Brownstone Insights

This article was co-authored by Dr. Timothy Kelly.

Introduction

“Do you think there would have been less deaths overall if we hadn’t had a vaccine?”

This question was posed to Dr. Aseem Malhotra by Steven Bartlett during an interview on Bartlett’s podcast Diary of a CEO. To which Dr. Malhotra responded simply “Yes.”

Full Fact, a fact-checking organization, has written a verdict on Malhotra’s answer, claiming: “False. There is clear evidence that the vaccines saved far more lives than they cost.”

While we appreciate Full Fact’s attention to this important question, their verdict is premature, given that the true answer has not yet been conclusively determined by medical science.

Part I: The Illusion of Certainty – Deconstructing Claims of Vaccine Efficacy

The assertion that “There is clear evidence” of Covid-19 vaccines’ benefits outweighing their harms” exemplifies a dangerous oversimplification of complex medical realities. This claim, often propagated by fact-checkers and mainstream narratives, fails to acknowledge the fundamental limitations in our current understanding and the methodological flaws inherent in much of the existing research.

The Missing Gold Standard: Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs)

In evidence-based medicine, properly conducted RCTs measuring all-cause mortality are the gold standard for determining an intervention’s overall impact. For Covid-19 vaccines, no such trials have demonstrated an all-cause mortality benefit. The original trials were not designed or powered to detect differences in all-cause mortality, and follow-up periods were too short to capture long-term effects. Without this crucial evidence, claims of clear benefit are premature at best and misleading at worst.

The Pitfalls of Observational Studies

In the absence of robust RCT data, fact-checkers often turn to observational studies. However, these studies are fraught with potential biases that consistently overestimate benefit and underestimate harm:

Selection Distortion: Healthy user bias and time-dependent effects inflate apparent vaccine benefits and mask potential harms due to inherent differences in vaccinated groups and changing study conditions.

Temporal Misclassification: Survivorship bias and miscategorization of vaccination status in early post-injection periods artificially inflate efficacy estimates and underestimate potential harms.

Classification Bias: Vaccine status classification errors occur in a single direction, with the vaccinated often misclassified as unvaccinated. This results in infections and harms in the vaccinated being misattributed to the unvaccinated group, overestimating benefit and underestimating harms.

Reporting Bias: Systematic underreporting of adverse events following vaccination due to factors like lack of recognition, dismissal of potential vaccine-related causes, or fear of professional repercussions leads to underestimation of vaccine risks and overstates safety.

Publication Bias: The preferential publication and promotion of studies showing positive vaccine effects, coupled with the suppression or non-publication of studies showing no effect or negative effects, skews the overall body of evidence and public perception.

The Modeling Mirage

Fact-checkers often rely on modeling studies to support dramatic claims of lives saved, compounding the issues of observational studies:

Amplification of Errors: Small inaccuracies in input data or assumptions lead to wildly inaccurate projections
Oversimplification: Complex real-world dynamics are reduced to equations that may not capture crucial nuances
Confirmation Bias: Models can be inadvertently (or deliberately) tuned to produce expected or desired results
Lack of Falsifiability: Unlike controlled experiments, many model predictions are not truly testable
Overconfidence: Precise-looking numbers create a false sense of certainty

In conclusion, modeling studies often use overestimates of benefit taken from observational studies to create oversimplified models tuned to further amplify these overestimated benefits. By extrapolating across millions, they produce unrealistic estimates that can never be verified by proper scientific experimentation.

The magnitude of benefit from Covid-19 vaccines is likely much smaller than portrayed by observational and modeling studies. To determine the net effect of the vaccines, both known harms and potential yet unknown harms must be carefully considered against this uncertain benefit.

Part II: Evaluating the Evidence of Harm

Given the uncertain and likely overestimated magnitude of benefit, it is crucial to consider the potential harms of the Covid-19 vaccines. Dr. Malhotra’s expert opinion that the vaccines may have resulted in a net loss of life for society is justifiable and defensible based on various studies and their logical implications.

Reanalysis of Clinical Trial Data

A re-analysis of the original clinical trials of the mRNA Covid-19 vaccines revealed an increased rate of serious adverse events of 1 in 800. Serious adverse events are defined as either death, hospitalization, or prolonged disability, most of which would certainly reduce life expectancy. Considering that billions of doses have been administered worldwide, this suggests millions may have suffered serious vaccine-induced harms. This rate is orders of magnitude higher than the typically accepted rate of serious harm from other vaccines (approximately 1-2 in a million).

Observational Studies and Autopsy Findings

The high rate of serious harm identified in clinical trials has been corroborated by observational studies from surveillance systems in the US and European Union. Additionally, autopsy studies have confirmed that a significant percentage of deaths occurring within 30 days after Covid-19 vaccination were caused by the vaccine, unequivocally demonstrating that the vaccines can cause death.

It’s worth noting that while observational studies consistently overestimate benefits, they simultaneously underestimate harms due to factors such as healthy user bias, publication bias, reporting bias, and classification bias.

Population-Level Mortality Trends

If the Covid-19 vaccines offered more benefit than harm, we would expect to see decreased excess deaths in highly vaccinated populations after 2021 compared to 2020. However, nearly all nations with high mRNA vaccine uptake experienced higher excess mortality in 2021 than in 2020, contrary to the typical pattern following a pandemic. These elevated excess deaths have persisted beyond 2021, raising concerns about the vaccines’ ongoing impact.

Moreover, since 2022, an overall mortality benefit from the Covid-19 vaccines has become less likely, given that variants have become less deadly, most of the population has been infected, and vaccine efficacy appears greatly reduced. Yet, the serious harm caused by the vaccines likely remains constant, suggesting a worsening harm-benefit ratio over time.

Part III: Current Harm-Benefit Analysis

While uncertainty remains without a Covid-19 vaccine clinical trial testing all-cause hospitalization or mortality, we can attempt an informal harm-benefit analysis using existing data:

Re-analysis of clinical trials found that within the original clinical trials the rate of serious adverse events in the vaccinated was greater than the protection offered against Covid-19 hospitalization
Using UK Health Security Agency observational data on vaccine effectiveness and the rate of serious harm from clinical trials, they found for people over 90 (the highest risk group), vaccinating 7,000 people would prevent one Covid-19 hospitalization that requires oxygen but cause about 7 serious adverse events
The benefit-to-harm ratio becomes increasingly unfavorable for younger age groups based on the UKHSA data, with those under 45 requiring nearly a million vaccinations to prevent one hospitalization

Ethical Considerations in Continued Vaccination

Even if the initial introduction of Covid-19 vaccines offered a net mortality benefit (which remains uncertain), it is much less likely that they offer a net benefit today and moving forward. Without a proper clinical trial, we will remain uncertain about the true harm-benefit balance. Continuing to offer a prophylactic intervention with an unknown and potentially negative harm-benefit profile is unethical.

Conclusion: The Call for Reassessment

The complex nature of mRNA vaccine risk-benefit analysis underscores the need for ongoing, rigorous scientific inquiry and open, honest dialogue about the impacts of large-scale medical interventions. Dr. Malhotra’s position that the Covid-19 vaccines may have had a net negative impact is justifiable based on the available evidence and the significant uncertainties that remain. In response to these concerns, the Hope Accord was created. This petition, of which Dr. Malhotra and the authors of this article are founding co-signers, calls for the suspension of Covid-19 vaccines and a return to fundamental ethical principles that were abandoned during the pandemic.

Tens of thousands of individuals have already signed the Accord, reflecting growing concerns about the continued use of these vaccines without comprehensive safety data. We invite all who share our concerns to join us in signing the Hope Accord and supporting a thorough reassessment of Covid-19 vaccine policies.

To conclude, the complex medical question of Covid-19 vaccine’s impact on all-cause mortality across society remains one of profound uncertainty. In this context, Full Fact’s unequivocal verdict demonstrates a concerning level of hubris in scientific interpretation. When contacted about their scientifically invalid verdict, Full Fact maintained confidence in their position, citing the same synthetic modeling studies and unreliable observational data from their original article. This case illustrates a broader concern: fact-checking organizations often oversimplify complex medical questions and present certainty where none exists. The public deserves more rigorous and truthful evaluation of such complex scientific questions.

US Report on Covid Response: Ten Truths and an Elephant Family

Brownstone Institute — Thu, 19 Dec 2024 10:22:47 GMT

BY BHASKARAN RAMAN

US House of Representatives committee has laid out, with references and evidence, some 550 pages detailing most of the elements of the Covid response “mistakes:”

“AFTER ACTION REVIEW OF THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC: The Lessons Learned and a Path Forward,” 04 Dec 2024

SSCP Final Report

14.8MB ∙ PDF file

The report clearly has international implications. Most importantly the report calls into question the needless atrocities on children, as part of the supposedly scientific official Covid response. There are ten important conclusions of the report, supported both by everyone’s common-sense observation as well as scientific evidence. However, there is an entire family of four elephants-in-the-room missed by the report – either ignoring scientific evidence or citing only weak evidence. First, the ten truths.

Report findings: “Long Term School Closures Were Not Supported by Available Science and Evidence.” (page 412). “Pandemic-era School Closures Adversely Impacted Academic Performance that Will Continue for Years.” (page 438). “School Closures Significantly Contributed to Increased Instances of Mental and Behavioral Health Issues.” (page 440).

Comment: We all got to see how children suffered mentally and physically due to extended school closure for nearly two years. Specific to India: While it was a travesty in the US, in India where child malnutrition, poverty, child labour, and child marriage are rampant problems, it was unconscionable. School closure was nothing short of institutionalized child abuse by those in mortal panic, based on exaggerated fear rather than on scientific evidence.
Report findings: “Enduring COVID-19 Lockdowns Unnecessarily Damaged American’s (sic) Mental Health.” (page 215). “Enduring COVID-19 Lockdowns Disrupted the Development of American Children and Young Adults.” (page 216). “Enduring COVID-19 Lockdowns Unnecessarily had Severe Consequences for Americans’ Physical Health.” (page 217).

Comment: Children and young adults were not only denied education, but were also denied a normal childhood – they were literally driven mad with unscientific restrictions on play, recreational activities, and simply being children/youth. The US report needs to be commended for stating the obvious, and supported by scientific evidence.
Report finding: “Forcibly Masking Young Children, Ages Two and Older, Caused More Harm than Good.” (page 212).

Comment: Hiding children’s smiles behind ineffective masks will forever remain a symbol of how unscientific and delusional society behaved. Mask mandates for children were hence also institutionalized child abuse by those in mortal panic, based on exaggerated fear rather than on scientific evidence.
Report findings: “Unscientific COVID-19 Lockdowns Caused More Harm Than Good.” (page 214). “Enduring COVID-19 Lockdowns Unnecessarily Harmed the U.S. Economy.” (page 215).

Comment: Lockdown was premised on society functioning with “essential” workers. Why did the world not have the common sense or compassion to even find out what was happening to the “essential” workers? Specific to India: Why were the so-called pro-poor incapable of comparing virus risk to starvation risk for the millions of migrant labourers who lead a hand-to-mouth existence? Migrant workers were even heard saying in the media that they would not die of Covid but would surely die of hunger. Why did the so-called scientists and elites assume that they have the right to decide for someone else?
Report finding: “Those Who Recovered From COVID-19 Were Conferred Infection Acquired Immunity.” (page 331).

Comment: Not only is this supported by recent evidence, this is one of the oldest truths known in healthcare. Immunity after natural infection and recovery is known science for more than 2,400 years since the plague of Athens. Indeed, such immunity is the basis of most vaccines.
Report findings: “COVID-19 Vaccine Mandates Caused Massive Collateral Damage and Were Very Likely Counterproductive.” (page 340). “COVID-19 Vaccine Mandates Were Not Supported by Science.” (page 346).

Comment: Covid vaccines were never properly tested and approved vaccines, they were a mass medical experiment. What gave anyone the authority to violate someone else’s bodily integrity for a medical intervention, that too an experimental one? Why was there no informed consent?
Report finding: “The Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System is Insufficient and Not Transparent.” (page 349).

Comment: Specific to India: Such a system is virtually non-existent in India; there was just half-an-hour “observation” and a photo of the Supreme Leader after such “observation.” Even the mandatory half-an-hour observation was not followed in many villages – people were happy that they were not forced to wait for half an hour and could immediately leave for their work! Nobody was ever told of any possible side effects or if anything happens where they should report.
Report finding: “There Was No Quantitative Scientific Support for Six Feet of Social Distancing.” (page 198).

Comment: Specific to India: Was such distancing ever possible in India? Why were Indian elites and even the so-called pro-poor blind to whether any apocalypse was happening in slums where such six-foot distancing is unthinkable? Did they not see crowds of starving migrant labourers queuingup for food? Crowds of migrant workers not only queuing up, but some photographs showed them falling on each other – driven by starvation, in desperation for food. Why did the scientists and elites then not have the common sense to see that such six-foot distancing was made-up quackery?
Report finding: “The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Relied on Flawed Studies to Support the Issuance of Mask Mandates.” (page 207).

Comment: If the US CDC cited flawed studies, one has to ask: why did the rest of the world not have sufficient independent thinking to analyze critically? To the contrary, everyone – housing societies, municipal authorities, even higher education institutions – was blindly copying and downloading and printing CDC posters on masking.
Report finding: “The Biden Administration Employed Undemocratic and Likely Unconstitutional Methods to Fight What It Deemed to Be Misinformation.” (page 292).

Comment: It was not just the government, but so-called scientists also engaged in censorship of voices opposing the mainstream narrative – all in exaggerated panic. Such censorship is rife even today in social media platforms.

The US report must be commended for bringing out these ten truths. Its mention of the needless suffering of children is especially filling a much-needed gap in honesty among officials in charge of Covid response, and for this no amount of praise is sufficient.

However, the report misses an entire family of four elephants-in-the-room.

The Time Element Elephant: When Did SARS-CoV-2 Originate?

The US report begins with the finding: “SARS-CoV-2, the Virus that Causes COVID-19, Likely Emerged Because of a Laboratory or Research Related Accident.” (page 1). The report thus deems this finding to be of primary importance. This is an important finding indeed and is likely a correct conclusion. However, the question of whenSARS-CoV-2 originated is of far greater importance than where it originated. To take an analogy, in a case of suspected murder, the question of when the event happened is of prime importance – it should raise eyebrows if an investigation assiduously avoids the question of timing.

But this is exactly what the US report does – it entirely skirts the timing question ofwhen SARS-CoV-2 originated. This is of significance since there is substantial evidence that the so-called “novel and dangerous” virus was circulating as early as September 2019 in Italy, without anyone noticing anything extraordinary. During the military Olympics held in China in October 2019, circumstantial evidence points to the fact that athletes from around the world caught, and likely took back with them, what was later to be termed as “Covid.”

So if the virus was circulating in different parts of the world in Sep/Oct 2019 without anyone noticing, can it really be termed as “novel and dangerous?” This is the biggest elephant in the room avoided by the report – if the virus (regardless of man-made versus natural) were not clinically “novel and dangerous” in a meaningful way, the entire Covid pandemic narrative falls apart.

The Swedish Elephant: Lesser Mortality Than 2015

Amid the (manufactured) panic in Mar/Apr 2020, one prominent Western country did not lock down – Sweden. For this, it was vilified in the media and even in “scientific” circles. But no-lockdown, no-mask Sweden had no statistically meaningful excess deaths at all! In fact, the winter of 2015 saw a higher mortality in Sweden than the so-called first wave of Covid.

Should the US report not investigate as to why Sweden had no pandemic of note? It misses to do so.

The Continent-Sized African Elephant: Poorer Fared Better

The Covid narrative ran – the virus was highly infectious and overwhelmed hospitals everywhere. So it is natural to ask what happened in places where population density is high and hospital resources are poor. Strangely, there was no pandemic of note in almost the entire continent of Africa – no reports of hospitals being overwhelmed, or large numbers of people dying, no reports of official counts missing many deaths.

Most of resource-poor Africa had much lesser per-capita Covid mortality than resource-rich New York and San Francisco. Should this not pique curiosity in a report investigating Covid response? Once again, there is no mention of this continent-sized African elephant in the entire report.

The Needle-Shaped Elephant: Covid “Vaccines” Lack Rigorous Trial Data

One of the report’s findings is: “Operation Warp Speed Was a Great Success and Helped Save Millions of Lives.” (page 301). This finding refers to the Covid “vaccines” – it is deeply flawed and is a political claim, lacking scientific evidence. Fittingly, the report cites only a simulation/modeling study to support this claim of millions of lives saved – thus conflating imagined simulations with real-world data. Whether a product is a safe and effective vaccine or an unsafe and ineffective immuno-suppressant is to be decided based on trial results. None of the randomised controlled trials (RCTs) started in 2020 for Covid “vaccines” have completed trial results – all were unblinded (abandoned) 2-6 months into the study, declaring success without the numbers to support it.

Worse, Pfizer’s intermediate results in fact showed more deaths in the “vaccine” arm than in the placebo arm. This needle-shaped elephant is also missed by the US report. It is therefore absurd and counter to scientific evidence, for it to claim that the “vaccines” saved millions of lives.

Where Is Such an Official Report in India?

It is unfortunate that we do not have any such official report in India – despite immense damage to children and the poor, and continuing “sudden” and excess deaths time-correlated with the rollout of the Covid “vaccines.” Perhaps some blunders are too huge for anyone to admit and sleep at night after admitting.

Empowered by the State, Condemned by the Crisis: The Purdue Paradox

Brownstone Institute — Wed, 18 Dec 2024 10:28:35 GMT

BY RANDALL BOCK

Purdue Pharma’s story unfolds as a Shakespearean tragedy. Like Julius Caesar, whose ascent was made possible by those who later betrayed him, Purdue rose on the government’s push for broader pain management—“pain as the fifth vital sign”—and FDA approvals of its products.

The company addressed a legitimate medical need but became the scapegoat when perceptions (of a long pre-existing) opioid crisis erupted. Stabbed in the back by the very institutions that once supported it, Purdue bore the brunt of public and legal fury (like King Lear’s Cordelia, to add a Shakespearean metaphor), while the systemic issues that enabled the crisis—unchecked prescriptions, pill mills, illicit drug trade (heroin, fentanyl), and government-supported maintenance therapies—remained relatively untouched.

Purdue Pharma: Opioid Crisis Villain, or Easy Target?

Purdue Pharma became synonymous with the opioid crisis, largely due to high-profile lawsuits and media portrayals in Painkiller and Dopesick. Yet, Purdue’s OxyContin maximally held only 4% of the opioid painkiller market, dwarfed by companies like Mallinckrodt, Actavis, and Endo Pharmaceuticals, which together produced 88% of opioids.

Purdue stood out not because it flooded the market, but because it had developed a “boutique” product (and more importantly in the aftermath, at “boutique” prices)– one crafted in response to the prevailing medical thinking of the time, which emphasized the need for long-acting opioids in managing chronic pain. Studies like 2001’s Long-acting Opioids for Chronic Pain concluded that “long-acting opioids offer distinct advantages over short-acting opioids” by enhancing compliance, quality of life, and stable pain relief.

Purdue’s 1996 OxyContin was precisely aligned with this prevailing medical consensus.

In 2010, Purdue went a step further with the introduction of a groundbreaking “abuse-deterrent formulation” (ADF)—what we might call “OxyContin II”—designed to make tampering difficult and misuse not worth the effort. This reformulation, which had required substantial investment and innovation, was the first of its kind and proved IMMEDIATELY effective in curbing abuse.

In an industry dominated by generic manufacturers producing much simpler morphine analogues, Purdue’s innovation was rare, and the FDA found it so compelling that similar ADF principles were later applied to government-endorsed drugs like Suboxone (to prevent duplication of methadone’s easy diversion).

“(OxyContin II is)…a step in the right direction,” said the FDA’s Bob Rappaport, MD, in 2010.

According to the lawsuit(s), Purdue’s actions “fed the addiction” of a generation, causing widespread harm. Yet this focus on Purdue ignores the broader context, akin to blaming doughnuts for obesity while running a bakery.

Government-endorsed methadone and Suboxone have long expanded the narcotic user base, priming the opioid crisis. The roots of this epidemic trace back to the 1960s, with the shift toward “medicalizing” addiction through maintenance therapies, which significantly increased baseline narcotic use and dependency. For a detailed historical perspective and market analysis, see my “Methadone Maintenance Ignited America’s Opioid Crisis.”

The irony is stark: despite holding only a 3.3% market share, Purdue paid settlements at a rate 43 times higher than the largest opioid producer. Precisely like a wealthy spouse in a bitter divorce, Purdue bore the brunt of public and legal outrage, while poorer industry players without abuse-deterrent strategies escaped scrutiny. The government killed Purdue, yet (as with post-settlement tobacco) opioids remain with the challenge (e. g. fentanyl) greater than ever.

Purdue’s Original Intent

Purdue Pharma’s intent in marketing OxyContin was not to create (or expand) an opioid epidemic. Opioids have always been uniquely reliable—performing exactly as intended, consistently relieving pain — and inducing a sense of pleasure, whether from physical or psychological relief, so intense it may have recipients “coming back for more;” often to the point of addiction. Unlike any other drug, opioids deliver this effect universally, across individuals and even across species, making them both powerful and perilous. This precise, consistent effect creates a complex marketplace with three types of users:

those with legitimate pain needs,
those who began with valid prescriptions but slid into misuse, and
individuals seeking opioids purely for recreational highs, without initial pain.

Studies at the time (1990s) pointed to an under-treatment of pain, especially chronic pain, as many doctors were cautious about prescribing narcotics.

Purdue’s OxyContin sought to address this need with a time-release formula aimed at reducing abuse. One “recreational” user noted, “Most people that I know don’t use OxyContin (II) to get high anymore. They have moved on to heroin.” Among those using opioids to “get high,” OxyContin use dropped while heroin use nearly doubled. According to Theodore Cicero et al. (2012), “Of all opioids used to get high in the past 30 days, OxyContin use fell…whereas heroin use nearly doubled.” The abuse-deterrent formula successfully curbed misuse of OxyContin…

…notwithstanding intrepid Times reporters’ tips for solo “users.”

Purdue’s Historically Contingent Marketing

Purdue’s marketing efforts relied heavily on studies that suggested addiction was a minimal risk when opioids were used properly for pain management. A now infamous reference was this 1980 letter to the New England Journal of Medicine that claimed the addiction risk for patients with no history of drug abuse was less than 1%.

While later criticized, this study and others like it (as incorporated into the Institute of Medicine’s Committee on Pain’s 1987 report “Pain and Disability… Perspectives”) helped push Purdue (and medicine in general) towards the idea that opioids could be safely prescribed for conditions that had traditionally been treated with more caution or left untreated.

Purdue Pharma’s target audience for OxyContin was never the “addict” demographic but those unfortunates in genuine physical pain via illness or injury.

Purdue positioned (and informed) these patients as distinct from recreational drug users, emphasizing that if doctors monitored prescriptions properly, addiction risk would remain low. And Purdue wasn’t necessarily wrong. Critics argue that it downplayed addiction risks and blurred the line between medical and recreational use; yet, like yesteryear’s slavery and today’s sexual identity surgeries, Purdue’s approach reflected its own time: a healthcare landscape that saw pain relief as an urgent need.

Just as law enforcement and personal safety rely on firearms, opioids retain their essential role in pain management — even if risks of criminal elements’ abuse persist and overshadow the valid use of such tools. To fault Purdue alone misses the broader, unresolved challenge: balancing legitimate medical need with the risk of dependency. The divide between therapeutic and illicit opioid use is not Purdue’s creation but a societal dilemma yet to be fully addressed.

This chart highlights the assumptions that underlie the anti-Purdue narrative—particularly the claim that Purdue misled the public by downplaying opioid addiction risks (see red boxes, below). These critics interpret Purdue with hindsight bias. The actual language used in Purdue’s educational materials, as shown at left, acknowledges risks without advocating misuse. Promoting condom use does not endorse sexual violence; Purdue’s focus on legitimate pain doesn’t encourage opioid diversion.

When Intent Meets Reality: The Emergence of Pill Mills and Prescription Abuse

The flaw in Purdue’s model wasn’t so much in its initial intent, but in what happened once OxyContin entered the broader healthcare system and the market. In theory, physicians were meant to monitor patients closely, ensuring that prescriptions were used for legitimate purposes. But in practice, the system became ripe for exploitation. Certain physicians, driven by financial incentive or indifference, began overprescribing the drug. “Pill mills” sprung up across the country, where doctors would write prescriptions for wholesale doses of OxyContin with little medical justification or interaction.

As a primary-care physician, I witnessed patients coming into my office claiming “allergies” (sic) to lower-dose opioid medications (like Percocet), in an effort to obtain more potent OxyContin. The black market for OxyContin flourished, eventually settling at ~$1 per gram. The flow of OxyContin buoyed by “fifth vital sign” mentality created a leaner, more competitive landscape for narcotics. Heroin dealers adapted by lowering prices and expanding their “customer” base of “users.”

The Bigger Picture: Is Purdue the Real Smoking Gun?

“Because that’s where the money is.”
(why Willie Sutton robbed banks)

Through high-dosage methadone maintenance, the government itself normalized opioid dependency, creating fertile ground for heroin dealers—independent actors as ineradicable as mosquitoes. Government-financed replacement narcotics daily deliver eight times the “high” of peak OxyContin.

Purdue’s fixed resources and corporate visibility made it a prime target for legal action. This approach mirrors past lawsuits against the tobacco industry, and even the gun industry, where the company that provides the legal, adult-only item—whether a smoke or a firearm—became the focal point of litigation, regardless of misuse by end-users. In fact, many of the same lawyers who targeted Big Tobacco adopted the same legal tactics against Purdue, casting the company as the public face of a multifaceted epidemic. Notably, pornographers and sex workers; marijuana and psychedelic dealers (many operating illegally) avoid these strong-arm tactics.

Financial motives drive this selective focus. The NFL, despite not having the highest concussion rates—sports like cycling, snowboarding, and gymnastics surpass it in injury frequency—was targeted for its deep pockets. Like the Sacklers, the NFL was forced to pay out billions for the harm linked to its product. But unlike the Sacklers, the NFL survives, protected by public affection as ‘America’s game.’ The Sacklers had no such goodwill; even the universities and museums that gladly took their donations had no qualms about cutting ties and erasing the family name (with the exception of Harvard!) while conveniently keeping the funds.

The Sacklers were sacked, their assets and reputations torched, much like cities sacrificed to BLM sentiments. Fickle society: are we addressing real issues—or just picking socially acceptable targets to burn?

Like a goose fattened by policies encouraging opioid access, Purdue was plump with profits when the state carved out its liver—a pâté de foie gras feast of settlements—while leaving the deeper, systemic issues it helped create untouched.

Addendum, QUIZ: which entity is missing in the public imagination as an opioid epidemic causative agent? See this Fortune magazine 2017 poll, via classaction.com.

The opioid epidemic exploded one-hundredfold with the unprecedented introduction of narcotic maintenance “therapy,” methadone—an approach never applied to other addictions like alcohol, cocaine, gambling, or sex.

This unique exception, rooted in the medical profession’s ability to prescribe and profit, reveals a troubling partnership between government policy and corporate gain. Just as taxpayer-funded research paved the way for the Covid-19 pandemic through gain-of-function experiments in Wuhan, the government’s blind spot—or complicity—in fostering addiction treatment models fueled by profit underscores its failure to protect its citizens. When the government errs, it doesn’t just fail—it enables catastrophe.

RFK Jr. and the Samoan Measles Outbreak

Brownstone Institute — Tue, 17 Dec 2024 10:24:39 GMT

BY BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE

The propaganda of our times is utterly overwhelming! If it is not one psyop, it’s another. From drones to performative assassinations, we are inundated by craziness minute by minute.

If this isn’t the last hurrah of the deep state, it certainly feels like it. The people who locked you down and tried to force an experimental drug into your body are not giving up easily. They will fight until the end, no matter how discredited they are.

It’s not easy to keep up with it all, and even harder to tell what’s real and what is not but here we are. We have 5 weeks until the inauguration of the first independently funded transition in the postwar period and the scramble to control the public mind is the main show.

We have just a few weeks remaining to donate to the great cause with your contribution to Brownstone Institute. Will you renew your support this week? Thank you for considering.

The West Hartford supper club is December 18 and features essayist and best-selling author Charles Eisenstein. You are certainly invited!

The Philadelphia supper club is on January 9 and features none other than Brownstone Founder and President Jeffrey Tucker! We hope to see you there.

Here is some content since our last email.

Free Speech Wins the Culture War By Andrew Lowenthal. The election was a repudiation of the censorship regime and the culture that enabled it, but the battle for free speech is not complete until the captured institutions become homes again for free inquiry and facilitators of open conversations.

RFK Jr. and the Samoan Measles Outbreak By David Marks. The current criticism of Kennedy is an endeavor to make him look dangerously ignorant and irresponsible to sway members of the Senate. His efforts to understand and assist in the Samoan measles outbreak exemplify his thoughtfulness and capabilities.

Disaster Caused by Medical Journal Censorship By Pierre Kory. I want to further the historical record of censoring actions by medical journals on the adverse vaccine data of the Covid vaccines. A Midwestern doctor has done a masterful job of detailing that history in regard to aspects of childhood vaccines.

FEMA’s Response and the Hurricanes of 2024 By Robert Malone. By all appearances, there is a governmental blackout regarding their disastrous response and criticisms about that response. Of interest, in previous news stories between Oct 1-7, almost all center around ‘fact-checks’ that try to blunt the criticisms about FEMA, including Trump’s.

MHRA and Covid Vaccines Surveillance By Tom Jefferson and Carl Heneghan. We thought: this is active surveillance of 30 thousand people who had at least one exposure to one of the Covid vaccines and were prepared to give feedback to MHRA. So we started reading.

The Democratic Party Changed While We Stayed in Place By Josh Stylman. I struggle with what comes next because I understand the gravity of our situation. Our republic is incredibly fragile—more fragile than most people realize. The Founders knew this, warning us about the difficulty of maintaining a democratic republic.

War, Revolution, and Ambition By Bert Olivier. (Hannah) Arendt’s elaboration on ‘deterrence’ (1990, p. 15-17) is equally relevant today, insofar as its focus on the (nuclear) arms race during the Cold War similarly applies to the conflict in Ukraine, but with important differences and specifications.

Confusion and Clarity: Excerpts from House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic Report By David Bell. Despite sections with refreshing clarity and depth, the report is also often shallow and dismissive of fundamental issues. It fails to assess with evidence the overall effectiveness of the lockdown-mass vaccination paradigm, making sometimes contradictory claims.

FDA “GRAS” Additives and Artificial Food Coloring Banned in Many Countries Still “Certified” in the USA By David Gortler. GRAS food additives and food colorings will be one of many things that Trump-appointed HHS Director Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and his new FDA commissioner will need to address, alongside an extended list of overdue, critical FDA modernizations and reforms.

Empowered by the State, Condemned by the Crisis: The Purdue Paradox By Randall Bock. Just as taxpayer-funded research paved the way for the Covid-19 pandemic through gain-of-function experiments in Wuhan, the government’s blind spot—or complicity—in fostering addiction treatment models fueled by profit underscores its failure to protect its citizens.

Freedumb, You Say? By Gabrielle Bauer. Freedom desperately needs a comeback from its current incarnation as an expendable frill. In my own small way I’m trying to make this happen: I’m now part of a small group preparing to launch a Free Speech Union in Canada.

US Report on Covid Response: Ten Truths and an Elephant Family By Bhaskaran Raman. There are ten important conclusions of the report, supported by scientific evidence. However, there is an entire family of four elephants-in-the-room missed by the report – either ignoring scientific evidence or citing only weak evidence. First, the ten truths.

A Critical Analysis of Covid-19 Vaccine Impact Claims By Joseph Fraiman. To conclude, the complex medical question of Covid-19 vaccine’s impact on all-cause mortality across society remains one of profound uncertainty. In this context, Full Fact’s unequivocal verdict demonstrates a concerning level of hubris in scientific interpretation.

Confusion and Clarity: Excerpts from House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic Report

Brownstone Institute — Mon, 16 Dec 2024 10:17:37 GMT

BY DAVID BELL

When a country has abrogated the long-accepted human rights of its citizens on a vast scale, pushed a novel class of pharmaceuticals on its people, and had many of its state governors rule by emergency decree, it seems sensible to look back and assess whether it was all a good idea.

A sensible country would also carefully review new policies that resulted in a rapid increase in wealth inequality and a prolonged jump in excess mortality. While many countries are still struggling to find the maturity to do so, the United States House of Representatives released the findings of its 2-year review into the Covid-19 pandemic on December 4^th.

Titled the “After Action Review of the COVID-19 Pandemic – The Lessons Learned and a Path Forward,” it was intended to do just that – learn lessons. Its 520 pages range over multiple topics with a variety of depth, and a short overview can be found here. It spends many pages, reasonably, on the actions of key senior public health officials to mislead the public and governments. It notes the fully predictable health, economic, and societal harms of lockdown policies such as workplace and school closures, and the false messaging used to promote them.

Written by a committee led by a Republican Party chair (Brad Wenstrup) on the opposite side to the current (outgoing) government, it contains some bipartisan conclusions and others that only the Republican members appear to have been keen on.

Unfortunately, basic public health and even truth have become political. Despite sections with refreshing clarity and depth, the report is also often shallow and dismissive of fundamental issues. It fails to assess with evidence the overall effectiveness of the lockdown-mass vaccination paradigm, making sometimes contradictory claims. It seems to avoid several difficult subjects such as iatrogenic harm.

The committee notes the probable laboratory (i.e. non-natural) origin of Covid-19 and considers it the worst pandemic for over a century. Yet it then ignores questions on the proportionality of the post-Covid-19 pandemic preparedness agenda, endorsing the need for greater powers for global non-State organizations including the WHO to detect and manage future major natural outbreaks. As a result, while informing some key aspects of the global debate that is dominating international public health, it also adds to the confusion.

This short summary seeks to highlight some of the more compelling, and contradictory, aspects of the report. Sections of the report not covered here also concentrate on Andrew Cuomo’s actions as governor of New York, waste and fraud in the use of public funds, and government-sponsored misinformation (a separate good House Committee report on this was released in October, covering the period 2021-2024).

The Most Likely Origins of Covid-19: Accidental Lab Leak

The report concludes that an accidental lab leak is the most likely origin of the outbreak, originating from the Chinese Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). This gain-of-function research, considered to have developed the SARS-CoV-2 virus and resulted in subsequent years of global excess mortality, was funded by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) through the US-based non-profit EcoHealth Alliance. The research involved manipulation of SARS-like viruses. Some of these were conducted in BSL2 facilities that were inadequate to contain such a virus, reportedly with the knowledge of EcoHealth Alliance.

The committee also notes that this laboratory origin was suspected by several of the authors who wrote the proximal origins letter in early 2020 intended to quash speculation of such an origin. This ‘Proximal Origins’ paper was initially rejected by the journal Nature as not opposing the lab leak strongly enough. The committee notes that the wording was then strengthened, and the letter submitted to Nature Medicine.

Francis Collins (the then-head of the NIH) and others subsequently cited Proximal Origins as ‘proof’ that the virus was derived from a zoological spillover event, and so not a result of reckless research. NIH staff are then noted by the report to have systematically misspelled gain-of-function and other terms in emails to evade future FOIA requests.

The presence of the furin cleavage site (a site on the spike protein on the surface of the virus that allows it to infect human respiratory tract cells more efficiently, and is found in no other virus) is considered to be almost certain evidence of human manipulation of the genome. The committee also noted that WIV used techniques that make detecting genetic manipulation difficult. EcoHealth Alliance then failed to fulfill its obligation to inform the NIH of evidence of high increases in transmissibility (i.e. gain-of-function) noted in the experiments at WIV. WIV has also failed to provide basic data on the laboratory experiments. The committee was not pleased and recommended that EcoHealth Alliance never receive US government funding again.

The WHO, China, Fault, and Responsibility: Arguments for Strengthening WHO Powers Despite Demonstrated Incompetence

In the section of the report discussing the role of the World Health Organization (WHO), the committee takes a generally confusing approach. It blames the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for many of the WHO’s failures. The WHO is then noted to lack the power to enforce the 2005 International Health Regulations (IHR) that were intended to address events such as pandemics. The non-pharmaceutical response that the WHO supported (e.g. lockdowns, masks, social distancing) is heavily criticized as harmful and ineffective, yet the report also suggests that it should have more power over countries to force the release of data and demand early responses, by which the committee presumably means lockdown-type measures:

“The WHO was misinformed, denied access to China, and was used as cover for CCP’s reckless actions” The WHO was misinformed, denied access to China 171)

Yet:

“The WHO’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic was an abject failure. The Organization failed to satisfy all of the above stated goals [to address health emergencies].” (page 173)
“Unlike the World Trade Organization, the WHO has no real authority to sanction or otherwise pressure its Member-States…[t]he WHO has been drained of its power and resources. Its coordinating authority and capacity are weak. Its ability to direct an international response to a life-threatening epidemic is non-existent.” (page 187)

This is interesting, as the committee characterizes a lack of WHO power as an impediment. “Drained of resources” is also an unusual term for a body that has seen a steady increase in its funding, and suggests a lack of deep knowledge here.

The report goes on:

“[Covid] further exposed the severe limitations of the IHR and the institutional limits of the WHO.” (page 187)
“The Pandemic Treaty does not address the weaknesses of the IHR. The WHO’s refusal to hold the CCP accountable for violating the IHR is a major issue in protecting global public health.” (page 188)

The argument here appears to be that the pandemic was China’s fault, even though the panel considers WIV was working under NIH funding and in collaboration with a US Government-funded entity (EcoHealth Alliance). It seems to consider that a stronger WHO would be able to dictate to China.

This is the same WHO that the Committee noted had a private organization (the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation) as its second largest funder and considers to be politically beholden to the CCP. As neither the IHR 2024 amendments or draft Pandemic Agreement address political influence on the WHO, it is unclear why a WHO with greater powers but under the influence of China and the Gates Foundation would be better than one unable to impose their will on other sovereign states and peoples.

The same WHO was noted to have sent its investigative team to China, refusing to include nominations from the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) but including EcoHealth Alliance’s head Peter Daszak. Despite being denied access to raw data and having very limited and supervised access to Chinese experts, the WHO concluded:

“The theory that the virus came from a lab was voted as “extremely unlikely” and wasn’t recommended for further research.” (page 185)

The Committee claims that the WHO should have acted faster once it became aware of a health concern in Wuhan, and such earlier action would have stopped or greatly curtailed the spread. It does not seem to address evidence of earlier spread despite including a quote from Robert Redfield, former director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), of “the unusual actions in and around Wuhan in the fall of 2019” (page 2).

If a lab release of SARS-CoV-2 in the fall of 2019 is correct, then the WHO declaring a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) at the end of December 2019 rather than January 2020 would probably have made little difference. The report seems to presuppose that the spread of an aerosolized virus with significant mild and asymptomatic cases, in a large city and province, could have been completely stopped weeks or months after transmission started, without spreading elsewhere in China and beyond.

“By the time the WHO declared COVID-19 a PHEIC on January 30, 2020, the disease had infected almost 10,000 and killed almost 1,000 people in 19 different countries.” (page 176)
“The BND [German federal intelligence service] concluded that the WHO’s delay in declaring the PHEIC wasted approximately four to six weeks of the potential global response to the COVID-19 pandemic.” (page 176)

So, what would have changed in those 4-6 weeks to stop spread to 19 (and doubtless many more as testing was mostly non-existent) countries? The lockdowns and masks that the report (on good evidence) considers ineffective?

And further on China:

“For potentially more than two weeks, the CCP held the key to the global response [the viral genome sequence] but refused to share it.” (page 181)

Again, how would this have helped? Would having PCR tests 2 weeks earlier, or a vaccine in late November rather than early December 2020, have made a substantive difference to the number of deaths from Covid-19?

Perhaps China, in the fall of 2019, could have detected a lab leak affecting its staff, isolated all known staff, their families, and close contacts immediately, and stopped the spread. However, as an aerosolized virus, it is likely this would have been ineffective unless action was taken at the time of the leak itself, before healthy lab staff spread undetected through mildly symptomatic infections. This would not be a WHO responsibility (one would certainly hope the world does not go down that path) but a WIV one.

However, while the committee is clear that China and the WHO clearly acted with an absence of good faith, responsibility for the pandemic should also be shared by those (e.g. in the US) who supported the studies involving virus manipulation under inadequate conditions of inadequate containment, then apparently colluded to cover the evidence. While the NIH role is highlighted elsewhere, the committee seems keener on assigning overall blame distantly than closer to home.

In arguing for a strengthened WHO with dictatorial power over countries (i.e. taking sovereignty from nations and individuals to impose what are now just recommendations under the IHR), the committee’s position seems highly incompatible with the human rights focus elsewhere in the report. The WHO promoted lockdowns, and its IHR lists interventions such as border closures and mandates as something the WHO may currently recommend. The argument, as written, is for this body to have stronger powers of global governance over countries (e.g. China, and therefore, it follows, the United States).

Lockdowns: Clear Conclusions of Harm Outweighing Benefit

The report damningly sums up the lockdown strategy as:

“Ultimately, the promised 15 days evolved into years, which caused incredibly damaging consequences for the American people. Rather than prioritizing the protection of the most vulnerable, federal and state government policies encouraged or forced millions of Americans to forego critical elements of a healthy, happy, productive, and fulfilling life.” (page 214)

And notes further:

“Unfortunately, it also appears that many of the individuals who were the least at risk of serious illness or death from COVID-19 were at disproportionately higher risk of suffering serious mental distress as a result of lockdowns.” (page 216)

Such harms were of course expected – induced anxiety, income loss, and separation from loved ones will do that. The report goes on to discuss the tragic increase in suicide attempts and overdoses among young people and the cognitive and developmental impacts on infants and young children.

As the report sensibly concludes:

“…it appears the American people could have been better served by policies which focused on protecting the most vulnerable while prioritizing productivity and normalcy for the less vulnerable.” (page 215)

This is an approach consistent with the WHO 2019 pandemic influenza recommendations and with orthodox and ethical public health. An outbreak or other disease event should be addressed in a targeted and proportionate way, avoiding harm to those not at risk from the virus. However, this is not what the WHO promoted in 2020, or would have demanded if its IHR recommendations had become requirements as the original 2022 draft of the IHR amendments stated. As above, it is hard to see here how strengthening the WHO would improve outcomes.

The report has a very good summary of the economic harms of lockdown policies and the upward concentration of wealth and increased inequality associated with these policies, forcing closure of small business whilst keeping their larger corporate rivals operating (pages 376 to 396). It also goes into detail on alleged inadequacy, fraud, and incompetence in the funds set up to address this. (pages 146-170 and 357-365).

School closures are also called out as examples of highly harmful and predictably ineffective measures. In particular, the CDC is noted to have given more weight to the American Federation of Teachers than evidence and scientific analysis in its decision-making. The Federation distinguished itself by advocating for avoidance of formal education of children, ensuring families of lower-income children would stay in lower-income brackets for the next generation or two.

Vaccination: Weak Evidence and Ambiguous Conclusions

“Dr. Walensky notoriously warned that “this is becoming a pandemic of the unvaccinated.” (page 219)

As did many others…The report rightly calls them out for sowing division and misleading the public. The Covid-19 vaccines were never shown to significantly reduce spread. The report is also clear that they were not more effective at stopping severe disease than post-infection immunity. Thus, even leaving aside the issues of human rights and bodily autonomy, the vaccine mandates imposed on the US armed forces and workers of federal government agencies and many state and private entities were without justification. They would not stop transmission, and those who remained unvaccinated were of no greater risk to the vaccinated than fellow vaccinated workers.

The report also notes the unusually high rate of vaccine adverse events reported, and early knowledge of myocarditis in young adults that, together with their very low risk from Covid-19, made school and college mandates particularly egregious.

While acknowledging this massive public health travesty, the report is generally supportive of the mass vaccination program and rapid vaccine development (Operation Warp Speed). Although it reasonably justifies the concept of accelerated development and testing in the face of a massive health threat, it also acknowledges that the threat from Covid-19 was relatively limited.

It fails to explain why, even if the threat of the disease was mistakenly overstated initially, basic testing normally required for genetic therapeutics, including those for carcinogenicity and teratogenicity, was not done. The report specifically notes the Covid ‘vaccines’ are better termed therapeutics based on their action, undermining the ‘vaccine’ terminology ridiculously used to work around these requirements.

Such tests could have been carried out extensively in animals in parallel to late-stage development and even early rollout to people considered highly vulnerable. Regrettably, the only data available, showing increased fetal malformations and failure of pregnancy in injected rats compared to controls, is not expanded on in the report.

The vaccine strategy overall is justified as:

“However, there is little doubt that the rapid development and authorization of COVID-19 vaccines saved millions of lives.¹¹⁶⁹” (page 302)

The citation here, reference 1169, is the sole reference in the report for such a claim. It is an online report by the Commonwealth Fund of a modeling study that gives little detail of vaccine efficacy used and assumes vaccines reduce variant emergence. This latter is contrary to what one would expect from a vaccine that does not inhibit transmission.

The model assumes the vaccines greatly restrict incidence of infection (and thereby transmission) which the committee acknowledges they don’t. Its mortality-saving estimates are further based on the assumption that incidence would have been far higher in years 2 and 3 of the pandemic than in the first year – a highly unusual epidemic curve for an acute respiratory virus outbreak. The study also ignores adverse events, so it predicts Covid-19 death reduction, not overall mortality reduction (which in the Pfizer and Moderna six-month trial reports was not reduced by vaccination).

Thus, the thoroughness of the report seems to fall away badly when the mass vaccination issue is addressed. One can speculate on the reasons for this, as governments change at different stages of the pandemic. Beyond a good analysis of human rights abuses and the poor mechanisms to address those who are harmed by vaccination, it appears to avoid serious analysis of the underlying wisdom of rapidly developing a novel class of pharmaceuticals for mass distribution without thorough testing. As a result, It is unable to start formulating useful recommendations on this.

In Summary

The report addresses specific aspects of the Covid-19 event, covering some thoroughly, such as the proximal origins controversy and the devastating economic effects and rise in inequality through lockdowns. In contrast, it promotes the concept of mass vaccination for Covid-19 as a model for pandemic management, contrary to prior approaches and without offering strong evidence in support.

The committee considers Covid-19 to be the result of a predictable laboratory accident, resulting in the worst acute outbreak in 100 years. It further recognizes that the virus predominantly targeted the sick elderly, and that most deaths in younger age groups were related to the response rather than the direct effects of the virus itself. It condemns the abuses of human rights and attack on bodily autonomy through mandates, yet promotes earlier imposition of lockdown-related measures and travel restrictions.

The committee seeks to blame China for the pandemic. However, they also acknowledge the role of US-based entities in the probable laboratory origin of the virus and the subsequent coverup by senior health officials, which would seem to make them similarly culpable.

Regarding international policies, the committee condemns the policies promoted by the WHO, and notes its influential private-sector funding and perceived geopolitical capture. Despite this, it promotes the idea that the WHO should have more direct power to enforce health regulations on countries and their populations, apparently overriding both national and individual sovereignty. The committee fails to explain how the more forceful imposition of the WHO’s harmful pandemic policies would provide a net benefit.

Many will also be frustrated by the failure to address the reasons for mortality, the unusual rise in excess mortality in years 2 and 3 of the pandemic, and the very limited discussion on iatrogenic harms and clinical management failures. The report steers clear of the role of financial incentives in the US in attributing deaths to Covid. It also fails to address the low priority given to supplements such as vitamin Din improving individual immune resilience, fundamental to managing future outbreaks.

Overall, the report reads as though it was indeed written by a committee, with differing agendas depending on the subject under discussion. This may reflect the inevitable political preferences and tussles that come with opposing parties analyzing the actions of each other’s recent administrations during an election year. However, it is disappointing in its lack of deep analysis and coherent recommendations. While raising important examples of the harm imposed on the population, their health, and economies over the past few years, it offers little clarity on a better path forward.

The committee’s last two recommendations, found in Brad Wenstrup’s opening letter on the second page, do however provide a strong guide to the future, irrespective of the ambiguities elsewhere:

“The Constitution cannot be suspended in times of crisis and restrictions on freedoms sow distrust in public health.”
“The prescription cannot be worse than the disease, such as strict and overly broad lockdowns that led to predictable anguish and avoidable consequences.”

Whatever the risk public health officials ascribe to any future disease event, the public must be in charge, and each individual human must be sovereign and have the ultimate right of decision-making over their own health. This is the basis of post-World War II human rights norms, was formulated with good reason, and used to be a bipartisan understanding. If we could all agree to start there, we may be able to develop an approach that all can work with.

SSCP Final Report

14.8MB ∙ PDF file

From Marcus Aurelius to Omar Little: A Man’s Code is Vital

Brownstone Institute — Fri, 13 Dec 2024 10:13:46 GMT

BY JOSH STYLMAN

As this Thanksgiving weekend draws to a close, my gratitude centers not on the usual holiday platitudes, but on something that has become increasingly precious in our artificial age: authentic relationships – both family and lifelong friends – that deepen rather than fracture under pressure. What binds these relationships, I’ve come to realize, isn’t shared opinions or circumstances, but a shared code – an unwavering commitment to principles that transcends the shifting sands of politics and social pressure. I’m particularly grateful for my inner circle – friends I’ve known since elementary school and family members whose bonds have only strengthened through the crucible of recent years.

Like many others who spoke out against Covid tyranny, I watched what I thought were solid relationships dissolve in real time. As the owner of a local brewery and coach of my kids’ sports teams, I had been deeply embedded in my community – a “man about town” whose friendship and counsel others actively sought. Yet suddenly, the same people who had eagerly engaged with me would scurry when they saw me coming down the street. Professional networks and neighborhood connections evaporated at the mere questioning of prevailing narratives. They reacted this way because I broke orthodoxy, choosing to stand for liberal values – the very principles they claimed to champion – by rejecting arbitrary mandates and restrictions.

In this moment of testing, the difference between those who lived by a consistent code and those who simply followed social currents became starkly clear. Yet in retrospect, this winnowing feels more like clarification than loss. As surface-level relationships fell away, my core relationships – decades-long friendships and family bonds – not only endured but deepened. These trials revealed which bonds were authentic and which were merely situational. The friendships that remained, anchored in genuine principles rather than social convenience, proved themselves infinitely more valuable than the broader network of fair-weather friends I lost.

What strikes me most about these enduring friendships is how they’ve defied the typical narrative of relationships destroyed by political divisions. As Marcus Aurelius observed, “The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.” Despite taking opposite sides of the dialectic on political and cultural issues over the decades, we found ourselves united in opposition to the constitutional transgressions and rising tyranny of the past few years – the lockdowns, mandates, and systematic erosion of basic rights. This unity emerged not from political alignment but from a shared code: a commitment to first principles that transcends partisan divisions.

In these contemplative moments, I’ve found myself returning to Aurelius’s Meditations – a book I hadn’t opened since college until Joe Rogan and Marc Andreessen’s excellent conversation inspired me to revisit it. Aurelius understood that a personal code – a set of unwavering principles – was essential for navigating a world of chaos and uncertainty. The connection feels particularly apt – like my own friend group, Rogan’s platform exemplifies a code of authentic discourse in our age.

Critics, particularly on the political left, often talk about needing their “own Joe Rogan,” missing entirely what makes his show work: its genuine authenticity. Despite being historically left-leaning himself, Rogan’s willingness to engage in real-time thinking with guests across the ideological spectrum and across a broad variety of topics, his commitment to open inquiry and truth-seeking, has paradoxically led to his estrangement from traditional liberal circles – much like many of us who’ve found ourselves branded as apostates for maintaining consistent principles.

This commitment to a code of authentic discourse explains why organizations like Brownstone Institute – despite being routinely smeared as “far right” – have become a crucial platform for independent scholars, policy experts, and truth-seekers. I witnessed this firsthand at a recent Brownstone event, where, unlike most institutions that enforce ideological conformity, diverse thinkers engaged in genuine exploration of ideas without fear of orthodoxy enforcement. When attendees were asked if they considered themselves political liberals ten years ago, nearly 80% raised their hands.

These are individuals who, like my friends and me, still embrace core liberal values – free speech, open inquiry, rational debate – yet find themselves branded as right-wing or conspiracy theorists merely for questioning prevailing narratives. What unites this diverse community is their shared recognition that the reality being presented to us is largely manufactured, as explored in “The Information Factory,” and their commitment to maintaining authentic discourse in an age of enforced consensus.

In The Wire, Omar Little, a complex character who lived by his own moral code while operating outside conventional society, famously declared, “A man got to have a code.” Though a stick-up man targeting drug dealers, Omar’s rigid adherence to his principles – never harming civilians, never lying, never breaking his word – made him more honorable than many supposedly “legitimate” characters. His unwavering dedication to these principles – even as a gangster operating outside society’s laws – resonates deeply with my experience.

Like Rogan’s commitment to open dialogue, like Brownstone’s dedication to free inquiry, like RFK Jr.’s determination to expose how pharmaceutical and agricultural interests have corrupted our public institutions: these exemplars of authentic truth-seeking mirror what I’ve found in my own circle. My friends and I may have different political views, but we share a code: a commitment to truth over comfort, to principle over party, to authentic discourse over social approval. This shared foundation has proven more valuable than any superficial agreement could be.

In these times of manufactured consensus and social control, the importance of this authentic foundation becomes even clearer. The 2012 Smith-Mundt Modernization Act, which made it legal to propagandize American citizens, merely formalized what many had long suspected. It represented the ultimate betrayal of the government’s code with its citizens – the explicit permission to manipulate rather than inform. As anyone not under the spell has come to realize – we’ve all been thoroughly “Smith-Mundt’ed.” This legal framework helps explain much of what we’ve witnessed in recent years, particularly during the pandemic – when those who proclaimed themselves champions of social justice supported policies that created new forms of segregation and devastated the very communities they claimed to protect.

This disconnect becomes even more apparent in the realm of charitable giving and social causes, where “virtue laundering” has become endemic. The absence of a genuine moral code is nowhere more evident than in our largest charitable institutions. While many charitable organizations do crucial work at the local level, there’s an unmistakable trend among large NGOs toward what a friend aptly calls the “philanthropath class.”

Consider the Clinton Foundation’s activities in Haiti, where millions in earthquake relief funds resulted in industrial parks that displaced farmers and housing projects that never materialized. Or examine the BLM Global Network Foundation, which purchased luxury properties while local chapters reported receiving minimal support. Even major environmental NGOs often partner with the world’s biggest polluters, creating an illusion of progress while fundamental problems persist.

This pattern reveals a deeper truth about the professional charitable class – many of these institutions have become purely extractive, profiting from and even amplifying the very issues they purport to solve. At the top, a professional philanthropic class collects fancy titles in their bios and flashes photos from charity galas while avoiding any genuine engagement with the problems they claim to address. Social media has democratized this performance, allowing everyone to participate in virtue theater – from black squares and Ukrainian flag avatars to awareness ribbons and cause-supporting emojis – creating an illusion of activism without the substance of real action or understanding. It’s a system entirely devoid of the moral code that once guided charitable work – the direct connection between benefactor and beneficiary, the genuine commitment to positive change rather than personal aggrandizement.

The power of a genuine code becomes most evident in contrast with these hollow institutions. While organizations and social networks fracture under pressure, I’m fortunate that my closest friendships and family bonds have only grown stronger. We’ve had fierce debates over the years, but our shared commitment to fundamental principles – to having a code – has allowed us to navigate even the most turbulent waters together. When the pandemic response threatened basic constitutional rights, when social pressure demanded conformity over conscience, these relationships proved their worth not despite our differences, but because of them.

As we navigate these complex times, the path forward emerges with striking clarity. From Marcus Aurelius to Omar Little, the lesson remains the same: a man gotta have a code. The crisis of authenticity in our discourse, the chasm between proclaimed and lived values, and the failure of global virtue-signaling all point to the same solution: a return to genuine relationships and local engagement. Our strongest bonds – those real relationships that have weathered recent storms – remind us that true virtue manifests in daily choices and personal costs, not in digital badges or distant donations.

This Thanksgiving, I find myself grateful not for the easy comforts of conformity but for those in my life who demonstrate real virtue – the kind that comes with personal cost and requires genuine conviction. The answer lies not in grand gestures or viral posts, but in the quiet dignity of living according to our principles, engaging with our immediate communities, and maintaining the courage to think independently. As both the emperor-philosopher and the fictional street warrior understood, what matters isn’t the grandeur of our station but the integrity of our code. Returning one final time to Meditations, I’m reminded of Aurelius’s timeless challenge: “Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.”

The Rise and Fall of Western Science

Brownstone Institute — Thu, 12 Dec 2024 10:09:47 GMT

BY TOMAS FURST

Before you start reading, take a moment and look around you. There’s a good chance that everything you see is human creations—sophisticated products of human ingenuity and intelligence backed by hundreds of years of accumulated understanding of how and why nature works. The prosperity of our civilization is based on the following virtuous circle:

Find out how and why nature works,
based on this understanding, develop technologies and innovations,
manufacture them…
…and sell them.

And if you sell these technologies and innovations – for example, microscopes or spectrometers – to researchers, they can even better investigate how and why nature works, and the virtuous circle rises to the dizzying heights of the immense wealth of our civilization.

However, the virtuous circle needs some important institutions to work properly: Science cannot thrive without freedom of speech and thought, the development of technology, and innovation requires a certain degree of capital accumulation, manufacturing requires stable and predictable property rights, and sales are best organized in a free market. But without Science, the virtuous circle breaks. Thus, we need to understand where and why this wonderful human activity started and where it is heading.

The Technological Sprint of the Late 19th Century

Before the Reformation, one monolithic religious Truth reigned in Europe and there was no room for other opinions. However, the Reformation split this truth into two – mutually exclusive ones. In the gap between the two religious truths, scientific truth began to sprout. Almost immediately, the virtuous circle described above kicked in, and miraculous technologies began to emerge.

For example, in 1742, Benjamin Robins noticed that by combining Newton’s law of motion and the equation of state of gases (discovered a few years earlier by Robert Boyle), the muzzle velocity of an artillery projectile could be calculated. This discovery made artillery much more precise. Frederick the Great of Prussia noticed the discovery and asked Leonhard Euler to translate and supplement Robins’ work. On this basis, Frederick completely rebuilt his army – he introduced fast and accurate horse-drawn artillery, which was an almost unbeatable force in Europe at the time. Napoleon later only copied and perfected this model.

European rulers noticed that the key to these military successes lay in Science. The constant rivalry among states accelerated the spread of innovation and created enormous pressure for further research. This sprint resulted in a technological whirlwind in the late 19th century, the scale and scope of which was incomparable to anything that happened before (and afterward). In 1859, Edmund Drake drilled the first successful oil well in Pennsylvania, starting a revolution in lighting, as burning animal fat could be replaced by kerosene lamps. This was very useful, especially in the sweatshops of the North, where it was always dark.

In 1876 Gottlieb Daimler and Carl Benz invented the four-stroke engine, creating a demand for oil that exceeded the need for lighting by orders of magnitude. Just in time, because Thomas Edison patented the incandescent light bulb two years later, effectively ending the era of kerosene lighting. A year later, Benz came up with the two-stroke engine, and Rudolf Diesel patented the diesel engine in 1892, which allowed internal combustion engines to be scaled up to power trucks, ships, and submarines. At the same time, Werner von Siemens constructed the first electric locomotive.

Ten years later, the Wright brothers introduced the first steerable aircraft powered by an internal combustion engine. This technological whirlwind was brought to a close in 1909 by Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch, who mastered a method of nitrogen-fixing that enabled the mass production of industrial fertilizers, without which the planet could barely support a billion people.

Each of the above technologies alone changed the world more than anything that had emerged since the birth of Jesus Christ. Together, they revolutionized the world in ways few can imagine today. It is worth noting that this fascinating transformation took place at a time when governments did not interfere much with Science. Scientists were often inventors and entrepreneurs at the same time. They were mostly white men with a beard or mustache who believed in God, were certain that European civilization was superior to all others, and agreed that it was the white man’s moral obligation to wisely govern and administer the rest of the world.

Collectivist Ideologies of the 20th Century

But then, quite unexpectedly, the world came to an end. Before European nations could reap the fruits of all these fascinating technologies, World War I broke out. The European nations used all the miraculous new technologies and all their scientific potential to kill their fellow humans as efficiently as possible. The generals planned the war on horseback with bayonets. In the end, the war was fought with planes, tanks, battleships, submarines, trucks, and machine guns. It is unbelievable that almost no one today can explain anymore why that war happened.

The war brought a radical change in the position of Science. The main casualty of the war was the belief in the good old Christian God and in the White Man’s Burden. This loss of faith in God – and themselves – left a hole in the souls of Europeans which various false prophets immediately started filling with nationalism, socialism, communism, or fascism. These modern secular religions were quick to understand that Science was too important to be left unchecked. Moreover, each of these ideologies needed an appearance of legitimacy.

After the war, the source of legitimacy was no longer religion, but Science. And so the “nationalization” of science gradually began to take place, with various totalitarian regimes supporting Science in exchange for results that served the ideological needs of the regimes. This disease of the 20th century bore its first poisonous fruits in the form of Nazi biology, eugenics, or Soviet Lysenkoism. In the Communist bloc, it continued long past World War II in almost all scientific fields, as some readers may still remember. The current “scientific consensus” on man-made CO2-driven climate change is just another offshoot of state-funded “nationalized” Science, the purpose of which is not to understand the world but to legitimize various collectivist ideologies and their perverse goals.

The interwar collectivist ideologies quickly led the world to another war, which repeated the apocalypse of the previous one – once more and for good. All the murderous technologies of WWI were used again, but perfected, mass-produced and used on a scale that defied all imagination. Cryptography, radar, and the nuclear bomb were added, symbolically confirming the total dominance of Science: The power to destroy the world no longer belonged to God, but to the Scientist. Europe, the cradle of Science, lay in ruins and the center of gravity of the world moved to the United States and the Soviet Union.

Big State and Big Business

Since the beginning of the Cold War, the two superpowers disagreed on everything, apart from one thing: Everything must be based on Science. The East continued with “nationalized” Science. Under this system, the areas of research that thrived in the Soviet bloc were mainly those that were not asked to “scientifically” underpin communist ideology but rather to “catch up and overtake” the capitalist bloc. Technical sciences and mathematics more or less kept pace with the West, while social sciences and humanities languished and perished in the suffocating embrace of communist ideologues.

In the West, the original “Naturwissenschaft” was gradually replaced by the victorious Anglo-Saxon Science. At first, it went well. The post-war American conjuncture was supplemented by the open atmosphere of American (mostly private) universities, where a generation of (often Jewish) emigrants with rigorous German interwar education blossomed. After half a century-long orgy of murder and destruction, the world seemed to be returning to the technological whirlwind of the late 19th century. Semiconductors, computers, nuclear power, and satellites appeared, and man walked on the moon.

But then, things started going downhill in the West as well. Science increasingly fell victim to two cancers of the 20th century: Big State and Big Business. In the 1960s, Lyndon Johnson announced the “Great Society” program, and American society embarked on a path that had long since destroyed the social sciences in the East. The federal government declared war on poverty, war on racism, and war on illiteracy, and in all these campaigns, it needed social science to legitimize its political goals.

The amount of public funding increased sharply and more and more research areas started to appear, where it was clear which results were politically desirable and which were not. It mostly concerned social sciences, which willingly metastasized under state funding into various branches of Gender Studies, Puppet Arts, and EcoGastronomy, but in the end, Natural Science was not spared either. Historically, the first post-war victim of “nationalized science” was climatology, which today serves exclusively to legitimize the political goals of the deindustrialization of the West.

Moreover, the second deadly threat to Science – corruption by Big Business – started to creep in. The history of this tragedy can be traced back to 1912, when a German medical doctor named Isaac Adler first hypothesized that smoking might cause lung cancer. It took more than 50 years – and 20 million deaths – for this hypothesis to be confirmed. This absurdly long time is explained, among other things, by the fact that the greatest figure in statistics of the 20th century, the avid smoker Ronald Fischer, devoted a large part of his mind and influence to vehemently and very inventively denying any causal link between smoking and lung cancer.

He didn’t do it for free – it was later discovered that he was paid by the tobacco industry. Yet, after half a century, the tobacco concerns finally lost the battle, and in 1964 the Surgeon General issued an authoritative report confirming the causal link between smoking and lung cancer. Big Business learned a lesson: Next time, they needed to bribe not only the scientists but the regulatory authorities, too.

Going Downhill

More and more disasters followed, in which rigged research overseen by corrupt regulators led to damage on a staggering scale.

For example, pharmaceutical companies managed to convince American doctors that “chronic pain” is a problem that tens of millions of people suffer from. Through a combination of aggressive marketing and manipulated scientific studies, they created an addiction in millions of people to opioids (sold under the names OxyContin or Fentanyl), which they falsely claimed were “safe and effective,” and – above all – non-addictive. This tragedy continues to unfold in the United States, and to this day, over half a million Americans have died from opioid overdoses and millions more have fallen into addiction to harder drugs. The economic and social damage is almost incalculable. In the United States, about one painkiller per person per day is consumed.

This tragedy is based on science corrupted by the pharmaceutical business and dysfunctional drug market regulation. In Europe, pharmaceutical regulation is not as broken as in the US, but deliberately falsified or manipulated research poisons the global publication record. Science is therefore equally affected all over the world, because in the field of biomedical research today no one knows which published results are true and which are not. When John Ioannidis published the article titled “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False” in 2005, it became an instant scientific bestseller.

The opioid story is perhaps the most visible but by no means the only one. Tobacco companies – having lost the battle for lung cancer – used the accumulated capital to buy several food giants (for example, Kraft or General Foods). Their armies of scientists immediately went after the same goal as before, only in a different area: Over the following years, they developed hundreds of addictive substances that the companies started to add en masse to industrially processed food. Instead of a tobacco addiction, they plunged America into a “junk food” addiction.

Much of “food science” has been manipulated by the food corporations to make it appear that the main problem is natural fats, not industrially processed sugars and other crap. The corruption of science gradually reached such absurd proportions that, for example, the American Pediatric Society was sponsored by the Coca-Cola company. What do you think the Society’s “expert opinion” on sugary drinks was?

Accompanied by almost complete disinterest of the public, more and more scientific fields gradually became victims of the Big State or Big Business. The results came soon – more and more money was poured into Science, but those miraculous technologies and innovations have not appeared. I bet you to name at least three technologies that appeared since 2000 and changed the world as the invention of the internal combustion engine. I personally witnessed billions of Euros from European structural funds being poured into provincial East European universities. Dozens of laboratories were built, expensive equipment was bought, speeches by the university presidents were made, newspaper articles were written…and nothing useful ever came out of it.

The West Goes out of Its Mind

But the real catastrophe for Western Science has come with the Covid epidemic, when the West went completely out of its mind. At that moment, the two scientific curses of the 20th century met in terrible synergy. Big Business quickly understood that the epidemic represented an opportunity that may not be repeated. If opioids were worth a few lies, the possibility of selling billions of “vaccines” to panicked governments all over the world was worth many lies. Moreover, the American left has just experienced the enormous shock of Trump’s election victory and readily jumped at every opportunity to derail his presidency.

So, when Donald Trump initially (very rationally) refused to panic, refused to introduce drastic mass-scale measures, and encouraged experimentation with available drugs (especially Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine), the American left launched a hysterical campaign to panic as much as possible, implement as drastic across-the-board measures as possible, and attack any attempts to use repurposed drugs to treat Covid. Academic and scientific circles, which have always sided with the left and hated Trump fiercely, began to spew out a flood of falsified, manipulated, and completely meaningless “studies” whose sole aim was to promote the Covid madness. Moreover, it has become fully apparent that the regulatory bodies (CDC and FDA) are completely controlled by Big Pharma, and rather than protecting the public from corporate greed, they acted like their sales departments.

The election of Joe Biden finished the disaster. The interests of Big Pharma suddenly became aligned with the interests of the federal government and the entire monstrous power apparatus of the government threw itself into a battle against its own citizens. The military (vaccine distribution), the secret services (censorship of social networks), the police (surveillance of lockdowns), and many other repressive branches of the state became involved in this appalling project. Later generations will remember this as the era of Covid fascism.

In a matter of months, the entire building of Western Science, carefully assembled over several hundred years, collapsed. Every aspect of the Covid disaster has been linked to some scientific failure. It is almost certain that the SARS-CoV-2 virus itself originated from the Wuhan laboratory, where – at the expense of Western taxpayers – extremely problematic gain-of-function research was carried out. Throughout the epidemic, doctors and scientists lied about the ineffectiveness of early treatment because they knew that was exactly what the establishment wanted to hear from them.

As soon as the end of 2021, however, it was clear that Ivermectin, Hydroxychloroquine, vitamin D (and many other drugs) represented a cheap, safe, and effective treatment and prevention that could have saved millions of lives. Despite that, the entire scientific establishment completely denied the principles of Evidence-Based Medicine and repeated the CDC’s political “You’re not a horse” propaganda.

The experimental gene technology masqueraded as a “vaccine” was the final nail in the coffin of Western Science. The hysterical push for “vaccine” mandates under the Safe and Effective mantra violated almost all professional, legal, and ethical principles of Science. The next few years will reveal the full extent of the catastrophe, but already today it can be said that mRNA “vaccines” prevented few cases of Covid (if any) but harmed millions. Right now, this terrible arithmetic gradually creeps into public space. Once the public realizes the extent of this disaster, it is safe to assume that their anger will turn not only against the political establishment but also against the institutionalized Western Science that caused every aspect of the Covid disaster.

The End of Science

European Science has not fared any better than American Science, as they have been connected vessels for decades. Both the diseases of American Science have been present in Europe, too. Moreover, the big publishing houses that decide what can and cannot become part of the “published record” have long been multinationals and don’t care about national borders. If the European Union surpasses America in anything, it is the aggressiveness of promoting the “climate change” agenda. At present, climate change ideology seems to be the only thing holding the European Union together.

After 300 years, the Enlightenment project of Western Science has reached an important crossroads. At the end of the 19th century, Science brought fascinating progress to mankind. During the 20th century, Science gained so much prestige that it replaced religion and became the central ideology of the world. Gradually, however, like Christianity before the Reformation, it became a victim of its own success: Instead of seeking the Truth about how and why the world works, it began to abuse its prestige and serve the powerful and rich.

By the end of the 20th century, Science had already been damaged beyond repair either by Big Governments to legitimize their ideological goals or by Big Business to legitimize the distribution of their (often toxic) products. The rotten edifice of Western Science finally collapsed in 2020 during the Covid crisis.

We have to wait now before enough people realize that Science – the central ideology of our civilization – is in ruins. Then we can start thinking about what to do. Christianity was saved by the strict separation of Church and State. To save Science, an equally daring step will be needed. But that is a topic for further essays.

Decouple Trade and IP Protection

Brownstone Institute — Wed, 11 Dec 2024 10:18:44 GMT

BY STEPHAN KINSELLA

Many of us who support free trade and private property rights tend to look favorably on regional and bilateral treaties that claim to further these goals. There is a vast network of bilateral investment treaties, or BITs, for example, designed to promote foreign direct investment by Western firms into developing nations by limiting the host state’s ability to expropriate the investments.

These BITs aim to strengthen the property rights of international investors in the host state so as to make investment less risky. There are more than 2,500 BITs in force worldwide; the US itself currently has BITs in place with 39 countries. BITs and other measures can benefit both host states and international investors by strengthening local property rights, as I explain in International Investment, Political Risk, and Dispute Resolution.

In addition to investment treaties that concern the property rights of foreign investors in host countries, there is also a global network of bilateral and multilateral free trade agreements ostensibly aimed at promoting trade between nations. Many of us favored so-called free trade agreements like NAFTA even if we would have preferred more radical approaches. Regional, multilateral, and bilateral trade agreements are viewed as incremental improvements even if thousands of pages of regulations could be easily replaced by a couple of sentences or, better, unilateral abolition of import tariffs.

But over time it has become apparent that “free trade” agreements often serve as a pretext for exporting Western intellectual property (IP) law—mainly US-style patent and copyright law—onto the rest of the world. This is what I call IP imperialism. Here’s how it works. First, we are told that intellectual property rights are legitimate, and in fact are part of the reason for the relative success of the industrialized countries in the West. (It’s not. For more on this, see You Can’t Own Ideas: Essays on Intellectual Property.)

Next, developing countries are chided for not having strong IP law enforcement. They are even accused of “stealing” know-how and technology from Western capitalist firms as if there is something wrong with manufacturers in a developing country using the most efficient known production techniques.

Finally, the West, primarily the US, uses its leverage to pressure developing nations to adopt and strengthen IP protections and adopt international IP treaties, primarily for the benefit of US corporate interests, namely pharmaceuticals (patent) and Hollywood and music (copyright). This has led to various IP treaties on copyright, patent, trademark, and so on, which most states and the world are party to (including China, Russia, North Korea, and so on) and which require member states to protect IP in their national legislation. And there is continual agitation by the Western powers to add even more IP protections and to pressure other countries to adopt them.

In addition to international IP treaties, the US and other countries pressure developing countries to strengthen local IP protection by including IP provisions in multilateral, regional, and bilateral free trade agreements. The US does not deny this; it admits it. As stated by the United States Trade Representative:

“USTR’s Innovation and Intellectual Property (IIP) uses a wide range of bilateral and multilateral trade tools to promote strong intellectual property laws and effective enforcement worldwide, reflecting the importance of intellectual property and innovation to the future growth of the U.S. economy. … Key areas of work include: … the negotiation, implementation, and monitoring of intellectual property provisions of trade agreements … ”

But the ostensible purpose of a free trade agreement is simply to lower tariffs and barriers to international trade. Such an agreement really should have nothing to do with the property rights in force in the other country (unlike BITs, which do concern the protection of property rights of foreign investors in the host country). Notice that free trade agreements never dictate to the developing country that they must respect their citizens’ property rights, not engage in eminent domain, not engage in confiscatory taxation, and so on. So then why do these “free trade” agreements require IP rights to be protected in the developing country?

In any case, this is what the US and other countries do. Their free trade agreements invariably contain a section requiring developing nations to strengthen their local IP law. For example the agreement may require the other state to increase its copyright term even beyond what is required by the IP treaties.

As an example, the Trans-Pacific Partnership was being negotiated for years between the US and various Pacific Rim economies, until it was scuttled after Donald Trump won the US Presidency in 2016. Of course, although this supposed free trade agreement has nothing to do with the local property rights of member states, it naturally included an entire chapter requiring member states to ratchet up their local IP protections.

The Berne Convention on copyright requires member states to protect copyright for at least 50 years after the author’s death (for perspective, copyright used to last for only 14 or 28 years); in the US, copyright protection now lasts for 70 years after the death of the author. The TPP proposed to require member states to follow suit. During negotiation of the TPP, Canada considered strengthening its copyright law. Finally, in 2022, as a result of terms in the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement, which replaced NAFTA, Canada got on board and finally extended its copyright term to 70 years after death. In 2018, as a result of the TPP negotiations, Japan also extended its copyright term for some works.

This kind of pressure works, even on other advanced economies not as beholden to IP special interests as the US government is. And developing nations of course grudgingly go along as well. They sometimes complain, even if those complaining accept the legitimacy of IP but merely want more “balance” or “flexibility.” See, for example, a paper by Anselm Kamperman Sanders, “The Development Agenda for Intellectual Property: Rational Humane Policy or ‘Modern-day Communism’?,” in Intellectual Property and Free Trade Agreements (pdf), which notes:

More in particular, the mounting pressure from developing nations to view intellectual property not just as a means to guarantee the interests of rightholders, but also to bring about economic development and welfare for the whole of global society.
…In the fall of 2004 Argentina and Brazil submitted a formal proposal to the WIPO relating to the establishment of a new development agenda within WIPO The proposal addresses the ‘knowledge gap’ and ‘digital divide’ that separates wealthy nations from developing nations and calls for a case-by-case assessment of the role of intellectual property and its impact on development.
Whereas in the previous years the prevailing trend has been to harmonise international legal norms through the World Trade Organisation’s (WTO) Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPS Agreement), there is now a clear call for increased flexibility.
…these provisions place the protection of intellectual property rights in the context of a balance of rights and obligations of producers and users of technical knowledge.
…these provisions recognise that WTO Members are entitled to a certain degree of flexibility when it comes to the protection of public health and nutrition, and the promotion of public interest in sectors of vital importance to their socio-economic and technological development. (pp. 3–4)

In other words, the WTO is supposed to protect IP but balance the harms that strict, Western-style IP enforcement puts on developing countries, by giving them flexibility, such as the ability to issue compulsory licenses (which blunt the harshness of patents), access to technology transfers, etc.

However,

the Western world is undermining the Development Agenda by introducing so-called TRIPS-plus obligations through the WTO system and bilateral Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) and Bilateral Investment Treaties (BITs).
…The Development Agenda is about finding flexibility in the implementation of TRIPS obligations but also about balancing the monopoly of the intellectual property rights holder with the interests of third parties and of society as a whole. Flexibility is, however, something that sits uneasy with the current trend in intellectual property policy. This trend has been one of maximizing rights to stamp out piracy and one of harmonization to provide a one-size fits all level playing field of rights. (p. 4–5)

No surprise. Sanders then quotes Bill Gates, who “In a recent interview … even went so far as to say that restricting intellectual property rights is tantamount to communism.” As Gates said:

Q. In recent years, there’s been a lot of people clamouring to reform and restrict intellectual-property rights. What’s driving this, and do you think intellectual-property laws need to be reformed?
No, I’d say that of the world’s economies, there’s more that believe in intellectual property today than ever. There are fewer communists in the world today than there were. There are some new modern-day sort of communists who want to get rid of the incentive for musicians and moviemakers and software makers under various guises. They don’t think that those incentives should exist.
And this debate will always be there. I’d be the first to say that the patent system can always be tuned—including the US patent system. There are some goals to cap some reform elements. But the idea that the United States has led in creating companies, creating jobs, because we’ve had the best intellectual-property system—there’s no doubt about that in my mind, and when people say they want to be the most competitive economy, they’ve got to have the incentive system. Intellectual property is the incentive system for the products of the future.

It’s a shame that Sanders and others can only dimly see the real problem: that IP law is unjust. Even those who sense something is wrong with the provisions foisted on developing countries by bilateral and multilateral trade agreements (see, e.g., www.bilaterals.org) criticize the wrong things about free trade agreements. It’s not the free trade part that is the problem. But they all sense something is unfair.

In any case, Gates’s comments are ironic on many levels. First, he used to understand that patents impede innovation. As he said back in 1991, “If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today’s ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today.” But now Microsoft is just a huge rent-seeking IP bully.

Second, his underlying assumption is that patents are pro-West, part of capitalism, and that socialism is opposed to patents. This is not true either. Most countries, including socialist ones, have IP law, even if the “capitalist” West keeps pushing them to strengthen IP protections.

This should not be a surprise since IP is inherently statist, an artificial manufacturing of pseudo-rights even as it systematically violates property rights. IP rights are not part of capitalism; it is one of modern “capitalism’s” socialistic aberrations. The West should not foist its destructive IP laws onto developing countries and certainly should not link it to free trade.

The Moral Urgency of Our Times

Brownstone Institute — Tue, 10 Dec 2024 10:10:03 GMT

BY BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE

The Cathedral of Notre-Dame burned one year before most governments in the world closed all churches, preventing the public celebration of Easter and Christmas for nearly two seasons in some places. The fires that ignited this great cathedral – built over 182 years but with improvements lasting many centuries– were experienced in all our lives.

The burning was a foreshadowing and a reminder of the fragility of all civilization, not just the cathedrals we see but the mores, habits, laws, stories, manners, and expectations built into the idea of freedom. Within a year, fires were raging in all aspects of our lives.

And yet here we are five and a half years later and Notre-Dame is reopened, restored, and refurbished, with pressure from the people and the donations of folks the world over. Master craftsmen appeared under the direction of traditionalist architects and designers and made the magic happen.

Let’s let the symbolism roll: may the rebuilding of this great church turn to a rebuilding of all things wrecked over four years (and more). We have another private retreat happening this week with 45 highly influential intellectuals who are behind the restoration ahead. Please wish us the best: this is an important meeting.

We have just a few weeks remaining to donate to the great cause with your contribution to Brownstone Institute. Will you renew your support this week? Thank you for considering.

The West Hartford supper club is December 18, and features essayist and best-selling author Charles Eisenstein. You are certainly invited!

Here is some content since our last email.

Korean Dramas and the Covid Collusion By Bruce W. Davidson. Korean dramas exhibit a parade of corrupt politicians, executives, judges, prosecutors, government officials, doctors, and mainstream news organizations, all on the payroll. The only things they seem to fear are social media attacks and public exposure of their behavior.

Congressional Committee Condemns (Nearly) Every Feature of the Covid Response By Jeffrey Tucker. The conclusion of the report: nothing worked and everything tried resulted in more damage than the pandemic could ever have achieved on its own. In this sense, every champion of truth, honesty, and freedom should celebrate this report.

Millions of Entries Erased from World’s Largest Obituary Database By Debbie Lerman. Legacy.com is a website where you can search “the world’s largest obituary database,” with nearly 50,000,000 entries accumulated since 1998. Given the claim that Legacy.com offers a “permanent” space for commemoration, the recent discoveries raise some interesting questions.

The WHO Rallies in Square Formation By Tom Jefferson and Carl Heneghan. In military history, a square formation has been one of the ways infantry defends itself against cavalry assaults. We have watched the ways in which those responsible for the recent social and economic butchery have sought to defend their actions.

The Culmination of Decades of Censorship and Propaganda By Emily Burns. Censorship brought us Trump. No matter what the media wants to claim, the reason people like me voted for Trump was because of our fury over the policies and cultural insanity of the last four years and beyond.

An Accidentalist’s Guide to Denying the Obvious By Josh Stylman. There’s a peculiar comfort in believing that things simply happen by accident. That the powerful don’t conspire, that institutions don’t coordinate. I’ve come to call these people “accidentalists” – those who find refuge in randomness, who dismiss patterns as paranoia.

The Philosophy of Provisionality By Bert Olivier. Everything we do as humans is provisional. Because of time’s eroding power, everything is revisable. Every decision represents an acknowledgment that we have to act with incomplete, provisional knowledge, and that more information could lead to a different decision.

Decouple Trade and IP Protection By Stephan Kinsella. IP is inherently statist, an artificial manufacturing of pseudo-rights even as it systematically violates property rights. The West should not foist its destructive IP laws onto developing countries and certainly should not link it to free trade.

The Rise and Fall of Western Science By Tomas Furst. We have to wait now before enough people realize that Science – the central ideology of our civilization – is in ruins. Christianity was saved by the separation of Church and State. To save Science, an equally daring step will be needed.

The Rebuilding Begins By Brownstone Institute. Getting the truth, realizing justice for the wrong done, restoring health, and fighting through the thicket of lies to secure the blessings of freedom now and in the future. This is the meaning of your investment in the work of Brownstone Institute.

Congressional Committee Condemns (Nearly) Every Feature of the Covid Response

JeffreyTucker — Mon, 09 Dec 2024 10:14:55 GMT

BY JEFFREY TUCKER

Are there words in the English language that fully describe what happened during the Covid years that are not already overused? Calamity comes to mind. Disaster. Cataclysm. Ruin, devastation, catastrophe, unprecedented debacle, fiasco, and utter wreckage – all fine words and phrases but nothing quite captures it.

Given that, there is probably no report on the thing that can properly characterize the whole of it. On the other hand, it’s worth trying.

Meanwhile, the results of Covid commissions of governments around the world have become unbearably predictable. So far they have mostly said their government failed because they didn’t act fast enough, did not enforce lockdowns hard enough, did not communicate and coordinate well enough, and so on.

Everyone in the corporate world knows that when a committee reduces all problems to “communication and coordination” you are being fed a load of bull.

So far, it’s been almost entirely bureaucratic blather, and that helps account for the global loss of confidence in political systems. They cannot even be honest about the most catastrophic policies in our lifetimes or several.

The amount of corruption, waste, and destruction from this period of our lives, lasting from 2020 until 2023 but with remnants of bad policies all around us, is so unspeakable that not one report has yet been fully honest about what happened, why it happened, who really won and lost, and what this period implies for how vast swaths of the public see the world.

Among other astonishing revelations to come from this period was a full presentation of just how many institutions have been corrupted. It was not just governments and certainly not just the elected leaders and career bureaucrats. The problems are very deep and reach more deeply to intelligence agencies, military-based bioweapons systems, and preparedness agencies that guard their activities under the cloak of what is called classified.

This is a major reason why so many questions are being left unasked and unanswered. Then we have the ancillary failures in a whole series of additional sectors. The media went along with the nonsense as if they are wholly owned and controlled by government and industry. Industry mostly went along too, at least the highest reaches of it, even as small business was crushed.

The tech companies cooperated in a massive censorship operation. The retail end of the pharmaceutical companies enforced the government’s edicts, denying people basic medicines, as did the whole of the medical systems, which heavily enforced mandates on an experimental and failed product mistakenly called a vaccine. Academics were largely silent and public intellectuals fell in line. Most mainline religions cooperated in locking worshippers out. Banks were in on it too. And advertisers.

In fact, it’s hard to think of any institution in society that leaves this period untarnished. It’s probably not possible for a government report on the subject to be fully honest. Maybe it is too soon, plus the hooks that created the whole problem are still embedded too deeply.

All that said, we’ve got a solid start with the highest-level government report produced to date: After Action Review of the Covid-19 Pandemic: The Lessons Learned and a Path Forward, by the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic as assembled by the US House of Representatives. The report was written by the majority and it shows.

Coming in at 550 pages with 2,000-plus footnotes (we have made a physical version available here), the preparation involved hearing from hundreds of witnesses, reading thousands of documents, listening to thousands of reports and interviews, and working at a furious pace for two years. Based on the outline and breadcrumbs of the Norfolk Group, while adding in additional material based on critiques of media and economic policy, it is a comprehensive blast against the public-health features of the pandemic response.

The conclusion of the report: nothing worked and everything tried resulted in more damage than the pandemic could ever have achieved on its own. In this sense, and given the low bar of expectations for all such political commissions, every champion of truth, honesty, and freedom should celebrate this report. It is an excellent breaking of the ice around the topic. Note that this report has received very little press attention, which only further underscores the problem.

Coming in for heavy criticism: gain-of-function research, the deference to the WHO, the lab-leak coverup, the funding of pharma cutouts, business and school closures, mask mandates, the lack of serious attention to disease monitoring, vaccine mandates, the sloppy approval process, the vaccine injury system, the banning of off-the-shelf therapeutics, social distancing, the rampant fraud in business loans, the effects of monetary policy, and more.

The report contains nuggets that we cannot help but praise:

Ignored in the report: the rental moratorium, the frenzy of Plexiglas and air filtration, the push for sanitizing all things, the reopening racket designed to prolong lockdowns, domestic capacity restrictions, the division of the workforce between essential and nonessential, the role of CISA and the intelligence agencies, the CDC’s push for mail-in ballots that might have been decisive in the national election, and the astonishing gibberish over the infection fatality and case fatality rates.

There is so much more to chronicle and criticize that the report could have been 10 or 100 times as long.

To be sure, the report has plenty of problems aside from these exclusions. Operation Warp Speed comes in for praise for saving “millions” of lives but the citation is to a modeling exercise that assumes what it is trying to prove. Look at the footnote: It’s bad science.

The real trouble with this section is not even its incorrect claim that the vaccine saved lives. The core issue is that the whole point of the lockdowns and all that followed was to create conditions for the release of the countermeasure. The plan from the beginning was: lockdown until vaccination. Praising the goal while criticizing the ineffective means diverts the point.

This is precisely what was explained to me in the early days in a phone call from a member of George W. Bush’s biosecurity team, a man who now runs a vaccine company. He said we would stay locked down until the world’s population got a shot in the arm. This phone call happened in April 2020.

Quite simply, I thought he had lost his mind and hung up. I did not believe that 1) the plan was always to stay in lockdowns until vaccination, and that 2) anyone seriously believed that governments could vaccinate their way out of a wave of respiratory infections insofar as the pathogen had a zoonotic reservoir.

The very idea struck me as so preposterous that I was incredulous that an educated and responsible adult could ever advance it. And yet that was precisely the plan all along. Sometime in the last week of February 2020, a global cabal decided to pull the trigger on a worldwide campaign of shock and awe – tapping every asset in civil society for assistance – to bring about worldwide forced medicalization with a new technology.

This was never really a public health response. That was only the cover story. This was a coup against science and against democracy, for purposes of industrial and political reset, not just in one nation but all nations at once. I get it: that is an ominous statement and hard to wrap one’s brain around the whole of it. In completely ignoring this point, the Select Subcommittee has missed the forest for the trees.

Let’s attempt a different metaphor. Let’s say your car is hijacked in Manhattan and you are thrown in the backseat. The goal is to drive all the way to Los Angeles for a drug deal. You could object to the means and goal but instead you spend the entire trip complaining about potholes, reckless driving, warning of the need for an oil change, and complaining about the bad music playing on the car radio.

At the end of the trip, you put out a report to this effect. Do you think that would be strange, to wholly ignore the theft of your car and the destination and purpose of the hijacking and instead focus on all the ways in which the grand larceny could have been smoother and happier for everyone involved?

In that spirit, the Subcommittee’s separate recommendations list is weak, leaving governments wholly in charge of anything labeled a pandemic while only suggesting a more cautionary approach that takes into consideration all costs and benefits. For example, it says on travel restrictions: “It is far easier to undo the restrictions that may have been unneeded than it is to take a ‘wait and see’ approach once the unknown virus of concern has entered our borders and thoroughly spread.”

It seems like the core lesson – governments cannot be masters of the microbial kingdom and allowing them to pretend otherwise for purposes of an industrial and political reset cues up a moral hazard that is an ongoing threat to freedom and rights – is not yet learned, or even so much as admitted. We are still being invited to believe that the same people and institutions who created calamity last time should be trusted again next time.

And keep in mind: this is the best report yet issued!

My friends, we have a very long way to go to absorb the fullness of the reality of what was done to individuals, families, communities, societies, and the whole world. Nor is it truly possible to move on without a full accounting of this disaster. Has it begun? Yes, but there is a very long way to go.

SSCP FINAL REPORT

14.8MB ∙ PDF file

SSCP FINAL REPORT RECOMMENDATIONS

331KB ∙ PDF file

The “Let It Rip” Canard: Reflections on Jay Bhattacharya

JeffreyTucker — Fri, 06 Dec 2024 10:03:17 GMT

BY JEFFREY TUCKER

Early in the Covid period, the skeptics of government closures and universal quarantines were denounced as favoring a policy of “let it rip.” The phrase has been in use since the 19th century. It is apparently drawn from experience with steamships. When you released power to its maximum extent, it made a ripping sound.

The implication is that when you let it rip, you let go of all controls and just wait to see what happens.

Think about the application to infectious disease, at least in the context of the debate over lockdowns. The theory is that if you don’t force people to stay home, force businesses to close, and force schools and churches to shut down, people will mindlessly move about here and there and cause infection to spread wildly. No one will have a clue about what to do about it.

The implication is that people are unbearably stupid, lack all personal incentive to protect themselves, and somehow cannot but be as reckless as possible. There will be no strategies, no methods of mitigation, no therapeutics, no limits on the spread of incurable sickness.

We need geniuses like Anthony Fauci to give us police-enforced guidance in order to stay safe from the consequences of our own choices. We don’t have brains. We don’t have habits born of experience. We don’t have any social mechanisms embedded in our traditions. We don’t have anything.

We are worse than an anthill, which at least has a rules-based order born of instinct. In this view, human behavior is purely randomized and rote, moving about here and there, fully unable to process information about guidance, lacking completely in any capacity to be careful, wise, or otherwise govern ourselves.

This is the essence of the push for lockdowns. Anything less than totalitarian control of the human population amounts to utter chaos in which the virus rules us all whereas the geniuses at the controls of government power know all things. This is the essential worldview of all those who said that lockdown opponents merely want to let the virus rip.

This was of course the core criticism of the Great Barrington Declaration of which NIH Director-nominee Jay Bhattacharya was the main author. It advocated no such thing as “let it rip.” Instead, it called for public health to recognize the existence of human intelligence and consider the costs of overriding it with police-state edicts that ruin businesses and lives. It came out six months after lockdowns began and already revealed themselves to be devastating. There should not have been anything even slightly controversial about the statement.

And yet truly there was something about those times that tempted intellectuals toward grave extremes of utopian thinking. Remember the “Zero Covid” movement? Talk about insane.

I just read an outrageous paper in Frontiers of Health (date March 2021!) that claimed to have the magical solution to Covid. The plan would defeat the disease in “one day” by ordering simultaneous universal testing, forcing all positive tests to isolate, and monitoring all public spaces with concentration camp guards. The authors proposed this seriously, forgetting that a respiratory virus with a zoonotic reservoir cares nothing for such antics. To have signed one’s name to such a suggestion should confine one to a lifetime of ill repute as an intellectual.

There is also the slight problem of human rights and freedom. But, hey, anyone who yammered on about those topics was then accused of being an advocate of “let it rip.”

The truth is that we do have intelligence and brains. Older people have always known to avoid large crowds in flu season. Pick up any geriatric magazine and you can discover that this is true. Even our habits of the season reflect that. Intergenerational family units tend to stay indoors as we enter winter months and get out and about in the spring when threats of infectious disease die down. “Focused protection” is embedded in the habits of the calendar year.

We are also capable of reading data on risk demographics. We knew from February 2020 that Covid posed a medically significant risk mainly to the aged and infirm. There was never a serious risk associated with beach parties or schooling. We knew this at least intuitively, and vast numbers of people also knew to disregard the crazy fear-mongering from the top that was designed to prepare the population for the shot.

Society knew better than its managers. It is this way in every sector of life in a world in which society is trusted as the primary manager of itself.

It’s true in economics. Now that Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are pushing for radical deregulation of all things, the same critique is being offered. They merely advocate that enterprise “let it rip.” It’s the new name for laissez-faire, another smear term from the 19th century.

But in the same sense that people have the intelligence to judge disease risk, society generates systems and institutions that put limits and guardrails up for enterprise too. The existence of rivalrous competition with easy entry and exit keeps prices, profits, and costs toward an equilibrium. Producer accountability is instilled with user ratings, reputation, and strict liability (unless you are a vaccine maker enjoying full indemnification).

People forget that the best institutions assuring quality and safety are not government agencies but private services like Underwriters Laboratory, which has been around since the 19th century, long before the federal government had a single agency regulating even food quality. Remove the regulations, abolish the agencies, and competent and well-run private institutions would appear in every area, the same as professional credentialing now.

Trusting people to manage infectious disease based on realistic risk assessments is no different from trusting property owners, workers, prices, and markets to work out the best possible solutions to the problem of scarcity in the material world. It doesn’t mean full throttle come what may any more than not locking down means zero control over our health.

In other words, this whole phrase has been deployed against the idea of freedom itself. In fact, the proponents of lockdowns were not opposed to smearing that word too, spelling it as freedumb.

Early on in the pandemic response, I was interviewed in Germany and the person asked what the best rhetorical strategy would be to push for a reopening. I suggested they campaign for freedom. The response: that is not possible because the word itself has been discredited. My response: if freedom is discredited, we have no cause of hope at all.

The legacy of Jay Bhattarcharya’s actions during Covid – joining what felt like a half-dozen of us immediate critics of these awful policies – is not only his attention to science and facts; it is also a reverence for the idea of freedom itself, which really means to trust that society can manage itself with the best-possible outcomes apart from the dictates of pretentious and powerful people at the top.

In a beautiful irony, Jay now inherits the position of the man who called him a “fringe epidemiologist” and called for the censors to do a “quick and devastating takedown” of his work. It’s been a very long journey lasting nearly five years, but here we are, the man who led the opposition to the worst-imaginable public health policies now in a position to make sure that nothing like this ever happens again.

Savor this moment: it’s a rare one when justice prevails. As for accountability and the truth about what happened in those dark days, there is a good phrase for what should happen to the information flows that should now happen: let it rip.

Justice Is Served: Jay Bhattacharya Chosen to Be NIH Director

Brownstone Institute — Thu, 05 Dec 2024 10:14:49 GMT

BY STEVE TEMPLETON

(photo: David Zweig, me, Jay Bhattacharya, November 2021)

Many years ago, I was at the wedding of a good friend, a guy who everyone seemed to like. He was/is humble, considerate, kind, and down to earth. I remember telling his mother while at the wedding that I would tell anyone that, “If you don’t like him, then the problem is you.”

I also feel that way about Stanford health economist Jay Bhattacharya. Jay’s nomination by President-elect Trump to be Director of the National Institutes of Health has been a long time coming and is a hopeful signal that national health research policy is headed in the right direction.

Jay was right about all the big things during the Covid pandemic and was an important counter to the destructive hubris of lockdown and mandate-promoting public health leaders and scientists in the US. Along with Martin Kulldorff and Sunetra Gupta, Jay took enormous personal and professional risks in drafting the Great Barrington Declaration in October of 2020. In response to the highly age-stratified mortality of Covid-19 and with the threat of serious collateral damage of continuing lockdowns, school closures, and mandates, the GBD instead promoted the policy of focused protection for vulnerable elderly and infirm people while allowing young and healthy people to live their lives.

The virus was going to infect everyone eventually and establish herd immunity, and there was no evidence that a vaccine (none approved at the time) would stop that natural process. The big question was how to deal with a natural disaster without making the situation much worse. Thus, the debate was focused protection versus unfocused protection—sheltering everyone regardless of their risk of mortality or serious disease until the entire population could be vaccinated with a vaccine of unknown efficacy and net benefit.

At least that’s the debate that should’ve happened. Unfortunately, it didn’t. Jay and his GBD coauthors were attacked, threatened, and slandered. When Jay’s research group published a study showing that the seroprevalence of Covid-19 in Santa Clara County in California was much higher than previously believed, it destroyed the delusion that the virus could be eliminated, that containment was at all possible. Many people didn’t want to hear that, and Jay was subjected to numerous attacks in the media, including a defamatory article in BuzzFeed claiming he was funded by dark money and implied he used questionable methods because he was biased toward the study’s outcome.

The fact that he shortly thereafter authored a paper showing very low seroprevalence in Major League Baseball franchises wasn’t enough to prove his objectivity. The message put forth by the public health establishment would simply not allow any dissent or debate. The policy needed to drive The Science™, and lower-case science could not be allowed to drive the policy.

I signed the Great Barrington Declaration the day it was published on October 4th, 2020. I had seen, and was greatly impressed by, interviews of Jay by Peter Robinson in March and April of 2020 and was heartened by Jay’s calm display of knowledge and humility. Jay described in one of these interviews the uncertainty surrounding the number of people infected and the claims being made by experts like Anthony Fauci regarding the infection fatality rate:

They don’t know it and I don’t know it. We should be honest about that. And we should be honest about that with people who make these policy decisions when making them. In a sense, people plug the worst case into their models, they project two to four million deaths, the newspapers pick up the two to four million deaths, the politicians have to respond, and the scientific basis for that projection…there’s no study underlying that scientific projection.

When asked about the potential for collateral damage to lockdowns, “It’s not dollars versus lives, it’s lives versus lives.” An understanding of the responsibility to avoid collateral harm of lockdowns was essential yet was in extremely short supply. Jay was attacked for this nuanced message. He got emails from colleagues and administrators telling him that questioning the high infection fatality rate was irresponsible. Yet, someone had to do it. However, the interviews went viral, because Jay gave millions of people something they didn’t have and desperately needed. He gave them hope.

As the year went on, Jay became the face of the opposition to unfocused protection, appearing in countless interviews and writing countless articles. He became an advisor to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who vowed to not lock down the people of Florida again after an initial wave of closures. When waves of Covid inevitably hit Florida, Stanford students papered the campus with pictures of Jay next to Florida death rates, implying Jay’s nuanced message was responsible for the deaths of thousands of people. When the age-adjusted mortality rate of Florida ended up being rather average compared to other states, including lockdown and mandate-happy California, no one apologized.

YouTube censored a public forum with Jay and Martin Kulldorff and Governor DeSantis, where they made claims about the hazards of continuous lockdowns, school closures, and mandates that months before wouldn’t have been at all controversial. After the GBD was published, Jay and Martin were invited to the White House by Covid advisor Scott Atlas to discuss the idea of focused protection with President Trump. Despite that meeting, the political battle continued to be an uphill fight.

The response of federal officials was shameful. Fauci and White House Covid Advisor Deborah Birx boycotted the meeting. Then NIH Director Francis Collins called for a “swift and devastating takedown” of the GBD’s premise and called the authors “fringe epidemiologists.” There simply was no appetite at the highest levels for a nuanced message or any debate whatsoever. Media coverage of Jay and other Covid response critics continued to be toxic.

Yet Jay’s appearances and message continued to inspire millions of people and give them hope. I began writing in support of focused protection and against the constant doom-saying that was harming everyone, especially children. I met Jay in the fall of 2021 because of my writing, at a conference organized by Brownstone Institute. “I think we are making a difference,” he said after shaking my hand. Like many other people he had inspired to take a stance against Covid hysteria, I needed to hear that.

The next day, Jay was preparing to give his speech in front of a small crowd in the ballroom, and I sat next to him while he reviewed his notes during the previous speaker’s talk. Although he was dressed in a suit and tie, when glancing down, I noticed Jay had a hole in his dress shoe. This truly wasn’t about money or even status. He was simply doing what he believed was morally right.

Later on, Jay helped spearhead a couple of Covid-related projects I was also involved in (I was there largely due to his influence). First was the Norfolk Group, which produced a resource document for the US Congress titled “Questions for a COVID-19 Commission” and the second was Florida’s Public Health Integrity Committee formed by Governor DeSantis and led by Florida Surgeon General Joe Ladapo. Both groups attempted to bring accountability for the US public health response, and I believe they were successful in spotlighting just how wrong and harmful lockdowns and mandates were for the very public they were supposed to help.

During the initial Norfolk Group meeting, Jay often talked about the moment of no return, “crossing the Rubicon,” as he put it, the moment that each one of us made a conscientious decision to stand up against the mob. He later recalled in an interviewwith Jordan Peterson: “At some point in summer of 2020, I decided—what is my career for? If it’s just to have another CV line or a stamp, I’ve wasted my life—that I would speak no matter what the consequences were.”

The world has benefitted from Jay’s crossing of the Rubicon. His nomination, after years in the wilderness and on the “fringe” of public health and health policy, restores a sense that there is in fact justice in the world. Now he moves on to the significant task of reforming health research policy. We should be cheering him on all the way.

And if you don’t like Jay, then the problem is you.

Republished from the author’s Substack

The Rebuilding Begins

Brownstone Institute — Wed, 04 Dec 2024 10:07:53 GMT

BY BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE

It’s nearly five years after the hell of lockdowns and all that followed. This man-made trauma was shared by everyone but some suffered more than others. Governments and their partners did fine. It’s the rest of society that was robbed of freedom and prosperity.

The pandemic response resulted in damage and despair on a scale we’ve never before experienced.

It was all predicted. We fought the policies every step of the way. Brownstone Institute now asks for your support to carry this institution, its mission, and our society to the next stage.

We are enormously pleased – and you feel it too – that the light seems to be dawning. It’s not just political trends, though that plays a part. It is also the lifting of illusion, the exposure of lies, and the ferreting out of foolishness.

The winter of despair might indeed be turning to the spring of hope. But the damage is incalculable. The powers that did this are still in charge. The dangers are all around us, from mighty bureaucracies to captured industries to the surveillance state generally.

Our work is far from over. People are still being de-banked. Some of the best scholars have been purged from academia. Excellent doctors are fighting for their rights. Top journalists have lost publishing venues and scientists have lost grant money. The march toward central bank digital currencies continues. Injury from shots is ubiquitous.

Goliath is still alive and well, though scared and with less confidence than before.

The challenge before us is on a scale we’ve not seen in many generations.

The “epoch of incredulity” – a phrase from Charles Dickens – might be on its way out but we struggle to find that in which we believe. The once-trusted sources of the fallen: media, academia, pharma, political leaders, legacy institutions, and experts. We cannot trust Google or Facebook or any tech giants.

They were all in on it. We know that now. In such times, we can only turn to truth: facts, evidence, ethics, and the core belief that drives Brownstone Institute: freedom itself.

Since our founding in the darkest days, we’ve supported the dissidents, the contrary ideas, published real research, and somehow made it around the censors to gain many millions of followers the world over.

To keep the flame burning, and turn it into a roaring fire of justice, please consider an investment in our work right now. It’s never been more important. We must keep the pressure on and make it clear that we will not comply: not intellectually and not physically.

Donate Today

We’ve learned this much: we cannot count on the system to fix itself. It requires citizen involvement, contrarian voices, serious community involvement, and a large share of risk-taking. It also requires alternative means of support for those willing to speak out in hard times.

It’s the only way, and notice how relieved many people in the world are that the US seems to be trying to right itself. The Covid lockdowns were global in scope. The whole world is now clamoring for justice and freedom. It might be coming, with the US leading the way.

Your past donations to Brownstone have made possible what seemed impossible just a few years ago. Our research has been cited in court cases, a major book by a Supreme Court justice, major media like the Wall Street Journal, and has been reprinted on viral alternative media sources, in addition to countless reprints in all major languages.

Much of the research we pushed for years is now discussed daily in the news. Our website, Brownstone.org, stands as a mighty tool for writers the world over, having documented every crime and every bad actor.

We see now the difference it makes. It’s our view too that our alternative model of institutional structure has been key. We have a tiny staff and the lowest-possible operating costs. The priority is on the mission, the message, fellowships, and reach: as a result every dollar of our budget goes toward the mission.

It’s a new model of nonprofit structure – realizing the vision rather than constructing a fat institution – worthy of attention in every business journal.

Our society and country – really all countries – have been granted a chance to rebuild and fix what’s gone wrong. We dare not pass it up. We cannot sit back and rely on the politicians to make things better. There is no one hero in which we can vest all hope. Rebuilding freedom is the work of everyone.

New voices have emerged, and they come from people who are battle-hardened and utterly committed to the task. Brownstone Institute has adopted many of the bravest voices, and supported their work for years. Your support for this work makes it possible to continue it. We simply cannot walk away now with the hope that all will be well. The road to recovery is long and arduous but it can be done.

It was only a few years ago that certain elites in high places began to disparage freedom, even misspelling it as “freedumb.” Your rights to live freely were said to be contrary to public health, security, and science. It was like a dystopian novel come to life, fiction made real before our very eyes.

Brownstone blasted onto the scene with huge literature reviews proving that lockdowns are only damaging, that masks don’t work, that every nostrum from Plexiglas to mass testing systems have no effect, and that the shots were always based on a forlorn hope of sterilizing a respiratory virus with a zoonotic reservoir.

It was all fake science, every bit of it from the very beginning. It was deployed for purposes of a power grab by the national security state. They still hold that power, and the target was and is your liberty.

It needed correcting. Everything about the experience needed exposure and resetting.

Brownstone Institute literature reviews rattled the establishment, no question, and we came under heavy fire from the usual suspects. So did our scholars, researchers, and working groups on pandemic planning, censorship, and financial centralization.

We were called every name, and subjected to libelous smears along the way. Some people have said Brownstone is the leading source for “misinformation” on the Internet – the very center of a web – but you know what this means. It means we are independent of the media cartel and report inconvenient truths.

Despite it all, here we are, not only surviving but thriving. This is entirely thanks to generous donors, without whom nothing could happen.

In the meantime, we’ve published thousands of studies and 18 books including a suppressed history of medicine by the great historian Harris Coulter. His own publisher took the books out of print during the Covid years but his family stepped up and permitted the reprinting. Now they are available as guides to reform in the years to come.

Brownstone is on every social media platform, with special emphasis on those that do not censor.

We held around 50 public events too, and you know the spirit if you have attended. There is warmth, community, intelligence, and confidence in the future. We’ve formed new friendships in darkest times that will carry us many years in the future.

So many trends are headed the right way, with many Brownstone writers and scholars leading the way. You surely know the names by now. Some are on all your podcasts and videos and some appear on the nightly news.

Others are headed now to high positions in the next administration. You know this and you know the names so there is no reason to reprint them all here. Look through a list of our Fellows, scholars, and authors and you will see.

Responsible giving is always a challenge. When you look where the fortunes of Bill Gates, George Soros, and Jeff Bezos go, it is completely shocking. This is not philanthropy but malanthropy, doing bad rather than doing good.

But it can be defeated. It’s remarkable to watch the trajectory and power of good ideas as pushed by Brownstone Institute, its Fellows, and partners, with a budget of a tiny fraction of the big players out there, many of whom are government-funded.

Your contribution to our work – tax deductible to the full extent allowed – permits a continued flourishing of truth. It worked in the darkest times and it can work even more now that we have begun to see the dawn.

We only do this push once per year, and much of our plans for next year are determined by the extent of your generosity, without which we could do nothing. If you believe in the cause of human freedom, and its capacity to overcome even the most powerful obstacles, please join us as a donor and supporter.

Your investment in Brownstone Institute is an investment in the future of a civilized life itself.

Will you donate with your most generous contribution now? Thank you so much for considering. They used to say during the lockdowns that “We are all in this together.” It was propaganda then, but true now: the cause of freedom is something for all of us.

We truly are all in this together: getting the truth, realizing justice for the wrong done, restoring health, and fighting through the thicket of lies to secure the blessings of freedom now and in the future.

This is the meaning of your investment in the work of Brownstone Institute.

Is the Light Dawning?

Brownstone Institute — Tue, 03 Dec 2024 10:03:49 GMT

BY BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE

You have followed the cabinet picks. You have followed the changed tune of the media. The voices of oppression that were riding high only recently seem to be scampering away, acting like they never did anything wrong.

There is every reason to feel hope these days but let us be cautious and wary. Goliath is massive and clever, and it will require far more than a dedicated few to make a difference. The industry that gave us lockdowns and forced injections is larger than any constructed in human history.

Think of it: a power so entrenched that it locked billions in their homes! That is what we are up against. It has no intention of evaporating on its own.

Remember when George W. Bush sent troops to Afghanistan and found no government in Kabul? He declared victory without understanding that the enemy simply scurried off to the hills and mountains to fight another day.

That is where we are today, dealing with a machine that has no intention of giving up; it plans to weather the storm until it passes.

If freedom and government-by-the-people are going to make a return, we need sustained efforts at dramatic intellectual and cultural change to back genuine upheaval of all institutions.

That’s where Brownstone Institute has a very important role to play. There is now opportunity for a real shift but it does not happen through some top-down imposition. It happens only with a new Renaissance of ideas, one backed by you our supporters.

Will you renew your support this week? Thank you for considering.

The West Hartford supper club is December 18, and features essayist and best-selling author Charles Eisenstein.

The next Philadelphia supper club is Thursday, December 5. Our guest speaker is fearless legal warrior, New York Civil Rights attorney, and Brownstone Fellow Bobbie Anne Cox. She’ll tell us all about her epic legal battle against Governor Hochul and the NYS Department of Health’s “quarantine camp” regulation and where the lawsuit stands.

Here is some content since our last email.

From Marcus Aurelius to Omar Little: A Man’s Code is Vital By Josh Stylman. The answer lies in the dignity of living according to our principles, engaging with our communities, and maintaining the courage to think independently. As the emperor-philosopher and the fictional street warrior understood, what matters is the integrity of our code.

Privacy in Voting Is a Treasure By Christine Black. At my polling place, I valued my privacy when completing a ballot behind a partition. I have been independent for a long time but couldn’t help but wonder this time why the Democratic Party seemed so surprised that it lost.

Fluoride in the Water By Carl Heneghan and Tom Jefferson. RFK, Jr. rightly asks questions about an intervention based on evidence going back to the 1930s. In the meantime, there have been growing concerns about harm and little contemporary evidence evaluating the effectiveness of water fluoridation in preventing caries

How Engineered Dependency Erases Our Autonomy By Josh Stylman. We’re not just losing skills and privacy; we’re losing the ability to recognize independence. The question isn’t whether convenience is worth the cost of liberty—it’s whether we’ll recognize what we’ve lost before we forget we ever had it.

Justice Is Served: Jay Bhattacharya Chosen to Be NIH Director By Steve Templeton. Jay’s nomination, after years on the “fringe” of public health and health policy, restores a sense that there is in fact justice in the world. Now he moves on to the significant task of reforming health research policy.

The “Let It Rip” Canard: Reflections on Jay Bhattacharya By Jeffrey Tucker. It’s been a very long journey lasting nearly five years, but here we are, the man who led the opposition to the worst-imaginable public health policies now in a position to make sure that nothing like this ever happens again.

Federal Covid Inquiry Finds Public Trust Plummeted By Rebekah Barnett. In a report handed down on Tuesday, Australia’s federal Covid Inquiry found that extreme public health restrictions, coupled with a lack of transparency about the evidence informing these decisions, has led to a major slide in public trust.

America the Titanic: Policy Recommendations By Breeauna Sagdal. America stands at a critical tipping point. To protect the foundational freedoms of America’s farmers and ranchers, the I Am Texas Slim Foundation calls for immediate executive actions to dismantle these mandates and restore power to communities.

Fallout from Vermont Ruling on Unauthorized Vaccinations By John Klar. The Vermont public school system violated this fundamental principle, and the Vermont Supreme Court saw to it that the perpetrators escaped all accountability and that the victims were shut down.

Go Paint the Porch By Christine Black. Go ahead and paint the porch, clean the barn, clear the closet, cook the soup, even if you’re depressed and don’t feel like it. You’ll still have all the same problems when you’re finished but the porch will be painted.

The Vaccine Paradox By Filipe Rafaeli. It’s an interesting paradox…Big Pharma’s power has managed to paint its critics as lunatics. After all, in the public’s mind, “anti-vaxxer” and “flat-earther” are essentially the same type of person. The problem only arises when people Google our names.

Privacy in Voting Is a Treasure

Brownstone Institute — Mon, 02 Dec 2024 09:58:48 GMT

BY CHRISTINE BLACK

Styrofoam partitions at the polling place comforted me. Our polling place is a cinder block community center in a very small town in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. I also liked the black curtain around the machine where I fed my ballot. I liked the privacy and dignity partitions and black curtains provided. Men came in their trucks and work clothes, taking time off jobs to vote; women held their small children by the hand as they entered.

“You didn’t vote for him, did you?” people asked this election season and in 2016. “I don’t know what we’re going to do if he wins.” An independent for many years, I’m not registered with either of the main political parties since the US government’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and throughout the Middle East and Africa, under both Republicans and Democrats. Many people I knew wildly erected Obama yard signs in 2008 when he ran against John McCain. Curious, I wandered to our downtown and picked up some Obama campaign literature. Ramping up military spending and proliferating US military bases in other countries were listed as two of his priorities.

I didn’t like McCain either, but I just couldn’t put up an Obama sign. Obama became known during his administration for compiling assassination lists, for drone bombing suspected “terrorists,” including a 16-year-old American teenager, under the Authorization to Use Military Force in Afghanistan, legislation that gave a free pass and open funding to any US military action anywhere in the world without Congressional approval. I had voted independent even before that terrible legislation that was blessed and funded by both Democrats and Republicans.

Even before this recent horribly contentious election, I believed people should be able to keep their votes private if they chose to. Partitions and curtains are there for good reason. People have lost jobs, been discriminated against, not hired, and been threatened in this country and around the world for who they voted for or for trying to vote at all. They have been forced overtly or covertly to vote for certain candidates. They have been barred from voting. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 inspires me. It states, “no person . . .shall intimidate, threaten, coerce. . . any other person for the purpose of interfering with the right of [that] person to vote or to vote as he may choose.”

Almost 77 million people voted for Donald Trump in this last election, and he earned most of the states’ Electoral College votes, yet major media outlets published headlines like “What Trump Unleashed Means for America” on MSNBC (Nov. 8) and “You Can’t Despair Because That’s What They Want” in the Nov. 8 edition of Rolling Stone. Who is the “you” in this headline, and who is the “they?” Media language like this condescends and insults those 77 million people, whatever we may think of Donald Trump as a politician or now as the President-elect. Maybe such posturing and language caused the Democratic Party’s failure.

No one likes to be treated, spoken to, or spoken about with contempt as though they are so dumb and misinformed, they don’t know any better. The Atlantic trumpeted on Nov. 8, “The Case for Treating Trump Like a Normal President.” The Atlantic has continued, even in 2023, to stand by its lies about weapons of mass destruction that justified the US government’s invasion and occupation of the sovereign nation of Iraq. Most major media outlets championed those war lies and many more Covid period lies.

From church email lists after the election, I received messages about “grieving,” and notes that if anyone needed counseling or a place to pray, clergy would be available. Trump won the popular vote in this election – with Republicans winning the popular vote for the first time since 2004. What message do these church-grieving and garment-rending comments send to those 77 million people all over the country? What are we missing? I like the dignity and privacy of polling place partitions and curtains to protect against voter discrimination, in workplaces, neighborhoods, and especially, in churches.

Churches should not endorse or reject candidates, either overtly or by implication, and should remain separate from political party politics as these associations conjure memories of bad times in our history when church was a capital “C,” working alongside government, to demand tithes, imprison people for not attending Church, or for not acting as the Church and State dictated. In the past, the Church used government’s power and force to intimidate and repress. Which churches sent grieving emails post-election and which did not? Don’t we pray for everyone? Open doors to everyone, regardless of political party or whom we voted for? Or, is that unless someone voted for “him?” What are we learning from this period?

Church with a capital “C” may remind us of Science with a capital “S,” with all the harms. The Science perpetrated during lockdowns and over the last few years. In addition, media took on a capital “M.” Media outlets claimed their assertions were the only valid ones, the only Truths (there’s that capital letter again), and then colluded with governments to censor alternative opinions and information while bullying, slandering, threatening, and deplatforming writers and speakers with alternative views, many of which have proven to be correct.

During this terrible time, noble, highly credentialed people lost friends and family, jobs and careers, reputations and benefits, including firefighters and other public servants, doctors and health care professionals, and people from many fields, for their speech when it did not align with The Science or when they declined an experimental shot.

Democrats’ loss took on a new iteration recently when Dr. Jay Bhattacharya was appointed to head the National Institute of Health. Bhattacharya, along with Drs. Martin Kulldorff and Sunetra Gupta, authored the Great Barrington Declaration that opposed school closures and lockdowns. These experts said barring children from in-person school was a “grave injustice.” They opposed forced experimental shots. Media spread cruel language about these authors and their supporters, as well as many others, for merely speaking out with compassion, critical thinking, and common sense.

Capital letter organizations garnered too much power and made assumptions about what we, everyone beneath them, must think and believe and do. Capital letter institutions took on lives of their own and assumed superiority. Corporations with a capital “C” subsumed and destroyed small businesses, including many African-American businesses, all over the country. Many restaurants and in-person service businesses, like nail and hair salons, massage centers, yoga studios closed for good. Small churches, especially in rural areas, collapsed when they could not survive declining memberships after governments ordered their doors shuttered.

Jesus may not have wanted a church with a capital “C,” that endorses or rejects politicians, as he walked dusty country sides, accompanied by his growing band of ragamuffins and misfits, those who challenged dominant narratives and powerful figures of their time. Radical sects broke from the Church of England and the Catholic Church, rejecting powers implied in the capital “C” church tied to the state, which rallied behind military invasions and conquests, forced memberships and payments.

What are the capital letter institutions missing – the Church, the Media, the Science, the Corporations, the Pharmaceutical Companies? What have they missed for years and especially these last few years after the 2020 lockdowns? Answers may help us understand the election’s outcome. Ask a small business owner, one of all the many relying on live communities to survive. Ask the owner of a restaurant that a family built over generations that was forced to close during lockdowns because it couldn’t survive unconstitutional government mandates or reduced capacity edicts – or the cruel societal and biased media backlash if it tried opening earlier than virtue-signaling or societal peer pressure allowed. During that strange and terrible time after 2020 descended, those favoring reopening businesses or schools were maligned as “reckless” or “homicidal.”

Who are these 77 million people who voted for “him,” and why don’t so-called mainstream reporters ask them more questions? Ask the postman, the UPS driver, the guy coming to your house to get the electricity going for laptop computers, the farmer down the road, the truck driver, eating at the truck stop diner, who drives the truck transporting what we order from the internet. Ask the servicemember, sent to one of those disastrous wars for lies and profits. Ask the truck drivers who transported vegetables, meat, and spices, used at the restaurant making meals that people computer-clicked and then had delivered by Grubhub or Uber Eats while staying home because the New York Times told us to.

Ask the chicken factory worker who produced the chicken for the Grubhub meal or the machinist who built the engine parts in the car driven by the Grubhub driver. Ask them who they voted for. Maybe ask them why. Ask the mechanic who maintained the truck, transporting Amazon orders for people “working from home;” ask the guy coming to your house to pump the septic tank while people stayed in their houses, drawing salaries from Zoom meetings. No one likes to be referred to as an ignorant slob who doesn’t know any better about whom to vote for, what shots to take, whether or not he can gather with friends, attend church, or go to an AA meeting inside.

DC bureaucrats may not have minded lockdown and stay-at-home “orders,” maybe even liked them, because they still drew excellent salaries without having to commute. I have commuted to work into DC from Virginia and Maryland suburbs. It’s exhausting and nerve-wracking. It’s better to stay home. It’s also privileged. I’m not surprised DC bureaucrats and high-paid media figures promoted, defended, and prolonged lockdown policies that devastated communities and families all over the country. Devastation spread across the world because other countries often follow the US lead.

Where were voters and how did they feel when lights went out in children and teenagers’ eyes from school closures and bizarre Covid policies, forced on them for a disease that posed almost no threat to them? Public schoolteachers continue dealing with the damage politicians and bureaucrats inflicted on schoolchildren and adolescents. College students tell stories of police showing up at their dorm rooms when they gathered with friends. Many of my mom’s friends described terrible mental health crises among their adolescent and young adult children – from near-catatonic depression to suicidal ideation to suicidal attempts that required hospitalizations. Some lost their precious children to suicide.

Did bureaucrats and politicians promote harmful policies because they didn’t get adequate information – or did they just not care as long as they could get gourmet ice cream delivered to their house? They may never have read an article or heard a talk from former Democratic Presidential Candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. because they operate in a completely different “information ecosystem,” as he phrased it. Censorship divided information ecosystems, snuffed out entire ones from public view, so people may never have read or heard certain information to provoke more critical thinking, to learn from new and uncomfortable angles.

Media with a capital “M,” which largely supports the Democratic Party, dismissed Kennedy as a discredited kook and still does. How was that fair? He comes from a prominent political family with a long Democratic Party history, earned an Ivy League education, and, as an attorney, successfully sued some of the country’s most powerful corporations. Why would Big Media not give him air time for interviews? Why not treat him with basic respect and decency, even if you disagreed with his ideas? Largely because of his opposition to Media censorship, he said, he joined the Trump campaign.

Why did the Democratic Party refuse security protection for RFK, Jr. when he ran as a Democrat? Isn’t that one of the rules of the game – that presidential candidates get Secret Service protection? Maybe not playing by the rules contributed to their loss? Why would major networks not interview him? Which ideas were not discussed at all during the election season?

At my polling place, I valued my privacy when completing a ballot behind a partition and then feeding it into the machine with a black curtain around it. I have been independent for a long time but couldn’t help but wonder this time why the Democratic Party seemed so surprised that it lost.

Trump’s Multiethnic Winning Coalition

Brownstone Institute — Fri, 29 Nov 2024 10:17:40 GMT

BY RAMESH THAKUR

Go on, admit it. Don’t be shy. Did you feel the joy in the late evening and early hours of 5–6 November? How about the vibe? Democrats failed to feel either as the garbage deplorables took out the trash and made a bonfire of the dumpster bin. The diversity hire can now retire and feel the sadness of adversity instead.

Source: Reuters, 12 November 2024

Donald Trump’s 312-226 landslide victory in the Electoral College is not a repudiation of democracy but a triumphant affirmation of its liberating power. He lost the popular vote in 2016 by three million votes (two percent) and in 2020 by 7 million (four percent). This time he won the popular vote by three million (76-73) and two percent (50.1-48.1) – his first victory in the number of ballots and in securing an absolute majority. About 90 percent of over 3,000 counties across the nation shifted to the right.

Trump won in 2016 with a winning coalition of disaffected working-class whites. More than half of workers are living paycheck-to-paycheck, the purchasing power of which has been falling with high inflation. Contrary to the American dream of intergenerational progress, many young people have a worse standard of living than their parents. While consolidating that voting base, the more sweeping triumph this year was helped considerably by substantial inroads into ethnic groups traditionally aligned with Democrats. Trump described his diverse and inclusive coalition as a ‘beautiful,’ ‘historical realignment’ in his victory speech on the night. Harris refused to give a concession speech until the day after.

In an NBC exit poll, Trump won 57 percent of white and 55 percent of male voters, retaining his hold on these groups. In an AP exit poll, he won 20 percent of the black vote, up from 8 in 2016 and 13 in 2020. Harris’s 80 percent black vote is a ten-point drop from Joe Biden’s four years ago. In addition, he also won the support of 46 percent of Latinos, 39 percent of Asian-Americans, 54 percent of ‘Other,’ 45 percent of women, and 43 percent of 18–29-year-olds. Hence the prospect of a major new realignment of American politics. There are important lessons in all this for centre-right parties across the West: authentic conservatism attracts more voters than it repels.

Trump’s success in creating a new multiethnic winning coalition indicates that voting trends may be coalescing, with previously segmented cohorts normalising and starting to vote more as Americans and less as ethnics. Thus in an AP analysis, the economy and jobs rated as the top issues for voters overall, for blacks and Latinos, and for the youth. Phrases like the Latino, black, or Asian-American vote are increasingly meaningless. What once were voting blocs are fragmenting into individuals with agency. This can only be good for the long-term health of American democracy, contrary to the hysterical warnings of its imminent collapse should Trump win.

In the history books, 2016 might be described as a dress rehearsal for the real deal in 2024. Trump won back the White House and delivered Congress on his coattails, with a net gain of four Senate and 1-2 House seats. Plus he will have a favourable balance of justices on the Supreme Court. All this will be crucial in confronting the expected challenges from Resistance 2.0, aka swamp dwellers protesting at the swamp drainage scheme. So will the lessons internalised from the experience of 2016–20, including the choice of top personnel who understand and are committed to the Trump agenda.

Traditional Voter Concerns Beat Woke Neoliberalism

Progressives once again went into meltdown. Writing in The Globe and Mail in reliably woke Canada, Andrew Coyne solemnly describes Trump as ‘manifestly, palpably, incontrovertibly unfit for public office, not only in his own character and abilities, but for what he represents, including his attacks on the rule of law, basic freedoms and democracy itself.’ His take on the outcome? ‘Sometimes the people get it wrong.’ He echoed the instant reaction from Jill Filipovic that ‘this election was not an indictment’ of Harris but ‘an indictment of America.’ At least one Guardiancolumnist gets it. John Harris concluded that the ‘simple, inescapable message’ from Trump’s victory is that ‘many people despise the left’ with progressives seen as ‘one judgmental, “woke” mass.’

Harris goes on to note that support for border security and enforcement was higher among blacks and Hispanics than among white progressives. So too for statements that ‘America is the greatest country in the world’ where ‘most people can make it if they work hard,’ again contradicting the core tenets of critical race theory. The fact that Trump’s 14-point advantage among voters without college degrees flips into a 13-point loss among the college-educated indicates the source of the luxury beliefs. This in a tough economic environment in which, in a survey last year, 39 percent of Americans admitted to having skipped meals to keep up with housing payments.

Trump was authentic and Harris inauthentic, intellectually shallow, morally vacuous, and prone to mistaking platitudes as policy pronouncements. Harris held a celebrity-studded rally in Philadelphia on 4 November. Speaking at his own overlapping rally in Pittsburgh, Trump said: ‘We don’t need a star because we have policy.’

She recruited Republican reject Liz Cheney whose surname remains toxic among true-blue Democrats. He won over disillusioned Democrats Robert F Kennedy, Jr (nominated to be Secretary of Health and Human Services) and Tulsi Gabbard (the new Director of National Intelligence) along with Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy (co-chairs of a new Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE). Her only sales pitch was ‘I am not Trump. I am not Biden.’ This was delivered with an accompaniment of trademark word salads, infamous cackles, and a baffling array of accents to suit every audience.

Trump dodged bullets, Harris dodged questions. He had a record to defend, she had one to airbrush. Democrats voted for the party, not Harris. MAGA people voted for Trump more than the party. Harris neither explained and defended the last four years nor articulated a vision for the next four. All she did was to attack Trump. He closed with the simple yet powerful question: Are you better off now than then? They replied: Diversity hire, you are fired.

Trump won, Harris lost, and the progressive governance elite was humiliated. The biggest losers of the night were A-list celebrities and the legacy media. Even Taylor Swift’s hometown of Reading, PA went with Trump. She might be a fashion influencer but is no more an opinion influencer and thought leader than I am a fashion influencer. The centre ground of the political information complex has shifted from legacy to online alternative and podcast media. As Kimberly Strassel put it in the Wall Street Journal, it was ‘a landslide against the media’ (think CBS editing a word salad answer from Harris into a crisper sound bite but refusing to publish the full transcript).

Echoing the ‘quadfecta’ of the GOP capture of the Presidency, Senate, House, and popular vote, the MSM too suffered a quadruple calamity. Their preferred candidate lost. Their already dented credibility was torn to shreds. Echoing the George Costanza strategy, some voters did the opposite of what the media hacks told them, echoing last year’s Voice referendum here in Australia. Also like the Voice, Harris’s massive spending advantage merely reinforced the perception that she was the candidate of the wealthy few and he of the more numerous little guys.

Ironically, the media helped shrink-wrap the Democrats in the DC bubble so they never woke up to just how cut off they’d become from the concerns, fears, hopes, and aspirations of everyday Americans. Reduced to a party of, by, and for elites, they mistook the noise of shouty inner-city activists for the voice of Middle America. The voters gave the tiresome snobs (elites) and scolds (culture warriors) a big ‘FU’ in return, just like with the Voice down under.

Growing the Trump Voter Base

There isn’t just one US presidential election but 50 simultaneous but separate ones in every state, each with its own rules and processes. Similarly, there isn’t one unified and cohesive electorate but several distinct voting cohorts. As alluded to above, the Trump-led Republicans deepened their appeal among white working-class Americans but also broadened it to peel away once-solid support for the Democrats among specific cohorts and bring them inside the Republican tent.

This was particularly true of but not limited to the immigrant ethnic groups. According to a Forbes analysis, Harris’s six-point lead over Trump among Latinos was a steep drop from the 33 and 38-point margins for Biden and Clinton in 2020/2016. In Starr County in south Texas with a 97 percent Latino population that hasn’t voted for a Republican presidential candidate since 1892 and Clinton won by 79 points in 2016, Trump won 58 percent of the votes this time round. In Queens County, NY, one of the most ethnically and racially diverse counties in the US, the needle moved 20 points towards Trump from 2020. For all the brouhaha over an insult comedian’s off-colour Puerto Rican joke, even heavily Puerto Rican Osceola, FL, which Biden carried by nearly 14 points, flipped to Trump.

Clearly, voters were not moved much by Harris’s appeal to gender and minorities. Having failed to read the room, CNN’s exit poll shows that the Democrats have shrunk into the party of college-educated, high-income (above $100,000), whites, and single women.

None of the four main attack lines against Trump – a convicted felon, a racist, a misogynist, a wannabe Hitler who will destroy American democracy – resonated with these demographics. The first was viewed as the result of anti-democratic lawfare. The second was contradicted by the evidence of their own lying eyes with people such as Nikki Haley, Ramaswamy, Gabbard (raised a Hindu), Kash Patel, and Bobby Jindal inside the GOP fold. Ditto the third with Haley, Gabbard, Susie Wiles (Trump’s new chief of staff, plus Elise Stefanik and Kristi Noem among his other early top picks), his public support for Kellyanne Conway, and his emphatic support for women’s rights against trans extremism. The fourth flew in the face of their direct experience of the records of Trump and Biden-Harris and their own judgment on which of the respective two records was the greater violation of democratic norms. The CNN exit poll confirmed that voters perceived democracy to be threatened almost evenly by Harris and Trump.

The established immigrant populations too see economic downsides to having newer immigrant workers come in and compete for jobs. They too object to unlimited immigration on cultural grounds, having become proud of their American citizenship. They may even become more vociferous defenders of Americanism than whites who can trace their ancestry in the US further back but are wracked with guilt over historical sins like slavery and racism. They fault the Democrats on immigration, culture wars, and pronouns, and net zero obsession and costs be damned. Their optimistic vision for America is one based on promoting nationhood, national identity, American culture, secure borders, a history of many accomplishments to be proud of and celebrated, social conservatism, the prosperity of people who actually live in the country, and a better life for their kids.

Democracy Under Threat

In a surreal bait-and-switch tactic, the Democrats campaigned heavily on the fear that Trump, a closet Hitler, would begin to establish a dictatorship from Day One. This is from the party that overturned the democratic choice of 14 million voters to dump Biden and impose a DEI pick for the ultimate job, even though she failed to win a single delegate in 2020 and did not contest the party primary this year. She knew it, Americans knew it, the world knew it. Everyone also knew that the Democrats had lied about Biden’s cognitive health for four years and then, after replacing him, lied about Harris’s fitness for office. They treated voters with open contempt and they’ve returned the favour.

When the machine came after Trump in a scorched earth campaign of total lawfare, blacks and immigrants from countries where state harassment is routine related to him. This is disturbingly reminiscent to many immigrants, including Indians, of the VIP culture in their home countries which they fled in search of a better future for themselves and their descendants in the land of opportunity and the free.

The Democrats mostly refused to accept the legitimacy of Trump’s victory in 2016 and worked assiduously to undermine his presidency with guerrilla tactics and the Russia collusion hoax. Fifty-one former senior intelligence officials ran election interference against Trump in 2020 with knowingly false declarations on the Hunter Biden laptop story as classic Russian disinformation. They spied on his campaign, impeached him twice, arrested him, and tried to bankrupt, incarcerate, and throw him off the ballot. He was twice the target of assassination attempts and famously rose up from one with defiant fist pumps of ‘Fight! Fight! Fight!’ He absorbed all the punches and just kept coming back at them.

This was the mother of all overkills. Those pushing it sounded more like demented rage addicts than serious contenders for high political office. In the end, the only verdict that matters was delivered by the jury of all American voters. The charge that Trump is an existential threat to American democracy was also totally contradicted by Harris’s concession speech on the 6^th: We lost this battle, she said, but the fight goes on and we will win the next time. And then she appealed for kindness towards the person she had been trashing for the past 100 days as a racist and sexist second coming of Hitler.

Immigration

Immigration has long been argued to bring multiple benefits of economic stimulus and growth, replenished gene pool, enriched cultural diversity, exposure to the world’s diverse range of scrumptious cuisine, and so on. In the US, Republicans tolerated illegal immigrants as a large pool of cheap labour and Democrats as a large bloc of reliable long-term votes. But in recent times mass and illegal immigration in particular have tipped the balance away from net benefits to harms, including net lifetime drain on public finances and stressed out public infrastructure. This is more so for the working classes than the elites.

This has put many settled liberal assumptions under scrutiny. For example, it is true that liberalism embraces multiculturalism. But actual and growing evidence in many Western democracies clearly indicates that not all multicultural groups embrace the core assumptions and values of liberalism, including tolerance for diversity of faiths, beliefs, and practices. The resulting fractures of civic culture, social cohesion, and political stability have heavily qualified the experience of shared citizenship.

By reversing Trump’s efforts to control the southern border and opening it wide to floods of illegal aliens on Harris’ watch as the border czar, the Democrats left her candidacy hostage to fortune and have paid the price. Exit polls showed immigration and the economy as the voters’ top two concerns and Trump – with a tough message on immigration, border enforcement, and mass deportations – won on these with 90 and 80 percent support.

A Win for Women’s Rights against Trans Colonisation of Female Spaces

The progressive cultural crusade is quintessentially Western, irrelevant, and repugnant to many non-Westerners. They don’t subscribe to white privilege and guilt, don’t believe masculinity is toxic and all women should be believed automatically when making serious allegations of sexual assault that devastate not just the man but his whole family, don’t support affirmative action for blacks, women, and transgender, don’t obsess over personal pronouns, and don’t lie in bed terrified of being cooked alive by global boiling.

They were horrified at the very thought, in the name of promoting trans rights, of males invading female spaces involving their daughters, from sporting competitions to changing rooms, showers, toilets, and schoolchildren on overnight camping trips. Trump’s disdain for these progressive pieties quite appeals to them. The distortion of policy priorities by the Democrats on climate catastrophism and trans extremism moved the needle of voter sentiment from opposed to angry. Most migrant minorities would favour a return to the progressive centrism of equal opportunity and fairness, not the cultural Marxist nostrum of identity-driven equitable outcomes.

While Trump-Vance spoke to people’s concerns on inflation, jobs, energy security, mass illegal immigration, and crime, Harris-Walz identified with boutique ideas around race and gender. Trump’s counterattack on transgender rights more than offset abortion – sorry, reproductive rights – as an issue for women in general and for non-white men and women in particular. In a Gallup Poll last year, 69 percent of Americans backed restricting sporting teams to biological sex and not based on gender self-identity.

Harris suffered a fall of three points from men and two points from women voters; Trump gained three points from both. How could this be: Isn’t he misogyny incarnate? The Biden-Harris administration was responsible for the most grievous assault on the sacrosanct principles of bodily integrity and ‘My Body, My Choice’ with its vaccine mandates. But when the Supreme Court struck down Roe v Wade in June 2022, they suddenly rediscovered their passion for the same principles and launched an all-out attack on the threat to abortion from another Trump term.

Yet, in a report published in May 2024 by Guttmacher Institute, a research organisation that supports access to abortion, the total number of abortions in the US was 1,037,000 in 2023, the first full year after the court decision. According to CDC data, this was a 64 percent jump from 625,978 in 2021 before the court decision (possibly depressed during shutdowns) and the highest in a decade.

Most people want neither harshly restrictive access to abortions nor the removal of all restrictions until birth. But most people don’t feel comfortable discussing it, believing it to be an intensely personal choice. The topic doesn’t align with the joy vibe and there’s something unsettling about any national leader who campaigns against bringing children into the world.

About a third of American women are pro-life. Even among pro-choice women, the majority don’t back abortion all the way to full term. Trump sided with the Supreme Court that it’s a state-level political issue, not one for the federal judiciary to adjudicate. He explicitly ruled out taking any further action and promised to veto any national ban on abortion. In the end, the much-trumpeted gender gap worked to Trump’s net advantage. Men broke for him 55-42 and women for Harris 53-45, giving Trump a five-point net gain.

The issue didn’t even excite the young. About 39 percent of young women and 42 percent of young men identified jobs and the economy as their top issue, while 17 percent and 8 percent picked abortion. Trump won 40 percent of the votes of female under-30s, up by seven points. Harris won the under-30s overall by 52-46, but fell back from Biden’s margin by 19 points. He won among under-30 men by 14 percent, a 29-point swing from 2020.

The Democrats spent $175 million on TV ads across the country to hammer their message on abortion – more than on any other issue. Republicans spent $123 millionattacking trans athletes. One ad featured footage of Harris from the 2019 primaries saying she supported taxpayer-funded gender-affirming surgery for illegal immigrants and transgender prison inmates. The tagline: ‘Kamala’s For They/Them. President Trump is for you’ was exceptionally effective. The New York Timesreported on 7 November on an analysis by Future Forward, a pro-Harris super PAC, that that one single ad shifted the race by a stunning 2.7 percent towards Trump after viewers watched it.

Culture warriors have captured and occupied the commanding heights of state and public institutions, including most of the print and electronic legacy media, from which to coerce and harass critics and dissenters into compliance through an expansive abuse of administrative power by unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats. Australia’s eSafety Commissioner is a good example and I wonder how much harm this American import has caused to Australia’s critical relationship with the incoming administration by picking a fight with Musk (which she lost) who will wield a powerful influence on Trump.

Indo-Americans

For reasons that should be self-evident, I am more familiar with Indo-American than with other groups’ sentiments. The comments that follow draw on many conversations over time with colleagues, friends, and relations in the US.

Unlike the low depression hanging over many Western capitals led by people yet to outgrow student politics, in heavily polluted Delhi the Modi government will be pleased to see the House of Orange restored to the White House. Speaking at a function in Mumbai on 10 November, in response to a question from the audience on the implications of Trump 2.0 for India, Foreign Minister S Jaishankar remarked(at around 25 minutes) that ‘a lot of countries are nervous about the US…We are not one of them.’ He said that Modi’s call of congratulations was among the first three that Trump took from foreign leaders.

The rise in India’s global profile has coincided with the rise into public prominence of many people of Indian origin living in the West, none more so than in the US. There are 5.2 million Indo-Americans, over half of them of voting age. They have been a historically solid Democratic voting cohort. Their high-income worth, educational qualifications, professional occupations, and political engagement give them a role that belies their small numbers.

It’s worth remembering that small numbers can tip the outcomes in just a handful of states to determine the overall winner. There are over 700,000 Indians in the seven swing states. In 2016, 84 percent of Indo-Americans voted for Hillary Clinton, falling to 68 percent for Biden in 2020. Harris’s share fell again to 60 percent, despite her mother being Indian. Support for Trump was 31 percent, up from 22 percent in 2020.

Many Indo-Americans had to wait years for a green card while working in tech, starting companies, paying taxes, but unable to claim Social Security benefits until they became citizens. Immigration as a fairness issue has turned many into Trump voters, especially when they see undocumented immigrants committing crimes and accessing social benefits funded in part by their taxes.

They resent Democrats pandering to grifters who contribute little to society or the economy and forgiving debts incurred by students of the many victimhood and grievance degrees. Coming from a country that was invaded, conquered, colonised, and ruled for a thousand years by Islamic and British invaders then partitioned, they are bewildered at being maligned as White Adjacent for their success through education and work ethic because this contradicts the narrative of oppressed minorities. They fought all the way to the Supreme Court against discriminatory admissions by the nation’s elite universities. They have lived experience of the onerous burden of the parasitical regulatory state.

The reasons why Indo-Americans have begun switching to Trump’s Republican Party offer important clues on Trump’s appeal to other Asian-Americans, Latinos, and blacks. This should attract the interest of campaign strategists of centre-right parties across Western democracies, including Australia, on how to fight and win culture wars and defend cultural centrism in order to win elections in a rapidly evolving political landscape where traditional partisanship is in freefall and new alignments are coalescing around class- and family-based values and concerns.

A substantially shorter version was published in Spectator Australia online on 14 and in the magazine on 16 November.

A Diagram of Elite Wickedness

Brownstone Institute — Thu, 28 Nov 2024 10:12:32 GMT

BY DANIEL KLEIN

had the honor of being a guest on “Amazing Academics,” a YouTube series hosted by Philip Davies, who is retired from Bournemouth University in southeast England. Dr. Davies’ prior guests include Frank Furedi, Norman Fenton, Judith Curry, and Eric Kaufmann.

Although I was invited to speak on ‘misinformation’ and ‘hate’ as censorship stratagems, I asked Dr. Davies whether I might first zoom out, and he agreed. I begin the video by presenting the following diagram of elite wickedness:

Censorship is at the bottom, listed with propaganda and persecution, which together form a battery of intimidation. Censorship presupposes propaganda, because censorship exists to sustain the big programmatic lying. Censorship is joined with persecution: When a powerful personality is censored at one platform, he can move to another soapbox and carry his audience and charisma with him. Wicked elites need to destroy the person himself, through persecution.

All of that is engineered through a ‘whole-of-society’ approach, which is to say a vast and loose array of clientelism, using carrots and sticks. The carrots come by way of taxation and privileges based on coercive restrictions, so, in a deeper sense, it is sticks that undergird all of clientelism. The government does not peacefully grow any carrots. All the carrots come from sticks. The following clip from the film 48 Hours teaches the single most important lesson in sound political theory:

In the diagram above, some of the terms are in quotation marks. The quotation marks signify that the term is borrowed directly from Mike Benz. I regard him to be the best guide to the wickedness that we are attempting to wrap our minds around and defend civilization from. The diagram above is my own, but it leans heavily on what I am learning from Benz.

The diagram is tentative in the components listed, in the configuration of those components, and in the labeling of each component. We are groping to theorize elite wickedness.

In the diagram, the CLIENTELISM space shows, from Benz:

“Civil Society Institutions,” which include NGOs, academic operations, research, scientific journals, and so on;
“Private Corporations” which is a catch-all for whatever for-profit businesses (banks, pharma, etc.) are allied or corrupted by DEI, ESG, and turned into clients;
“Media,” which includes both legacy media and social media.

Much of the censorship is engineered through control of media, to some extent by arm-twisting and to some extent simply by shared vanities including false and frivolous political ideologies. In the UK, which lacks a First Amendment, much censorship is directly fascistic. Reports on the latest in Orwellian UK are provided here.

What is behind it all?

That brings up to the top of the diagram. I tentatively use SWAMP for the whole skein of governmental elites loosely allied in the wicked operations. Benz does not much use the term Swamp. He focuses on “The Blob,” which is: (1) the State Department, (2) the intelligence community, and (3) the Department of Defense.

Benz’s concept of the Blob, therefore, is narrower than the Swamp, which some would call the Deep State. Perhaps I should have DEEP STATE where I have SWAMP. My theorizing of all this is in the first stages of conceptualizing, configuring, and denominating.

Benz also has pointed out that all roads run through the Department of Justice. Challenges and impediments to swampy activity often fall to the DOJ, so the Swamp needs a DOJ that will protect it, enforce its wickedness, persecute its adversaries, and so on.

Then there are the politicians. In the conversation, Philip Davies and I clarify that we are talking about elites, not the New York Times reader next door. We discuss how bipartisan the set of wicked elite politicians is.

Finally, there is the administrative state writ large—agencies of government, many of which are led and manned by elites ideologically aligned with the wicked elites. Davies and I also discuss how monolithic the Swamp is, and how it is conflicted within itself.

The diagram shown above, channeling Benz, might be compared to Jeffrey Tucker’s essay on the deep, middle, and shallow state. Broadly speaking, Tucker makes the Blob the core of the Deep State, identifies the administrative state as the Middle State, and the array of clientelistic organizations the Shallow State.

As for the politicians themselves, Tucker gives them little place, saying that they are “reduced to bit players on the scene, marionettes whose main job is to keep up appearances.” That strikes me as overstated and overly fatalistic. In my diagram, influential politicians have a significant role in the skein of elite wickedness. Still, Tucker’s motion to follow through on ‘deep’ by spelling out middle and shallow is illuminating.

Something else in Tucker’s essay I am not so comfortable with is that “the state” seems to become overextended, such that the many and varied clientelistic organizations are identified as parts of “the state.” I use ‘the state’ with reluctance, because ‘the state’ is highly polysemous: Is ‘the state’ the coercive rule-making authority? Is it the entire governmental sector? Is it the entire polity, including its populace? For Americans with their 50 states, the term ‘state’ is especially polysemous.

Davies and I ponder what the aims and goals of the Swamp creatures are. We suggest a complex mix of vanity, careerism, and grift, which depend on having and maintaining power—the badge, as Eddie Murphy put it.

The diagram is a sketch of a first draft of the big picture. I’d call it the big Benz picture, except that, again, what you see in that sketch does not all come directly from Benz. For example, Benz does not seem to use the term clientelism.

After discussing the diagram, Philip Davies and I drill down to censorship. We discuss the censorship stratagems ‘misinformation’ and ‘hate.’

The good will be better able to fend off wickedness if they grow more competent in understanding how words and the notions they signify (information, hate) are being weaponized by wicked elites. We grow our competency by applying sound moral philosophy (which, I say, subsumes epistemology) to such matters.

How to Cut $2 Trillion of Fat from the Federal Budget

Brownstone Institute — Wed, 27 Nov 2024 10:12:20 GMT

BY DAVID STOCKMAN

goal of $2 trillion of budget savings is crucial to the very future of Constitutional democracy and capitalist prosperity in America. In fact, the soaring public debt is now so out of control that the Federal budget threatens to become a self-fueling financial doomsday machine. So more power to the DOGE of Musk and Ramaswamy. In spades!

For want of doubt, just recall this sequence. When Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980 on a call to bring the nation’s inflationary budget under control, the public debt was $1 trillion.

By the time Donald Trump was elected the first time it had erupted to $20 trillion, which has now become $36 trillion. And under current built-in spending and tax policies it will hit $60 trillion by the end of the current 10-year budget window.

Thereafter, however, soaring interest expense will ignite a veritable fiscal wildfire. On paper, the public debt would power upward unabated to $150 trillion by mid-century under the CBO’s latest projection. Yet even the latter is based on a Rosy Scenario budget model that assumes Congress never again adopts a single new tax cut or spending program and that the US economy steams along without a recession, inflation recurrence, interest flare-up, or other economic crisis during the entirety of the next quarter-century!

Of course, long before the public debt actually hits $150 trillion or 166% of GDP per the CBO’s current long-term projection, the whole system would implode. Every remnant of America as we now know it would go down the tubes.

So we need to be clear that the team of Musk and Ramaswamy is talking about savings of $2 trillion per year and relatively soon, too. We make this clarification because we see the usual clueless commentators on Bubblevision saying, “Oh, they must be talking about $2 trillion over 10 years or at least a multi-year period of time.”

But we don’t think they meant that at all because Elon’s statement on the matter at the Madison Square Garden rally was very clear, and, quite frankly, if realized over 10 years or even 5 years it would be hardly worth the bother. That’s because the nation’s fiscal doomsday machine will be accumulating interest expense so fast as to make $2 trillion of savings spread over a decade little more than a rounding error. To wit, Federal interest expense has already passed the $1 trillion per year mark, which figure will hit $1.7 trillion by 2034 according to CBO and would top $7.5 trillion per year at minimum by our calculations by mid-century.

That is, if something drastic is not done now—like a $2 trillion annual budget savings soon—America will be paying more interest on the public debt within 25 years than the entirety of the Federal budget—Social Security, defense, Medicare, education, highways, interest, and the Washington Monument—today.

So, yes, Musk surely did mean $2 trillion per year in this interchange:

“How much do you think we can rip out of this wasted, $6.5 trillion (annual) Harris-Biden budget?” Howard Lutnick, a Wall Street CEO and Trump’s transition team co-chair, asked Musk at the former president’s recent rally held at Madison Square Garden in New York City.
Without offering specifics, Musk said in response that he thinks “at least $2 trillion” in a brief moment that has since gained widespread attention online and drawn mixed reactions from budget world.

Obviously, the sprawling Federal government and its prodigious expanse of spending and debt literally defies easy comprehension and graspable solutions. After all, the current annual budget of $7 trillion amounts to Federal spending of nearly $20 billion per day and $830 million per hour. And when you talk about the 10-year budget outlook, comprehension literally fades away completely: The current CBO spending baseline for 2025-2034 amounts to $85 trillion or just shy of the annual GDP of the entire planet this year.

So based on experience we suggest building the $2 trillion case around a target year and several big buckets of savings by type. The latter can then be used to build a detailed but comprehensible plan for arraying and conveying the desperately needed house-cleaning of the Federal budget.

In that context, FY 2029 makes the most sense as a target year since it would represent the 4th and outgoing Trump budget; and also one which would give sufficient time for phasing in some of the sweeping cuts that will be needed, but not so far in the distant future as to be largely irrelevant to the here and now of fiscal governance during Donald Trump’s second term.

We’d also suggest three big buckets of savings, which we would short-hand as follows:

Slash the Fat…by eliminating unnecessary and wasteful agencies and bureaucrats wholesale.
Downsize the Muscle…by curtailing national security capacities and functions not needed for an America First policy.
Cut the Bone…by reducing low-priority entitlements and subsidies that the nation cannot afford, and which a reasonable view of societal equity does not require.

Needless to say, when it comes to the vast wasteland of the Federal budget there are innumerable ways to skin the cat. But based on our own experience of more than a half-century of familiarity with the Federal budget as both a participant and an informed observer, we judge the following mix to be the most plausible and balanced way to get to the $2 trillion of annual savings by FY 2029.

To be sure, even this relatively judicious mix is sure to ignite firestorms on the banks of the Potomac like never before, but it can be strongly justified and defended for the reasons we will lay out in several subsequent installments.

Slash the Fat: $300 billion or 15%.
Downsize the Muscle: $500 billion or 25%.
Cut the Bone: $1.2 trillion or 60%.

Suffice here to say that even the first bucket would leave them screaming to high heaven in the Swamplands of DC. But even that $300 billion savings could be accomplished only by eliminating entirely the estimated $50 billion annual cost of Biden’s misguided Green New Deal, including all EV credits and subsidies, and $150 billion per year of other forms of corporate welfare and subsidies embedded in the budget and tax code.

We will amplify the details of this $200 billion of inherent fat and waste in Part 2. But suffice it here to say that attacking the usual shock effect lists of outrageous studies, stupid foreign aid projects, or even payments to dead people, as is often used to illustrate wasteful spending, will get you barely a fractional decimal point of the savings target, as desirable as eliminating this nonsense might be in its own right.

For instance, the savings from eliminating “Dr. Fauci’s Monkey Business on NIH’s Monkey Island” from the list below would amount to just 0.002% of the $2 trillion target, while eliminating the “USAID Fund to Boost Egyptian Tourism” would save just o.0003% of the target.

Even some of the larger ideas of this sort, such as more timely elimination of dead people from the Social Security rolls, would not get you very far, either. That’s because 1.1 million Social Security recipients pass on their rewards each year, and departing beneficiaries would be receiving an average benefit currently of $1,907 per month. So one month of dead people on the rolls costs the not inconsiderable sum of $2.1 billion.

At the present time, however, that does not actually happen. The rolls are purged every month based on newly filed death certificates, and this encompasses the termination of payments to anyone who died during the month, including the last day. So the average duration on the rolls of Social Security decedents is 15 days, which computes to $1.050 billion of payments.

Thus, the average duration of dead people on the rolls might well be cut by two-thirds if the Musk and Ramaswamy team could come up with some more efficient software to monitor, report, recalculate last month’s benefits, and then terminate decedents. In turn, that means getting the dead people off Social Security 10 days faster would amount to a savings of $700 million per year or about 0.04% of the $2 trillion target. That is to say, there is undoubtedly room for efficiency improvements and elimination of outright waste and stupidity everywhere in the Federal budget, but it unfortunately adds up to rounding errors.

Stated differently, if it doesn’t “scream and bleed” politically it won’t likely make a dent in achieving the $2 trillion goal. There is just plain nothing antiseptic about slashing the Federal budget.

In this regard, it would take an average 47% cut in the current nondefense Federal headcounts of 1.343 million, including the elimination of a dozen or more agencies entirely, to achieve the balance of $100 billion of savings in the Slash the Fat category.

And that’s a comprehensive figure based on an average cost per Federal employee of $100,000 in pay per year plus $44,000 in average benefits and fringes—escalated to $160,000 per bureaucrat by FY 2029. In Part 2, we will lay out the most plausible and judicious route to the Slash the Fat category with respect to both $200 billion of corporate welfare and Green New Deal waste and $100 billion of excess nondefense payroll.

Then in Part 3, we will lay out how to cut $500 billion per year of unneeded muscle from the national security budget, followed by $1.2 trillion per year of bone from the entitlement and domestic welfare basket.

Times of Glorious Change!

Brownstone Institute — Tue, 26 Nov 2024 10:03:37 GMT

BY BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE

Has a presidential transition ever been so much fun? Doubtful. Plus for the first time in the history of the world, we have a minute-by-minute front-row seat to watch all the action. Everyone is involved, cheering this pick and booing that one.

It’s all important but don’t forget about the big picture: we do seem to have turned the corner on the darkest times. That’s not to say the hard times are over. Turning around the trends of many years is not an easy task, and no one person can do it, not even a huge team. The mess is on a level of complexity that defies human comprehension.

Plus, an economic crisis awaits. We need to be honest about the predicament we are in. It’s been nearly five years of utter insanity and the level of suffering is unspeakable. New presidents and appointments in powerful positions can help but they cannot be the whole solution.

The expectations for the next administration already far outstrip any realistic expectation, and that is a potential problem. There are already signs of the classic internal firing squad developing, with claims of betrayal everywhere. There are historical references here that conjure up good results and terrible ones.

So our fate is far from determined and our job is far from over. Brownstone Institute has always played the long game apart from political trends. We are to be the sanctuary of ideas and support for great minds who dare to depart from the consensus. We publish the best books and in-depth articles. We sponsor private retreats for scholars, Fellows, and others, in addition to supper clubs and other public events.

Your vision and faith have supported this work and now we see how it all plays out, slowly and then all at once. Again, all dramatic social and political change absolutely needs a philosophical infrastructure of interpretative support. We have surely learned that much, which is precisely why you can be fully confident that your donation to this work is a mighty investment in a bright future.

The West Hartford supper club is December 18, and features essayist and best-selling author Charles Eisenstein. The form to register is not yet live but put this on your calendar and check the site in a few days.

Here is some content since our last email.

Something Wicked Your Way Comes By Ann Bauer. What’s left is a pleasant and cohesive story that follows a direct and unsurprising plot, reminiscent of the 1971 film Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory but without the dryness or wacky turns. Instead, Wicked is pure kitsch and sparkle.

An Open Letter to Councilman Lincoln Restler By Josh Stylman. If you still stand behind these policies, I welcome the opportunity to engage in public dialogue about their impact. This could be a chance for both sides to be heard. Your willingness to participate would demonstrate confidence in your position.

What Kennedy Must Do to Defeat Regulatory Capture By Bretigne Shaffer. Kennedy has an unprecedented opportunity to strike at the root of what makes our healthcare system so dysfunctional: to dismantle the institutions that stifle the production of medicine, distort information about its safety, and suppress alternatives.

First Amendment Blues By Philip Davies. I live in the UK, the home of the Bill of Rights and the Magna Carta, the mother of parliamentary democracy. But those days seem long gone when police knock on your door to arrest you for an X post.

Europe Sleepwalks into Irrelevance as the U.S. Ascends By Christiaan W.J.M. Alting von Geusau. The EU and European nations should work on establishing a relationship with the new leadership in the White House and on Capitol Hill so as to be able to influence the outcome of the greatest geopolitical upheaval of our time.

Our Last Innocent Moment Is Our First Step Forward By Julie Ponesse. When the history of our time is written, this period will be a case study for students of global corruption, classical tragedies, and mass psychosis, and will be used as an example of what humans must never do again.

Six Simple Steps to Pharma Reform By Clayton J. Baker. While not easy, should the political will be mustered, the process of breaking the stranglehold Big Pharma has on us would be surprisingly simple. Six changes in Federal law – four repeals of existing law, and two new pieces of legislation – would go a long way toward reining in and even reforming Big Pharma.

Peanut and Puppycide By Robert Blumen. The puppycide movement made a good effort. The ACLU took it one step further, situating violence against our pets within the scope of the militarization of policing. While the ACLU was directionally correct, policing is downstream of something more fundamental.

How to Cut $2 Trillion of Fat from the Federal Budget By David Stockman. A goal of $2 trillion of budget savings is crucial to the future of Constitutional democracy and capitalist prosperity in America. The Federal budget threatens to become a self-fueling financial doomsday machine. So more power to Musk and Ramaswamy.

Gattaca’s Warning against Vaccine Passports By Bert Olivier. Unless their advice regarding the withdrawal of the vaccines is heeded, we could face the dystopian prospect of a world which – like the fictional one in Gattaca – is riven into two irreconcilable groups, the ‘vaccine valids’ and the ‘vaccine in-valids.’

A Diagram of Elite Wickedness By Daniel Klein. The good will be better able to fend off wickedness if they grow more competent in understanding how words (information, hate) are being weaponized by wicked elites. We grow our competency by applying sound moral philosophy to such matters.

Peanut and Puppycide

Brownstone Institute — Mon, 25 Nov 2024 10:26:47 GMT

BY ROBERT BLUMEN

In the waning moments of the 2024 election, Peanut, a squirrel, went viral. A wildlife rescue, Peanut had been unable to go back to being a wild animal after his rehabilitation. His owner, Mark Longo adopted him as a pet. His heart-warming interactions with his human family earned the adorable rodent celebrity status, including nearly one million followers on Instagram.

“Following anonymous complaints over rabies fears” Peanut was confiscated and put to death by New York state health officials. The heavy-handed actions by the State prompted a massive backlash from animal lovers. A Change.org petition calling for justice has over 73,000 signatures. A crowd-funding campaign for the benefit of a wildlife sanctuary in memory of the charismatic furball has raised over $224,000 at the time of this writing. The New York Post reported:

The squirrel’s death has sparked so much fury that it prompted a state lawmaker to propose legislation to improve animal rights statutes — calling the bill “Peanut’s Law: Humane Animal Protection Act.”…The outcry also triggered the outpouring of donations, as well as the hashtag #Justice4Peanut to spread on social media.

l’Affaire Peanut recalls the “puppycide” movement of the previous decade. Awareness of the epidemic of police officers shooting dogs rose, peaked in the mid-teens, and has since almost vanished. The movement was driven by concerns that aggressive law enforcement was taking out pets that were, for the most part harmless, as routine operational procedures, regardless of any actual danger to the officer.

Legal scholar Courtney G. Lee in a 2018 law review article titled More than Just Collateral Damage: Pet Shootings by Police wrote:

The Department of Justice estimates that American police officers shoot 10,000 pet dogs in the line of duty each year. It is impossible to ascertain a reliable number, however, because most law enforcement agencies do not maintain accurate records of animal killings. The tally may be substantially higher, and some suggest it could reach six figures.
Deferring to officers’ judgment when they reasonably fear for human safety is sound policy because they regularly must make split-second, life-or-death decisions in highly stressful situations; but many pet shootings occur when officers mistake the behavior of a friendly, curious dog for aggression. Further, some animals have been deliberately shot and killed under questionable circumstances, including through doors or while tied, running away, or hiding. Studies show that some officers shoot pets unnecessarily, recklessly, or in retaliation, and that subsequent civilian complaints are investigated inadequately. Moreover, not every animal that police officers shoot is a large dog that may be more likely to pose a genuine risk to human safety—or even a dog at all. Police claiming a threat to human safety have shot puppies, Chihuahuas, Miniature Dachshunds, and domestic cats, among other pets. In some tragic cases, bullets missed their nonhuman targets and injured or even killed human bystanders instead.

Lee’s paper cites data that “animals are involved in the majority of instances when officers discharge their firearms.” Think about that for a moment. If the data is correct, more pets are killed than the combined total of humans, inanimate objects shot at, and bullets that miss.

Lee adds that “police shootings of domesticated animals that allegedly pose a threat to safety implicate many different species, ranging from pigs, to goats, and even to cats.” In fairness to police, who must operate in dangerous situations, an aggressive dog could attack an officer. Drug dealers allegedly keep pit bulls for exactly this reason. And people from all walks of life are injured—even killed—by dogs. But what is the danger to officer safety presented by pigs? How many officers have been injured in the line of duty by a goat, an animal not known for aggression? (Some goats participate in yoga classes).

The puppycide movement at its peak consisted of a range of advocacy groups. The puppycide database, a project founded to create a public record of animal shootings, used public records, news stories, and interviews to compile evidence of nearly 3,000 incidents of police killings of pets. The Marshall Project, a non-profit devoted to impacting criminal justice reforms in the US through journalism, has a curated page of links about police shooting dogs. One representative recent piece was the Washington Post’s An officer was called to help a blind, deaf dog. He shot him instead.

The ACLU in 2015 published War Comes Home: The Excessive Militarization of American Police. The report was primarily concerned with the militarization of policing. The report criticized tactics such as sending SWAT teams, which are frequently dispatched for routine policing issues, and even in cases where evidence was weak that the recipient was either violent or had broken the law.

A typical story from the ACLU is:

Officers had no reason to believe that the man they suspected of selling marijuana out of his home was armed. Yet, they still classified their investigation as “high risk” to justify deploying a SWAT team. Instead of knocking and demanding to search the premises, the SWAT team burst into the man’s home, igniting a flashbang grenade, shattering a window, and breaking down the man’s front door.

The ACLU found that “it is not unusual for family pets to be shot unnecessarily.” The report highlights several such cases involving a dog, such as:

The year before [a reform was passed], the Prince George’s County Sheriff’s SWAT team had raided the home of Cheye Calvo, the mayor of a small Prince George’s County municipality. The county police department then held Calvo and his family at gunpoint for hours and killed his two dogs, on the basis of a misguided investigation in which Calvo and his wife were wrongly suspected of being involved in a marijuana transaction.

The libertarian Reason magazine (online) has published hundreds of articles tagged “puppycide.” One of many is headlined A Missouri Cop Shot a Family’s Dog and Threw Its Body in a Ditch. The story covers “a 9-year-old lab mix (who) wandered away from home during a storm. When a neighbor called the police to help find the dog’s family, cops shot the pup instead.” Not all of the tagged stories directly involved a dog being shot. Take, for example, Tina Hight, who herself was shot when Columbus County Arkansas law enforcement was aiming for her dog.

Outside of Reason (whose archived pieces go back prior to 2012 and continue up to the current year), the puppycide movement has largely vanished. The Marshall Project page has been updated as recently as May of 2024, but it contains hardly more than a dozen links since 2016. The PuppycideDB is no longer active. Their open-source database has not been updated in eight years. The now-defunct Ozymandias media launched a Kickstarter in 2016 to fund a documentary on this issue with the pitch “Every 98 minutes, a dog is shot by law enforcement. Help us tell their stories.” The Kickstarter appears to have failed and the film was never made. During the peak of this movement, at best only minor reforms were achieved.

What we find particularly painful about pet murders is that, whatever the crimes owners may be suspected of, the pets themselves are innocent. In fact, the abuse of animals is itself a crime in all fifty US states. What, then, is the explanation of this campaign of companion animals mass murder? In the Western political tradition, murdering harmless pets is not considered a legitimate function of government. To understand this ongoing problem, we must look at theories of state dysfunction.

First, we will examine Samuel Francis’ concept of anarcho-tyranny.

This condition…is essentially a kind of Hegelian synthesis of what appear to be dialectical opposites: the combination of oppressive government power against the innocent and the law-abiding and, simultaneously, a grotesque paralysis of the ability or the will to use that power to carry out basic public duties such as protection or public safety. And, it is characteristic of anarcho-tyranny that it not only fails to punish criminals and enforce legitimate order but also criminalizes the innocent.

And:

Yet at the same time, the state does not perform effectively or justly its basic duty of enforcing order and punishing criminals, and in this respect its failures do bring the country, or important parts of it, close to a state of anarchy. But that semblance of anarchy is coupled with many of the characteristics of tyranny, under which innocent and law-abiding citizens are punished by the state or suffer gross violations of their rights and liberty at the hands of the state. The result is what seems to be the first society in history in which elements of both anarchy and tyranny pertain at the same time and seem to be closely connected with each other and to constitute, more or less, opposite sides of the same coin.

Peanut’s owner Mark Longo says roughly the same thing:

We used resources from this state to kill a squirrel and raccoon and raid my house as if I was a drug dealer. We have resources to kill a raccoon and a squirrel, but we can’t fix the major bridges down the street? I am appalled.”

The danger posed by a pet squirrel, according to the authorities, was the spread of rabies. Were such heavy-handed measures needed to contain a possible outbreak? A doctor with expertise in infectious diseases says that rabies was unlikely and that there were other options than putting Peanut to death. It is likely that the most destructive alternative was chosen. In any case, rabies only became an issue because Peanut allegedly bit a conservation worker who only became involved because some busybody had called in a complaint: owner Longo was reported for harboring illegal wildlife. The caller might have been in a different US state than the animal, and if so, was not at any risk.

Readers of this site might recall another incident in recent history involving government overreach in an effort to control a virus. In the Covid panic, a massive armada of ineffective methods were deployed against a respiratory virus. The tsunami of nonsensical strategies included wearing masks—outdoors—that don’t filter viral aerosols, half-hearted lockdowns (excluding large retail outlets and marijuana dispensaries), school shutdowns, and a so-called vaccine that did not stop transmission or infection. The massive failure of these pointless precautions caused enormous damage to everyone in pursuit of earning a living, mental health, family life, career, art, athletics, education, and worship.

The public health authorities clearly know that these methods did not work. The elites, including the governors of the most locked-down states, ignored the measure with impunity and continued to live their lives normally. Deliberate cultivation of fear by behavioral scientists was used to promote compliance anyway. In an article about the German response:

At the time the lockdowns were implemented, [the main public health agency] leaders knew the seasonal peak in respiratory illness was on its way out. However, in their internal communications they stated: “You can see that the curve is slowly leveling off, but we should avoid drawing attention to this in our external communications, to encourage compliance with measures.” Likewise, they also believedCOVID-19 was less dangerous than the flu and that there was no justification to keep children out of schools.
This meant the lockdowns were utterly unnecessary (as COVID would disappear on its own).

If those in command knew that it was all fake, what, then, was their purpose? Francis identified punishment of the non-compliant as the real purpose of the tyranny component. His list of the targeted elements of society begins with “people who do not like to pay taxes, wear seat belts, or deliver their children to the mind-bending therapists who run the public schools.” The obvious additions are those who will not wear masks, stay at home, or accept untested vaccinations, and those with pet squirrels.

Francis’ theory only goes partway toward explaining the pet genocide as policy. Francis’ examples primarily demonstrate administrative excess. Shooting pets is closer to the terror of Stalin’s The Great Purge. In the purge’s one year, over 100,000 Russians were accused of political crimes and put to death. Wikipedia explains that later investigations showed that the condemned were innocent—of anything.

Randomness is a feature not a bug of state terror. Without the necessity of having broken a law in order to be guilty, anyone can become a target for any reason. The death of innocent people was intended to create fear—and compliance.

Randomness was also a key aspect of Covid propaganda. We were told constantly that we all must comply with the measures because we were all—equally—at risk. We were told that everyone must wear a mask. We were told that no one could be safe until everyone was fully injected. We were told that the unvaccinated could not work in the same workplace because they might infect the vaccinated (which makes no sense at all if the vaccine stopped infection).

The randomness narrative around Covid was imposed on a reality of highly specific non-random vulnerability. The existence of a steep age gradient was denied. The survival of those with adequate vitamin D levels was ignored. A commonsense proposal to focus protection on the old, sick, and obese while the rest of us would go about our lives was the subject of a harsh counter-propaganda effort.

The seven blind men have detected features of the problem without realizing that it is an elephant. The puppycide movement made a good effort to increase awareness of harm to dogs but was aimed primarily at the welfare of animals. The ACLU took it one step further, situating violence against our pets within the larger scope of the militarization of policing. While the ACLU was directionally correct, policing is still downstream of something more fundamental.

Nearly all pet owners consider pets to be family members. While the stated goal of pet execution is to avoid harm to the SWAT team members, discharging a firearm in the direction of a family pet is intended to terrorize the owner. The defenders of dogs did not realize that we are the target and the animals are our proxies.

As our governance systems have increasingly become divorced from public oversight, transparency, and democratic controls, they are losing. Not only have the organized political structure forms (elected and administrative) been corrupted. Former parts of civil society such as the media and health have become governmentalities. These institutions have all burned their trust capital by constantly lying. They are now facing trust bankruptcy and the associated restructuring. Cooperation which was formerly voluntary out of pro-social inclinations toward harmony and being a good neighbor is no longer earned. Compliance, which must be forced, replaces cooperation. When compliance is resisted, the resistance becomes the target.