has indeed landed us in very dark places but we can see our way out with the truths elucidated herein.

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After Covid: Twelve Challenges for a Shattered World 
By Jeffrey Tucker 

Three years ago, in the depths of lockdowns, it became obvious that we desperately needed a new citizen movement with a different focus. Prevailing ideological forms were simply not adapted to the enormous exogenous shock to the system that lockdowns implied. It was unexpected, especially under the guise of public health. 

Every essential freedom was under attack. Authoritarian/totalitarian government sweep over the country and world, and nearly the entire intellectual class said: this is fine. And so I suggested a response: 

This movement, whether it is called anti-lockdown or just plain liberalism, must reject the wickedness and compulsion of this current moment in American life. It needs to counter the brutalism of lockdowns. It needs to speak and act with humane understanding and high regard for social functioning under freedom, and the hope for the future that comes with it. The enemies of freedom and human rights have revealed themselves for the world to see. Let there be justice. The well-being of us all is at stake. 

And such a movement did in fact form. It has been broad. It has transcended the ideological and class entrenchments of the past. It grew in sophistication and strategy over time. The resistance became international. It fought its way out of censorship and shaming. The fields of battle have been varied and comprehensive, from the scientific journals to journalism to hard-core revolts on the street such as the truckers’ protest. 

The results have been impressive. Vaccine mandates and passports have been beaten back. The right of international travel has been restored. Emergency declarations have been allowed to expire (even if the powers are still in place). We are back to pretending that the people and not the Faucis of the world are in charge. 

There has been no justice, however. No question that the officials who did this to us are on the ropes. Many have resigned. Others are hiding. Rare is the public figure today who is willing to own what happened. And these days, hardly anyone defends the claim that the despotic response achieved anything in terms of public health. 

Congress holds hearings on the pandemic response and that’s great. But the mass media does not cover them. A brutalized population does not want to revisit the trauma. There has been and will likely not be any real accountability much less a Nuremberg 2.0. 

We are left with a vast number of remaining issues from the past and new ones we never expected. These all necessitate continued ideological adaptation and citizen mobilization. It’s a sad truth because people are tired and demoralized and more than ready for normal life again. But we cannot simply wish away the ugly truths all around us. 

No question that the administrative bureaucracies would lock down again under the same or new pretext. Yes, they will face more opposition the next time and trust in their wisdom has fallen off a cliff. But the pandemic response also granted them new powers of surveillance, enforcement, and hegemony. The scientism that drove the response informs everything they do. So the next time, it will be harder to restrain them. 

Below are some remaining and new issues we must confront in the coming years. 

1. Tech Surveillance and Censorship 

Big Tech surveilled before the pandemic response but the quasi-martial law of the period consolidated the power of the government over private data. The Twitter Files have proven the huge role that the police state played in censorship of science and any opinion that contradicted regime priorities. 

Facebook groups were blasted away. LinkedIn and Twitter accounts were banned. Even Google search results were gamed. This was why those of us in the resistance had such a very difficult time finding each other in the first place. 

When they demanded social distancing, they wanted more than human separation of six feet. They wanted to stop the formation of any serious resistance. They wanted us all isolated, disoriented, and thus easy to control. As a result, the tools that we once believed were designed for more human connection were deployed to keep us apart. 

Yes, there are many lawsuits ongoing that challenge this practice as a violation of First-Amendment rights. Court discovery has produced many thousands of pages, and the decisions seem likely to land in the correct position. 

But here’s what is spooky. If these court challenges really posed much of a threat to the practice, wouldn’t mainstream social platforms be eschewing censorship right now? They are not. YouTube is the king of takedowns. Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook do the same. 

Only Twitter was relatively freed up once Elon Musk took over. But his new CEO is a champion of content moderation at the behest of the advertisers she hopes to lure back to the platform. It appears that the platform is going back to the way it was, perhaps with not the same intensity but with the same potential. In any case, the trajectory is not headed the right way. Censorship and surveillance are being institutionalized. 

The mass media performed abysmally during the entire fiasco, threatening dissidents, amplifying lies, and cheering the compulsion. There have been no admissions of wrongdoing. We need all new sources of news. 

Continue reading here.