Brownstone Institute
The Post-Ideological Age
Fr0m the Brownstone Institute
Conventional wisdom has it that the US and much of the Western world has polarized into right and left. These tribes are hard-core and share mutual loathing. That model of understanding pervades all popular media and consumes the culture, such that everyone feels the need to choose. It’s simple, harkens back to Cold War binaries, drums up media attention, and further divides the population in ways that benefit the leaders of both sides.
The reality underneath the surface is otherwise. The old ideologies are fractured and most serious people are trying to piece together something other than the old frameworks. The turning was slow at first, probably beginning at the end of the Cold War, but culminated in the response to the Covid crisis. Despite the claim, left and right have never been more scrambled. The reassembling is also occurring right now but it looks much more like the ruling class vs everyone else.
The Covid policy response confounded every ideological outlook. For the center-left that had always trusted public health, seeing the principles of 100 years shredded in an instant was a shock. For the center-right, to see the Republicans in power acquiesce to the idea of “shutting down the economy” was truly hard to believe. The concerns of the traditional civil libertarians, including free speech, were trampled. Those who had traditionally rallied around the rights and interests of business big and small watched with horror as Big Business joined the lockdown armies and small businesses were crushed. The believers in science as a standard of truth to rise above it all were astonished to see every journal and every association compromised by state priorities.
As for nearly everyone who believed that we still lived in a representative democracy, in which elected leaders held the power, they were astonished to watch as politicians became fearful and powerless over the many layers of entrenched bureaucratic experts in government, the deepest layers of which seem to be taking charge over traditional civilian agencies. The people who had always regarded pharma as constantly foiled by the FDA watched in amazement as these vaccine-wielding powerhouses called the shots over all approval processes.
As the dissidents began to cut through the censorship that was almost immediate in the spring of 2020, we discovered a fascinating thing. Our traditional allies were not with us. I’ve heard this from the right, left, and libertarians all. Whether in academia or media, no one was speaking out in ways we might have expected. As Naomi Wolf put it in a private seminar, in words that shocked me at the time, “all our past alliances, institutions, and networks have collapsed.”
There was something about the excuse for the imposition of sudden despotism that seemed to confound all the main voices on all sides. That was a clue that something was very wrong, and it was more than betrayal. It was a sign that we had profoundly misunderstood the intellectual lay of the land.
One might have supposed that church leaders would protest the closing of houses of worship. For the most part, they did not. It was the same with old-line civil liberties organizations. They fell silent. The Libertarian Party had nothing to say and neither did most libertarian think tanks; even now the party’s standard bearer was fully in with the lockdown program when it mattered. The left fell in line and so did the right. Indeed, major “conservative” outlets weighed in on behalf of lockdowns and vaccine mandates – same as the traditional “liberal” outlets.
And what did the dissidents have in common? They were concerned with evidence, science, calm, and traditional law and liberty. Crucially, they were in a career position to say something about the problem. That is to say, most of the dissidents were not in a position of dependency on the major systems of power and influence, whether in the nonprofit world, academia, Big Media and Tech, and otherwise. They spoke out because they cared and because they were in a position to do so.
Gradually over the months and years, we have found each other. And what have we found? We’ve discovered that people who were seemingly on different sides solely due to branding of the past had far more in common than we thought.
And as a result, and partly because we were now in a position to trust each other more than we might otherwise, we began to listen to each other. More importantly, we have begun to learn from each other, discovering all the ways in which our previous tribal connections had blinded us to realities that we had right before us the whole time but we simply could not see.
As an example, many on the left who had long defended the rise of government power as a check on the depredations of private business were amazed to see these very powers turned against the classes of people whose interests they had long defended, namely the poor and working classes. If nothing else, the pandemic response was a prime example of class exploitation of the people on behalf of the economic, cultural, and political elites.
Conversely, those of us who had long championed the rights of business were forced to look squarely at the reality that the largest corporations, heavily consolidated after decades of loose credit, were working so closely with government as if there really was no difference between the public and private sector. Indeed it was hard to tell the difference.
Those who had long championed the rights of media against elite attacks discovered that there really was very little difference between mainstream corporate media and government public relations departments, who in turn were carrying water for the most powerful corporations that stood to gain trillions from the whole caper.
Watching all this unfold in real time was an astonishing experience. Above all else, it was intellectually disorienting. And so those of us who care about holding an accurate understanding of the world had to regroup, draw on what we knew to be true which was confirmed but rethinking postulates and dogmas we assumed to be true but which turned out to be false in the emergency.
Yes, these days have ended, at least for now, but they leave a vast carnage of old ideological systems in the dustbin of history. Part of the job of Brownstone Institute, and perhaps even our main job, is to figure out the operations of the world in a realistic way, backed by evidence and the best theory, toward finding our way back to the fundamental principles that have built civilization over the centuries. That goal is inseparable from the very idea of rights, and public institutions that are responsive to the people.
What we have learned is that our ideological system not only didn’t protect us; they could not even fully explain the strange realities that unfolded.
Everyone in the dissident community agrees fully with the main theme of The Lord of the Rings: power is the great killer of the human spirit. Our job is to figure out who has that power, how to dismantle it, and the right path to preventing something like this from ever happening again. And by “something like this,” we mean everything: the exploitation, the restrictions on peaceful behavior, the agency capture and corporate aggression, the censorship and betrayal of the promise of the information age, the crushing of property rights and enterprise, and the violation of bodily autonomy.
In our quieter moments, all of us are wondering how we could have been so confused about the ideological bifurcations of the past. Why were we so entrenched in them? And to what extent did those ideologies create an artificial veneer over the growing problems underneath the binary overlay? This was surely the case and it went on for decades.
We think back now on populist movements of the past and see how many of them, whether ostensibly from the right or left, ultimately came from the same place, the perception that the system was being run by something or someone other than is being advertised. The Occupy Wall Street movement ultimately came from the same instincts as the Truckers Revolt in Canada that came some twelve years later, and yet one is called left and one is called right.
It is impossible to separate the BLM protests and sometimes riots from reaction against being locked up for the better part of two months from a virus that was known to be a threat mainly to the aged and infirm. That unleashed predictable anger that was often deeply destructive. And the shock and outrage at the vaccine and mask mandates stemmed from the same basic impulse: the human desire not to live in cages of someone else’s creation but rather be in charge of our own bodies and lives.
It’s the same with the anti-censorship movements today, and the growing nationalist movements around the world that wonder whether or not nation-states even have authority anymore to control the massive and hegemonic global forces that seem to be pulling the strings behind the scenes.
All these shifts in the firmament of opinion and politics come from the same place: the desire to take back control of our lives.
This means many things. It includes causes that many on the right have neglected: food freedom, medical freedom, corporate consolidation, the rise of the corporate state, private-sector censorship pushed by agency outsourcing, the militarization of civilian agencies, and deep-state power. And the same is true for the honest left, newly aware of the corruption of government, the rights of religious freedom and free enterprise, the evils of central banking and financial surveillance, and far more.
Looking back, much more makes sense. Consider the domestic discontent in the US that culminated in the implausible election of Donald Trump in 2016, an event that confounded the elite classes in media, government, tech, and pharma. Trump stood in symbolic opposition to it all and took some minor steps toward rolling back the empire at home and abroad. He was joined in this effort by political trends in the UK (with Brexit) and Brazil (with the rise of Bolsonaro). A new flavor of populism seemed to be on the rise.
There were many attempts to crush it here and abroad, starting far back but intensifying after 2016. The culminating moment was the Covid regime which was global in scope and involved a “whole of society” approach as if to say: we and not you are in charge. Look what we can achieve! Observe how little you really matter in the scheme of things! You thought the system worked for you but it is designed and run by us!
Is this sustainable? It is highly doubtful, at least not in the long term. What is desperately needed now is a paradigm of understanding that transcends the tribal alliances of the past. It really is the ruling elite vs. everyone else, an outlook that blows apart ideological divisions of the past and cries out for a new comprehension of the present moment, not to mention new plans of action. And this remains true regardless of the outcome of the election in November.
In the language of Thomas Kuhn, our times have seen the decisive collapse of old paradigms. They have fallen under the weight of too many anomalies. We have already entered into the pre-paradigmatic stage that seeks a new and more evidence-based orthodoxy of understanding. The only way we can get there is to enter into and enjoy the clash of ideas, in a spirit of freedom and learning. If nothing else, these are exciting times to be alive and active, an opportunity for all of us to make a difference for the future.
If you are interested in supporting the work of Brownstone Institute – the fellowships, events, books, retreats, and ongoing journalism and research – we invite you to do so. Unlike so many others, we have no government or corporate backing and depend entirely on your willingness to help. This is how we save intellectual integrity and how we save the world.
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
If you want to argue that a mysterious factor X is responsible for the drop in fertility, you will have to explain (1) why the factor affected only the vaccinated, and (2) why it started affecting them at about the time of vaccination.
In January 2022, the number of children born in the Czech Republic suddenly decreased by about 10%. By the end of 2022, it had become clear that this was a signal: All the monthly numbers of newborns were mysteriously low.
In April 2023, I wrote a piece for a Czech investigative platform InFakta and suggested that this unexpected phenomenon might be connected to the aggressive vaccination campaign that had started approximately 9 months before the drop in natality. Denik N – a Czech equivalent of the New York Times – immediately came forward with a “devastating takedown” of my article, labeled me a liar and claimed that the pattern can be explained by demographics: There were fewer women in the population and they were getting older.
To compare fertility across countries (and time), the so-called Total Fertility Rate (TFR) is used. Roughly speaking, it is the average number of children that are born to a woman over her lifetime. TFR is independent of the number of women and of their age structure. Figure 1 below shows the evolution of TFR in several European countries between 2001 and 2023. I selected countries that experienced a similar drop in TFR in 2022 as the Czech Republic.
So, by the end of 2023, the following two points were clear:
- The drop in natality in the Czech Republic in 2022 could not be explained by demographic factors. Total fertility rate – which is independent of the number of women and their age structure – dropped sharply in 2022 and has been decreasing ever since. The data for 2024 show that the Czech TFR has decreased further to 1.37.
- Many other European countries experienced the same dramatic and unexpected decrease in fertility that started at the beginning of 2022. I have selected some of them for Figure 1 but there are more: The Netherlands, Norway, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Sweden. On the other hand, there are some countries that do not show a sudden drop in TFR, but rather a steady decline over a longer period (e.g. Belgium, France, UK, Greece, or Italy). Notable exceptions are Bulgaria, Spain, and Portugal where fertility has increased (albeit from very low numbers). The Human Fertility Project database has all the numbers.
This data pattern is so amazing and unexpected that even the mainstream media in Europe cannot avoid the problem completely. From time to time, talking heads with many academic titles appear and push one of the politically correct narratives: It’s Putin! (Spoiler alert: The war started in February 2022; however, children not born in 2022 were not conceived in 2021). It’s the inflation caused by Putin! (Sorry, that was even later). It’s the demographics! (Nope, see above, TFR is independent of the demographics).
Thus, the “v” word keeps creeping back into people’s minds and the Web’s Wild West is ripe with speculation. We decided not to speculate but to wrestle some more data from the Czech government. For many months, we were trying to acquire the number of newborns in each month, broken down by age and vaccination status of the mother. The post-socialist health-care system of our country is a double-edged sword: On one hand, the state collects much more data about citizens than an American would believe. On the other hand, we have an equivalent of the FOIA, and we are not afraid to use it. After many months of fruitless correspondence with the authorities, we turned to Jitka Chalankova – a Czech Ron Johnson in skirts – who finally managed to obtain an invaluable data sheet.
To my knowledge, the datasheet (now publicly available with an English translation here) is the only officially released dataset containing a breakdown of newborns by the Covid-19 vaccination status of the mother. We requested much more detailed data, but this is all we got. The data contains the number of births per month between January 2021 and December 2023 given by women (aged 18-39) who were vaccinated, i.e., had received at least one Covid vaccine dose by the date of delivery, and by women who were unvaccinated, i.e., had not received any dose of any Covid vaccine by the date of delivery.
Furthermore, the numbers of births per month by women vaccinated by one or more doses during pregnancy were provided. This enabled us to estimate the number of women who were vaccinated before conception. Then, we used open data on the Czech population structure by age, and open data on Covid vaccination by day, sex, and age.
Combining these three datasets, we were able to estimate the rates of successful conceptions (i.e., conceptions that led to births nine months later) by preconception vaccination status of the mother. Those interested in the technical details of the procedure may read Methods in the newly released paper. It is worth mentioning that the paper had been rejected without review in six high-ranking scientific journals. In Figure 2, we reprint the main finding of our analysis.
Figure 2 reveals several interesting patterns that I list here in order of importance:
- Vaccinated women conceived about a third fewer children than would be expected from their share of the population. Unvaccinated women conceived at about the same rate as all women before the pandemic. Thus, a strong association between Covid vaccination status and successful conceptions has been established.
- In the second half of 2021, there was a peak in the rate of conceptions of the unvaccinated (and a corresponding trough in the vaccinated). This points to rather intelligent behavior of Czech women, who – contrary to the official advice – probably avoided vaccination if they wanted to get pregnant. This concentrated the pregnancies in the unvaccinated group and produced the peak.
- In the first half of 2021, there was significant uncertainty in the estimates of the conception rates. The lower estimate of the conception rate in the vaccinated was produced by assuming that all women vaccinated (by at least one dose) during pregnancy were unvaccinated before conception. This was almost certainly true in the first half of 2021 because the vaccines were not available prior to 2021. The upper estimate was produced by assuming that all women vaccinated (by at least one dose) during pregnancy also received at least one dose before conception. This was probably closer to the truth in the second part of 2021. Thus, we think that the true conception rates for the vaccinated start close to the lower bound in early 2021 and end close to the upper bound in early 2022. Once again, we would like to be much more precise, but we have to work with what we have got.
Now that the association between Covid-19 vaccination and lower rates of conception has been established, the one important question looms: Is this association causal? In other words, did the Covid-19 vaccines really prevent women from getting pregnant?
The guardians of the official narrative brush off our findings and say that the difference is easily explained by confounding: The vaccinated tend to be older, more educated, city-dwelling, more climate change aware…you name it. That all may well be true, but in early 2022, the TFR of the whole population dropped sharply and has been decreasing ever since.
So, something must have happened in the spring of 2021. Had the population of women just spontaneously separated into two groups – rednecks who wanted kids and didn’t want the jab, and city slickers who didn’t want kids and wanted the jab – the fertility rate of the unvaccinated would indeed be much higher than that of the vaccinated. In that respect, such a selection bias could explain the observed pattern. However, had this been true, the total TFR of the whole population would have remained constant.
But this is not what happened. For some reason, the TFR of the whole population jumped down in January 2022 and has been decreasing ever since. And we have just shown that, for some reason, this decrease in fertility affected only the vaccinated. So, if you want to argue that a mysterious factor X is responsible for the drop in fertility, you will have to explain (1) why the factor affected only the vaccinated, and (2) why it started affecting them at about the time of vaccination. That is a tall order. Mr. Occam and I both think that X = the vaccine is the simplest explanation.
What really puzzles me is the continuation of the trend. If the vaccines really prevented conception, shouldn’t the effect have been transient? It’s been more than three years since the mass vaccination event, but fertility rates still keep falling. If this trend continues for another five years, we may as well stop arguing about pensions, defense spending, healthcare reform, and education – because we are done.
We are in the middle of what may be the biggest fertility crisis in the history of mankind. The reason for the collapse in fertility is not known. The governments of many European countries have the data that would unlock the mystery. Yet, it seems that no one wants to know.
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved hundreds of drugs without proof that they work—and in some cases, despite evidence that they cause harm.
That’s the finding of a blistering two-year investigation by medical journalists Jeanne Lenzer and Shannon Brownlee, published by The Lever.
Reviewing more than 400 drug approvals between 2013 and 2022, the authors found the agency repeatedly ignored its own scientific standards.
One expert put it bluntly—the FDA’s threshold for evidence “can’t go any lower because it’s already in the dirt.”
A System Built on Weak Evidence
The findings were damning—73% of drugs approved by the FDA during the study period failed to meet all four basic criteria for demonstrating “substantial evidence” of effectiveness.
Those four criteria—presence of a control group, replication in two well-conducted trials, blinding of participants and investigators, and the use of clinical endpoints like symptom relief or extended survival—are supposed to be the bedrock of drug evaluation.
Yet only 28% of drugs met all four criteria—40 drugs met none.
These aren’t obscure technicalities—they are the most basic safeguards to protect patients from ineffective or dangerous treatments.
But under political and industry pressure, the FDA has increasingly abandoned them in favour of speed and so-called “regulatory flexibility.”
Since the early 1990s, the agency has relied heavily on expedited pathways that fast-track drugs to market.
In theory, this balances urgency with scientific rigour. In practice, it has flipped the process. Companies can now get drugs approved before proving that they work, with the promise of follow-up trials later.
But, as Lenzer and Brownlee revealed, “Nearly half of the required follow-up studies are never completed—and those that are often fail to show the drugs work, even while they remain on the market.”
“This represents a seismic shift in FDA regulation that has been quietly accomplished with virtually no awareness by doctors or the public,” they added.
More than half the approvals examined relied on preliminary data—not solid evidence that patients lived longer, felt better, or functioned more effectively.
And even when follow-up studies are conducted, many rely on the same flawed surrogate measures rather than hard clinical outcomes.
The result: a regulatory system where the FDA no longer acts as a gatekeeper—but as a passive observer.
Cancer Drugs: High Stakes, Low Standards
Nowhere is this failure more visible than in oncology.
Only 3 out of 123 cancer drugs approved between 2013 and 2022 met all four of the FDA’s basic scientific standards.
Most—81%—were approved based on surrogate endpoints like tumour shrinkage, without any evidence that they improved survival or quality of life.
Take Copiktra, for example—a drug approved in 2018 for blood cancers. The FDA gave it the green light based on improved “progression-free survival,” a measure of how long a tumour stays stable.
But a review of post-marketing data showed that patients taking Copiktra died 11 months earlier than those on a comparator drug.
It took six years after those studies showed the drug reduced patients’ survival for the FDA to warn the public that Copiktra should not be used as a first- or second-line treatment for certain types of leukaemia and lymphoma, citing “an increased risk of treatment-related mortality.”
Elmiron: Ineffective, Dangerous—And Still on the Market
Another striking case is Elmiron, approved in 1996 for interstitial cystitis—a painful bladder condition.
The FDA authorized it based on “close to zero data,” on the condition that the company conduct a follow-up study to determine whether it actually worked.
That study wasn’t completed for 18 years—and when it was, it showed Elmiron was no better than placebo.
In the meantime, hundreds of patients suffered vision loss or blindness. Others were hospitalized with colitis. Some died.
Yet Elmiron is still on the market today. Doctors continue to prescribe it.
“Hundreds of thousands of patients have been exposed to the drug, and the American Urological Association lists it as the only FDA-approved medication for interstitial cystitis,” Lenzer and Brownlee reported.
“Dangling Approvals” and Regulatory Paralysis
The FDA even has a term—”dangling approvals”—for drugs that remain on the market despite failed or missing follow-up trials.
One notorious case is Avastin, approved in 2008 for metastatic breast cancer.
It was fast-tracked, again, based on ‘progression-free survival.’ But after five clinical trials showed no improvement in overall survival—and raised serious safety concerns—the FDA moved to revoke its approval for metastatic breast cancer.
The backlash was intense.
Drug companies and patient advocacy groups launched a campaign to keep Avastin on the market. FDA staff received violent threats. Police were posted outside the agency’s building.
The fallout was so severe that for more than two decades afterwards, the FDA did not initiate another involuntary drug withdrawal in the face of industry opposition.
Billions Wasted, Thousands Harmed
Between 2018 and 2021, US taxpayers—through Medicare and Medicaid—paid $18 billion for drugs approved under the condition that follow-up studies would be conducted. Many never were.
The cost in lives is even higher.
A 2015 study found that 86% of cancer drugs approved between 2008 and 2012 based on surrogate outcomes showed no evidence that they helped patients live longer.
An estimated 128,000 Americans die each year from the effects of properly prescribed medications—excluding opioid overdoses. That’s more than all deaths from illegal drugs combined.
A 2024 analysis by Danish physician Peter Gøtzsche found that adverse effects from prescription medicines now rank among the top three causes of death globally.
Doctors Misled by the Drug Labels
Despite the scale of the problem, most patients—and most doctors—have no idea.
A 2016 survey published in JAMA asked practising physicians a simple question—what does FDA approval actually mean?
Only 6% got it right.
The rest assumed that it meant the drug had shown clear, clinically meaningful benefits—such as helping patients live longer or feel better—and that the data was statistically sound.
But the FDA requires none of that.
Drugs can be approved based on a single small study, a surrogate endpoint, or marginal statistical findings. Labels are often based on limited data, yet many doctors take them at face value.
Harvard researcher Aaron Kesselheim, who led the survey, said the results were “disappointing, but not entirely surprising,” noting that few doctors are taught about how the FDA’s regulatory process actually works.
Instead, physicians often rely on labels, marketing, or assumptions—believing that if the FDA has authorized a drug, it must be both safe and effective.
But as The Lever investigation shows, that is not a safe assumption.
And without that knowledge, even well-meaning physicians may prescribe drugs that do little good—and cause real harm.
Who Is the FDA Working for?
In interviews with more than 100 experts, patients, and former regulators, Lenzer and Brownlee found widespread concern that the FDA has lost its way.
Many pointed to the agency’s dependence on industry money. A BMJ investigation in 2022 found that user fees now fund two-thirds of the FDA’s drug review budget—raising serious questions about independence.
Yale physician and regulatory expert Reshma Ramachandran said the system is in urgent need of reform.
“We need an agency that’s independent from the industry it regulates and that uses high-quality science to assess the safety and efficacy of new drugs,” she told The Lever. “Without that, we might as well go back to the days of snake oil and patent medicines.”
For now, patients remain unwitting participants in a vast, unspoken experiment—taking drugs that may never have been properly tested, trusting a regulator that too often fails to protect them.
And as Lenzer and Brownlee conclude, that trust is increasingly misplaced.
- Investigative report by Jeanne Lenzer and Shannon Brownlee at The Lever [link]
- Searchable public drug approval database [link]
- See my talk: Failure of Drug Regulation: Declining standards and institutional corruption
Republished from the author’s Substack
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