A Victory for Free Speech

Ready for some good news? We are too. Fortunately there is some: the injunction against agency intimidation is back. As a result, some of the rights we lost have been clawed back. Some. For now. But it’s good news, and we’ll take it.

Brownstone Institute is now coming out of our second retreat. For three days, scientists, journalists, attorneys, academics, and media people, all of whom are fighting dearly for the restoration of civilization, gathered to share ideas and inspiration.

It was enormously productive. We are ever grateful to donors who have supported these efforts, and we sincerely hope to continue and grow such programs. You can help. It’s a source of hope.

We are thrilled to welcome Dr. Meryl Nass to our monthly support club on Wednesday. You are welcome to join us! 

Here is some content since our last email:

A Tremendous Victory for Free Speech  By Brownstone Institute. Friday’s decision provides a crucial step in fighting against that informational totalitarianism. The Fifth Circuit issued an injunction that prohibits the Biden Administration from taking actions, “to coerce or significantly encourage social-media companies to remove, delete, suppress, or reduce, including through altering their algorithms, posted social-media content containing protected free speech.”

The Dirty Secret About How Masks Really “Work” By Clayton J. Baker. Masks are also extremely effective in exposing dissidents. Who dares to stand up against the state? There’s one, right over there. Shame on them. Shun them. Arrest them. That’s how masks really “work”, and that’s why the Public HealthTM types love them.

You Should Be Very Worried About the Digital Services Act By David Thunder. The only hope is that this ugly, complicated and regressive piece of legislation ends up before a judge who understands that freedom of expression means nothing if held hostage to the views of the European Commission on pandemic-preparedness, the Russia-Ukraine war, or what counts as “offensive” or “hateful” speech.

Whatever Happened to Informed Consent? By Stella Paul. Every American is a sovereign individual with inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, not a sack of meat to be treated as a profit opportunity.  Informed consent must be revived from the grave if Americans are to have a fighting chance against powerful financial interests allied against them.

How “Fact Checking” Obliterates Truth By Thomas Buckley. For “fact-checking” to have any legitimacy whatsoever, it needs to ditch rating the crazies. It also should start each week with releasing a list of 20 items, check each of those, and then write about all of them, true or false. At the very least, the public would know the fact-checkers aren’t hiding facts they don’t like.

Lead Author of Cochrane Mask Review Responds to Fauci’s Dismissal of Evidence By Maryanne Demasi. Jefferson explains that the entire point of the Cochrane review was to systematically sift through all the available randomised data on physical interventions such as masks and determine what was useful and what was not. “It might be that Fauci is relying on trash studies,” said Jefferson. “Many of them are observational, some are cross-sectional, and some actually use modelling. That is not strong evidence.”

The Rise of the Public-Private Partnership in Tyranny By Ramesh Thakur. Call it the public-private tyranny partnership. Traditionally coercion and tyranny have been the preserve of states, with citizen consent the exclusive preserve of liberal democratic states. The private sector has been the domain of choice and competition where the customer is always right. Now the citizen must hew to state-dictated morality and the customer must bow to the corporate moral compass.

Anthony Fauci’s Very Bad Week By Jeffrey Tucker. Despite Fauci’s wishes, the most extreme aspects of lockdowns gradually faded away in time, most anointed experts can pretend as if the vaccine ended the worst aspects of the pandemic (that’s why the mandates became necessary, if only to maximize uptake and confound the science), and Fauci keeps going on national television, despite his age and wealth, to dial back his responsibility for any aspect of it, including the lockdowns he is on record backing from February 26, 2020, onward.

The Dignity of Labor Requires Freedom and Truth By Rev. John F. Naugle. The same dynamic that Jesus encountered in Nazareth held true today; bringing “glad tidings to the poor” is a popular slogan but very often those who embrace it most quickly care little for being called out for their own sins which prevent delivery of these glad tidings. Sadly, this is precisely what has happened to those whose political history has been tied up with what was once called the labor movement.

Unredacted: The EU’s Hidden Contract with Pfizer-BioNTech By Robert Kogon. The ‘acknowledgement’ clause in the order form – acknowledgement, in effect, that the manufacturers knew neither if the vaccine was safe nor if it was effective, at any rate in the long term – is in addition to the clauses which already provide the manufacturers extremely wide-reaching indemnification in the section on indemnification of the contract proper.

The Vicious Punishment of CJ Hopkins  By Christine Black. When asked what gives him courage, Freda said, “I look at this as this a spiritual battle. The people who censor are not good people. If they believed in their ideas, then they would stand up to scrutiny.” He added that many smart people fell in line with dominant and controlling narratives during the Covid period, and, he said, “I lost a lot of heroes. They just crumbled.”

Get a New Covid Shot? The Evidence Suggests Otherwise By Eyal Shahar. Taking a new Covid shot every winter has no empirical basis. The burden of proving effectiveness against death squarely rests on public health officials and anything short of a double-blind, placebo-controlled randomized trial is unacceptable. And that applies to the flu shot as well.

The Case Against Ivermectin to Prevent and Treat COVID-19 Has Been Reversed by the Court By FLCCC Alliance. In their opinion, Judges Clement, Elrod, and Willett state, “FDA argues that the Twitter posts are ‘informational statements’ that cannot qualify as rules because they ‘do not ‘direct’ consumers, or anyone else, to do or refrain from doing anything.’ We are not convinced.”

Here We Go Again: Now It’s Pirola By Will Jones. Here we go again. According to the Mail, “experts” (from Independent SAGE, naturally) have called for everyone to be eligible for another Covid booster amid fears the new “concerning” Pirola Covid variant could overwhelm the NHS.

The Global War on Thought Crime  By David James. In their push to cancel unapproved content, out-of-control governments are seeking to penalise what George Orwell called “thought crimes.” But they will never be able to truly stop people thinking for themselves, nor will they ever definitively know either the writer’s intent or what meaning people will ultimately derive. It is bad law, and it will eventually fail because it is, in itself, predicated on disinformation.

The Delights of the Pfizer/Moderna Catfight By Robert Malone. Pfizer is now claiming that the Moderna patents, which Moderna sought to weaponize against Pfizer/BioNTech, are invalid because the technology and invention of using mRNA for vaccination purposes was first disclosed and reduced to practice in 1990.

Disease-X Is A High-Return Business Strategy By David Bell. Disease-X is a business strategy, dependent on a series of fallacies, dressed up as an altruistic concern for human welfare. Embraced by powerful people, the world they move in accepts amoral practice in public health as a legitimate path to their version of success.

Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds Scrubs Her Lockdown Record  By Kathleen Sheridan. It seems that everyone is running from the lockdowns they once supported, and that includes former presidents and governors, and probably mayors too. Apologies would be better so we can at least have an honest accounting rather than an attempt to rewrite the history that everyone knows.