Brownstone Institute
Ketanji Brown Jackson Defenestrates the First Amendment
From the Brownstone Institute
At her confirmation hearings, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson claimed she lacked the expertise to define “woman.” Just two years later, she did not hesitate to redefine the First Amendment and free speech as she advocated for the regime to bulldoze our Constitutional liberties provided they offer sufficiently sanctimonious justifications.
At Monday’s oral arguments in Murthy v. Missouri, Jackson said her “biggest concern” was that the injunction, which prohibits the Biden Administration from colluding with Big Tech to censor Americans, may result in “the First Amendment hamstringing the Government.”
This, apparently, was of greater concern to Jackson than the revelations that the Intelligence Community held ongoing meetings with social media companies to coordinate censorship demands, that the White House explicitly demanded the censorship of journalists, and that the Department of Homeland Security was instrumental in manipulating citizens ahead of the 2020 presidential election.
But according to Jackson’s outlook, those facts may have actually been encouraging. She scolded counsel, “Some might say the Government actually has a duty to take steps to protect the citizens of this country.”
Jackson’s formulation inverts the structure of constitutional liberties. The Constitution does not limit the powers of citizens; it restrains our elected officials from tyrannical overreach. It is the law that “governs those who govern us,” as law professor Randy Barnett explains.
Impediments to state powers are not flaws in the system; they are the essence of the design. But Jackson offers no deference to these constitutional restraints. Instead, she explained, “I am really worried about…the First Amendment operating in an environment of threatening circumstances.”
Of course, the First Amendment was designed for environments of threatening circumstances. American history offers no shortage of threats that could be justified to abridge our liberties – from Cholera and Yellow Fever to polio and Spanish flu; from the Red Coats and the XYZ Affair to the Red Army and the War on Terror; from conquering the west to defeating the Nazis.
The Framers understood the ineradicable threat that power poses to liberty, which is why they were unequivocal that the Government cannot “abridge” constitutionally protected speech, no matter the moral surety of the censors.
At times, the country has failed to live up to this promise, but those instances are rarely heralded. Jackson’s deference to emergencies or “threatening circumstances” is precisely the logic that the Court used to intern the Japanese and jail Eugene Debs. More recently, censors invoked that familiar paternalism to justify censorship of the origin of Covid and the veracity of Hunter Biden’s laptop.
But the Constitution demands a different path, as explained by Louisiana Solicitor General Benjamin Aguinaga in response to Jackson. The choice between liberty and safety is a false binary. “The Government can’t just run rampant pressuring the platforms to censor private speech,” Aguinaga explained.
The Biden Administration can promote its interests, deliver its own speeches, and purchase its preferred PSAs. It cannot, however, use vapid slogans of paternalism to usurp the First Amendment.
Justice Alito appeared to see through the justifications for censorship in his questioning of Brian Fletcher, Biden’s Deputy Solicitor General. He asked:
“When I see that the White House and federal officials repeatedly say that Facebook and the federal government should be ‘partners,’ [or] ‘we are on the same team.’ [GOVERNMENT] Officials are demanding answers, ‘I want an answer. I want it right away.’ When they’re unhappy, they curse them out…The only reason why this is taking place is that the federal government has got Section 230 and antitrust in its pocket…And so it’s treating Facebook and these other platforms like their subordinate.Would you do that to the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Associated Press, or any other big newspaper or wire service?”
Meanwhile, Jackson could not grasp the most basic tenets of the First Amendment or free speech. Instead, she fear-mongered with absurd questions of whether the State has a compelling interest in stopping teens from “jumping out of windows.”
In the process, Jackson revealed her intent to defenestrate the First Amendment alongside her fictitious adolescent victims. Her “biggest concern” is that the First Amendment may hinder the regime’s pursuit of power, just as it was designed to do.
Tyranny has long draped itself in cloaks of benevolent phrasing. The judiciary is meant to safeguard our liberties from aspiring tyrants, even if they espouse the socially fashionable shibboleths of the day. Jackson does not just abdicate that responsibility; she appears to abhor it. We must hope her peers on the Court retain their oath to the Constitution.
It was especially striking for many people listening to these arguments to become aware of the astonishing lack of sophistication on the part of some of these Justices, Jackson in particular, and others had their moments.
The sidewalks outside the court were filled with actual experts, people who have followed this case closely since its inception, victims of the censorship industrial complex, and people who have read every brief and scoured through the evidence.
These actual experts and dedicated citizens who know the facts inside and out stood on the sidewalks outside the case while the plaintiffs’ attorney scrambled within the time limits to introduce the topic, possibly for the first time, to these men and women who hold the future of freedom in their hands.
Unbeknownst to themselves, the Justices themselves are victims of the censorship industrial complex. They could themselves have been plaintiffs in this very case, since they too are consumers of information using technology. And yet, given their status and position, they had to pretend to be above it all, knowing what others do not know, though clearly they did not.
It was frustrating scene, to say the least.
Sadly, the oral arguments became bogged down in minutiae over plaintiff standing, the particular wording of this or that email, various farflung hypotheticals, and hand wringing over what will become of the influence of our overlords should the injunction take place. Lost in this thicket of confusion was the bigger trajectory: the clear ambition on the part of the administrative state to become the master curator of the Internet in order to disable the whole promise of a democratized communication technology and introduce full control of the public mind.
A clear-headed court would strike down the entire ambition. That will not happen, apparently. That said, perhaps it is a very good sign that at least, and after so many years of this deep-state meddling in information flows, the issue has finally gotten the attention of the highest court.
May this day become a catalyst for what is needed most of all: the formation of a hard-core of informed citizens who absolutely refuse to go along with the censorship no matter what.
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
Every morning, hundreds of millions of people perform a socially approved ritual. They line up for coffee. They joke about not being functional without caffeine. They openly acknowledge dependence and even celebrate it. No one calls this addiction degenerate. It is framed as productivity, taste, wellness—sometimes even virtue.
Now imagine the same professional discreetly using a nicotine pouch before a meeting. The reaction is very different. This is treated as a vice, something vaguely shameful, associated with weakness, poor judgment, or public health risk.
From a scientific perspective, this distinction makes little sense.
Caffeine and nicotine are both mild psychoactive stimulants. Both are plant-derived alkaloids. Both increase alertness and concentration. Both produce dependence. Neither is a carcinogen. Neither causes the diseases historically associated with smoking. Yet one has become the world’s most acceptable addiction, while the other remains morally polluted even in its safest, non-combustible forms.
This divergence has almost nothing to do with biology. It has everything to do with history, class, marketing, and a failure of modern public health to distinguish molecules from mechanisms.
Two Stimulants, One Misunderstanding
Nicotine acts on nicotinic acetylcholine receptors, mimicking a neurotransmitter the brain already uses to regulate attention and learning. At low doses, it improves focus and mood. At higher doses, it causes nausea and dizziness—self-limiting effects that discourage excess. Nicotine is not carcinogenic and does not cause lung disease.
Caffeine works differently, blocking adenosine receptors that signal fatigue. The result is wakefulness and alertness. Like nicotine, caffeine indirectly affects dopamine, which is why people rely on it daily. Like nicotine, it produces tolerance and withdrawal. Headaches, fatigue, and irritability are routine among regular users who skip their morning dose.
Pharmacologically, these substances are peers.
The major difference in health outcomes does not come from the molecules themselves but from how they have been delivered.
Combustion Was the Killer
Smoking kills because burning organic material produces thousands of toxic compounds—tar, carbon monoxide, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and other carcinogens. Nicotine is present in cigarette smoke, but it is not what causes cancer or emphysema. Combustion is.
When nicotine is delivered without combustion—through patches, gum, snus, pouches, or vaping—the toxic burden drops dramatically. This is one of the most robust findings in modern tobacco research.
And yet nicotine continues to be treated as if it were the source of smoking’s harm.
This confusion has shaped decades of policy.
How Nicotine Lost Its Reputation
For centuries, nicotine was not stigmatized. Indigenous cultures across the Americas used tobacco in religious, medicinal, and diplomatic rituals. In early modern Europe, physicians prescribed it. Pipes, cigars, and snuff were associated with contemplation and leisure.
The collapse came with industrialization.
The cigarette-rolling machine of the late 19th century transformed nicotine into a mass-market product optimized for rapid pulmonary delivery. Addiction intensified, exposure multiplied, and combustion damage accumulated invisibly for decades. When epidemiology finally linked smoking to lung cancer and heart disease in the mid-20th century, the backlash was inevitable.
But the blame was assigned crudely. Nicotine—the named psychoactive component—became the symbol of the harm, even though the damage came from smoke.
Once that association formed, it hardened into dogma.
How Caffeine Escaped
Caffeine followed a very different cultural path. Coffee and tea entered global life through institutions of respectability. Coffeehouses in the Ottoman Empire and Europe became centers of commerce and debate. Tea was woven into domestic ritual, empire, and gentility.
Crucially, caffeine was never bound to a lethal delivery system. No one inhaled burning coffee leaves. There was no delayed epidemic waiting to be discovered.
As industrial capitalism expanded, caffeine became a productivity tool. Coffee breaks were institutionalized. Tea fueled factory schedules and office routines. By the 20th century, caffeine was no longer seen as a drug at all but as a necessity of modern life.
Its downsides—dependence, sleep disruption, anxiety—were normalized or joked about. In recent decades, branding completed the transformation. Coffee became lifestyle. The stimulant disappeared behind aesthetics and identity.
The Class Divide in Addiction
The difference between caffeine and nicotine is not just historical. It is social.
Caffeine use is public, aesthetic, and professionally coded. Carrying a coffee cup signals busyness, productivity, and belonging in the middle class. Nicotine use—even in clean, low-risk forms—is discreet. It is not aestheticized. It is associated with coping rather than ambition.
Addictions favored by elites are rebranded as habits or wellness tools. Addictions associated with stress, manual labor, or marginal populations are framed as moral failings. This is why caffeine is indulgence and nicotine is degeneracy, even when the physiological effects are similar.
Where Public Health Went Wrong
Public health messaging relies on simplification. “Smoking kills” was effective and true. But over time, simplification hardened into distortion.
“Smoking kills” became “Nicotine is addictive,” which slid into “Nicotine is harmful,” and eventually into claims that there is “No safe level.” Dose, delivery, and comparative risk disappeared from the conversation.
Institutions now struggle to reverse course. Admitting that nicotine is not the primary harm agent would require acknowledging decades of misleading communication. It would require distinguishing adult use from youth use. It would require nuance.
Bureaucracies are bad at nuance.
So nicotine remains frozen at its worst historical moment: the age of the cigarette.
Why This Matters
This is not an academic debate. Millions of smokers could dramatically reduce their health risks by switching to non-combustion nicotine products. Countries that have allowed this—most notably Sweden—have seen smoking rates and tobacco-related mortality collapse. Countries that stigmatize or ban these alternatives preserve cigarette dominance.
At the same time, caffeine consumption continues to rise, including among adolescents, with little moral panic. Energy drinks are aggressively marketed. Sleep disruption and anxiety are treated as lifestyle issues, not public health emergencies.
The asymmetry is revealing.
Coffee as the Model Addiction
Caffeine succeeded culturally because it aligned with power. It supported work, not resistance. It fit office life. It could be branded as refinement. It never challenged institutional authority.
Nicotine, especially when used by working-class populations, became associated with stress relief, nonconformity, and failure to comply. That symbolism persisted long after the smoke could be removed.
Addictions are not judged by chemistry. They are judged by who uses them and whether they fit prevailing moral narratives.
Coffee passed the test. Nicotine did not.
The Core Error
The central mistake is confusing a molecule with a method. Nicotine did not cause the smoking epidemic. Combustion did. Once that distinction is restored, much of modern tobacco policy looks incoherent. Low-risk behaviors are treated as moral threats, while higher-risk behaviors are tolerated because they are culturally embedded.
This is not science. It is politics dressed up as health.
A Final Thought
If we applied the standards used against nicotine to caffeine, coffee would be regulated like a controlled substance. If we applied the standards used for caffeine to nicotine, pouches and vaping would be treated as unremarkable adult choices.
The rational approach is obvious: evaluate substances based on dose, delivery, and actual harm. Stop moralizing chemistry. Stop pretending that all addictions are equal. Nicotine is not harmless. Neither is caffeine. But both are far safer than the stories told about them.
This essay only scratches the surface. The strange moral history of nicotine, caffeine, and acceptable addiction exposes a much larger problem: modern institutions have forgotten how to reason about risk.
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
I recently purchased Aaron Siri’s new book Vaccines, Amen. As I flipped though the pages, I noticed a section devoted to his now-famous deposition of Dr Stanley Plotkin, the “godfather” of vaccines.
I’d seen viral clips circulating on social media, but I had never taken the time to read the full transcript — until now.
Siri’s interrogation was methodical and unflinching…a masterclass in extracting uncomfortable truths.
A Legal Showdown
In January 2018, Dr Stanley Plotkin, a towering figure in immunology and co-developer of the rubella vaccine, was deposed under oath in Pennsylvania by attorney Aaron Siri.
The case stemmed from a custody dispute in Michigan, where divorced parents disagreed over whether their daughter should be vaccinated. Plotkin had agreed to testify in support of vaccination on behalf of the father.
What followed over the next nine hours, captured in a 400-page transcript, was extraordinary.
Plotkin’s testimony revealed ethical blind spots, scientific hubris, and a troubling indifference to vaccine safety data.
He mocked religious objectors, defended experiments on mentally disabled children, and dismissed glaring weaknesses in vaccine surveillance systems.
A System Built on Conflicts
From the outset, Plotkin admitted to a web of industry entanglements.
He confirmed receiving payments from Merck, Sanofi, GSK, Pfizer, and several biotech firms. These were not occasional consultancies but long-standing financial relationships with the very manufacturers of the vaccines he promoted.
Plotkin appeared taken aback when Siri questioned his financial windfall from royalties on products like RotaTeq, and expressed surprise at the “tone” of the deposition.
Siri pressed on: “You didn’t anticipate that your financial dealings with those companies would be relevant?”
Plotkin replied: “I guess, no, I did not perceive that that was relevant to my opinion as to whether a child should receive vaccines.”
The man entrusted with shaping national vaccine policy had a direct financial stake in its expansion, yet he brushed it aside as irrelevant.
Contempt for Religious Dissent
Siri questioned Plotkin on his past statements, including one in which he described vaccine critics as “religious zealots who believe that the will of God includes death and disease.”
Siri asked whether he stood by that statement. Plotkin replied emphatically, “I absolutely do.”
Plotkin was not interested in ethical pluralism or accommodating divergent moral frameworks. For him, public health was a war, and religious objectors were the enemy.
He also admitted to using human foetal cells in vaccine production — specifically WI-38, a cell line derived from an aborted foetus at three months’ gestation.
Siri asked if Plotkin had authored papers involving dozens of abortions for tissue collection. Plotkin shrugged: “I don’t remember the exact number…but quite a few.”
Plotkin regarded this as a scientific necessity, though for many people — including Catholics and Orthodox Jews — it remains a profound moral concern.
Rather than acknowledging such sensitivities, Plotkin dismissed them outright, rejecting the idea that faith-based values should influence public health policy.
That kind of absolutism, where scientific aims override moral boundaries, has since drawn criticism from ethicists and public health leaders alike.
As NIH director Jay Bhattacharya later observed during his 2025 Senate confirmation hearing, such absolutism erodes trust.
“In public health, we need to make sure the products of science are ethically acceptable to everybody,” he said. “Having alternatives that are not ethically conflicted with foetal cell lines is not just an ethical issue — it’s a public health issue.”
Safety Assumed, Not Proven
When the discussion turned to safety, Siri asked, “Are you aware of any study that compares vaccinated children to completely unvaccinated children?”
Plotkin replied that he was “not aware of well-controlled studies.”
Asked why no placebo-controlled trials had been conducted on routine childhood vaccines such as hepatitis B, Plotkin said such trials would be “ethically difficult.”
That rationale, Siri noted, creates a scientific blind spot. If trials are deemed too unethical to conduct, then gold-standard safety data — the kind required for other pharmaceuticals — simply do not exist for the full childhood vaccine schedule.
Siri pointed to one example: Merck’s hepatitis B vaccine, administered to newborns. The company had only monitored participants for adverse events for five days after injection.
Plotkin didn’t dispute it. “Five days is certainly short for follow-up,” he admitted, but claimed that “most serious events” would occur within that time frame.
Siri challenged the idea that such a narrow window could capture meaningful safety data — especially when autoimmune or neurodevelopmental effects could take weeks or months to emerge.
Siri pushed on. He asked Plotkin if the DTaP and Tdap vaccines — for diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis — could cause autism.
“I feel confident they do not,” Plotkin replied.
But when shown the Institute of Medicine’s 2011 report, which found the evidence “inadequate to accept or reject” a causal link between DTaP and autism, Plotkin countered, “Yes, but the point is that there were no studies showing that it does cause autism.”
In that moment, Plotkin embraced a fallacy: treating the absence of evidence as evidence of absence.
“You’re making assumptions, Dr Plotkin,” Siri challenged. “It would be a bit premature to make the unequivocal, sweeping statement that vaccines do not cause autism, correct?”
Plotkin relented. “As a scientist, I would say that I do not have evidence one way or the other.”
The MMR
The deposition also exposed the fragile foundations of the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine.
When Siri asked for evidence of randomised, placebo-controlled trials conducted before MMR’s licensing, Plotkin pushed back: “To say that it hasn’t been tested is absolute nonsense,” he said, claiming it had been studied “extensively.”
Pressed to cite a specific trial, Plotkin couldn’t name one. Instead, he gestured to his own 1,800-page textbook: “You can find them in this book, if you wish.”
Siri replied that he wanted an actual peer-reviewed study, not a reference to Plotkin’s own book. “So you’re not willing to provide them?” he asked. “You want us to just take your word for it?”
Plotkin became visibly frustrated.
Eventually, he conceded there wasn’t a single randomised, placebo-controlled trial. “I don’t remember there being a control group for the studies, I’m recalling,” he said.
The exchange foreshadowed a broader shift in public discourse, highlighting long-standing concerns that some combination vaccines were effectively grandfathered into the schedule without adequate safety testing.
In September this year, President Trump called for the MMR vaccine to be broken up into three separate injections.
The proposal echoed a view that Andrew Wakefield had voiced decades earlier — namely, that combining all three viruses into a single shot might pose greater risk than spacing them out.
Wakefield was vilified and struck from the medical register. But now, that same question — once branded as dangerous misinformation — is set to be re-examined by the CDC’s new vaccine advisory committee, chaired by Martin Kulldorff.
The Aluminium Adjuvant Blind Spot
Siri next turned to aluminium adjuvants — the immune-activating agents used in many childhood vaccines.
When asked whether studies had compared animals injected with aluminium to those given saline, Plotkin conceded that research on their safety was limited.
Siri pressed further, asking if aluminium injected into the body could travel to the brain. Plotkin replied, “I have not seen such studies, no, or not read such studies.”
When presented with a series of papers showing that aluminium can migrate to the brain, Plotkin admitted he had not studied the issue himself, acknowledging that there were experiments “suggesting that that is possible.”
Asked whether aluminium might disrupt neurological development in children, Plotkin stated, “I’m not aware that there is evidence that aluminum disrupts the developmental processes in susceptible children.”
Taken together, these exchanges revealed a striking gap in the evidence base.
Compounds such as aluminium hydroxide and aluminium phosphate have been injected into babies for decades, yet no rigorous studies have ever evaluated their neurotoxicity against an inert placebo.
This issue returned to the spotlight in September 2025, when President Trump pledged to remove aluminium from vaccines, and world-leading researcher Dr Christopher Exley renewed calls for its complete reassessment.
A Broken Safety Net
Siri then turned to the reliability of the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) — the primary mechanism for collecting reports of vaccine-related injuries in the United States.
Did Plotkin believe most adverse events were captured in this database?
“I think…probably most are reported,” he replied.
But Siri showed him a government-commissioned study by Harvard Pilgrim, which found that fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events are reported to VAERS.
“Yes,” Plotkin said, backtracking. “I don’t really put much faith into the VAERS system…”
Yet this is the same database officials routinely cite to claim that “vaccines are safe.”
Ironically, Plotkin himself recently co-authored a provocative editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine, conceding that vaccine safety monitoring remains grossly “inadequate.”
Experimenting on the Vulnerable
Perhaps the most chilling part of the deposition concerned Plotkin’s history of human experimentation.
“Have you ever used orphans to study an experimental vaccine?” Siri asked.
“Yes,” Plotkin replied.
“Have you ever used the mentally handicapped to study an experimental vaccine?” Siri asked.
“I don’t recollect…I wouldn’t deny that I may have done so,” Plotkin replied.
Siri cited a study conducted by Plotkin in which he had administered experimental rubella vaccines to institutionalised children who were “mentally retarded.”
Plotkin stated flippantly, “Okay well, in that case…that’s what I did.”
There was no apology, no sign of ethical reflection — just matter-of-fact acceptance.
Siri wasn’t done.
He asked if Plotkin had argued that it was better to test on those “who are human in form but not in social potential” rather than on healthy children.
Plotkin admitted to writing it.
Siri established that Plotkin had also conducted vaccine research on the babies of imprisoned mothers, and on colonised African populations.
Plotkin appeared to suggest that the scientific value of such studies outweighed the ethical lapses—an attitude that many would interpret as the classic ‘ends justify the means’ rationale.
But that logic fails the most basic test of informed consent. Siri asked whether consent had been obtained in these cases.
“I don’t remember…but I assume it was,” Plotkin said.
Assume?
This was post-Nuremberg research. And the leading vaccine developer in America couldn’t say for sure whether he had properly informed the people he experimented on.
In any other field of medicine, such lapses would be disqualifying.
A Casual Dismissal of Parental Rights
Plotkin’s indifference to experimenting on disabled children didn’t stop there.
Siri asked whether someone who declined a vaccine due to concerns about missing safety data should be labelled “anti-vax.”
Plotkin replied, “If they refused to be vaccinated themselves or refused to have their children vaccinated, I would call them an anti-vaccination person, yes.”
Plotkin was less concerned about adults making that choice for themselves, but he had no tolerance for parents making those choices for their own children.
“The situation for children is quite different,” said Plotkin, “because one is making a decision for somebody else and also making a decision that has important implications for public health.”
In Plotkin’s view, the state held greater authority than parents over a child’s medical decisions — even when the science was uncertain.
The Enabling of Figures Like Plotkin
The Plotkin deposition stands as a case study in how conflicts of interest, ideology, and deference to authority have corroded the scientific foundations of public health.
Plotkin is no fringe figure. He is celebrated, honoured, and revered. Yet he promotes vaccines that have never undergone true placebo-controlled testing, shrugs off the failures of post-market surveillance, and admits to experimenting on vulnerable populations.
This is not conjecture or conspiracy — it is sworn testimony from the man who helped build the modern vaccine program.
Now, as Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. reopens long-dismissed questions about aluminium adjuvants and the absence of long-term safety studies, Plotkin’s once-untouchable legacy is beginning to fray.
Republished from the author’s Substack
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