Brownstone Institute
Read Between the Lies: A Pattern Recognition Guide
From the Brownstone Institute
When Avril Haines, Director of National Intelligence, announced during Event 201’s pandemic drill in 2019 that they would “flood the zone with trusted sources,” few understood this preview of coordinated narrative control. Within months, we watched it unfold in real time—unified messaging across all platforms, suppression of dissent, and coordinated narrative control that fooled much of the world.
But not everyone stayed fooled forever. Some saw through it immediately, questioning every aspect from day one. Others thought it was just incompetent government trying to protect us. Many initially accepted the precautionary principle—better safe than sorry. But as each policy failure pointed in the same direction—toward more control and less human agency—the pattern became impossible to ignore. Anyone not completely subsumed by the system eventually had to confront its true purpose: not protecting health or safety, but expanding control.
Once you recognize this pattern of deception, two questions should immediately arise whenever major stories dominate headlines: “What are they lying about?” and “What are they distracting us from?” The pattern of coordinated deception becomes unmistakable. Consider how media outlets spent three years pushing Russiagate conspiracies, driving unprecedented social division while laying the groundwork for what would become the greatest psychological operation in history. Today, while the media floods us with Ukraine coverage, BlackRock positions itself to profit from both the destruction and reconstruction. The pattern becomes unmistakable once you see it—manufactured crises driving pre-planned “solutions” that always expand institutional control.
Mainstream media operates on twin deceptions: misdirection and manipulation. The same anchors who sold us WMDs in Iraq, promoted “Russia collusion,” and insisted Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian disinformation” still occupy prime time slots. Just as we see with RFK, Jr.’s HHS nomination, the pattern is consistent: coordinated attacks replace substantive debate, identical talking points appear across networks, and legitimate questions are dismissed through character assassination rather than evidence. Being consistently wrong isn’t a bug—it’s a feature. Their role isn’t to inform but to manufacture consent.
The template is consistent: Saturate media with emotional spectacles while advancing institutional agendas with minimal scrutiny. Like learning to spot a fake smile or hearing a false note in music, you develop an instinct for the timing:
Money and Power:
- While the media fixated on January 6th, BlackRock and Vanguard quietly tightened their grip on the residential real estate market
- While coverage obsessed over Trump’s Twitter ban, Congress passed the largest upward transfer of wealth under cover of “Covid relief“
- While breathless reporting tracked every move of the Johnny Depp trial, the Fed printed more money than in the entire previous century
- While media flooded us with Ukraine coverage, unprecedented restrictions on energy production reshaped the global economy
- While reporters breathlessly tracked Trump indictments, central banks accelerated plans for programmable digital currency
Medical Control:
- While media focused on celebrity vaccine promotion, unprecedented numbers of young athletes collapsed on field
- While networks ran wall-to-wall coverage of school shootings, documents revealed Pfizer knew about hundreds of side effects
- While coverage fixated on anti-vax “misinformation,” insurance data showed alarming excess death rates
Digital Control:
- While media obsessed over Twitter content moderation, digital ID infrastructure was quietly built worldwide
- While coverage focused on TikTok privacy concerns, central banks accelerated digital currency development
- While endless AI chatbot debates dominated headlines, biometric surveillance systems expanded globally
As these deceptions become more obvious, different forms of resistance emerge. The truth-seeking takes different forms. Some become deep experts in specific deceptions—documenting early treatment successes with repurposed drugs, uncovering hospital protocol failures, or exploring the impact of vaccine injuries. Others develop a broader lens for seeing how narratives themselves are engineered.
Walter Kirn’s brilliant pattern recognition cuts to the heart of our manufactured reality. His tweets dissecting the United CEO murder coverage expose how even violent crimes are now packaged as entertainment spectacles, complete with character arcs and narrative twists. Kirn’s insight highlights a critical dimension of media control: by turning every crisis into an entertainment narrative, they divert attention from deeper questions. Instead of asking why institutional safeguards fail or who benefits, audiences become captivated by carefully scripted outrage. This deliberate distraction ensures that institutional agendas move forward without scrutiny.
His insight reveals how entertainment packaging serves the broader control system. While each investigation requires its own expertise, this pattern of narrative manipulation connects to a larger grid of deception. As I’ve explored in “The Information Factory” and “Engineering Reality,” everything from education to medicine to currency itself has been captured by systems designed to shape not just our choices, but our very perception of reality.
Most revealing is what they don’t cover. Notice how quickly stories disappear when they threaten institutional interests. Remember the Epstein client list? The Maui land grab? The mounting vaccine injuries? The silence speaks volumes.
Consider the recent whistleblower testimonies revealing suppressed safety concerns at Boeing, a company long entangled with regulatory agencies and government contracts. Two whistleblowers—both former employees who raised alarms about safety issues—died under suspicious circumstances. Coverage of their deaths disappeared almost overnight, despite the profound implications for public safety and corporate accountability. This pattern repeats in countless cases where accountability would disrupt entrenched power structures, leaving crucial questions unanswered and narratives tightly controlled.
These decisions aren’t accidental—they result from media ownership, advertiser influence, and government pressure, ensuring the narrative remains tightly controlled.
But perhaps most striking isn’t the media’s deception itself, but how thoroughly it shapes its consumers’ reality. Watch how confidently they repeat phrases clearly engineered in think tanks. Listen as they parrot talking points with religious conviction: “January 6th was worse than 9/11,” “Trust The Science™,” “Democracy is on the ballot” and, perhaps the most consequential lie in modern history, “Safe and Effective.”
The professional-managerial class proves especially susceptible to this programming. Their expertise becomes a prison of status—the more they’ve invested in institutional approval, the more fervently they defend institutional narratives. Watch how quickly a doctor who questions vaccine safety loses his license, how swiftly a professor questioning gender ideology faces review, how rapidly a journalist stepping out of line gets blacklisted.
The system ensures compliance through economic capture: your mortgage becomes your leash, your professional status your prison guard. The same lawyers who prides themselves on critical thinking will aggressively shut down any questioning of official narratives. The professor who teaches “questioning power structures” becomes apoplectic when students question pharmaceutical companies.
The circular validation makes the programming nearly impenetrable:
- Media cites “experts”
- Experts cite peer-reviewed studies
- Studies are funded by industry
- Industry shapes media coverage
- “Fact-checkers” cite media consensus
- Academia enforces approved conclusions
This self-reinforcing system forms a perfect closed loop:
Each component validates the others while excluding outside information. Try finding the entry point for actual truth in this closed system. The professional class’s pride in their critical thinking becomes darkly ironic—they’ve simply outsourced their opinions to “authoritative sources.”
Most disturbing is how willingly they’ve surrendered their sovereignty. Watch them defer:
- “I follow the science” (translation: I wait for approved conclusions)
- “According to experts” (translation: I don’t think for myself)
- “Fact-checkers say” (translation: I let others determine truth)
- “The consensus is” (translation: I align with power)
Their empathy becomes a weapon used against them. Question lockdowns? You’re killing grandma. Doubt transition surgery for minors? You’re causing suicides. Resist equity initiatives? You’re perpetuating oppression. The programming works by making resistance feel like cruelty.
Something remarkable is happening beneath the surface noise: a genuine awakening that defies traditional political boundaries. You see it in the subtle exchanges between colleagues when official narratives strain credibility. In the growing silence at dinner parties as propaganda talking points fall flat. In the knowing looks between strangers when public health theatre reaches new heights of absurdity.
This isn’t a movement in the traditional sense—it can’t be, since traditional movement structures are vulnerable to infiltration, subversion, and capture. Instead, it’s more like a spontaneous emergence of pattern recognition. A distributed awakening without central leadership or formal organization. Those who see through the patterns recognize the mass formation for what it is, while its subjects project their own programming onto others, dismissing pattern recognition as “conspiracy theories,” “anti-science,” or other reflexive labels designed to prevent genuine examination.
The hardest truth isn’t recognizing the programming—it’s confronting what it means for human consciousness and society itself. We’re watching real-time evidence that most human minds can be captured and redirected through sophisticated psychological operations. Their thoughts aren’t their own, yet they’d die defending what they’ve been programmed to believe.
This isn’t just media criticism anymore—it’s an existential question about human consciousness and free will. What does it mean when a species’ capacity for independent thought can be so thoroughly hijacked? When natural empathy and moral instincts become weapons of control? When education and expertise actually decrease resistance to programming?
The programming works because it hijacks core human drives:
- The need for social acceptance (e.g., masking as a visible symbol of conformity)
- The desire to be seen as good/moral (e.g., adopting performative stances on social issues without deeper understanding)
- The instinct to trust authority (e.g., faith in public health officials despite repeated policy reversals)
- The fear of ostracism (e.g., avoiding dissent to maintain social harmony)
- The comfort of conformity (e.g., parroting narratives to avoid cognitive dissonance)
- The addiction to status (e.g., signaling compliance to maintain professional or social standing)
Each natural human trait becomes a vulnerability to be exploited. The most educated become the most programmable because their status addiction runs deepest. Their “critical thinking” becomes a script running on corrupted hardware.
This is the core challenge of our time: Can human consciousness evolve faster than the systems designed to hijack it? Can pattern recognition and awareness spread faster than manufactured consensus? Can enough people learn to read between the lies before the programming becomes complete?
The stakes could not be higher. This isn’t just about politics or media literacy—it’s about the future of human consciousness itself. Whether our species maintains the capacity for independent thought may depend on those who can still access it helping others break free from the spell.
The matrix of control deepens daily, but so does the awakening. The question is: Which spreads faster—the programming or the awareness of it? Our future as a species may depend on the answer.
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
A walk through a dozen convenience stores in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, says a lot about how US nicotine policy actually works. Only about one in eight nicotine-pouch products for sale is legal. The rest are unauthorized—but they’re not all the same. Some are brightly branded, with uncertain ingredients, not approved by any Western regulator, and clearly aimed at impulse buyers. Others—like Sweden’s NOAT—are the opposite: muted, well-made, adult-oriented, and already approved for sale in Europe.
Yet in the United States, NOAT has been told to stop selling. In September 2025, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued the company a warning letter for offering nicotine pouches without marketing authorization. That might make sense if the products were dangerous, but they appear to be among the safest on the market: mild flavors, low nicotine levels, and recyclable paper packaging. In Europe, regulators consider them acceptable. In America, they’re banned. The decision looks, at best, strange—and possibly arbitrary.
What the Market Shows
My October 2025 audit was straightforward. I visited twelve stores and recorded every distinct pouch product visible for sale at the counter. If the item matched one of the twenty ZYN products that the FDA authorized in January, it was counted as legal. Everything else was counted as illegal.
Two of the stores told me they had recently received FDA letters and had already removed most illegal stock. The other ten stores were still dominated by unauthorized products—more than 93 percent of what was on display. Across all twelve locations, about 12 percent of products were legal ZYN, and about 88 percent were not.
The illegal share wasn’t uniform. Many of the unauthorized products were clearly high-nicotine imports with flashy names like Loop, Velo, and Zimo. These products may be fine, but some are probably high in contaminants, and a few often with very high nicotine levels. Others were subdued, plainly meant for adult users. NOAT was a good example of that second group: simple packaging, oat-based filler, restrained flavoring, and branding that makes no effort to look “cool.” It’s the kind of product any regulator serious about harm reduction would welcome.
Enforcement Works
To the FDA’s credit, enforcement does make a difference. The two stores that received official letters quickly pulled their illegal stock. That mirrors the agency’s broader efforts this year: new import alerts to detain unauthorized tobacco products at the border (see also Import Alert 98-06), and hundreds of warning letters to retailers, importers, and distributors.
But effective enforcement can’t solve a supply problem. The list of legal nicotine-pouch products is still extremely short—only a narrow range of ZYN items. Adults who want more variety, or stores that want to meet that demand, inevitably turn to gray-market suppliers. The more limited the legal catalog, the more the illegal market thrives.
Why the NOAT Decision Appears Bizarre
The FDA’s own actions make the situation hard to explain. In January 2025, it authorized twenty ZYN products after finding that they contained far fewer harmful chemicals than cigarettes and could help adult smokers switch. That was progress. But nine months later, the FDA has approved nothing else—while sending a warning letter to NOAT, arguably the least youth-oriented pouch line in the world.
The outcome is bad for legal sellers and public health. ZYN is legal; a handful of clearly risky, high-nicotine imports continue to circulate; and a mild, adult-market brand that meets European safety and labeling rules is banned. Officially, NOAT’s problem is procedural—it lacks a marketing order. But in practical terms, the FDA is punishing the very design choices it claims to value: simplicity, low appeal to minors, and clean ingredients.
This approach also ignores the differences in actual risk. Studies consistently show that nicotine pouches have far fewer toxins than cigarettes and far less variability than many vapes. The biggest pouch concerns are uneven nicotine levels and occasional traces of tobacco-specific nitrosamines, depending on manufacturing quality. The serious contamination issues—heavy metals and inconsistent dosage—belong mostly to disposable vapes, particularly the flood of unregulated imports from China. Treating all “unauthorized” products as equally bad blurs those distinctions and undermines proportional enforcement.
A Better Balance: Enforce Upstream, Widen the Legal Path
My small Montgomery County survey suggests a simple formula for improvement.
First, keep enforcement targeted and focused on suppliers, not just clerks. Warning letters clearly change behavior at the store level, but the biggest impact will come from auditing distributors and importers, and stopping bad shipments before they reach retail shelves.
Second, make compliance easy. A single-page list of authorized nicotine-pouch products—currently the twenty approved ZYN items—should be posted in every store and attached to distributor invoices. Point-of-sale systems can block barcodes for anything not on the list, and retailers could affirm, once a year, that they stock only approved items.
Third, widen the legal lane. The FDA launched a pilot program in September 2025 to speed review of new pouch applications. That program should spell out exactly what evidence is needed—chemical data, toxicology, nicotine release rates, and behavioral studies—and make timely decisions. If products like NOAT meet those standards, they should be authorized quickly. Legal competition among adult-oriented brands will crowd out the sketchy imports far faster than enforcement alone.
The Bottom Line
Enforcement matters, and the data show it works—where it happens. But the legal market is too narrow to protect consumers or encourage innovation. The current regime leaves a few ZYN products as lonely legal islands in a sea of gray-market pouches that range from sensible to reckless.
The FDA’s treatment of NOAT stands out as a case study in inconsistency: a quiet, adult-focused brand approved in Europe yet effectively banned in the US, while flashier and riskier options continue to slip through. That’s not a public-health victory; it’s a missed opportunity.
If the goal is to help adult smokers move to lower-risk products while keeping youth use low, the path forward is clear: enforce smartly, make compliance easy, and give good products a fair shot. Right now, we’re doing the first part well—but failing at the second and third. It’s time to fix that.
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
Cigarettes kill nearly half a million Americans each year. Everyone knows it, including the Food and Drug Administration. Yet while the most lethal nicotine product remains on sale in every gas station, the FDA continues to block or delay far safer alternatives.
Nicotine pouches—small, smokeless packets tucked under the lip—deliver nicotine without burning tobacco. They eliminate the tar, carbon monoxide, and carcinogens that make cigarettes so deadly. The logic of harm reduction couldn’t be clearer: if smokers can get nicotine without smoke, millions of lives could be saved.
Sweden has already proven the point. Through widespread use of snus and nicotine pouches, the country has cut daily smoking to about 5 percent, the lowest rate in Europe. Lung-cancer deaths are less than half the continental average. This “Swedish Experience” shows that when adults are given safer options, they switch voluntarily—no prohibition required.
In the United States, however, the FDA’s tobacco division has turned this logic on its head. Since Congress gave it sweeping authority in 2009, the agency has demanded that every new product undergo a Premarket Tobacco Product Application, or PMTA, proving it is “appropriate for the protection of public health.” That sounds reasonable until you see how the process works.
Manufacturers must spend millions on speculative modeling about how their products might affect every segment of society—smokers, nonsmokers, youth, and future generations—before they can even reach the market. Unsurprisingly, almost all PMTAs have been denied or shelved. Reduced-risk products sit in limbo while Marlboros and Newports remain untouched.
Only this January did the agency relent slightly, authorizing 20 ZYN nicotine-pouch products made by Swedish Match, now owned by Philip Morris. The FDA admitted the obvious: “The data show that these specific products are appropriate for the protection of public health.” The toxic-chemical levels were far lower than in cigarettes, and adult smokers were more likely to switch than teens were to start.
The decision should have been a turning point. Instead, it exposed the double standard. Other pouch makers—especially smaller firms from Sweden and the US, such as NOAT—remain locked out of the legal market even when their products meet the same technical standards.
The FDA’s inaction has created a black market dominated by unregulated imports, many from China. According to my own research, roughly 85 percent of pouches now sold in convenience stores are technically illegal.
The agency claims that this heavy-handed approach protects kids. But youth pouch use in the US remains very low—about 1.5 percent of high-school students according to the latest National Youth Tobacco Survey—while nearly 30 million American adults still smoke. Denying safer products to millions of addicted adults because a tiny fraction of teens might experiment is the opposite of public-health logic.
There’s a better path. The FDA should base its decisions on science, not fear. If a product dramatically reduces exposure to harmful chemicals, meets strict packaging and marketing standards, and enforces Tobacco 21 age verification, it should be allowed on the market. Population-level effects can be monitored afterward through real-world data on switching and youth use. That’s how drug and vaccine regulation already works.
Sweden’s evidence shows the results of a pragmatic approach: a near-smoke-free society achieved through consumer choice, not coercion. The FDA’s own approval of ZYN proves that such products can meet its legal standard for protecting public health. The next step is consistency—apply the same rules to everyone.
Combustion, not nicotine, is the killer. Until the FDA acts on that simple truth, it will keep protecting the cigarette industry it was supposed to regulate.
Author
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