Brownstone Institute
Cut the Truth Out of Our Heads
From the Brownstone Institute
The old meme of the man staying up late typing because “someone is wrong on the Internet” applies now to an entire swath of the ruling class. They want freedom out and the stakeholders in control
The censors are losing patience. They have gone from regretting the existence of free speech and gaming the system as best they can to fantasizing about ending it through criminal penalties.
You can observe this change in temperament – from frustration to fury to calling for violent solutions – over the last several weeks. And it serves as a reminder: censorship was never the end point. It was always about controlling society’s “cognitive infrastructure,” which is how we think. And to what end? A secure monopoly on political power.
This week, Fox reporter Peter Doocy was sparring with the White House spokesperson over whether FEMA is funding migrants even as it cannot help American storm survivors. She immediately shot back and called this “disinformation.” Peter wanted to know what part of his question qualified. Jean-Pierre said it was the whole context of the question and otherwise never said.
It was clear to anyone who was watching that the term “disinformation” means to her nothing other than a premise or fact that is unwelcome and needs to be shut down. This messaging has been further reinforced by a Harris/Walz ad blaming unnamed “misinformation” from Trump for exacerbating hurricane suffering following Hurricane Helene.
This exchange came only days after Hillary Clinton suggested criminal penalties for disinformation, else “they will lose total control.” It’s an odd plural pronoun because, presumably, she is not in control..unless she regards herself as a proxy for an entire class of rulers.
Meanwhile, former presidential candidate John Kerry said the existence of free speech is making government impossible. Kamala Harris herself has sworn to “hold social media accountable” for the “hate infiltrating their platforms.” And well-connected physician Peter Hotez is calling for Homeland Security and NATO to put an end to debates over vaccines
You can detect the fury in all their voices, almost as if every post on X or video on Rumble is causing them to lose their minds, to the point that they are just saying it out loud: “Make them stop.”
Hurricane Milton seems to have caused the censors to flip out in a violent rage, as people wondered whether and to what extent the government might have something to do with manipulating the weather for political reasons. A writer in the Atlantic explodes: “I’m running out of ways to explain how bad this is. What’s happening in America today is something darker than a misinformation crisis,” while decrying “outright conspiracy theorizing and utter nonsense racking up millions of views across the internet.”
Catch that? It’s the viewing itself that is the problem, as if people do not have the capacity to think for themselves.
The old meme of the man staying up late typing because “someone is wrong on the Internet” applies now to an entire swath of the ruling class. They want freedom out and the stakeholders in control, somehow forcing the whole of the digital age into a version of 1970s television with three channels and 1-800 numbers. The Biden administration even refounded the Internet, replacing the Declaration of Freedom with a new Declaration of the Future.
YouTube accounts have been demonetized and deleted. Facebook posts have been throttled and banned. LinkedIn’s algorithms punish posts that take issue with regime narratives. This has not slowed down in light of litigation but rather continued and intensified.
The goal is to close up the Internet. They would have done it by now if it were not for the First Amendment, which stands in their way. For now, they will continue to work through university cutouts, third-party providers, phony baloney fact-checkers, pressure on tech firms that provide government services at a price, and other mechanisms to achieve indirectly what they cannot do directly just yet.
Among the strategies is the political persecution of dissenters. Alex Jones is a bellwether here and his company is being bankrupted. Steve Bannon, the philosopher king of MAGA, has been in jail for the entire election season for having defied a Congressional subpoena on the advice of counsel. The protestors on January 6 have been in prison not for damages caused or trespassing but for landing on the wrong side of the regime.
Most of us had an intuition that the Covid vaccine mandates themselves were not entirely about health but rather a tactic of exclusion of those who were not fully trusting of authority. This was rather obvious when it came to the military and the medical profession but less apparent within academia where noncompliant students and professors were effectively purged for their refusal to risk their lives for pharma.
There was an element of malice, too, in the mask mandates. Even though there was zero scientific evidence that a Chinese-made synthetic cloth worn on the face can change epidemiological dynamics, they did serve well as a visible sign to separate believers from unbelievers, and also as a sadistic means of reminding individualists of who is really running the show.
The final means of censorship is violence against person and property, while the end is to control what you think in service of one-party rule. Major tech companies and major media are wholly complicit in bringing this about. Only a handful of services are stopping this and they are all being targeted by the regime through myriad forms of lawfare.
Postscript: as this article is released, the website archive.org has been fully down for the better part of a week, supposedly due to a catastrophic DDOS attack. The private owners say the data has been saved and it will be restored in time. Maybe. But consider: this the one tool we have for having a verified memory of what was posted when. It is how we found that WHO changed its definition of herd immunity. It’s how we found that the CDC was behind the mail-in ballot fiasco of 2020. It’s how we know that FTX funded anti-Ivermectin studies. And so on. The links were stable and good, never down.
Until now, two weeks before the election. We are of course supposed to believe that this shocking collapse is purely a coincidence. Maybe. Probably. And yet without this website – a central point of failure – vast amounts of the history of the last quarter century is deleted. The entire contents of the web can be re-written as vaporware, here one instant, gone the next. Even if this site does come back, what will be missing and how long will it take to figure it out? Will the Internet have been lobotomized? If not this time, could it happen in the future? Certainly.
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
The only way to restore public trust in vaccination – which has taken a big hit since the lies attending the rollout of the Covid-19 vaccine – is to put a well-known vaccine skeptic in charge of the vaccine research agenda. The ideal person for this is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who has been nominated to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.
At the same time, we must put rigorous scientists with a proven track record of evidence-based medicine in charge of determining the type of study designs to use. Two ideal scientists for this are Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and Dr. Marty Makary, who have been nominated to lead the NIH and FDA, respectively.
Vaccines are – along with antibiotics, anesthesia, and sanitation – one of the most significant health inventions in history. First conceived in 1774 by Benjamin Jesty, a farmer in Dorsetshire, England, the smallpox vaccine alone has saved millions of lives. Operation Warp Speed, which rapidly developed the Covid vaccines, saved many older Americans. Despite this, we have seen a sharp increase in general vaccine hesitancy. Vaccine scientists and public health officials who did not conduct properly randomized trials made false claims about vaccine efficacy and safety and established vaccine mandates for people who did not need the vaccines, sowing suspicion and damaging public trust in vaccination.
What went wrong? The purpose of the Covid vaccines was to reduce mortality and hospitalization, but the randomized trials were only designed to demonstrate short-term reduction in Covid symptoms, which is not of great public health importance. Since the placebo groups were promptly vaccinated after the emergency approval, they also failed to provide reliable information about adverse reactions. Despite these flaws, it was falsely claimed that vaccine-induced immunity is superior to natural infection-acquired immunity and that the vaccines would prevent infection and transmission.
Governments and universities then mandated the vaccines for people with superior natural immunity and for young people with very low mortality risk. These mandates were not only unscientific but with a limited vaccine supply, it was unethical to vaccinate low-mortality-risk people when the vaccines were needed by older high-risk people around the world.
Since government and pharmaceutical companies lied about the Covid vaccine, are they also lying about other vaccines? Skepticism has now spread to tried-and-true vaccines that are proven to work.
And there are real, unanswered vaccine safety questions. Seminal work from Denmark has shown that vaccines can have both positive and negative non-specific effects on non-targeted diseases, and that is something that must be explored in greater depth. Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD) scientists studying asthma and aluminum-containing vaccines concluded that while their “findings do not constitute strong evidence for questioning the safety of aluminum in vaccines…additional examination of this hypothesis appears warranted.”
While VSD and other scientists should continue to do observational studies, we should also conduct randomized placebo-controlled vaccine trials, as RFK has advocated. Since we have herd immunity for many diseases, such as measles, trials can be ethically conducted by randomizing the age of vaccination to, for example, one versus three years old, while spreading the trial over a large geographical area so that the unvaccinated are not all living close to each other.
I am confident that most vaccines will continue to be found safe and effective. While some problems may be found, that is more likely to increase rather than decrease vaccine confidence. For instance, it was found that the measles-mumps-rubella-varicella (MMRV) vaccine causes excess febrile seizures in 12- to 23-month-old children. MMRV is now only given as a second dose to older children, while the younger kids get separate MMR and varicella vaccines, resulting in fewer vaccine-induced seizures that scare parents. Although safety studies were inconclusive, it was also wise to remove mercury from vaccines. Even if we end up with fewer vaccines in the recommended vaccine schedule, that’s not necessarily a terrible thing. Scandinavia has a very healthy population with fewer vaccines in their schedules.
We won’t restore vaccine confidence by preaching to the choir. After the Covid debacle, Kennedy’s stated goal is to return to evidence-based medicine free from conflicts of interest. Letting him do that is the only way that skeptics will trust vaccines again, and those of us who trust vaccines have no reason to be afraid of that.
Attempts by the public health and pharma establishments to derail the nominations of RFK, Bhattacharya, and Makary are the surest way to further increase vaccine hesitancy in America. The choice is stark. We cannot let lopsided “pro-vaccine scientists” who clamp their hands over their ears at the mildest questions do any more harm to vaccine confidence. As a pro-vaccine scientist, and in fact, the only person ever being fired by the CDC for being too pro-vaccine, the choice is clear in my mind. To restore vaccine confidence to previous levels, we must support the nominations of Kennedy, Bhattacharya, and Makary.
Republished from RealClearPolitics
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
On Thursday, Joe Rogan and Marvel megastar Josh Brolin traded stories about the preponderance of Covid vaccine injuries among their friends. Brolin even described contracting “a mild case of Bell’s palsy” earlier this year, which Rogan attributed to the vaccine, noting he knew several people who suffered facial paralysis following Covid vaccination.
There is no perfect medicine. The benefits and harms of any treatment must be carefully considered in order to prescribe the safest, most effective course of action for a patient. While the FDA and CDC continue to extol the benefits of the Covid vaccines, they have ignored a growing body of evidence that these products can also be harmful. The code of medical ethics demands a transparent and balanced accounting of their impact on the American people. Only then can we set the best course for healthcare policy and future pandemics.
An honest accounting begins with clinical trials, supposedly “the most rigorous in history.” Pfizer’s own legal arguments suggest otherwise. Responding to a whistleblower lawsuit alleging major deviations from protocol, Pfizer’s lawyers noted that the company’s “Other Transactions Authority” agreement (OTA) with the Pentagon didn’t require clinical trials to comply with FDA regulations because the vaccine was a military prototype for “medical countermeasures.” This agreement allowed Pfizer to “grade its own homework,” so to speak — a point emphasized by DOJ lawyers in a separate filing in Pfizer’s support.
The FDA intended to keep Pfizer’s data hidden for 75 years, but attorney Aaron Siri’s FOIA lawsuit forced the agency to release them. Naomi Wolf’s DailyClout led 3,250 volunteer experts in analyzing more than 450,000 pages of internal Pfizer documents and uncovered massive harms ignored by the FDA, detailed in The Pfizer Papers: Pfizer’s Crimes Against Humanity.
This effort revealed 1,233 deaths in the first three months of the vaccine rollout, and a litany of injuries: “industrial-scale blood diseases: blood clots, lung clots, leg clots; thrombotic thrombocytopenia, a clotting disease of the blood vessels; vasculitis, dementias, tremors, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, epilepsies.”
These harms are echoed by data from V-safe, a smartphone-based tool created by the CDC. Among 10.1 million registered V-safe users, 7.7 percent reported side effects so serious they were compelled to seek medical care, many more than once.
The main culprit is the Covid spike protein encoded in the vaccine’s mRNA technology. This protein is an antigen, or foreign immunogenic substance, located on the outer coat of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, that triggers an immune response. The mRNA in the shots instructs the body’s cells to produce identical spike proteins, inducing the immune system to create antibodies that bind to them, theoretically protecting vaccinated individuals against the virus. Unfortunately, this plan has a fatal flaw: The spike itself is toxic and potentially deadly.
Hundreds of peer-reviewed articles have demonstrated the spike’s potential for harm independent of the rest of the virus. Potential complications include myocarditis, blood clots, neurological injuries, and immune dysfunction. Pfizer’s own pre-market biodistribution studies show that vaccine components leave the injection site in the arm and penetrate every major organ system within hours, where mRNA can linger for weeks, forcing cells to churn out more and more of the toxic spike protein, which can persist for months. There is no way to predict how much spike protein the mRNA injections will produce in any individual, and there is no “off switch.”
According to CDC figures analyzed in Toxic Shot: Facing the Dangers of the COVID “Vaccines,” from 2021-2023 the US suffered 600,000 excess deaths not associated with Covid. Furthermore, Bureau of Labor Statistics data reveal that two million Americans became newly disabled, with unusual excesses in historically low-risk groups.
These trends coincided with mass Covid vaccination, including an unaccountable 59 percent surge in deaths among Americans ages 15-44 in the third quarter of 2021 compared to 2019. Crucially Covid contributed only part of this excess mortality: in that quarter the US suffered around 201,000 excess deaths, with Covid officially accounting for 123,000, leaving 78,000 excess deaths — 39 percent of the total — still unexplained.
Similar figures from abroad underscore a tragic loss of life among healthy people at minimal serious risk from the virus.
It could get worse. No carcinogenicity studies were performed on the injections prior to their launch, thus long-term cancer risks are essentially unknown. The spike protein also appears prone to prion-like misfolding, raising the specter of potential neurodegenerative disorders.
Medical ethics demand a balanced approach to every intervention, weighing potential benefits against potential harms. However, in the case of the Covid vaccines, federal agencies have chosen only to proclaim benefits. By surfacing data that bear upon both the positive and negative impacts of the Covid vaccines, and evaluating the pandemic performance of CDC, FDA, and other health agencies, the new administration can restore confidence and integrity in medicine and public health.
Republished from The Federalist
Author
Alberta Premier Danielle Smith visits Trump at Mar-a-Lago
Ottawa cop sues CBC after she was suspended for investigating link between COVID shot, infant deaths
The problem with deficits and debt
New lawsuit challenges Ontario’s decision to prohibit safe consumption services
Ivermectin & Fenbendazole Cancer Secrets Revealed
Undemocratic tax hike will kill Canadian jobs: Taxpayers Federation
RFK Jr. blames US government for Russia-Ukraine conflict: ‘We wanted the war’
-
Uncategorized1 day agoTaxpayers Federation calling on BC Government to scrap failed Carbon Tax
-
Daily Caller2 days agoTrump Could Put An End To Biden’s Offshore Wind Vanity Projects
-
Daily Caller2 days agoUS Ally’s Approach To Handling Drones Over Military Bases Is Vastly Different From Biden Admin
-
Business21 hours agoDonald Trump appoints Mel Gibson, Sylvester Stallone as special ambassadors to Hollywood
-
Business2 days agoConservatives demand Brookfield Asset Management reveal Mark Carney’s compensation
-
Bruce Dowbiggin1 day agoNo, Really. Carney Is An Outsider. And Libs Are Done
-
Alberta1 day agoWhy U.S. tariffs on Canadian energy would cause damage on both sides of the border
-
Business2 days agoReport: Chinese government considering sale of TikTok to Elon Musk, possible X merger