Newsletter 12/3 - Freedom Was Torched Four Years Ago

It’s the fourth anniversary of the lockdowns, the two weeks that seemed never to end.


Mysteries remain but we are working daily to discover and reveal what happened to freedom, which is gravely in danger today, as you well know.


Meanwhile, the crisis continues. It falls increasingly to independent institutions like Brownstone Institute to get to the bottom of this and point the way out.


Some news items:


Brownstone is backing a major research project in cooperation with Leeds University in the UK to provide an independent voice on matters of pandemic preparedness. You can see some of the results at REPPARE.org. Also these efforts became the basis of a wonderful piece in the Wall Street Journal by Matt Ridley. Deeply grateful to the benefactors who made this possible!


We are thrilled to announce a new supper club location in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, with the first meeting on April 4, featuring Debbie Lerman and her crucial research. Register here.


Only 25 spots remain for our founding supper club in West Hartford, Connecticut, on March 20, featuring Aaron Kheriaty. Register here.


This past week, we became aware of some profound needs among some important writers, medical practitioners, attorneys, and other researchers, who have faced tremendous professional disruption as part of a broader purge of public life.


The problem: our fellowship program is tapped out for now.


If you can help, please do so. And if you write or call, we can explore giving options. Your support is critical.


Here is some content since our last email:


Jesus or…Amazon…Loves You By Christine Black. What could we count on after lockdowns descended? Mainstream churches shuttered doors while the local AA meeting near my house met at a park in the winter. Another 12-step meeting met under a tree in the yard of the church in warm months and under a porch awning when it rained. Church bureaucracies ordered doors closed. What had happened to us? Yet, Amazon never stopped.


Four Years Ago This Week, Freedom Was Torched By Jeffrey Tucker. The prevailing attitude in public life is just to forget the whole thing. And yet we live now in a country very different from the one we inhabited five years ago. Our media is captured. Social media is widely censored in violation of the First Amendment, a problem being taken up by the Supreme Court this month with no certainty of the outcome. The administrative state that seized control has not given up power. Crime has been normalized. Art and music institutions are on the rocks. Public trust in all official institutions is at rock bottom. We don’t even know if we can trust the elections anymore.


Divided We Fall By Lani Kass. We recoil because we know that the appeal to self is corrosive to unit cohesion. We also know that promoting individual identity and self-actualization—focusing on what is different among us—fosters division. And yet we are repeatedly told that it’s precisely such “diversity”—not of thought, but of gender, race, ethnicity, religion, national origin, and sexual orientation—that makes our nation prosperous and our military strong.


Health Care: Right, Privilege, or Neither? By Thomas Buckley. Much of the current debate surrounding health care – putting aside momentarily the catastrophic failure of the public health system during the pandemic – is whether or not it is a “right” or a “privilege.”


The Playmobil Society vs. The Game of Nations By Haley Kynefin. Our models represent, largely, a collaborative social universe, where people play by rules, say what they mean, and act with honesty and integrity — and where, in general, we do not deal with calculating minds trained in the arts of war and espionage. Their models, on the other hand, encompass a reality that exists completely off this game board, which is not beholden to it, and whose players often take each other’s movements into account and plot reactions several steps in advance.


The History of Public Health Colonialism By David Bell. With the world turning full circle, post-World War Two concepts of human rights, equality, and local agency are exiting the international stage. The veiled colonialism currently dressed up as vaccine equity looks like a bunch of colonial bureaucrats forcing their sponsors’ wares on those with less power, whilst building policies to ensure this imbalance remains. Malnutrition, infectious disease, child marriage, and generational poverty are side issues to the East India Pharma and Software Company’s bottom lines. This will stop when those being colonized once again unite and refuse to comply. In the meantime, the enablers could open their eyes and understand who they are working for.


WHO’s Guilty of Fake News, Now? By Molly Kingsley. With media shying away from publishing views critical of the WHO and its pharma sponsors, our politicians remain naively blind to the web of ulterior, vested motivations driving the restructuring of global public health. But with one set of actors coming to the table with clean hands — no undisclosed financial incentives nor purse strings pulled by profit-driven corporations — and the other with hands stained by pharmaceutical profits and dancing to the tune of undisclosed funders, who would the public trust were they only to be fed the facts?


How the Sea Turns Stones Into Pebbles By Thomas Harrington. We’ve become, through a series of coercions and inducements forced on us by the government since 2001, and made banal through cult-like invocations and rituals, a nation of first-class “skimmers” there for the taking by anyone who feels like tossing us out into the encroaching waves of the deep blue sea.


A Close Look at the Amici Briefs in Murthy v. Missouri By Brownstone Institute. The institutions we once expected to be our allies have revealed themselves to be derelict or submissive. In their place, new groups have emerged to speak truth to power. Now is the time if there ever was one.


Technocrats Cut Ireland at the Knees By Sinead Murphy. For many years now, Ireland has been subject to a particularly intense cultural offensive. Why this should be so is an open question. It may be that Ireland is – or was, at least – more than usually culturally robust, an opportunity for the technocrats to really cut their teeth.


Technology: Weapon of the People By Bert Olivier. In sum, while the poisonous aspect of the media pharmakon has not nearly exhausted its toxic potency, the curative side has incrementally been gaining strength and therapeutic effectiveness, as reflected in the anxiety of the ‘Davos elites,’ detectable in their worry, that they no longer ‘own the news.’ They thought they had it all under control, but were caught unawares by the unexpected power of the alternative media – those ever-expanding digital spaces of the machine inhabited by the resistance.


In Health Care, We Are Flying Blind By Jeffrey Tucker. Health insurance needs a new pricing structure that is not based on a one-size-fits-all model that it is now. Health and therefore healthcare expense is highly tuned to individual choice. We need more information about the best choices, and that information can only come to us once the specialists who know the data are allowed to impact pricing structures in ways they currently cannot.


The Truth Business Leaders Need to Face By Carla Peeters. In many countries, business leaders are facing a decline in productivity with an increasing risk for bankruptcy. In many discussions, the real problem of a poor economy is kept hidden. The dramatic eroding of human capital by poor health, increased sickness, early deaths in all ages, and lost education among the youth will disrupt business performance for years to come. This downward spiral urgently needs a U-turn to save human capital and economic flourishing. This transformation should be guided by trusted business leaders with high integrity who understand that profit is a result of investments in human capital and starts with good health and affordable pure nutritious food.


Australia to Face an Honest Inquiry By Ramesh Thakur. These are big questions. The answers to them need and demand an independent, impartial, and rigorous inquiry helmed by credible people with the appropriate mix of qualifications, experience, expertise, and integrity, who are not tainted with conflicts of interest.


We Are Being Systemically Blinded By Bret Weinstein. It will be jarring for many to hear a scientist speak with such certainty. It should be jarring. We are trained to present ideas with caution, as hypotheses in need of a test. But in this case I have tested the idea and I am as certain of this as I am of anything. We are being systematically blinded. It is the only explanation I have encountered that not only describes the present, but also, in my experience, predicts the future with all but perfect accuracy.


The End of the End of Ideology By Jeffrey Tucker. Looking back, Daniel Bell’s “end of ideology” seems more like an attempt to draw closed a green velvet curtain that was hiding something terrible, namely that we were gradually giving up citizen control of our societies to an elite that pretended to possess wisdom, judgment, and prudence to the point that the rest of us could do no better than to outsource our penchant for exercising freedom and democracy to them. Pull back that curtain and we find ignorance, institutional interest, fraud, graft, and a shocking lack of empathy.


Politics as Lawfare By El Gato Malo. This is not politics, this is dictatorship by unaccountable apparatchiks and it has festered into something truly ugly. This is how you undermine the faith in a system entirely. You make it lawless and capricious, blatantly unfair, rigged, and slanted.


We Build Anew in Australia By Gigi Foster. In mid-November 2023, Australians for Science and Freedom held its inaugural conference under the banner ‘Progress through Science and Freedom’ on the campus of the University of New South Wales. ASF is a think tank launched in mid-2023 by myself and nearly a dozen like-minded professionals from different disciplines, all aghast at the travesties we witnessed during the Covid era.


The AMA is Wrong About Julie Sladden By Kara Thomas. Dr Barratt is correct; doctors do have a higher standing in the community. Dr Julie Sladden is ethical and moral, and, after reviewing the best available evidence and using her clinical experience, she spoke up at great personal cost, to protect the public when authorities ignored her calls for a review. The Tasmanian people can decide who they wish to lead them; they do not need the AMA bullying doctors, silencing scientific debate and interfering in democracy.