Why Did the Intellectuals Fail So Badly?

They aren't paid to be brave

The last two years have been hard not only because of the hell our governments put us through. It’s also difficult learning truths about the world we previously found it convenient to ignore. Among them: the power of the deep state, the ambition to create bio-medical surveillance, the cravenness of the intellectual class, the collusion of government and big tech, and so much more. 

Daily, Brownstone tries to make sense of this mess and a possible way out. For most people in the world today, this is the main event: leaving the darkness and finding our way to a bright future. 

Our monthly supper club in West Hartford, Connecticut, is open for reservations.

Also please mark your calendar for “The Great Restoration: Conference and Gala,” Saturday, December 3, 2020, featuring Jay Ladapo, Jay Bhattacharya, David Stockman, George Gilder, Robert Malone, Michael Senger, Tom Harrington, and so many other of your favorite writers and thinkers. 

The future is very bright, due entirely to your support. 

Why Did So Many Intellectuals Refuse to Speak Out? BY JEFFREY A. TUCKER. Here is why in our time, as in all times, there is a crying need for intellectual sanctuaries for those brave souls who are willing to stand up and be counted, risk cancellation, put their professional careers on the line, simply to say what is true. They need protection. They need care. And they deserve our congratulations, for it is they who will guide us out of this mess. 

The Corruption of Private Enterprise in the Pandemic Era BY LISA NELSON. While the Constitution is designed to prevent the usurpation of these rights by the government, there is little that limits the power of the corporations and institutions, which are making decisions about when and how we exercise our rights. 

The Real Reason Vaccine Mandates are Wrong BY JULIE PONESSE. Vaccine mandates are wrong not because they fail to generate a net benefit or because the risks to vaccinated persons outweigh public health benefits (though both are true). They are wrong because they trample on the very thing the noblest version of a liberal democratic society should be trying to create.

Quo usque tandem abutere, Corona, patientia nostra? BY MANFRED HORST. The big open question, however, is what the political fallout will be from science’s return to truth. If it helps the constitutional state turn away from its absurd noble goals – war against a virus, fight against a climate change – and make it adhere to its real task – regulating the peaceful coexistence of people while respecting the freedom and dignity of the individual – then the many victims of the Covid hysteria will perhaps not have suffered entirely in vain.

Pandemics Bookended Our Careers ROBERT CLANCY. Covid has laid bare a medical profession no longer with input into health policy. Financial interest influences decisions enacted by bureaucrats, driven by the pharmaceutical industry, and woven into political agendas. A cultural blindness to objectivity begins with medical journals failing to publish any article outside of the narrative.

Churches in Japan During Lockdowns: Near Disaster SARAH HINKLICKY WILSON. The compassion-hacking of American churches did not in itself save anyone’s life, but it did help to break down another civil-society barrier standing in the way of governmental totalization. As Hannah Arendt warned us, authoritarian and totalitarian schemes do not work without mass buy-in from the constituency. Buy-in requires people to be isolated, lonely, atomized, and stripped of all meaning.

The Mandate on Health-Care Workers Is Still Unjust JAMES BOVARD. Biden’s vaccine mandates are another demolition of freedom that do nothing to end the most politically exploited pandemic in American history. But the government has no liability for the injections it mandates or the freedoms it destroys. For bureaucrats and politicians, gaining power and compelling submission are victory enough, even when their policies fail to vanquish a virus. How much longer will politicians pretend that their iron fists are a magic bullet?

United Nations Now Claims to “Own the Science” By ROBERT MALONE. The United Nations’ global communications representative Melissa Fleming is explicitly stating in this interview that the United Nations and their World Economic Forum partners are intentionally training and creating controlled opposition scientists, physicians, and social media influencers to assist in their global propaganda campaigns managed via partnerships with corporate media and big tech.

My Fight Against the Quarantine: The Backstory By BOBBIE ANNE FLOWER COX. How could our government be so cruel so as to concoct a regulation that aims to forcibly isolate law-abiding citizens, and, as NYS Assemblyman Chris Tague says, “is reminiscent of actions taken by some of the ugliest tyrannical regimes history has ever known. It has no place standing as law here in New York, let alone anywhere in the United States.”

Timeline on the UK Response: Open-Source Project By CARL HENEGHAN, TOM JEFFERSON. We have asked for readers’ help to build a freely available timeline of the six critical decision timepoints with links to primary documents underpinning policies. Over the coming months, we shall review some of these documents and explain the main issues. Others may do the same too.

Fauci has Awarded Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Another $650,000 to Study Bat Coronaviruses By MICHAEL SENGER. Despite every one of our highest-level officials publicly sharing their concern over the possible lab origin of this virus which, they say, has killed countless millions of people all over the world and justified a state of emergency going on three years, our government just granted the man whose research may have led to the emergence of that virus another $650,000 to conduct more of that research.

The Deeper Truth about Speed Bumps By THOMAS HARRINGTON. These are classic “controlling practices” designed to gradually leach from each and every one of us—and most infuriatingly those not yet fully socialized—what is arguably our greatest instinctual drive: the desire to weave stories of our own in the company of others that remind us not of what they tell us we are and must be for them, but of the sense of dignity that we all want to feel and, to the best of our abilities, extend to others.

The Left/Right Divide is Obsolete By HALEY KYNEFIN. This is an existential, mythic moment, during which we have to decide: what forces are we going to allow to shape our identities? Our social infrastructure? Our cultural landscapes? Do we even want them to be changed? If so, in what ways?

The Hypocrisy of Modern Pharmacological Ethics By AARON HERTZBERG. Pharmacists will fill prescriptions for medications without checking to see if the patient is on a different drug that is contraindicated to be taken together with the new drug, fill prescriptions for highly addictive opioids with black-box warning, and fill coprescriptions for highly addictive opioids. But they won’t fill prescriptions for Ivermectin or HCQ, two of the safest drugs ever developed if prescribed for Covid.