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Censorship Industrial Complex

Lockdowns Codified a World of Violence

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12 minute read

From the Brownstone Institute

During the misnamed and mostly preposterous debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, a moderator fact-checked Trump’s claim that crime is up. In contrast to his claim, he said that the FBI reports that crime is down, a claim that likely struck every viewer as obviously wrong.

Shoplifting was not a way of life before lockdowns. Most cities were not demographic minefields of danger around every corner. There was no such thing as a drug store with nearly all products behind locked Plexiglas. We weren’t warned of spots in cities, even medium-sized ones, where carjacking was a real risk.

It is wildly obvious that high crime in the US is endemic, with ever less respect for person and property. As for the FBI’s statistics, they are worth about as much as most data coming from federal agencies these days. They are there for purposes of propaganda, manipulated to present the most favorable picture possible to help the regime.

This is certainly true of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Commerce Department, which have been shoveling out obvious nonsense for years. Professionals in the field know it but go along for reasons of professional survival. In truth, we’ve never had a real economic recovery since lockdowns.

Crime is up. Literacy is down. Trust has collapsed. Societies were shattered and remain so.

Only a few weeks following the officious fact check at the debate, we now have new data from the National Crime Victimization Survey. The Wall Street Journal reports: “The urban violent-crime rate increased 40% from 2019 to 2023. Excluding simple assault, the urban violent-crime rate rose 54% over that span. From 2022 to 2023, the urban violent-crime rate didn’t change to a statistically significant degree, so these higher crime rates appear to be the new norm in America’s cities.”

The report isolates the “post-George Floyd protests” because no media source wants to mention the lockdowns. It is still a taboo subject. We somehow cannot say, even now, that the worst abuses of rights in US history in terms of scale and depth were a disaster, simply because saying so implicates the whole of the media, both parties, all government agencies, academia, and all the upper reaches of the social and political order.

The problem of political division is getting alarmingly serious. It’s no longer just about competing yard signs and loud rallies. We now have regular assassination attempts, plus even an extremely strange appearance of a bounty put on a candidate’s head by an official agency.

Surveys have shown that 26 million people in the US believe that violence is fine to keep Trump from regaining the presidency. Where might people have gotten that idea? Probably from many Hollywood movies that fantasize about having killed Hitler before he accomplished his evil plus the nonstop likening of Trump to Hitler, and hence one follows from another.

Liken Trump to Hitler and that is the result you produce. Just as the lockdowns and pandemic response acted out the Hollywood production of the movie Contagion – a perfect example of life imitating art – many activists today want to play a role in a real-life version of Valkyrie.

What’s next, the real-life version of “Civil War?”

There is private violence, public violence, and many forms in between including vigilante violence. Rights violations against person and property are the desiderata of our times. This springs from the culture of our times which has been heavily informed and even defined by the deployment of state violence in service of policy goals, at a scale, scope, and depth never before seen.

There were moments following March 12, 2020, and for the next two years, when there was no way to know for sure what was allowed and what was not, who was enforcing the orders (much less why), and what would be the consequences of noncompliance. We seem to have been subject to a range of coercive edicts but no one was sure of their source or the penalties for noncompliance. We were all introduced into the real-world workings of martial-law totalitarianism, which took forms we somehow did not expect. 

There is probably not a living soul without some bizarre story. I was thrown out of several stores for issues of mask compliance even though it was unclear whether there were mandates. It all depended on the day. There was one store where the proprietor was laughing about masks one day and enforcing them the next, following a threat from an angry customer that he would call the police.

Businesses that tried to reopen were closed by force. Violence was threatened against beachgoers. Churches gathered in secret. House parties were extremely risky. Later, refusing the shot meant being barred from the office, though once more it was not clear who precisely was enforcing the order and what the consequences would be for noncompliance.

When CISA – about which no one knew anything because it had been created only in 2018 – sent out its sheet about which industries were essential and which were nonessential, it was not clear precisely who would make the determination or what would happen if the judgment was wrong. Where was the enforcement arm? Sometimes it would appear – threatening visits from inspectors or checks by police – and other times not so much.

On that day, I was riding back from New York City on the Amtrak and suddenly found myself overwhelmed with the possibility that the train could be stopped and all passengers thrown into a quarantine camp. I sheepishly asked an employee about the possibility. He said “It’s possible but, in my view, unlikely.”

That’s what it was like for years ongoing. Even now the rules are unclear, and this is especially true when it comes to speech. We are merely feeling our way around a dark room. We are shocked when a vaccine-critical post stays up on Facebook. A video on YouTube that mentions censorship might stay up or be taken down. Most dissidents today have been demonetized from YouTube, which is nothing but an effort to financially ruin our best creators.

Censorship is the deployment of force in service of state power, and other institutions connected to state power, for purposes of culture planning. It is exercised by the shallow state, in response to the middle state, and on behalf of the deep state. It is a form of violence that interrupts the free flow of information: the ability to speak, and the ability to learn.

Censorship trains the population to be quiet, afraid, and constantly stressed, and it sorts people by the compliant vs the dissidents. Censorship is designed to shape the public mind toward the end of shoring up regime stability. Once it starts, there is no limit to it.

I’ve mentioned to people that Substack, Rumble, and X could be banned by the spring of next year, and people respond with incredulity. Why? Four years ago, we were locked in our homes and locked out of churches, and the schools for which people pay all year were shut down by government force. If they can do that, they can do anything.

Censorship has been so effective that it has changed the way we engage with each other even in private. Brownstone Institute just held a private retreat for scholars, fellows, and special guests. One very special guest wrote me that she was completely shocked at the freedom of thought and speech that was present in the room. As a mover in the highest circles, she had forgotten what that was like.

This censorship coincides with a strange valorization of violence that we are presented with from all over the world: Ukraine, the Middle East, London, Paris, and many American cities. Never have so many held video cameras in their pockets and never have there been so many platforms on which to post the results. One does wonder how all these relentless presentations of destruction and killing affect public culture.

What purpose are all these soft, hard, public, and private exercises of violence serving? The standard of living is suffering, lives are shortening, despair and ill-health are main features of the population, and illiteracy has swept through an entire generation. The decision to deploy violence to master the microbial kingdom did not turn out well. Worse, it unleashed violence as a way of life.

“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society,” wrote Frédéric Bastiat, “over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.”

That is precisely where we are. It’s time we talk about it and name the culprit. Liberty, privacy, and property were already unsafe before 2020 but it was the lockdowns that unleashed Pandora’s box of evils. We cannot live this way. The only arguments worth having are those that name the reason for the suffering and offer a viable path back to civilized living.

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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Censorship Industrial Complex

Former residential school student refutes ‘genocide’ claims, recalls positive experience

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From LifeSiteNews

By Clare Marie Merkowsky

An Indigenous whistleblower condemned the media-driven narrative about ‘mass’ graves at residential schools that led to church burnings across Canada.

An Indigenous whistleblower shared his positive experience at a Residential school, debunking the claim that the schools abused and murdered their students.

In an April 5 interview with Rebel News reporter Drea Humphrey, a Kamloops Band member and former Kamloops Indian Residential School student revealed that there was no”genocide” at the schools and many students benefited from the institution.

“A lot of the students were happy to be there,” the Band member, whose identity was kept anonymous, said. “They were away from abusive families, dysfunctional families, alcoholism. So, they were happy to be there.”

The former student revealed that he was treated well during his time at the residential schools in the 1970s. He also described the priests and nuns who ran the school as good people, referring to Father Noonan, the principal at the time, as “a real nice guy.”

Residential schools, while run by both the Catholic Church and other Christian churches, were mandated and set up by the federal government and ran from the late 19th century until the last school closed in 1996.

While some children did tragically die at the once-mandatory boarding schools, evidence has revealed that many of the children passed away as a result of unsanitary conditions due to underfunding by the federal government, not the Catholic Church.

As a consequence, since 2021, when the mainstream media ran with inflammatory and dubious claims that hundreds of children were buried and disregarded by Catholic priests and nuns who ran some of the schools, over 100 churches have been burned or vandalized across Canada in seeming retribution.

However, to date, there have been no mass graves discovered at any residential schools across Canada.

The Band member revealed that the Kamloops Band knows they “made a mistake” in labeling the ground anomalies as “unmarked graves.”

Therefore, if there were mass graves at that location, they would have been discovered in the 1990s, not in 2021.

The Band member revealed that he does not believe a “genocide” took place at residential schools, while condemning the church burnings across Canada.

“When I was growing up religion and church meant community and family,” he explained. “It seems like the Liberals want to destroy family so the way to do that is to attack religion.”

“Attacking religion was a good excuse to burn the churches,” he said.

Regardless of his testimony and the lack of evidence to support the claim, mainstream media outlets perpetuate the “mass graves” narrative and even threaten to punish those who oppose it. In November, CBC subtly suggested that “residential school denialism” should be criminalized.

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Censorship Industrial Complex

Scott Atlas: COVID lockdowns, censorship have left a ‘permanent black mark on America’

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From LifeSiteNews

Editor’s note: The following text is taken from a speech delivered by radiologist and political commentator Scott Atlas to the Independent Medical Alliance conference in Atlanta, Georgia, on April 5, 2025. Transcription provided by Dr. Robert Malone.

ATLANTA (Robert Malone) — First, thank you to the organizers, and to my many friends and supporters here. It’s great to be here – surrounded by people who believe in personal freedom!

At the recent international Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) forum in London, I was invited to address the question, “Can Institutions be Reformed?” Begun with Jordan Peterson, ARC joins voices from all over the world to discuss how to refresh the institutions and best values of Western heritage, values that provided the world with history’s most successful societies, particularly the commitment to freedom.

I asked that audience to first consider:

Why, at this moment in history, are we finally focusing on how institutions should be reformed, or if institutions can even be reformed?

After all, for decades we have been aware that our institutions were failing – editorialized, dishonest journalism; wasteful, corrupt government; and agenda-driven schools and universities increasingly unbalanced toward the left, with many conservative faculty and students often self-censoring, afraid to offer unpopular views.

The answer? It is COVID, the pandemic mismanagement specifically – the most tragic breakdown of leadership and ethics that free societies have seen in our lifetimes.

COVID fully exposed the massive, across-the-board, institutional failure – including the shocking reality of overt censorship in our country, the loss of freedoms and the frank violation of human rights – in this country, one explicitly founded on a commitment to freedom.

Yet, oddly, the pandemic remained invisible at the ARC conference, unmentioned by dozens of speakers addressing freedom. It was the elephant in the room – just as explaining the truth about lockdowns, the pseudoscience mandates on masks and social distancing, closing churches and businesses, prohibiting visits to elderly parents in nursing homes while they die – all are missing from post-election discussions today in the United States, including, notably, any of the very public statements and proclamations from the new administration about health care today.

Today, in the wake of COVID, we are left with an undeniable crisis in health. Trust in health guidance has plummeted more rapidly since 2019 than any other government institution, with almost two-thirds now rating the FDA and the CDC as “only fair or poor.”

Half of America no longer has much confidence in science itself. Trust in our doctors and hospitals dropped from 71 percent in 2019 to 40 percent in 2024. The loss of trust is part of the disgraceful legacy of those who held power, who were relied upon to use critical thinking and an ethical compass on behalf of the public, who were handed the precious gift of automatic credibility and almost blind trust.

To understand how to move forward to restore trust, it’s important to first acknowledge basic facts about the pandemic, and keep repeating them, because truth serves as the starting point of all rational discussion. And we must live in a society where facts are acknowledged.

Remember – lockdowns were not caused by the virus. Human beings decided to impose lockdowns.

Indeed, lockdowns were widely instituted, they failed to stop the dying, and they failed to stop the spread – that’s the data: Bjornskov, 2021; Bendavid, 2021; Agarwal, 2021; Herby, 2022; Kerpen, 2023; Ioannidis, 2024; Atlas, 2024.

Lockdowners ignored Henderson’s classic review 15 years earlier showing lockdowns were both ineffective and extremely harmful. They rejected the alternative, targeted protection, first recommended on national media in March 2020 independently by Ioannidis, by Katz, and by me (Atlas) – and then repeatedly for months – based on data already known back then, in spring of 2020. It was not learned 7 months later in 2020, when the Great Barrington Declaration reiterated it, or in 2021, or 2022, or more recently.

And the Birx-Fauci lockdowns directly inflicted massive damage on children and literally killed millions, especially, sinfully, the poor. “The U.S. alone would have had 1.6 million fewer deaths (through July 2023) if it had the performance of Sweden,” according to a review of 34 countries.  Bianchi calculates that over the next 15-20 years, the unemployment alone will cause another million additional American deaths – from the economic shutdown, not the virus.

Beyond a reckless disregard for foreseeable death from their policies, America’s leaders imposed sinful harms and long-lasting damage on our children, the totality of which may not be realized for decades. Mandatory school closings, forced isolation of teens and college students, and required injections of healthy children with experimental drugs attempting to shield adults will be a permanent black mark on America.

It is also worth remembering that this was a health policy problem.

While credentials are not the sole determinant of expertise, I was the only health policy scholar on the White House Task Force and advising the president. Virology is not health policy; epidemiology is not health policy. And while physicians are important in contributing, they are not inherently expert in health policy. Those are only pieces of a larger, more complex puzzle. The stunning fact is – I was the only medical expert there focused on stopping both the death and destruction from the virus and the death and destruction from the policy itself.

As Hannah Arendt observed in “Eichmann in Jerusalem”:

What has come to light is neither nihilism nor cynicism, as one might have expected, but a quite extraordinary confusion over elementary questions of morality.

More than massive incompetence, more than a fundamental lack of critical thinking, we saw the disappearance of society’s moral compass, so pervasive that we have rightfully lost trust in our institutions, leaders, and fellow citizens, trust that is essential to the function of any free and diverse society.

Why did free people accept these draconian, unprecedented, and illogical lockdowns?

This is the question. And the answer reveals the reason for today’s silence on the pandemic.

Clearly, censorship and propaganda are key parts of the explanation, tools of control that convinced the public of two fallacies – that a consensus of experts on lockdowns existed, and dissenters to that false consensus were highly dangerous.

Censorship first was done by the media companies themselves – when it counted most:

  • In 2020, before the Biden administration, when school closures and lockdowns were being implemented;
  • May 2020, YouTube bragged about its “aggressive policies against misinformation”;
  • August 2020, Facebook shamelessly admitted to the Washington Post it had already taken down 7 million posts on the pandemic;
  • My interviews as advisor to the president were pulled down by YouTube on September 11, 2020, by Twitter blocking me on October 18, 2020.

You might think the public – in a free society – should know what the advisor to the president was saying?

And what was the response to truth at America’s universities, our centers for the free exchange of ideas, including Stanford, my employer?

Censorship: character assassination, intimidation, and to me, formal censure.

Why is censorship used? To shut someone up, yes; but more importantly, to deceive the public – to stop others from hearing, to convince a naïve public there is a “consensus on truth.”

Truth is not a team sport.

Truth is not determined by consensus, or by numbers of people who agree, or by titles. It is discovered by debate, proven by critical analysis of evidence. Arguments are won by data and logic, not by personal attack or censoring others.

I am proud to be an outlier – happily proven right when the inliers are so wrong – but Cancel Culture is effective because it stops others from speaking. I received hundreds of emails from doctors and scientists all over the country, including from Stanford, from other professors, and from inside the NIH, saying, “Keep talking, Scott, you’re 100 percent right, but we’re afraid for our families and our jobs.”

And indeed, no one at Stanford Medical School – not a single faculty member there – spoke publicly against their attack on me. Only Martin Kulldorff, then a Harvard epidemiologist, wrote in and publicly challenged the 98 signatories at Stanford to debate on whether I was correct or not (none accepted that challenge!).

But that alone doesn’t explain today’s silence about that extraordinary collapse. It is not simply “issue fatigue.”

It is also that so many smart people, including many claiming to support the new “disruptors,” bought into the irrational measures when it counted most, when our kids and particularly the poor were being destroyed in 2020, uncomfortable to discuss and admit, but far more fundamental than the Sars2 origin, or Fauci, or the vaccine. That acquiescence, that silence, that cowardice, and that failure to grasp reality are inconvenient truths that no one wants to admit.

Today, disruption is sorely needed, and many are basking in the resounding victory of history’s most disruptive politician, President Donald J. Trump.

As promised, his new administration is moving quickly, disrupting on several fronts: national security, energy, trade, justice, immigration, and perhaps most importantly with Elon Musk’s effort to eliminate government waste and fraud, and protect our money. After all, the government has no money – it’s all our money, taxpayers’ money!

In health care, important changes in the status quo have also begun, first with Elon Musk’s much needed DOGE, streamlining tens of thousands of Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) bureaucrats while exposing massive fraud and waste in programs like Medicaid.

And Secretary of HHS Bobby Kennedy has also provoked an important, new national dialogue with his “Make America Healthy Again” mantra focused on wholesome foods to achieve the goal everyone readily supports – good health for themselves and their children. And no doubt, ensuring safety of all drugs and eliminating corruption in pharma and the food industry are also crucial to health. I am a strong supporter of those ideas.

We also have two excellent appointments in health – my friends and colleagues, Marty Makary to FDA and Jay Bhattacharya to NIH. Both Marty and Jay are highly knowledgeable, have top training and expertise, and are committed to critical thinking, to legitimate science, and most importantly to free scientific debate.

But I am concerned that most are simultaneously eager to “turn the page” on the human rights violations, the censorship, the true “constitutional crisis” – no setting the record straight, no official recognition of facts, no accountability? The ultimate disruptor won, and his disruptor appointees will now be in charge – so all is well?

Silently turning the page on modern history’s most egregious societal failure would be extraordinarily harmful. Failure to issue official statements of truth by the new government health agency leaders about the pandemic management would prevent closure for the millions who lost loved ones and whose children suffered such harms. And it would completely eliminate all accountability. Remember, only public accountability will prevent recurrence, and accountability is necessary to restore trust in institutions, leadership, and among fellow citizens.

My second concern: the era of trusting experts based solely on credentials must be over. But will that backlash against the failed “expert class” usher in a different wave of false belief? We cannot forget that legitimate expertise is still legitimate; that known, solid medical science is still valid; that unfounded theories based on simple correlations are not scientifically sound.

And we do not want to inadvertently replicate the cancel culture that harmed so many, with another wave of demonizing anyone who doesn’t 100 percent support the new narratives. It’s already begun – that if you disagree with any of the incoming opinions, then you must be “bought by pharma!” Blind support is just as bad as blind opposition; critical thinking must prevail.

What reforms are needed now?

  • The first step to restore trust is formal, official statements of truth on the COVID lockdowns, masks, and other pseudoscience mandates from new HHS, NIH, FDA, CDC, CMS leaders.
  • We need to forbid – by law – all shutdowns and reset that the CDC and other health agencies are (only) advisory. They recommend; they give information – they don’t set laws. They don’t have the power to set mandates. And if our guaranteed freedoms are not always valid, especially during crises, then they are not guaranteed at all.
  • We need to add term limits (5 years?) to all mid- and top-level health agency positions. We cannot continue the perverse incentives of career bureaucrats accruing personal power, like Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx with their 30-plus years in government.
  • All new heads of HHS, FDA, NIH, CDC, and CMS should be prohibited from post-government company board positions in health sectors they regulate for ~5 years. It’s unethical, an overt conflict-of-interest. Why hasn’t that been announced?
  • We need to forbid drug royalty sharing by employees of the NIH, the FDA, and the CDC. $325 million of royalties were shared with pharma by those people over the 10 years prior to the pandemic. That’s a shocking conflict of interest.
  • We should forbid all mandates forcing people to take drugs. First, the essence of all ethical medical practice is informed consent. And what kind of a “free country” requires you to inject a drug into your child or yourself? No – that’s antithetical to freedom. In public health, you give the information… you shouldn’t need to force anything legitimate, but you do need to prove the case.
  • We need to require the immediate posting of discussions in all FDA, CDC, and NIH meetings. They work for us. What are they saying? We should know in real-time.
  • We need accountability for all government funding. We have 15+ universities getting >$500M/year from NIH alone. The essence of research is free debate. If they’re thwarting that with intimidation, like faculty censures, why would they be entitled to U.S. taxpayers’ money?

More broadly, I and others are working on policies to ensure the free exchange of ideas – the essence of all legitimate science, the basis for the mission of education.

Ideological gatekeeping in public discourse has no place in free societies, especially in science and health.

Here’s the point – the solution to misinformation is more information. No one should be trusted to be the arbiter of truth.

Ultimately, most solutions come from individuals, and ultimately, it is individuals, not institutions, who will save freedom.

I fear we still have a disastrous void in courage in our society today.

To quote CS Lewis, “Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.”

We cannot have a peaceful, free society if it’s filled with people who lack the courage to speak and act with certainty on Hannah Arendt’s “elementary questions of morality.”

Finally, to the young people here, never forget what GK Chesterton said:

Right is right, even if nobody does it. Wrong is wrong, even if everybody is wrong about it.

Reprinted with permission from Robert Malone.

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