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Brownstone Institute

During the Crisis, Free Speech Worked Brilliantly

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10 minute read

From the Brownstone Institute

By Jeffrey A. Tucker

The free platform proved itself capable of quick course correction alongside maximum agility in processing the floods of constant new information. Meanwhile, the venues in which “misformation” has been anathematized ended up being the major source of exactly that.

There is only one major social media platform that is relatively free of censorship. That is X, once known as Twitter, and owned by Elon Musk, who has preached free speech for years and sacrificed billions in advertising dollars in order to protect it. If we don’t have that, he says, we lose freedom itself. He also maintains that it is the best path to finding the truth.

The crisis that broke out after the attempt on Donald Trump’s life put the principle in motion. I was posting regular updates and never censored. I’m not aware of anyone who was. We were getting second-by-second updates in real time. The videos were flying along with every conceivable rumor, many false and then corrected, alongside free speech “spaces” in which everyone was sharing their views.

During this time, Facebook and its suite of services fell silent, consistent with the new ethos of all these platforms. The idea is to censor all speech until it is absolutely confirmed by officials and then permit only that which is consistent with the press releases.

This is the habit born of the Covid years, and it stuck. Now all the platforms avoid any news that is fast in motion, except to broadcast precisely what they are supposed to broadcast. Maybe that works in most times when people are not paying attention. Readers do not know what they are missing. The trouble was that during these post-shooting hours when nearly everyone on the planet wanted updates, there were no press releases forthcoming.

By habit, I reached for what was once called television. The networks had plenty of talking heads and newscasters with their usual eloquence. What was missing from all the broadcasts that I saw in these hours were any factual updates. They too were waiting for confirmation of this or that before putting out any information at all beyond the basics. They let their “experts” speak as long as possible just to waste time before rolling out new advertisements.

Over time, I realized something. X was driving the whole of the news, while the newscasters had to wait for permission before reading scripted lines.

Meanwhile, on X, the situation was utterly wild. Posts were flying fast and furious. New rumors would circulate (the shooter’s name and affiliations, stories about a second shooting, claims that Trump was hit in the chest, and so on). But shortly after the rumor circulated, so did the debunking. The feature called “Community Notes” kept the faulty news in check, while the truth gradually circulated to the top. This happened on topic after topic.

The wildest theories ever were permitted to appear, while others would debunk them with reasoned arguments. The readers could decide for themselves. You could see how the seeming chaos gradually organized itself into communities seeking verification. Posters grew ever more careful about posting claims that could not be verified, or at least explaining what they were.

X was single-handedly holding the whole of the corporate media to account, and reporters and editors very obviously came to depend on their X feeds to figure out what to say next. It was the same with newspapers. When NYT, CNN, WaPo, and so on would make major missteps, posters on X would call them out, the word would reach the editors, and the headline or story would change.

In the end, X became the one place where you could find the fullness of truth. All the while, the old-world media was dishing out the most ridiculous headlines one could imagine. For many hours, the New York Times, CNN, Washington Post, and other such venues refused to say it was an assassination attempt on Trump. The headline led people to believe that this was a MAGA rally with some random shooters that got carried away and so Trump had to be ushered out. This really did happen, and readers were outraged.

CNN was probably the worst offender, with the following headline: “Secret Service Rushes Trump Offstage As He Falls at Rally.”

It took many hours and repeated attempts but eventually the mainstream media finally said that the incident was “being investigated” as an assassination attempt, even though it was very obvious that it was an attempt on his life that he barely survived with the slight turn of his head.

It was the kind of flurry of nonsense that further discredited the old corporate media right there in front of an entire planet that was no longer believing anything they said.

It’s hard to know why the corporate press did this. Were they just cautious and worried about misinformation? If so, how come so many of their headlines were of the same sort, that which refused to say that someone just tried to kill Trump? Were they just in the habit of waiting for officials to tell them what to say? Was it raw TDS that was driving this? It’s hard to know but the failure was conspicuous and obvious to all.

What stood out above all else was the way free speech on X worked to ferret out the real story, while actually driving forward the mainstream press to correct its errors and get the story right. One shudders to think how it would have all taken place in absence of this one platform, which became the go-to place for everyone. The most important lesson: free speech worked. And beautifully.

All Western societies are currently struggling with the question of just how much speech to allow on the Internet. The trajectory for years now has not been a good one. Once-free platforms have become more frozen, more propagandistic, more staid, and duller, even as this one platform has created a culture of freedom combined with community-driven accountability.

This freedom accomplished exactly what it was supposed to accomplish, while the censored platforms held onto misinformation much longer than they should have been.

Which makes the point. Too often, the battle over free speech is framed as misinformation/freedom vs. facts/truth/restriction. The very opposite has proven to be the case. The free platform proved itself capable of quick course correction alongside maximum agility in processing the floods of constant new information. Meanwhile, the venues in which “misformation” has been anathematized ended up being the major source of exactly that.

Freedom works. As messy as it is, it works better than any other system. Meanwhile, governments of the world have targeted X for destruction. Advertisers continue to boycott and regulators continue to threaten.

So far, it has not worked and thank goodness. But for X, the last 24 hours would have looked very different: nothing but propaganda, apart from a few marginal places here and there. Therein lies another irony: the way X is managed is increasing trust rather than reducing it.

The lesson should be obvious. The answer to the problems of free speech is more of it.

Author

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.

Brownstone Institute

The Latest “Bird Flu” Psyop

Published on

From Brownstone Institute

By Robert W. Malone Robert Malone

I am expert in influenza, and have consulted with the WHO over the past two decades on the topic of flu vaccines. This is one subject matter I am extremely knowledgeable about. This goes back to my medical school days, when I worked with Robert Lamb, one of the top influenza virus specialists in the world. It extended through much of my career, including my serving as Director of Clinical Influenza Vaccine Research for Solvay Biologicals, in which I oversaw over $200 million in federal (BARDA) alternative (cell-based) influenza vaccine research funding.

What is happening now with “Bird flu” is another psyops campaign being conducted by the administrative/deep state, apparently in partnership with Pharma, against the American people. They know and we know that the “vaccines” being produced will be somewhat ineffective, as all flu “vaccines” are. The government is chasing a rapidly evolving RNA virus with a syringe, just like they did with HIV and Covid-19.

Generally, the currently circulating avian influenza strain in the US does not include any cases of human-to-human transmission. And the current mortality, with over 60 cases identified, is 0%. NOT 50%.

All the while they are getting prepared to roll out masks, lockdowns, quarantines, etc.

All the while getting ready to roll out mRNA vaccines for poultry and livestock, as well as for all of us.

The more they test, the more “Bird flu” (H5N1) they will find. This “pandemic” is nothing more than an artifact of their newly developed protocols to test cattle, poultry, pets, people, and wildlife on a massive scale for avian influenza. In years past, this was not even considered. In the past, the USG did fund a massive testing and surveillance program called “Biowatch.” That program was a colossal failure and a massive waste of money. Billions of dollars.

Of course, these facilities producing the tests have been repurposed from the Covid-19 testing facilities.

Key questions include:

Will we all comply?

Will we be forced to comply?

Will President Trump go along with the PsyWar/psyops campaign again?

We will know soon enough.


As the United States is testing everyone who has even the mildest symptoms for the H5N1 (avian) influenza, guess what – they are finding it! This is what we call in the lab, a “sampling bias.”

Globally, from 1997 until the present, there have been 907 reported cases of H5N1. And in fact, this particular outbreak was not the worst – and it is the only one where a massive testing campaign has occurred. It appears that this is partly due to the new diagnostic capabilities developed and deployed during Covid-19. The more you test, the more you find. But is it clinically significant?

The Case Study of Tetanus: Supply Chain Issues.

The CDC recommends a booster for the tetanus vaccine every 10 years for adults.

However, research published almost a decade ago suggests that the protection from tetanus and diphtheria vaccination lasts at least 30 years after completing the standard childhood vaccination series.


“We have always been told to get a tetanus shot every 10 years, but actually, there is very little data to prove or disprove that timeline. When we looked at the levels of immunity among 546 adults, we realized that antibody titers against tetanus and diphtheria lasted much longer then previously believed.”

-Mark K. Slifka, Ph.D, study author


This research, published in a highly reputable journal, suggests that a revised vaccination schedule with boosters occurring at ages 30 and 60 would be sufficient. As this was published in early 2016, the US government, at the very least, could have commissioned easily designed prospective and retrospective studies to confirm these results. And those results would have been published by now, with the tetanus adult schedule revised to reflect what is now known about the durable immunity of tetanus and diphtheria vaccines. Reducing the boosters to just two shots would save the government vast sums of money.

Not only that, but both the tetanus and diphtheria vaccines carry risks for adults. It is estimated that 50%–85% of patients experience injection site pain or tenderness, 25%–30% experience edema and erythema. Higher preexisting anti-tetanus antibody levels are also associated with a higher reactogenicity rate and greater severity (reference).

Anaphylaxis after tetanus vaccination represents a rare but potentially serious adverse event, with an incidence of 1.6 cases per million doses. That means if 100 million adults receive the booster every ten years, 320 cases of anaphylaxis will be avoided over the 30-year period – from those two boosters being eliminated. Tetanus has always been a “rare” disease, spread through a skin wound contaminated by Clostridium tetani bacteria, commonly found in soil, dust, and manure. Before vaccines were available, there were about 500 cases a year, with most resulting in death. Concerns about vaccine-associated adverse events when immunizations were performed at short intervals led to a revision of the tetanus/diphtheria vaccination schedule in 1966 to once every 10 years for patients >6 years of age.

It has recently come to my attention that the traditional stand-alone tetanus vaccine (TT) that one used to receive as an adult has been discontinued due to WHO recommendations. Their reasoning being:


Use of TTCV combinations with diphtheria toxoid are strongly encouraged and single-antigen vaccines should be discontinued whenever feasible to help maintain both high diphtheria and high tetanus immunity throughout the life course.

WHO Position Paper


The CDC blames the shuttering of the only plant producing TT for the current lack of a stand-alone TT vaccine.

Now, in order to get a booster tetanus shot, an adult must take the following.

  • TdSanofi’s Tenivac protects against tetanus and diphtheria. Given to people 7 years and older as a booster every 10 years. *A version also includes pertussis (eg DPT), but due to the risk of encephalitis, it is not recommended as a booster.

Why is the DPT combination vaccine discouraged in adults due to encephalitis risk, but is it recommended for children? Another one of those inconvenient issues that plague the CDC-recommended childhood vaccine schedule.

From the CDC website

While supplies of diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis (Tdap) vaccines (Sanofi’s Adacel and GSK’s Boostrix) aren’t limited, they are more expensive, and a very small fraction of patients can develop encephalopathy (brain damage) from the pertussis component.

In the United States, diphtheria is virtually non-existent, with only 14 cases reported between 1996 and 2018. Of those cases reported, most were from international travelers or immigrants.

The market for a stand-alone TT vaccine vanished worldwide due to WHO recommendations to stop the sales of the TT vaccine. Which was due to the relatively few, economically stressed countries where diphtheria is still an issue. So, therefore, the only facility manufacturing the TT vaccine was shut down within the last year.

The blowback from the WHO recommendations is that now there is a shortage of tetanus and diphtheria (Td) vaccine in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention  (CDC) website.

This all comes down to poor planning. And illustrates why supply chain issues and infectious disease countermeasure stockpiles are essential considerations for governments.

The good news is that unless one is immunosuppressed, most of us have almost lifelong immunity against tetanus and diphtheria.

My recommendation is that unless one gets a very deep and dirty puncture wound and has not had a tetanus shot in over ten years or longer, avoid that booster.


Here is the ugly secret about influenza vaccines. They are given to protect one group of vulnerable people. Those who are immunosuppressed, and that cohort includes the very elderly.

If those influenza vaccine manufacturing plants only make enough vaccines for those susceptible to a severe case of the flu, there would not be enough of a market to sustain their production costs. Furthermore, if there were a pandemic of some sort of highly pathogenic influenza, there would not be sufficient capacity to make enough vaccines to meet demand.

Egg-based influenza vaccine production requires super “clean” eggs; about 100 million “clean” fertilized eggs are needed annually for vaccine production in the US alone. Candidate vaccine viruses are injected into the eggs. If the process is shuttered, the whole production comes to a screeching halt. Many vaccines can be stored for long periods. Even as long as a decade. This stockpiling system works well for DNA viruses with a low mutation rate. Stockpiling is rarely a solution for vaccines developed for RNA viruses that mutate rapidly.

Therefore, the influenza vaccine is pushed on the American people year after year. As a way to maintain “warm base manufacturing” and ensure sufficient market size to support industrial operations.

I have spoken on this subject at the WHO and US government agencies, as well as many, many conferences. Unfortunately, because the mRNA and RNA vaccine platforms require a lot of freezer space (commonly -20°C) to stockpile for even short periods, this limits the ability to stockpile. Furthermore, the frozen storage requirements are only for up to 6 months. That means stockpiling for more extended storage is not currently done, and it is back to square one on the supply chain issue.

The issue with freezer space and mRNA vaccines is one that most likely won’t be solved. This benefits the manufacturers of this vaccine technology – the US government has an endless need for new vaccines as the old ones expire.

My small hope is that the mRNA platform will be too costly to justify its continued use, as appeals concerning safety (or lack of) seem to fall on deaf FDA ears.


In the meantime, don’t believe the hype generated by ex-officials from the Biden and Trump administrations.

Both Dr. Lena Wen, CNN correspondent, and Dr. Redfield, ex-director of the CDC, have gone on to mainstream media shows and promoted the narrative that the case fatality rate for avian influenza is over 50 percent. This, frankly, is a lie that the WHO is promoting. Bird flu generally is not tested for when someone has flu symptoms. When an outbreak of avian flu occurs on a poultry farm, testing of farm workers who are seriously ill will commence. This has led to the generation of the 890 case reports since 2003. Of those seriously ill patients reported to the WHO, over 50 percent died.

This is not an actual case fatality rate of avian flu around the world. It is, again, a sampling error due to a tiny data set derived from those who are at greatest risk due to general health. And just like the WHO reported on an exaggerated case fatality rate for mPOX, which was also based on a sampling error, or for Covid-19, again a sampling error, it is now used to justify psychological bioterrorism on the world population. Please don’t fall for it.

El Gato Malo on X succinctly points out that Dr. Leana Wen and her public health ilk are advancing:

1. Do more of the same lousy testing used in Covid-19 to overstate a disease and cause panic.

2. Develop another non-sterilizing non-vaccine that does not work to be pushed on “the vulnerable.”

3. Doing it “right now” under EUA, so whoever makes these tests and jabs can cash in and be shielded from liability.

4. Claiming that proxies like “triggers antibody production” demonstrate clinical clinical efficacy.

It’s just one last smash-and-grab for cash before the Brandon (Biden) administration ends. Anyone who falls for this one will truly fall for anything.

Question: what are Leana’s conflicts of interest? Who is paying her or giving her grants?


For those that haven’t viewed Dr. Redfield speaking of the avian flu case fatality rate, have a watch below. It is genuinely shocking. This fear-mongering comes from an ex-director of the CDC. Shame on him.

Frankly, it reminds me of the 51 intelligence officials claiming that Hunter Biden’s laptop was fake.

One has to wonder what conflict of interest motivated him to say this on national TV?

Remember in the US, there have been 62 cases of avian influenza discovered, and all but one case were very mild.


This deep dive into the supply chain issues is meant to show that public health has put itself into a groupthink situation that it can’t escape.

Many solutions to this quandary do not involve an evermore expanding schedule of vaccinations, stockpiled for some future use. I have some general thoughts before I sign off.

  • The use of early treatments via safe, proven drugs is a good solution.
  • We now have many antibiotics to treat bacterial infections. Vaccines do not always need to be our first defense.
  • Our medical system is very good at treating infectious diseases. The risks from such diseases are much less than it once was. People do not have to live in fear of infectious disease. I like to ask people, how many people do you know have died of flu? If you know of any (I don’t), how old were they?
  • The need to scare people into more and more vaccines is a dangerous trend.
  • And yes, the more vaccinations one receives, the more likely an adverse event.
  • Vaccinating pregnant women and babies should always be a last resort.
  • It is time for Congress to rethink the vaccine liability laws.

Republished from the author’s Substack

Author

Robert W. Malone

Robert W. Malone is a physician and biochemist. His work focuses on mRNA technology, pharmaceuticals, and drug repurposing research.

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Brownstone Institute

The Real Purpose of Net Zero

Published on

From the Brownstone Institute

By Jefferey JaxenJefferey Jaxen 

The recent Telegraph headline rang out of England recently with unsettling tones: Tenth of farmland to be axed for net zero

More than 10 per cent of farmland in England is set to be diverted towards helping to achieve net zero and protecting wildlife by 2050, the Environment Secretary will reveal on Friday.

Swathes of the countryside are on course to be switched to solar farms, tree planting and improving habitats for birds, insects and fish.

The move comes on the back of an aggressive and highly unpopular inheritance tax placed on generational farmers by British politician Rachel Reeves that has drawn sustained protest in the country. The commercial officer of Britain’s largest supermarket chain Tesco warned Reeves’ tax raid on farmers is placing “UK’s future food security is at stake.

What if that’s the whole point? Tucker Carlson recently asked Piers Morgan this uncomfortable question.

Morgan refused to let his mind go there. And for good reason. It’s a dark premise. Yet one with historical context that must be analyzed due to the aggressive moves now in play against farmers around the world and humanity at large.

The British East India Company was the early template for the modern mega-corporate monopoly, globalization & vehicle to expand colonial power. Eventually dominating trade between Indian and Britain and far beyond. To say the company’s practices were ruthless would be putting it lightly.

Thomas Malthus was the East India Company’s first economist training individuals for service as administrators for the organization. Malthus was also a eugenicist in the economic wheelhouse of the world’s largest corporate monopoly with its own private army.

He wrote the following in his 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population:

The power of population is so superior to the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race. The vices of mankind are active and able ministers of depopulation. They are the precursors in the great army of destruction; and often finish the dreadful work themselves. But should they fail in this war of extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence, and plague, advance in terrific array, and sweep off their thousands and ten thousands. Should success be still incomplete, gigantic inevitable famine stalks in the rear, and with one mighty blow levels the population with the food of the world

Eugenicists aren’t picky. Whatever gets people off the planet en masse – they’re into. Notice his last sentence, when bases are loaded and “success be still incomplete,” it’s the famine that is the preferred home run hitter – the weapon of choice.

In the 1860s, the full weight of the East India Company’s monopoly helped kill off India’s economy of textile industries putting countless out of work and forcing them into agriculture. This, in turn, made the Indian economy much more dependent on the whims of seasonal monsoons as dry seasons gripped the country.

The Indian and British press carried reports of rising prices, dwindling grain reserves, and the desperation of peasants no longer able to afford rice.

All of this did little to stir the colonial administration into action. In the mid-19th Century, it was common economic wisdom that government intervention in famines was unnecessary and even harmful. The market would restore a proper balance. Any excess deaths, according to Malthusian principles, were nature’s way of responding to overpopulation. 

-BBC

The current overlay argument government, NGOs, and global bodies like the United Nations are using to interrupt farming during present day is because of ‘net zero’ goals.

[See video below on the origin of the ‘climate crisis’ narrative highlighting the Club of Rome’s hand in crafting the modern day operation.]

Cows create greenhouse gases, carbon emissions from fertilizers, destruction of wildlife, and people themselves are all, we are told to believe, BIG negatives for the earth. Therefore they must be reduced.

Not in an orderly way, but as fast as possible because we’re told change in climate is the biggest, world-ending threat humans face – or something like that.

The United Nations [think Agenda 2030, Paris Agreement] has been the prime mover, policy-shaping action arm to accomplish this ‘net zero’ utopia. Enter Julian Huxley.

Huxley emerges after World War 2 as a crucial bridging figure from what has been referred to as “old eugenics” [Malthus] to a new eugenics based on molecular biology and human evolution.

In 1945 as World War 2 was ending, the United Nations was founded in New York. That same year, the United Nations Conference for the Establishment of an Education and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) was also founded in London with Julian Huxley becoming the first Director-General.

One year later Huxley wrote UNESCO ITS PURPOSE AND ITS PHILOSOPHY stating:

At the moment, it is probable that the indirect effect of civilisation is dysgenic instead of eugenic; and in any case it seems likely that the dead weight of genetic stupidity, physical weakness, mental instability, and disease-proneness, which already exist in the human species, will prove too great a burden for real progress to be achieved. Thus even though it is quite true that any radical eugenic policy will be for many years politically and psychologically impossible, it will be important for Unesco to see that the eugenic problem is examined with the greatest care, and that the public mind is informed of the issues at stake so that much that now is unthinkable may at least become thinkable

As it appears we are now in the home stretch of the environmental overlay of modern-day eugenics, the consensus-building and subtle messaging are being done away with.

A 2022 research article published in the journal Social Studies of Science titled Environmental Malthusianism and Demography writes:

Some bioethicists argue that, because ‘we are threatened with more population than the planet can bear’, humans simply ‘don’t have a right to more than one biological child’ (Conly, 2016: 2). Some recommend that governments act to uphold this limit (Hickey et al., 2016). Even feminist historians and sociologists of science, including some sharp critics of the population control projects of the late 20th century, now call for measures to reduce childbearing as a means of combatting climate change. Environmental Malthusianism, the idea that human population growth is the primary driver of environmental harms and population control a prerequisite to environmental protection, is experiencing a resurgence.

The current leadership of the UK, EU member states and the U.S. in regards to climate. Where Keir Starmer is racing to fulfill ‘net zero’ goals, as of last week, the U.S. has withdrawn from the Paris Agreement under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change via executive order.

Without food, food production, and farming, there is famine. It’s that simple. The failed pandemic response was a reminder of that. 

It has been assumed that leaders and policymakers, especially the United Nations, know these basic historical and current facts. Farmers are becoming endangered because of government policy to meet ‘climate goals’ and it’s being allowed to happen.

Republished from the author’s Substack

Author

Jefferey Jaxen

Jefferey Jaxen is a health journalist and featured in his weekly segment, ’The Jaxen Report’, on The HighWire. As an investigative journalist, researcher, and writer, Jefferey serves as Lead editor of The HighWire News and Opinion Team.Serving on the front lines of society’s shift towards higher consciousness since 2014, Jefferey is constantly working behind the scenes to spotlight the untold, censored and under-reported stories of our time.Covering Big Pharma corruption, the censorship complex created by social media giants and the underreported issues of drug and vaccine safety since 2014.

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