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Brownstone Institute

The Choice Is Liberty or Lockdown

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BY JEFFREY A. TUCKER

Two years after the first edition, the second edition of Liberty or Lockdown is now in print, just as the US president announced the end of the pandemic. The emergency declaration that excused the mass violation of human rights is still in effect.

The significance of the timing of the first edition of this book is obvious to anyone who has lived through our strange times: September 2020. That was six months following the lockdown of most of the world during which places where people might “congregate” were shut by governments.

The reason was to avoid, mitigate, eliminate maybe, or otherwise diminish the disease impact of the virus that caused Covid. This was before the vaccine came out, before the Great Barrington Declaration, and before data on excess deaths the world over showed vast carnage from these policy decisions.

The state was unleashed on the population as never before, in the name of science. There are no words to describe my outrage then and now.

The onset of lockdowns put me to work trying to understand the thinking, a process which took me back through the history of pandemics, the relationship between infectious disease and freedom, and the origin of lockdown ideology in 2005.

The times during which this book was written were beyond strange. People went full medieval in every way in which that term can be understood. There was public flogging in the form of masking and the abolition of fun, feudalistic segregation and disease shaming, the practical end of most medical care unless it was for Covid, the scapegoating of non-compliers, the neglect and abuse of children, and a turn to other pre-modern forms. All of this became worse once the non-sterilizing vaccines appeared on the market that many if not most people were forced to accept at pains of losing their jobs.

Writing now in September of 2022, I cannot even imagine going through the pain of putting this research together again. I’m very pleased it was done then because now this book survives as a marker that there was dissent, if nothing else. I’ve added no new essays though I’ve written hundreds since then. The second edition should really stand as is.

This was also a period of time – still is today – when vast numbers of people feel betrayed by technology, media, politicians, and even their one-time intellectual heroes. It is a time of grave destruction with still-broken supply chains, roaring inflation, mass cultural demoralization, labor market confusions, shattered lives of young and old, and terrible uncertainty about the future.

When I put this book to bed in 2020, I had hoped we were near the end of this disaster. How wrong I was! Let us hope, too, that it is a period of rebuilding, however quietly it is taking place.

Starting Brownstone Institute is part of that for me. So many others have joined. Today we published articles from all over the world since so many around the world have shared in this suffering. What will it take to emerge from the other side?

From my point of view, it is not complicated. We need a renewed appreciation of human liberty and rights. That’s it. That is the whole prescription. It does not sound hard but apparently it is. This task will likely consume the rest of our lives.

Jeffrey Tucker

September 2022

Introduction to the Portuguese Edition (2021)

As I write, and much to my astonishment and sadness, the world is still in chains. These chains have been created by governments. They bind their citizens’ choices and actions in the name of virus control. I had expected the folly of lockdowns to end within weeks after their imposition, once the data were in on the demographics of severe outcomes. But through a terrible combination of factors – government and public ignorance and fear, media frenzy, big tech censorship, the outsized voice of fake lockdown science, and an unwillingness on the part of the lockdown industry to admit error – they continued for a full year and continue today.

On the day I’m writing, Paris and Berlin are once again under lockdown, Sao Paulo is being brutalized, and ever larger parts of Eastern and Western Europe are experimenting with a third round of failure. Anthony Fauci in the US is all over the media essentially denying that human immunity exists in any meaningful sense, kids are still being kept out of school, businesses are being forced to engage in preposterous rituals just to survive, most members of the ruling class parade in masks in a theatrical affectation that they are following the science, and a weary people are massively divided between those who want to believe the authorities and those who have lost all credulity in public health.

Our communities are shattered, our houses of worship in diaspora, our spirits crushed, and our expectations for the good life in tatters.

Also pouring in are the devastating data on the consequences of lockdown. The economic costs are stupefying, beyond anything we imagined we would ever see. The cultural costs are too, with arts and music devastated, along with the industries that support them. The most interesting and possibly counterintuitive costs are related to public health itself: the missed cancer screenings, the missed appointments, the prevalence of suicide ideation, the record drug overdoses, the alcoholism, the mental and emotional despair. As for settled matters of human rights – the freedom to speak, travel, worship, learn, trade – they are suddenly all in question.

It’s true that parts of the world are entirely open, and thank goodness for them. These places are experiencing no worse outcomes, and often much better outcomes, from the severe aspects of this disease than those who are still experimenting with rolling lockdowns. More evidence pours in by the day: this is a normal virus, with natural immunity, with distinct characteristics that should be mitigated by medical professionals one person at a time – not managed by politicians and their advisors with agendas that have nothing to do with public health.

I’ve been involved in the debate over the government’s role in disease control for at least 15 years. Until last year, the consensus of the experts was that governments have a very limited role, simply because of the capacity of pathogens to outsmart even the best intentions of the powerful and their plans. In the golden age of public health in the 20th century, such brutal methods as public quarantines, shutdowns, mandatory masks, closures, travel restrictions, and universal stay-at-home orders were specifically ruled out as counterproductive, overly disruptive, and futile for achieving the task of minimizing damage from new pathogens. The powers to do all this have been there for the better part of 15 years or possibly for longer but they were not deployed for good reasons.

For reasons that will become increasingly clear over time, 2020 became the year of the great experiment. Suddenly, “nonpharmaceutical interventions” would replace our laws, our settled traditions of liberty, and love of peace and prosperity, and even the ideals of the Enlightenment itself. We put fear above rationality, division above community, power above rights, wild experiments above settled science, and the intellectual pretensions of a tiny ruling class above the interests of the social order.

It was all so shocking and inexplicable that most of the world’s population sat through month after month in a state of confused delirium, attached to screens with pundits preaching to us daily that all of this was necessary and good. And yet, we all recall now that humanity has always lived amidst pathogens new and old. We dealt with them and cobbled together an implicit social contract around infectious disease: we agreed nonetheless to build civilization and experience social progress, treating sickness and death as something to mitigate within the context of human rights. For the first time ever, we tried a global lockdown as scripted by scientific elites.

But now writing one year later, I’m pleased to say that the days of shock and awe are over, gradually being replaced by disillusionment with the ruling class and incredulity toward those who did this to us. There is no power on earth strong enough or rich enough to suppress truth. Truth exists within the realm of ideas, and that is a realm of infinite reproducibility, malleability, and portability, subject only to the willingness of the curious and courageous to tell that truth in every possible way to as many people as possible in every venue available. This is how truth wins, reaching one mind at a time.

We’ve all been tested during this last year. What are our intellectual commitments? Do we really believe them or have we adopted them for career reasons? What are the pressures to which we will succumb in order to relinquish our principles for prestige? How much are we willing to give up in order to fight for a cause larger than ourselves? I’ve been surrounded by heroes this year who have inspired me – God bless them – and others who were unwilling to step up when their voices were most needed, much to my sadness.

That aside, let’s all admit something: part of each of us has been broken by these lockdowns. No one wants to live in a world in which our essential rights and liberties can be granted or taken away based on the judgment calls of a handful of scientists who have no regard for our traditions of law. That’s called tyranny. We now know how terrible it is. And how futile. How demoralizing. How utterly ghastly and unconscionable.

I somehow always come around to silver linings, not only because it is my personality but also because they always exist. The silver lining is that much of the world has lived through the apotheosis of statism, that ugly ideology that posits that force is a better way to organize the world than choice. We dabbled in it as societies for the better part of 100 years and then suddenly in one year we went full on, just as a test. That test completely failed. We know it first hand. As I write, I’m confident that we’ve seen the worst of it.

Now is our chance – right now – to choose another path. We don’t need to work out every detail. We don’t need an alternative plan. And it’s not just about getting a new set of political leaders. What we need is a different philosophy. I humbly suggest that the philosophy that built modern civilization – that which we once called liberalism – will do just fine as a base line. Let us believe it, rally around it, institutionalize it, protect it, and fight for it. In doing so, we are not just working in our own self-interest but also in the common good of all.

Never lockdowns. Never again.

Author

  • Jeffrey A. Tucker, Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute, is an economist and author. He has written 10 books, including Liberty or Lockdown, and thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He writes a daily column on economics at The Epoch Times, and speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.

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Brownstone Institute

First Amendment Blues

Published on

From the Brownstone Institute

By Philip DaviesPhilip Davies 

You might think these are quite rare but not a bit of it; 13,200 of these were recorded in the last 12 months, and that’s around 36 a day, and they go on your record and sometimes mean you end up with no job. They also have new laws planned to control misinformation and disinformation, something not just confined to the UK. Similar laws are planned for Ireland, Australia, Canada, and the EU.

I’m envious. The US has something the UK doesn’t have, namely a First Amendment. Yes I know there are those who wish the US didn’t have it either, including, I understand, John Kerry and that woman who still thinks she beat Trump the first time around. Kerry kind of wishes that the First Amendment wasn’t quite so obstructive to his plans. But from where I stand, you should be thankful for it.

Not only does the UK not have a First Amendment, it doesn’t have a constitution either, and that makes for worrying times right now. Free speech has little currency with Gen Z and the way it looks, even less with the new UK Labour government. Even Elon Musk, who takes a surprising interest in our little country, has recently declared the UK a police state.

It’s not surprising. Take for instance the case of Alison Pearson, who had the police knocking on her door this Remembrance Sunday. They had come to warn her they were investigating a tweet she had posted a whole year ago which someone had complained about. They were investigating whether it constituted a Non-Crime Hate Incident or NCHI. Yes, you heard me right, a ‘non-crime’ hate incident and no, this is not something out of Orwell, it’s straight out of the College of Policing’s playbook.

If you haven’t heard of them, you can thank your First Amendment. In the UK you can get a police record for something you posted on X that someone else didn’t like and you haven’t even committed a crime. NCHIs are a way they have of getting around the law in the same way John Kerry would like to get around the First Amendment, except it’s real where I live.

Alison Pearson is a reporter for the Daily Telegraph, but that doesn’t mean she can write what she likes. When she asked the police what the tweet was which was objected to, she was told they couldn’t tell her that. When she asked who the complainant was, they said they couldn’t tell her that either. They added, that she shouldn’t call them a complainant, they were officially the victim. That’s what due process is like when you don’t have a First Amendment or a constitution. Victims of NCHI in the UK are decided without a trial or a defense. They asked, very politely, if Pearson would like to come voluntarily to the police station for a friendly interview. If she didn’t want to come voluntarily, they would put her on a wanted list and she would eventually be arrested. Nice choice.

It’s true that there has been a public ruckus over this particular case, but the police are unapologetic and have doubled down. Stung into action by unwanted publicity, they are now saying they have raised the matter from an NCHI to an actual crime investigation. Which means they think she can be arrested and put in prison for expressing her opinion on X. And of course they are right. In the UK that’s where we are right now. Pearson tried to point out the irony of two police officers turning up on her door to complain about her free speech on Remembrance Day of all days, when we recall the thousands who died to keep this a free country, but irony is lost on those who have no memory of what totalitarianism means.

The way things are looking I would say things can only get worse. The new Labour government has made it clear that it wants to beef up the reporting of NCHIs and make them an effective tool for clamping down on hurtful speech. You might think these are quite rare but not a bit of it; 13,200 of these were recorded in the last 12 months, and that’s around 36 a day, and they go on your record and sometimes mean you end up with no job. They also have new laws planned to control misinformation and disinformation, something not just confined to the UK. Similar laws are planned for Ireland, Australia, Canada, and the EU. Germany in particular is keen to remove all misinformation from the internet, I understand.

Whenever I see the word ‘misinformation’ these days I automatically translate it in my head to what it really means, which is ‘dissent.’ Western countries, former champions of free speech, the bedrock of liberty and individual choice, en masse it seems, now want to outlaw dissent. What is coordinating this attack on free expression, I don’t know, but it’s real and it’s upon us. We are slowly being intellectually suffocated into not expressing any opinion that others might find objectionable or that might contradict what the government said. If you had told me that would happen in my lifetime, I would have called you a liar.

I live in the UK, the home of the Bill of Rights and the Magna Carta, and the mother of parliamentary democracy. I was proud that we produced men like John Milton, John Stuart Mill, and Thomas Paine, that we understood the importance of the Areopagitica, the Rights of Man, and incorporated On Liberty into our social thinking. But those days seem long gone when police knock on your door to arrest you for an X post.

So I’m glad someone somewhere has a First Amendment even if we don’t. It may be your last defense in that republic of yours, if you can keep it.

Author

Philip Davies

Philip Davies is Visiting Fellow at Bournemouth University, UK. He gained a PhD in Quantum Mechanics at the University of London and has been an academic for over 30 years teaching Masters students how to think for themselves. He is now retired and has the luxury of thinking for himself. He fills in his spare time with a small YouTube channel where he interviews amazing academics and indulges in writing books and articles.

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Brownstone Institute

The Most Devastating Report So Far

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From the Brownstone Institute

By Jay BhattacharyaJayanta Bhattacharya 

The House report on HHS Covid propaganda is devastating. The Biden administration spent almost $1 billion to push falsehoods about Covid vaccines, boosters, and masks on the American people. If a pharma company had run the campaign, it would have been fined out of existence.

HHS engaged a PR firm, the Fors Marsh Group (FMG), for the propaganda campaign. The main goal was to increase Covid vax uptake. The strategy: 1. Exaggerate Covid mortality risk 2. Downplay the fact that there was no good evidence that the Covid vax stops transmission.

The propaganda campaign extended beyond vax uptake and included exaggerating mask efficacy and pushing for social distancing and school closures.

Ultimately, since the messaging did not match reality, the campaign collapsed public trust in public health.

The PR firm (FMG) drew most of its faulty science from the CDC’s “guidance,” which ignored the FDA’s findings on the vaccine’s limitations, as well as scientific findings from other countries that contradicted CDC groupthink.

The report details the CDC’s mask flip-flopping through the years. It’s especially infuriating to recall the CDC’s weird, anti-scientific, anti-human focus on masking toddlers with cloth masks into 2022.

President Biden’s Covid advisor Ashish K. Jha waited until Dec. 2022 (right after leaving government service) to tell the country that “[t]here is no study in the world that shows that masks work that well.” What took him so long?

In 2021, former CDC director, Rochelle Walensky rewrote CDC guidance on social distancing at the behest of the national teachers’ union, guaranteeing that schools would remain closed to in-person learning for many months.

During this period, the PR firm FMG put out ads telling parents that schools would close unless kids masked up, stayed away from friends, and got Covid-vaccinated.

In March 2021, even as the CDC told the American people that the vaxxed did not need to mask, the PR firm ran ads saying that masks were still needed, even for the vaxxed. “It’s not time to ease up” we were told, in the absence of evidence any of that did any good.

In 2021, to support the Biden/Harris administration’s push for vax mandates, the PR firm pushed the false idea that the vax stopped Covid transmission. When people started getting “breakthrough” infections, public trust in public health collapsed.

Later, when the FDA approved the vax for 12 to 15-year-old kids, the PR firm told parents that schools could open in fall 2021 only if they got their kids vaccinated. These ads never mentioned side effects like myocarditis due to the vax.

HHS has scrubbed the propaganda ads from this era from its web pages. It’s easy to see why. They are embarrassing. They tell kids, in effect, that they should treat other kids like biohazards unless they are vaccinated.

When the Delta variant arrived, the PR firm doubled down on fear-mongering, masking, and social distancing.

In September 2021, CDC director Walensky overruled the agency’s external experts to recommend the booster to all adults rather than just the elderly. The director’s action was “highly unusual” and went beyond the FDA’s approval of the booster for only the elderly.

The PR campaign and the CDC persistently overestimated the mortality risk of Covid infection in kids to scare parents into vaccinating their children with the Covid vax.

In Aug. 2021, the military imposed its Covid vax mandate, leading to 8,300 servicemen being discharged. Since 2023, the DOD has been trying to get the discharged servicemen to reenlist. What harm has been done to American national security by the vax mandate?

The Biden/Harris administration imposed the OSHA, CMS, and military vax mandates, even though the CDC knew that the Delta variant evaded vaccine immunity. The PR campaign studiously avoided informing Americans about waning vaccine efficacy in the face of variants.

The propaganda campaign hired celebrities and influencers to “persuade” children to get the Covid vax.

I think if a celebrity is paid to advertise a faulty product, that celebrity should be partially liable if the product harms some people.

In the absence of evidence, the propaganda campaign ran ads telling parents that the vaccine would prevent their kids from getting Long Covid.

With the collapse in public trust in the CDC, parents have begun to question all CDC advice. Predictably, the HHS propaganda campaign has led to a decline in the uptake of routine childhood vaccines.

The report makes several recommendations, including formally defining the CDC’s core mission to focus on disease prevention, forcing HHS propaganda to abide by the FDA’s product labeling rules, and revamping the process of evaluating vaccine safety.

Probably the most important recommendation: HHS should never again adopt a policy of silencing dissenting scientists in an attempt to create an illusion of consensus in favor of CDC groupthink.

You can find a copy of the full House report here. The HHS must take its findings seriously if there is any hope for public health to regain public.

Author

Jay Bhattacharya

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is a physician, epidemiologist and health economist. He is Professor at Stanford Medical School, a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economics Research, a Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, a Faculty Member at the Stanford Freeman Spogli Institute, and a Fellow at the Academy of Science and Freedom. His research focuses on the economics of health care around the world with a particular emphasis on the health and well-being of vulnerable populations. Co-Author of the Great Barrington Declaration.

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