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Brownstone Institute

The Cure Was Vastly Worse than the Disease

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Fully 27 months into one of history’s most horrific of man-made global fiascos, after basically going about life as normal by climbing 14ers in Colorado, working a frontline public librarian job and traveling throughout the country, it happened.

My family and I finally got Covid. I am 52 and well within the range of someone who might expect, according to the media, a desperate battle with an unending cough, horrific and mind-numbing weeks of bed-ridden hell and possibly death on a respirator.

Covid was, as expected, a non-event.

If there is anything I would equate it to personally it is just a weird and mildly unpleasant experience where I lost my taste and smell and felt a fatigue not unlike being vaguely poisoned. If I were to characterize the severity of my particular case it would rank far below any flu I’ve had and possibly in the middle tier of colds, even though it didn’t actually even really FEEL like the sniffles.

My children, girls aged 16 and 12, both had slightly more intense symptoms, not unlike a bad cold virus. My wife and I refused to vaccinate them. They are now fine and don’t even have any residual symptoms after 3 days of taking it easy.

Covid exists. I have never doubted this. What does it feel like? I now can say that I’m even more firmly in the Martin Kulldorff “focused protection” camp having lived through it. If it feels like anything at all it is despair: the continued psychological despair that comes with knowing that your government hit the panic button and ever since has lied to you at every turn, caused massive chaos and destruction amongst your community and family at large, turned your friends and relatives against one another, made your workplace into a Maiost, health authoritarian hellscape, caused your best friend to lose his job, but perhaps worst of all put our youngest citizens out to pasture and destroyed many young prospects.

A destruction so thorough and vast that at a friend’s son’s recent high school graduation, only two of eight of his son’s friends even matriculated.

My 16-year old daughter suffers chronic depression after losing all her activities, some of her closest family and most of her friends in 2020, some of them lost purely due to disagreements about Covid protocols. Perhaps even more criminal and insidious is exposing our children to endless rounds of a needless and toxic “vaccine” that offers little if any protection for them.

Was my mild and unnatural feeling illness ameliorated by the fact that I received two rounds of the Pfizer vaccine in March and April of 2021? Perhaps? But probably not. I would expect any vaccine prophylactic would have worn off long ago. Indeed, let’s go down that path a little further.

The most inexplicable element to this catastrophic global panic is that, anecdotally, I found Covid really, really weird. Why did I lose my sense of smell so profoundly when this has never happened in a cold or flu before? It is gone, seemingly for good. What possible “gain-of-function” experiment caused this symptom?

“Experts” will claim that I was lucky just to lose this. But I wasn’t so lucky when I took my first round of the vaccine and suffered from an endlessly racing heart for two weeks straight–a symptom from which I’m still not sure I’ve completely recovered.

Finally, there is the brutal stigma associated with the illness itself. What does one really even say after coming down with this bizarre and altogether benign ailment? To all the radically woke people at my workplace, some of whom won’t even talk to me anymore because I refuse to wear a mask in a mask-optional environment: saying that it was basically a strange joke of a disease will only raise their ire.

Yet, putting any emphasis on the disease itself goes against two years of my own belief that it was anything but most likely a lab-induced virus that just severely affects the morbidly sick and aged and the very, very unlucky.

Giving Covid any of the sorts of terrifying reality that the mainstream corporate media and our technocratic elites have given it would be participating in the lie. I will never give power to that lie. Indeed, I will continue to expose the lie.

If we don’t keep speaking out about the horrors that the “public health” mafia, liberal elite, and mainstream scientific narrative has wrought upon us, we will continue down a path toward tyranny of a tiny coterie of “experts” who have perhaps intentionally led us into a miasma of destroyed human lives and societies.

Families like mine can only begin to pick up the pieces. There seems to be no real long-term electoral solution to this, and that may be correct, but I do know that those who are on the right side of history also seem to be in a position to make some kind of major difference in the future.

Reflect on that and let your health and heart lead the way, whatever your political persuasion.

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  • Seth Smith is an avid outdoorsman and public librarian based in Missouri.

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Brownstone Institute

Free Speech on Trial

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From the Brownstone Institute

BY Jeffrey A. TuckerJEFFREY A. TUCKER

Free speech is everything. If we don’t have that, we have nothing and freedom is toast. All other problems pale in comparison. There are plenty of them, from healthcare to immigration but if we don’t have free speech, we cannot get the truth out about any of them. The censorship industrial complex is wholly dedicated to making sure that we have no debates at all and that dissident voices are not even heard.

In a lifetime of observing policy controversies and court cases, we’ve never witnessed anything as crucial to the future of the idea of freedom itself compared with what will transpire on March 18, 2024. On that day, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in Murthy v. Missouri concerning whether the government can force or nudge private companies to censor users on behalf of regime priorities.

The evidence that they have been doing so is overwhelming. That’s why the 5th Circuit issued an emergency injunction to stop the practice on grounds that it is inconsistent with the First Amendment of the US Constitution. The censorship industrial complex is working right now and hourly to delete free speech in America. That injunction was stayed pending a review by the highest court.

The case itself hasn’t even gone to court. This decision is only about the injunction itself, which was issued based on the alarming results of discovery alone. Essentially, the lower court is screaming “This must stop.” The Supreme Court is trying to assess whether the violations of liberty are extreme enough to justify a pre-trial intervention now.

A positive ruling for the plaintiffs doesn’t solve every problem but at least it will mean that freedom still stands a chance in this country. A ruling for the defense, which is essentially the government itself, will give license to every federal agency – including those that operate in secret like the FBI and CIA – to threaten every social media and media company in this country to delete any and all content that runs contrary to the approved narrative.

There will be celebration in Washington if this happens. On the other hand, there will be tears if the court decides for the defense. It could be that the court will take an in-between position, refusing to let the injunction go ahead and promising some possible decision at a later date pending trial. That would be a disaster because it could mean three or more years of full censorship pending an appeal of whatever the outcome of the trial is.

Free speech is everything. If we don’t have that, we have nothing and freedom is toast. All other problems pale in comparison. There are plenty of them, from healthcare to immigration but if we don’t have free speech, we cannot get the truth out about any of them. The censorship industrial complex is wholly dedicated to making sure that we have no debates at all and that dissident voices are not even heard.

As it is, Google, Microsoft, and Facebook – and many more besides – already heavily restrict speech. They work in cooperation with government and those tasked by government to do elite bidding. We know this for a fact.

When Elon Musk took over Twitter, he discovered a vast censorship machine operating on behalf of the FBI and other agencies. Millions of posts were being taken down along with users. He has done his best to rip out the guts of this borg. Doing so entirely changed the character of the site. It became useful again.

Not even the scale of the problem is widely understood. Usually people say that free speech is necessary to protect minority opinions. In this case, the numbers don’t matter to the censors. You could have 90% of users trying to advance an idea and still have it censored. This is what the old Twitter did. It was daily and hourly attacking the company’s user base. This was their job, no matter how much it contradicts the whole point of social media.

Brownstone is predictably throttled by all these companies but it is not just about us. It is about everyone who disagrees with the Davos “Great Reset” agenda. This could pertain to EVs, gender transitions, lockdowns, immigration, or anything else. Even now, the Google Artificial Intelligence engine extols the glories of lockdowns, masking, and mass injections while completely ignoring contrary science. This is how they want things to be. Google’s search engine is no better. It might as well be a federal agency.

The Justices hearing the case will be in an awkward position. My guess is that none of them even know that this was going on to the extent it is. They will likely be shocked when they look at the evidence providing that there is a trillion-dollar industry in full operation that has massively distorted the public mind. Every federal agency is involved, deeply embedded in the operations of all media companies and digital technology, which in turn requires universal surveillance and persecution of contrary voices.

Until just a few years ago, this entire industry – which involves federal agencies, universities, nonprofits, shadow companies, bogus fact-checks, and every manner of spook-operated front companies – was not known to exist. Now that we know, we are shocked by the extent of it. It has invaded the whole of our lives to the point that we cannot tell the real news from that which is fed to us by intelligence agencies. Even worse, we’ve come to expect that most of what passes for approved opinion is flat-out false.

The Justices will discover this truth. They will likely be astonished. But they will also be taken aback by how integral to our lives it has become. As it turns out, the federal government for nearly a decade has placed a very high priority on curating the public mind, lying at every turn for its own benefit and that of its industrial partners.

Everyone in the old Soviet Union knew for sure that Pravda spoke for the Communist Party. But do people understand that their Google search results and Facebook timelines are no better? It’s not clear whether and to what extent people do understand this but it is our reality.

Will the Justices really be willing to pull the plug on the entire machinery? Doing that would be more disruptive of an established interest group than anything the court has done in many years or even ever. It would fundamentally change the way our technologies work. It would be devastating to federal agencies. Policing such a new system called free speech would be another matter entirely. It would mean that thousands of people would suddenly have nothing to do. That would be wonderful, but would it happen?

As I say, censorship is now an entire global industry. It involves the world’s most powerful foundations, governments, universities, and influencers. It seems like everyone wants a part in crushing what they called “disinformation,” “misinformation,” and “malinformation,” which is true information that they don’t want out. We are surrounded by this machinery of control and yet most people have no clue.

Every federal agency at this point has taken it upon themselves to cajole every information provider into rigging the system so that only one perspective gets out. This has a massive impact on public opinions.

As an example, four years ago, I wrote an article that accidentally made it through the censors and I watched as millions read my piece. Even now, I hear about it at cocktail parties coming from total strangers who don’t know that I’m the author. Nothing like that has happened since that magical day. Most of my writing goes into a dark hole, and this is despite writing daily for the 4th largest newspaper and having access to a huge public forum at Brownstone. People without such access do not stand a chance. Their posts on Facebook are disappeared the instant they post, while YouTube slams their content as contrary to community standards, with no other explanation.

Self-censorship has become the habitual practice of the intellectual class. Otherwise you only beat your head up against the wall and make yourself a target. Minute-by-minute in real time, public opinion is being shaped by this wicked industry, which dramatically distorts political outcomes.

As I say, this is surely the most important issue we face. A decision by the Supreme Court to let this go on – seeing no real issue here – will lead straight to our doom and the death of freedom itself.

There’s an additional problem that is very serious. These days, there is a massive race on to program censorship into the algorithms themselves so that no one is actually doing it, so that there cannot be any real defendants in a case against them. AI will soon be running everything so that Google and Facebook etc can simply say that their machine learning is doing the dirty work.

Perhaps one of the reasons AI has hit us with such a rush is precisely because of this case before the court. The deep state and its industrial partners are not going to give up easily. Everything depends on their victory over free speech, so far as they are concerned.

This is very worrisome, which is why one should hope for a sweeping statement by the Supreme Court that reaffirms the fundamental American commitment to have government completely out of the business of manipulating public opinion through curating what information you see and read and what you do not see and read.

It’s tragic that such a fundamental human right should so heavily depend on the majority decision of this one body. It’s not supposed to work this way. The First Amendment is supposed to be law but these days, the government has built an entire empire around the idea that it simply does not matter. The job of the Supreme Court is to remind our overlords that the people are not merely putty in the hands of deep state agents. We have fundamental rights that cannot be abridged.

There is a rally scheduled outside the court on March 18th, with many speakers making themselves available to the press. Note the sponsoring organizations: these are the freedom fighters in America today. You are welcome to join us.

It won’t sway the court, of course. And the crowds will surely be thinner than they otherwise would be given how much success the censorship industry already enjoys. Still, it is worth a shot.

Truly, we should all shudder to think of the future of American freedom in absence of a decisive statement by the court on behalf of the basic liberty the Framers intended be protected for everyone.

Author

  • Jeffrey A. Tucker

    Jeffrey Tucker is Founder, Author, and President at Brownstone Institute. He is also Senior Economics Columnist for Epoch Times, author of 10 books, including Life After Lockdown, and many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.

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Brownstone Institute

Gears of the Refugee Machine

Published on

From the Brownstone Institute

BY Spike HampsonSPIKE HAMPSON

This refugee epidemic is an orchestrated phenomenon, planned and supported by international organizations in cahoots with the United States government. It is not intended to solve a refugee problem. Its purpose is obviously something other than an amelioration of the suffering of displaced people.

A solid majority of American citizens now recognize that Biden’s many millions of alleged refugees are anything but the real deal. In all probability, some of these illegal immigrants are members of the “tired and poor” seeking a shortcut into the United States, but also include a number of spies, drug mules, human traffickers, criminals, and convicts. As for legitimate refugees, in all likelihood they represent less than 10% of the total.

The moment Biden took office, he invited the world to come to America — illegally.

He dismantled the proven methods used to stem the flow of illegal immigrants and publicly encouraged foreigners to come through the Southern border. As the numbers of illegal immigrants increased, the border patrol were shifted from patrolling the border to sitting behind desks and helping illegal immigrants to gain entry into the country. Most of the border patrol resent having been converted into neutered bureaucrats but had to follow orders or else get drummed out of the corps.

In short, Americans (indeed, the entire world) now realize that the Biden administration is dedicated to getting as many illegal aliens into the country as possible. This is, of course, aiding and abetting illegal behavior, but rampant corruption in the media, academia, and politics ignores or dismisses it.

Captive to leftist agendas, these institutions view citizenship as an antiquated concept that, along with an anachronistic constitution, must be eradicated — no holds barred.

Since Biden became president, his ushers have guided roughly nine million illegals into the United States. By pretending that they are refugees from war or persecution, it was possible to cloak them in sympathetic attire: ‘No compassionate person would ever reject a poor, mistreated refugee.’

At the start of Biden’s presidency, the flow of illegal immigrants originated from relatively few countries, most of which were in central America. In those days, a majority were impoverished people seeking a better life — illegal in their entry but not malevolent in their intent. A certain remainder, however, were not good people.

But over the past three years the border jumpers have started coming from all around the world — so much so that they now represent over 160 different countries. Most of them, by the way, are healthy, single, young men.

Since war and persecution are considered to be the causes of refugee flows, one should ask if it is reasonable to believe that three-quarters of all the countries in the world are afflicted by war or oppression. Next, one might ask why it is that women and children and the elderly are less susceptible to becoming refugees than healthy young men.

This refugee epidemic is an orchestrated phenomenon, planned and supported by international organizations in cahoots with the United States government. It is not intended to solve a refugee problem. Its purpose is obviously something other than an amelioration of the suffering of displaced people.

Since this refugee invasion is tearing apart our country, the federal government — especially the Department of Homeland Security — should be publishing detailed statistics regarding daily, weekly, monthly, and cumulative numbers for illegal immigrants admitted into the United States. There should be similar tabulations for deportations, gotaways, etc. Comparable tables should be readily available for age and sex structure. Parallel statistical fact sheets regarding contraband and drug seizures along with relevant data regarding the apprehended smugglers should be made public as well.

As long as the government was anxious to scare the bejeezus out of everybody regarding Covid-19, it had no trouble publishing data regarding infections, hospitalizations, and deaths. The fact that it is not doing anything similar for the ongoing refugee invasion suggests it is trying to hide something.

Since there are only about 35 countries in all of the Americas, this infiltration out of Mexico across our Southwest border includes invaders from about 130 additional countries located overseas. Those people fly to the Americas, but not to the United States (which is their destination). We can draw a couple of conclusions: they are not poor and they would have trouble getting into the United States legally. Most anybody who could get into the US on a visitor’s visa and then simply overstay would do that rather than flying to, say, Mexico City and then hoofing it northward.

Huge chunks of the American populace have been hoodwinked into thinking that anybody who crosses the border illegally is just trying to grab a share of the good life and should be allowed to remain. But, alas, the invasion is an orchestrated phenomenon. We have known for years that various countries and non-governmental organizations have been organizing and assisting the mass movement of people up through Mexico to and across the US border.

This was evident even back in the first year or two of the Trump presidency when organized caravans of illegal immigrants were arriving with the specific intent of numerically overwhelming the border patrol.

We now know that even the United Nations is involved in housing, feeding, and transporting would-be illegal immigrants headed north. It follows that our federal government is the main source of funding for much of this UN effort. The American citizenry remains ignorant about this.

Border crossings in Central America are tightly regulated for people like you and me, but clustered hoards of illegal immigrants are magically waved through from one country to the next. There are six or seven border crossings to be made before reaching the United States. Do you really think administrations in those countries are unaware of the situation? The unencumbered passage of millions of migrants is only possible if critical palms have been well greased — by Yankee dollars that Americans have paid in taxes.

For those who are unaware, the frontier zone between Central America’s Panama and South America’s Colombia is called the Darien Gap — a thick, wet jungle of hill country through which no road passes. Until recently, it was rarely penetrated and only by extreme adventurers or suspect characters, but now has three different jungle trails for illegal wannabes headed north. On any given day, thousands of people complete the trek, virtually always in large groups accompanied by several guides.

This 50-75 miles of jungle trekking has become a conduit for those from the Caribbean and South America who can find no easier pathway to the US. It is also favored by many of those coming from overseas since the country of Ecuador does not require a visa for entry and the circumvention of designated border crossings into Colombia is relatively easy.

Those with means but from countries whose citizens are severely restrained from traveling to other countries fly to Quito, circumvent the Colombian border stations, hazard the Darien Gap, and use either their feet or buses and trains to reach the US border. And virtually always this is done as part of a large group consisting mostly of strangers.

Many Americans are unaware of the degree to which illegal migrants are recruited and assisted by international and non-governmental organizations — all of which wish to see the United States Southern border eradicated. The flood of illegal immigrants across the border is clearly an invasion being sponsored by a globalist ideology.

This Muckraker.com video documents the nature of all that support and the characteristics of the actual migration.

What with the assistance of the UN and nongovernmental agencies, the Panamanian end of the Darien Gap now has established encampments offering meals and dry sleeping arrangements for the clusters of migrants who make the passage. More sinister is a separate camp specifically for Chinese passage-makers.

Evidently, crossing the Darien Gap takes the lives of some who become sick or have an accident, but the attrition is not sufficient to deter the flow. The larger point is that getting into the United States from distant locations involves a support system designed to game the American border controls. Millions of illegal border crossers are part of something bigger and more nefarious than simple, individualistic decisions to sneak into the United States.

American citizens are being exploited by the globalist elite that view countries as anachronisms. So convinced are they of their own moral superiority that the wishes of America’s ordinary people carry no weight. What we on this side of the border view as a chaotic influx of illegal immigrants is in fact a planned effort, a coordinated attempt to break down the integrity of the United States, the only country in the world still in a position to defeat the globalist agenda.

It is a difficult battle since much of America’s elite has been seduced into believing that globalism imposed from the top down is the ideal way to achieve the “unification of all humanity” — an idealistic goal that would just happen to put many of those same elite in control of the envisioned New World Order. The ordinary American who disapproves of illegal immigration wants it to stop but many of the national leaders want it to continue (although they hide their true intentions).

For all its flaws and weaknesses, for all its corruption, the United States remains the final bastion for protection of individual rights. The system being imposed from the top down will inevitably sacrifice the will of the people to the globalist vision — and that will prove to be the essence of tyranny and a wellspring of untold suffering.

Those interested in this topic might appreciate the more detailed observations of Bret Weinstein in the Dark Horse Podcast. He develops a hypothesis (i.e. a possible explanation of a phenomenon) that there are in fact two different migrations going on, one involving very large numbers of people from a great variety of source areas and evidently motivated by a desire for a better life, but the other being a purely Chinese flow that enjoys greater affluence and therefore less hazardous transit.

Bret explores the possibility that this sub-stream is in fact a Trojan migration designed to inject into the United States a sort of fifth column of healthy young males that with the ripeness of time will be well-positioned to undermine America whenever a US-China conflict becomes kinetic. He observes that this stream maintains a separate identity until having completed the journey through the Darien Gap but then presumably becomes integrated into the larger flow before reaching the United States border, thereby masking its distinct character. The meat of Bret Weinstein’s hypothesis is discussed between the 10th and 110th minutes of the podcast.

Author

  • Spike Hampson

    A retired academic, Spike Hampson did a PhD in population geography at the University of Hawaii and the affiliated East West Center. For most of his career he was a geography professor at the University of Utah and a ski instructor at Deer Valley.

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