Will people see the connections between what started three years ago and the chaos in world markets today? We can hope so. There are real cause-and-effect trajectories here involving public health, human rights, and economics, The planners unleashed hell.
There is also a moral/spiritual dimension in operation here. Most of the problems of the last three years were based on, and were certainly made worse by, fear. Fear of a virus. Fear of the government response. Fear of media shaming, the boss, exclusion by colleagues, disapproval by family, and cancellation by social media.
Now that the fear is abating, we are getting more truth and with that comes an intensification of the resistance. It’s the only way the best ideals win.
Courage of conviction is what will get us through this crisis and point the way to recovery. Truth is the light we see at the end of the tunnel. The key to navigating our way there is to keep our eyes on that truth and our feet moving in that direction. That metaphor is easy to imagine but much more difficult to live out in practice.
The coming months and years will provide ample opportunity for all of us – institutions, communities, and individuals – to become distracted by various fears. There will be new ones. We don’t want to be on the wrong team. We don’t need more insecurity. We have had enough disruption for a lifetime. We need to avoid another crisis. It will always be easier to make the seemingly strategic decision to stay silent and be buffeted by prevailing winds.
Brownstone Institute was founded with a different purpose. It was founded to put truth in public life first, from the conviction that this can be the only guide out of the morass in which the country and world has found itself.
It is time for all of us to renew that commitment. We ask you to join us. Brownstone commits to truth as a first principle. In that pursuit, no political, industrial, or ideological interest can or should distract us from the mission to say what we believe to be true, even when that comes at a cost. With that commitment also comes humility, a willingness to change in light of evidence, and a deference to logic, reason, and experience.
Without that pledge, we become just another institution of the sort that failed so badly over three years. We’ve all experienced enough pain and we do not welcome a worsening of the storm. We’ve been tested and tested again, all of us. But as things are stacking up, the challenges will only intensify.
Join us please in pledging to promote honor, courage, and truth as first principles in public life, regardless of every wind that seeks to derail us from the one goal of restoring the rights and liberties of an emancipated people. We need your support.
Reminder that Dr. Harvey Risch will join us at our Supper Club, March 22, 2023, for which you can register here.
Here is some content since our last email:
Pandemics are Not the Real Health Threat BY DAVID BELL. Saving society from eating itself with fear and stupidity will rely on us educating ourselves. Society’s ‘experts’ are doing very well from pandemics, and have no incentive to provide such education. This will require each of us to find time. Time for discussion, time for self-reflection, and time for thought on what life actually is. We need to calmly sum up what is happening around us, and take the risk of exploring what it is that we really value. Then we can stop others from abusing our ignorance.
Bonfire of the Covid Vanities BY GABRIELLE BAUER. Freedom to take a walk on the beach? Stop killing the vulnerable! Freedom to earn a living? The economy will recover! The demotion of freedom—that noble ideal of liberal democracy—to a caricature has been painful to observe. Without freedom, we have nothing resembling a life. Pandemic or not, freedom needs a place at the discussion table.
The Pandemic of Journalistic Malfeasance BY RAMESH THAKUR. Thanks to the Lockdown Files, we now have “definitive” proof that much of Covid policy was cruel and inhumane, made on the hoof, driven by dogma and self-interest, without the requisite evidence and sometimes even against scientific advice, to foment fear, avoid picking arguments with political opponents, promote personal and party agendas, etc. It failed to stop the spread of Covid but has inflicted substantial and lasting damage.
Governor Hochul Files Appeal in Quarantine Camp Lawsuit BY BOBBIE ANNE FLOWER COX. The regulation allowed them to use law enforcement to enforce their orders of isolation or quarantine, which means you could have received a knock at the door from your local police or sheriff telling you that you had to go with them… by order of the Health Department.
Was Trump Tricked Into Lockdowns or Not? BY JEFFREY A. TUCKER. How do we know for sure that Trump was not selling his advisors on lockdowns rather than that reverse? We do not actually know that. The most plausible scenario is that everyone in that hot house of Oval Office power pretension was equally enthusiastic for the most catastrophic public-health decision in modern history.
The Administrative State Strikes Again: Monetary Edition BY DAVID STOCKMAN. They have done it again, and in a way that makes a flaming mockery of both honest market economics and the so-called rule of law. In effect, the triumvirate of fools at the Fed, Treasury, and FDIC have essentially guaranteed $9 trillion of uninsured bank deposits with no legislative mandate and no capital to make these sweeping promises good.
Why Are the Chickens So Sick? BY JOEL SALATIN. The parallels between HPAI expert orthodoxy and covid orthodoxy are too numerous to mention. Fear porn is rampant in our culture. The HPAI worry feeds food worry, which makes people clamor for government security. People will accept just about anything if they’re afraid. Does anyone really think human cleverness is going to beat migratory ducks? Really? Think it through and then embrace a more natural remedy: well-managed decentralized pastured poultry with appropriate flock sizes.
The Corruption of Georgetown Law BY WILLIAM SPRUANCE. Most of all, this system benefits the people in charge, who maintain the status quo through the politics of personal destruction. The school serves as an incubator for the unimpressive rulers of tomorrow. Some classmates will go on to serve the party line in Congress, others as bureaucrats, and many more as faceless defenders of Wall Street. No matter where they land, they’ll internalize the dogma of Georgetown Law.
Do You Matter? BY JULIE PONESSE . Do facts matter? Of course they do. But facts, alone, will not answer the questions we really care about. The real ammunition of the COVID war is not information. It’s not a battle over what is true, what counts as misinformation, what it means to #followthescience. It’s a battle over what our lives mean and, ultimately, whether we matter.
Cochrane Fact-Checked with Absurd Results BY THORSTEINN SIGLAUGSSON. Considering how this seriously flawed article is now apparently used to suppress the dissemination of an important scientific paper, to press the Cochrane editor-in-chief into making false claims about the objective of the paper and downplay its results, and to censor a review of the findings by an important mainstream newspaper, there is clearly an urgent need to act strongly against the so called “fact-checking” industry.
Brainwashing Versus Critical Thinking in Japan BY BRUCE W. DAVIDSON. The overwhelming majority in all age groups in Japan got caught up in the panic generated by government officials, mainstream news media, and the medical community. For three years now masks have been worn continuously everywhere, including mountain trails and public parks. The widespread use of brainwashing here has been especially disheartening to me, since I have spent much of my time and effort over the last thirty years teaching, researching, and writing about critical thinking education in Japan.
Where Is Occupy Silicon Valley? BY CRAIG PIRRONG. Silvergate’s failure was not a scandal. SVB’s failure per se was not a scandal (except to the extent that our vaunted banking regulators failed to prevent the most prosaic type of failure). Again–the scandal is the politically tainted response that will have baleful consequences in the future, as the response virtually guarantees that there will be more SVBs in the future.
Science Is Not to Be Trusted BY ALEX WASHBURNE. Science is not a belief system, so it’s not something to be trusted. Science is a social process which anyone can join, it is a conversation with evidence to be examined, discussed, questioned, and tested. Science is not limited to Ivory Towers and people with PhDs. Anyone, no matter how anonymous or weird they are (in our idiosyncratic views of “weird”), can examine a paper, question some results, discuss them, and change our perspectives. Or at least, that’s how it should be.
How to Cut Through the New Gordian Knots BY PAUL FRIJTERS, GIGI FOSTER, MICHAEL BAKER. We can forget about seemingly simple fixes, like giving politicians the right to fire civil servants on the spot. Besides, giving clueless and corrupted politicians yet more power is not going to make matters better. Real reform will have to be dramatic, and it will come about only in dramatic circumstances.
The Covid Response Museum By Bhaskaran Raman. The target inauguration date for the museum is March 25, 2023, which is the third anniversary of mass incarceration of one-sixth of humanity, i.e. India’s first lockdown. To start, the museum will be online. We also encourage people to setup physical museums using the material from this website, under creative commons license: free to share with attribution.
Bureaucratic Doublespeak Gets People Killed By Christine Black. Orwell argues that these language patterns destroy truth and beauty and clarity; they cloud thinking and collapse culture with their obfuscations. When reading or listening to such speech, we find ourselves mired in the muck of sloppy language that confuses, disorients, and depresses, and in the extreme, such language gets people killed, because if we don’t question it, allow it to frustrate and anger us, it lulls and numbs our minds.