What Is Woke?

It's a pathology and the end of the West

What a wild week it has been. 

The surveillance and censorship was far more extensive, aggressive, and dictated from above than we knew. Court proceedings are headed the right way but it is a long slog. Even if we get the first amendment reaffirmed, how will it be enforced in the future?

Meanwhile, the lockdown junta is not backing down. Indeed, they are more brazen than ever, especially with the appointment of another from the tribe to head the CDC. 

The national press continues to ignore all important issues while social media remains tightly controlled. Even so, Brownstone continues as a central source of information and research on how these catastrophic policies came to be and what to do about them. 

There is also some good news: our research team to monitor the World Health Organization is firming up nicely and will be launched soon. More on that later. 

In many ways, the resistance is growing and becoming more sophisticated and broad. This does not happen without knowing and intellectual passion. We have every intention to continue and broaden our reach, so we very much appreciate your support. 

Dr. Simon Goddek joins us on June 14th for our supper club. 

Also, you can register now for Brownstone’s annual conference and gala, Dallas, Texas, November 4, 2023. 

Will we see you at Porcfest in two weeks? Brownstone has all day, every day, talks and discussions. You can meet our Fellows and hear talks by top medical professionals, economists, and others. 

See all our events here. 

Here is some content since our last email:

3/16: The Day That Will Live in Infamy By El Gato Malo. While perhaps the US is a Constitutional republic in form and theory, in terms of function it has devolved into something far less suited to human flourishing. America has elevated, enabled, and become largely captured by a bureaucratic security apparatus whose raison d’être was purported to be fighting wartime threats. But the war machine does not exist to produce victory.

What and Why is ‘Woke?’ By Paul Frijters, Gigi Foster, and Michal Baker. Woke’s lust for destruction has emerged from the heart of a decaying Western society. Woke is an attack on the most potent and healthy elements of that society, backed by the super-rich who seek more control. At once a sterile new religion of the useless to celebrate uselessness, a fanatical doomsday cult, and a thief of what is good, healthy and self-affirming, woke represents in four letters what ails the West, and the antithesis of what is needed to heal the West.

New CDC Director Is Another Lockdowner  By Jeffrey A. Tucker. We are all hoping for a clean repudiation of these policies, and even a flip of the narrative such that participating in this disaster would be a mark against people in terms of career development. We are nowhere near that point yet. It’s the opposite. The regime is still hiring and promoting out of the lockdown party for the future. They cannot admit error and are working to make sure they never have to do so.

An Ideology and Agenda of Estrangement  By Christopher S. Grenda. Marxism for children involves mental unwellness. It fractures the deepest sense of love, loyalty, and trust children experience – with parents. The experience of this fracture is a process of mental unhealth. That’s the logic of Marxist praxis these days.

The Fraying of the Liberal International Order By Ramesh Thakur. To no one’s surprise, the rising and revisionist powers wish to redesign the international governance institutions to inject their own interests, governing philosophies, and preferences. They also wish to relocate the control mechanisms from the major Western capitals to some of their own capitals. China’s role in the Iran–Saudi rapprochement might be a harbinger of things to come.

A Myth-Making Toolkit from the Volcano’s Shadow By Haley Kynefin. Collective consciousness, especially when it spans multiple centuries, carries immense power; but many of us have lost our communal ties and our sense of history. We may have forgotten who our ancestors were and where they came from; we may know little about what they ate, what they believed in, and the rituals they practiced.

The Deplatforming of the “Disinformation Dozen”: More Coverage From Tracy Beanz By Aaron Kheriaty. Facebook responded to the White House’s incessant and abusive demands for more censorship with, “We hear your call for us to do more, and as I said on the call we are committed to working towards our shared goal.” This after a triple punch of threats were lobbed by the White House and the Office of the Surgeon General (OSG), Dr. Vivek Murthy, at social media companies in mid July 2021.

Complying, Not Defying: Twitter and the EU Censorship Code  By Robert Kogon. The withdrawal of Twitter’s signature from the Code is a highly theatrical, but essentially empty gesture, which will undoubtedly serve to shore up Musk’s free speech bad-boy bona fides, but has virtually no practical consequences.

Ireland’s Assault on Free Speech By David Thunder. A law infected with this level of vagueness will easily become a conduit for the subjective opinions and ideologies of the interpreter. This means that public officials, whether police, prosecutors, or judges, will be able to use their power, if they so wish, as an instrument of political and ideological domination, dressed up under hopelessly vague language. For example, a judge who believes that biological sex is passé might interpret hard-hitting criticism of the trans agenda as “incitement to hatred” rather than reasonable democratic debate.

The Economics of Lockdown Panics By Robert Blumen. Economics alone cannot tell us if any cost is too much to “save one life.” But economic thinking can help us understand that preserving human life entails bearing costs. It requires resources and people with skills. We must provide ourselves with the means to bear those costs if we wish to continue to have the ability to preserve human life in the future.

Misinformation Is a Word We Use to Shut You Up By Daniel Klein. The “anti-misinformation” projects are obvious miscarriages of civility, decency, and the rule of law. We must rediscover the norms of openness, tolerance, and free speech that dignify humankind. Science depends on confidence, and confidence depends on those liberal norms. Those norms are the parents of good science, healthy sense-making, and civil tranquility.

My Official Apology to the New York Post By Yasmina Palumbo So, I’m sorry, NY Post. I judged you by your cover. By your red and black barking headlines. But I was wrong. And for anyone else out there who feels they might owe someone an apology, let me tell you it feels good to settle a debt. I highly recommend it.

Nowhere Man By Thomas Buckley. One moment, you’re waving to a longtime neighbor. The next, the neighbor is calling the police because you are violating the lockdown. One moment, you have a decent little community business. The next, the authorities have shuttered your doors and you watch helplessly as the “big box” near the freeway gobbles up your customers and, in the end, your livelihood.

They Censored at the Behest of the White House: More Reporting from Tracy Beanz By Aaron Kheriaty. Social media companies acted in direct response to the White House calling out the so-called “Disinformation Dozen.” Evidence in the case proves that they acted to deplatform those branded within 24 hours of the White House publicly identifying them.

Why Are Hospitals Still Using Remdesivir? By Stella Paul. Alas, the federal government insisted that if hospitals wanted to get paid, they had to treat Covid patients with Remdesivir. The fact that this drug was made by their good friends at Gilead Science and everybody was getting rich from the deals they cut had absolutely nothing to do with it, of course. It was all done for love of the people. But just to make sure that Remdesivir could attain its current billion-dollar status, the feds incentivized hospitals with a 20 percent boost to the entire hospital bill of patients treated with Remdesivir.

A Cheat Sheet for Legislators Regarding the WHO and Health Emergencies By David Bell. We are currently funding the dismantling of our own independence and ceding our human rights to a small group which stands to benefit from our impoverishment, financed from a war chest accrued through the pandemic just ended. We don’t have to. It is as straightforward to see through this as it should be to stop it. All that is needed is clarity, honesty and a little courage.

The Struggle for Free Speech: More Reporting on Missouri v. Biden from Tracy Beanz By Aaron Kheriaty. Biden even accused Facebook of “killing people” and the next day threatened Section 230 action on social media companies that didn’t comply with their demands.