Brownstone Institute
The Post-Ideological Age
Fr0m the Brownstone Institute
Conventional wisdom has it that the US and much of the Western world has polarized into right and left. These tribes are hard-core and share mutual loathing. That model of understanding pervades all popular media and consumes the culture, such that everyone feels the need to choose. It’s simple, harkens back to Cold War binaries, drums up media attention, and further divides the population in ways that benefit the leaders of both sides.
The reality underneath the surface is otherwise. The old ideologies are fractured and most serious people are trying to piece together something other than the old frameworks. The turning was slow at first, probably beginning at the end of the Cold War, but culminated in the response to the Covid crisis. Despite the claim, left and right have never been more scrambled. The reassembling is also occurring right now but it looks much more like the ruling class vs everyone else.
The Covid policy response confounded every ideological outlook. For the center-left that had always trusted public health, seeing the principles of 100 years shredded in an instant was a shock. For the center-right, to see the Republicans in power acquiesce to the idea of “shutting down the economy” was truly hard to believe. The concerns of the traditional civil libertarians, including free speech, were trampled. Those who had traditionally rallied around the rights and interests of business big and small watched with horror as Big Business joined the lockdown armies and small businesses were crushed. The believers in science as a standard of truth to rise above it all were astonished to see every journal and every association compromised by state priorities.
As for nearly everyone who believed that we still lived in a representative democracy, in which elected leaders held the power, they were astonished to watch as politicians became fearful and powerless over the many layers of entrenched bureaucratic experts in government, the deepest layers of which seem to be taking charge over traditional civilian agencies. The people who had always regarded pharma as constantly foiled by the FDA watched in amazement as these vaccine-wielding powerhouses called the shots over all approval processes.
As the dissidents began to cut through the censorship that was almost immediate in the spring of 2020, we discovered a fascinating thing. Our traditional allies were not with us. I’ve heard this from the right, left, and libertarians all. Whether in academia or media, no one was speaking out in ways we might have expected. As Naomi Wolf put it in a private seminar, in words that shocked me at the time, “all our past alliances, institutions, and networks have collapsed.”
There was something about the excuse for the imposition of sudden despotism that seemed to confound all the main voices on all sides. That was a clue that something was very wrong, and it was more than betrayal. It was a sign that we had profoundly misunderstood the intellectual lay of the land.
One might have supposed that church leaders would protest the closing of houses of worship. For the most part, they did not. It was the same with old-line civil liberties organizations. They fell silent. The Libertarian Party had nothing to say and neither did most libertarian think tanks; even now the party’s standard bearer was fully in with the lockdown program when it mattered. The left fell in line and so did the right. Indeed, major “conservative” outlets weighed in on behalf of lockdowns and vaccine mandates – same as the traditional “liberal” outlets.
And what did the dissidents have in common? They were concerned with evidence, science, calm, and traditional law and liberty. Crucially, they were in a career position to say something about the problem. That is to say, most of the dissidents were not in a position of dependency on the major systems of power and influence, whether in the nonprofit world, academia, Big Media and Tech, and otherwise. They spoke out because they cared and because they were in a position to do so.
Gradually over the months and years, we have found each other. And what have we found? We’ve discovered that people who were seemingly on different sides solely due to branding of the past had far more in common than we thought.
And as a result, and partly because we were now in a position to trust each other more than we might otherwise, we began to listen to each other. More importantly, we have begun to learn from each other, discovering all the ways in which our previous tribal connections had blinded us to realities that we had right before us the whole time but we simply could not see.
As an example, many on the left who had long defended the rise of government power as a check on the depredations of private business were amazed to see these very powers turned against the classes of people whose interests they had long defended, namely the poor and working classes. If nothing else, the pandemic response was a prime example of class exploitation of the people on behalf of the economic, cultural, and political elites.
Conversely, those of us who had long championed the rights of business were forced to look squarely at the reality that the largest corporations, heavily consolidated after decades of loose credit, were working so closely with government as if there really was no difference between the public and private sector. Indeed it was hard to tell the difference.
Those who had long championed the rights of media against elite attacks discovered that there really was very little difference between mainstream corporate media and government public relations departments, who in turn were carrying water for the most powerful corporations that stood to gain trillions from the whole caper.
Watching all this unfold in real time was an astonishing experience. Above all else, it was intellectually disorienting. And so those of us who care about holding an accurate understanding of the world had to regroup, draw on what we knew to be true which was confirmed but rethinking postulates and dogmas we assumed to be true but which turned out to be false in the emergency.
Yes, these days have ended, at least for now, but they leave a vast carnage of old ideological systems in the dustbin of history. Part of the job of Brownstone Institute, and perhaps even our main job, is to figure out the operations of the world in a realistic way, backed by evidence and the best theory, toward finding our way back to the fundamental principles that have built civilization over the centuries. That goal is inseparable from the very idea of rights, and public institutions that are responsive to the people.
What we have learned is that our ideological system not only didn’t protect us; they could not even fully explain the strange realities that unfolded.
Everyone in the dissident community agrees fully with the main theme of The Lord of the Rings: power is the great killer of the human spirit. Our job is to figure out who has that power, how to dismantle it, and the right path to preventing something like this from ever happening again. And by “something like this,” we mean everything: the exploitation, the restrictions on peaceful behavior, the agency capture and corporate aggression, the censorship and betrayal of the promise of the information age, the crushing of property rights and enterprise, and the violation of bodily autonomy.
In our quieter moments, all of us are wondering how we could have been so confused about the ideological bifurcations of the past. Why were we so entrenched in them? And to what extent did those ideologies create an artificial veneer over the growing problems underneath the binary overlay? This was surely the case and it went on for decades.
We think back now on populist movements of the past and see how many of them, whether ostensibly from the right or left, ultimately came from the same place, the perception that the system was being run by something or someone other than is being advertised. The Occupy Wall Street movement ultimately came from the same instincts as the Truckers Revolt in Canada that came some twelve years later, and yet one is called left and one is called right.
It is impossible to separate the BLM protests and sometimes riots from reaction against being locked up for the better part of two months from a virus that was known to be a threat mainly to the aged and infirm. That unleashed predictable anger that was often deeply destructive. And the shock and outrage at the vaccine and mask mandates stemmed from the same basic impulse: the human desire not to live in cages of someone else’s creation but rather be in charge of our own bodies and lives.
It’s the same with the anti-censorship movements today, and the growing nationalist movements around the world that wonder whether or not nation-states even have authority anymore to control the massive and hegemonic global forces that seem to be pulling the strings behind the scenes.
All these shifts in the firmament of opinion and politics come from the same place: the desire to take back control of our lives.
This means many things. It includes causes that many on the right have neglected: food freedom, medical freedom, corporate consolidation, the rise of the corporate state, private-sector censorship pushed by agency outsourcing, the militarization of civilian agencies, and deep-state power. And the same is true for the honest left, newly aware of the corruption of government, the rights of religious freedom and free enterprise, the evils of central banking and financial surveillance, and far more.
Looking back, much more makes sense. Consider the domestic discontent in the US that culminated in the implausible election of Donald Trump in 2016, an event that confounded the elite classes in media, government, tech, and pharma. Trump stood in symbolic opposition to it all and took some minor steps toward rolling back the empire at home and abroad. He was joined in this effort by political trends in the UK (with Brexit) and Brazil (with the rise of Bolsonaro). A new flavor of populism seemed to be on the rise.
There were many attempts to crush it here and abroad, starting far back but intensifying after 2016. The culminating moment was the Covid regime which was global in scope and involved a “whole of society” approach as if to say: we and not you are in charge. Look what we can achieve! Observe how little you really matter in the scheme of things! You thought the system worked for you but it is designed and run by us!
Is this sustainable? It is highly doubtful, at least not in the long term. What is desperately needed now is a paradigm of understanding that transcends the tribal alliances of the past. It really is the ruling elite vs. everyone else, an outlook that blows apart ideological divisions of the past and cries out for a new comprehension of the present moment, not to mention new plans of action. And this remains true regardless of the outcome of the election in November.
In the language of Thomas Kuhn, our times have seen the decisive collapse of old paradigms. They have fallen under the weight of too many anomalies. We have already entered into the pre-paradigmatic stage that seeks a new and more evidence-based orthodoxy of understanding. The only way we can get there is to enter into and enjoy the clash of ideas, in a spirit of freedom and learning. If nothing else, these are exciting times to be alive and active, an opportunity for all of us to make a difference for the future.
If you are interested in supporting the work of Brownstone Institute – the fellowships, events, books, retreats, and ongoing journalism and research – we invite you to do so. Unlike so many others, we have no government or corporate backing and depend entirely on your willingness to help. This is how we save intellectual integrity and how we save the world.
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
How many genuine, shocking – and unexposed – scandals actually occurred in the last four years? To partially answer this question, I composed another of my List Columns.
The Most Epic of Scandals Might Be…
The world’s most epic scandal might be the massive number of citizens who’ve died prematurely in the last four years. This scandal could also be expressed as the vast number of people whose deaths were falsely attributed to Covid.
My main areas of focus – “early spread” – informed my thinking when I reached this stunning conclusion: Almost every former living person said to have died “from Covid” probably did not die from Covid.
The scandal is that (unreported) “democide” occurred, meaning that government policies and deadly healthcare “guidance” more plausibly explain the millions of excess deaths that have occurred since late March 2020.
My research into early spread suggests that the real Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) of Covid should have already been known by the lockdowns of mid-March 2020.
If, as I believe, many millions of world citizens had already contracted this virus and had not died, the Covid IFR would be the same, or perhaps even lower, than the IFR for the common flu – said to be 1 death per 1,000 infections (0.1 percent).
Expressed differently, almost 100 percent of people who contracted this virus did not die from it – a fact which could and should have been known early in the “pandemic.” The fact this information was concealed from the public qualifies as a massive scandal.
Evidence That Would ‘Prove’ This Scandal
Furthermore, one does not need early spread “conjecture” to reach the conclusion that only a minute number of people who were infected by this virus later died from Covid.
After April 2020, a researcher could pick any large group or organization and simply ascertain how many people in these groups later died “from Covid.”
For example, more than 10,000 employees work for the CDC. About 10 months ago, I sent an email to the CDC and asked their media affairs department how many of the CDC’s own employees have died from Covid in the past three-plus years.
This question – which would be easy to answer – was never answered. This example of non-transparency is, to me, a massive “tell” and should be “scandalous.”
To be more precise, if the CDC could document that, say, 10 of their employees had died from Covid, this would equate to a disease with a mortality risk identical to the flu.
My strong suspicion is that fewer than 10 CDC employees have died from Covid in the last four years, which would mean the CDC knows from its own large sample group that Covid is/was not more deadly than influenza.
I’ve performed the same extrapolations with other groups made up of citizens whose Covid deaths would have made headlines.
For example, hundreds of thousands if not millions of high school, college, and pro athletes must have contracted Covid by today’s date. However, it is a challenge to find one definitive case of a college or pro athlete who died from Covid.
For young athletes – roughly ages 14 to 40 – the Covid IFR is either 0.0000 percent or very close to this microscopic fraction.
One question that should be obvious given the “athlete” example is why would any athlete want or need an experimental new mRNA “vaccine” when there’s a zero-percent chance this disease would ever kill this person?
The scandal is that sports authorities – uncritically accepting “guidance” from public health officials – either mandated or strongly encouraged (via coercion) that every athlete in the world receive Covid shots and then, later, booster shots.
Of course, the fact these shots would be far more likely to produce death or serious adverse events than a bout with Covid should be a massive scandal.
More Scandals
Needless to say, all the major pediatrician groups issued the same guidance for children.
In Pike County, Alabama, I can report that in four years no child/student between the ages of 5 and 18 has died from Covid.
I also recognize that the authorized “fact” is that millions of Americans have now “died from Covid.” However, I believe this figure is a scandalous lie, one supported by PCR test results that would be questioned in a world where investigating certain scandals was not taboo.
Yet another scandal is that officials and the press de-emphasized the fact the vast majority of alleged victims were over the age of 79, had multiple comorbid conditions, were often nursing home residents, and, among the non-elderly, came from the poorest sections of society.
These revelations – which would not advance the desired narrative that everyone should be very afraid – are similar to many great scandals that have been exposed from time to time in history.
Namely, officials in positions of power and trust clearly conspired to cover up or conceal information that would have exposed their own malfeasance, professional incompetence, and/or graft.
This Might Be the No. 1 Scandal of Our Times
As I’ve written ad nauseam, perhaps the most stunning scandal of our times is that all-important “truth-seeking” organizations have become completely captured.
At the top of this list are members of the so-called Fourth Estate or “watchdog” press (at least in the corporate or “mainstream” media).
In previous articles, I’ve estimated that at least 40,000 Americans work as full-time journalists or editors for mainstream “news organizations.” Hundreds of MSM news-gathering organizations “serve” their readers and viewers.
In this very large group, I can’t think of one journalist, editor, publisher, or news organization who endeavored to expose any of the dubious claims of the public health establishment.
When 100 percent of professionals charged with exposing scandals are themselves working to conceal shocking revelations…this too should qualify as a massive scandal.
To the above “captured classes” one could add college professors and administrators, 99 percent of plaintiffs’ trial lawyers, 100 percent of CEOs of major corporations, almost all elected politicians, and, with the exception of perhaps Sweden, every one of the public health agencies in the world, plus all major medical groups and prestigious science journals.
Or This Might Be Our Greatest Scandal
Yet another scandal – perhaps the most sinister of them all – would be the coordinated conspiracy to silence, muffle, intimidate, bully, cancel, demonetize, and stigmatize the classes of brave and intelligent dissidents who have attempted to reveal a litany of shocking truths.
The Censorship Industrial Complex (CIC) is not a figment of a conspiracy theorist’s imagination.
The CIC is as real as Media Matters, News Guard, The Trusted News Initiative, the Stanford Virality Project, and the 15,000-plus “content moderators” who probably still work for Facebook.
Government officials in myriad agencies of “President” Joe Biden’s administration constantly pressured social media companies to censor content that didn’t fit the authorized narrative (although these bullying projects didn’t require much arm-twisting).
Here, the scandal is that the country’s “adults in the room” were identified as grave threats to the agenda of the Powers that Be and were targeted for extreme censorship and punishment.
When people and organizations principled enough to try to expose scandals are targeted by the State and the State’s crony partners, this guarantees future scandals are unlikely to be exposed…which means the same unexposed leaders are going to continue to inflict even greater harm on the world population.
This Scandal Is Hard to Quantify
Other scandals are more difficult to quantify. For example, it’s impossible to know how many citizens now “self-censor” because they know the topics they should not discuss outside of conversations with close friends.
This point perhaps illustrates the state of the world’s “New Normal” – a now-accepted term that is scandalous if one simply thinks about the predicates of this modifier.
It should be a scandal that the vast majority of world citizens now eagerly submit to or comply with the dictates and speech parameters imposed on them by the world’s leadership classes.
The “New Normal” connotes that one should accept increasing assaults on previously sacrosanct civil liberties.
What is considered “normal” – and should now be accepted without protest – was, somehow, changed.
As I routinely write, what the world has lived through the past four-plus years is, in fact, a New Abnormal.
This Orwellian change of definition would qualify as a shocking scandal except for the fact most people now self-censor to remain in the perceived safety of their social and workplace herds.
The bottom line – a sad one – might be that none of the above scandals would have been possible if more members of the public had been capable of critical thinking and exhibited a modicum of civic courage.
As it turns out, the exposure of scandals would require large numbers of citizens to look into the mirror (or their souls) and perform self-analysis, an exercise in introspection that would not be pain-free.
It’s also a scandal our leaders knew they could manipulate the masses so easily.
Considering all of these points, it seems to me that the captured leadership classes must have known that the vast majority of the population would trust the veracity of their claims and policy prescriptions.
That is, they knew there would be no great pushback from “the masses.”
If the above observation isn’t a scandal, it’s depressing to admit or acknowledge this is what happened.
To End on a Hopeful Note
What gives millions of citizens hope is that, belatedly, more citizens might be growing weary of living in a world where every scandal cannot be exposed.
Donald Trump winning a presidential election by margins “too big to steal” is a sign of national hope.
Mr. Trump nominating RFK, Jr. to supervise the CDC, NIH, and FDA is definitely a sign of hope, an appointment that must outrage and terrify the world’s previous leadership classes.
For far too long, America’s greatest scandal has been that no important scandals can be exposed. Today, however, it seems possible this state of affairs might not remain our New Normal forever.
Republished from the author’s Substack
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
“Authorities have attacked, detained, prosecuted, and in some cases killed critics, broken up peaceful protests, closed media outlets, and enacted vague laws criminalizing speech that they claim threatens public health”
Didn’t give much thought to freedom until four years ago, at age 63. Freedom was just there, like the water surrounding a goldfish. And then the Covid-19 pandemic blew in, the world locked down, and admonitions to “stay the ‘$^#&’ home” blazed through social media. No freedom was too important to discard in the name of public safety: jobs, family businesses, artistic endeavours, public meetings, social connections that kept despair at bay, all took a backseat to the grim business of saving grandma (who ended up getting Covid anyway). No discussion of moral or practical trade-offs, no pushback from the press, nothing. It felt wrong to me on a cellular level.
Apparently I was the only one in my middle-class liberal circle to harbour misgivings about this astonishing new world. If I tried, ever so timidly, to articulate my concerns on Facebook or Twitter, the online warriors shot back with a string of epithets. “Go lick a pole and catch the virus,” said one. “Crawl back into your cave, troglodyte,” said another. And my all-time favourite: “You’re nothing but a mouth-breathing Trumptard.”
From the get-go, I perceived Covid as more of a philosophical problem than a scientific one. As I wrote on more than one occasion, science can inform our decisions, but not dictate them. What ultimately powers our choices are the values we hold. I saw Covid as a morality play, with freedom and safety cast as the duelling protagonists, and it looked like safety was skipping to an easy victory.
It was a heady time for the health bureaucrats, whose increasingly arcane rules betrayed a naked impulse to control: the Canadian high-school students required to use masks on both their faces and their wind instruments during band practice, the schoolchildren forced (for hygiene reasons) to study on their knees for hours in an Alaska classroom, the “glory-hole” sex advised by the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control. The lack of public pushback against these absurdities heightened my awareness of the fragility of our freedoms.
One of the earliest memes to surface during the pandemic was “muh freedumb.” The locution became a shorthand for a stock character – a tattooed man wearing camo gear and a baseball cap, spewing viral particles while yelling about his rights. A selfish idiot. The memes kept coming: “Warning, cliff ahead: keep driving, freedom fighter.” “Personal freedom is the preoccupation of adult children.” Freedom, for centuries an aspiration of democratic societies, turned into a laughing stock.
Eventually, pro-freedom voices began trickling into the public arena. I wasn’t alone, after all. There were others who understood, in the words of Telegraph writer Janet Daley, that the institutional response to Covid-19 had steamrolled over “the dimension of human experience which gives meaning and value to private life.” Lionel Shriver decried how “across the Western world, freedoms that citizens took for granted seven months ago have been revoked at a stroke.” And Laura Dodsworth brought tears to my eyes when she wrote, in her 2021 book A State of Fear, that she feared authoritarianism more than death.
Once the vaccines rolled out, the war on freedom of conscience went nuclear. If you breathed a word against the products, or even the mandates, you were “literally killing people.” The hostility towards the “unvaxxed” culminated in a Toronto Star front page showcasing public vitriol, splashed with such sentiments as: “I honestly don’t care if they die from Covid. Not even a little bit.”
This, too, felt viscerally wrong. I knew several people who had refused the vaccine, and they all had well-articulated reasons for their stance. If they didn’t fully trust the “safe and effective” bromide recycled by all government and pharmaceutical industry spokespeople, I could hardly blame them. (And I say this as someone who writes for Big Pharma and got five Covid shots.)
One of the most deplorable casualties of Covid culture was freedom of expression, a core principle in the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Experts speaking publicly about the harms of lockdown faced systematic ostracism from mainstream media, especially left-wing news outlets. By early 2021, Human Rights Watch estimated that at least 83 governments worldwide had used the Covid-19 pandemic to violate the lawful exercise of free speech and peaceful assembly.
“Authorities have attacked, detained, prosecuted, and in some cases killed critics, broken up peaceful protests, closed media outlets, and enacted vague laws criminalizing speech that they claim threatens public health,” the group wrote in a media release. “The victims include journalists, activists, healthcare workers, political opposition groups, and others who have criticized government responses to the coronavirus.”
But what about misinformation? Doesn’t it kill people? Newsflash: misinformation has always existed, even before TikTok. It’s up to each of us to sift the credible folks from the cranks. The best defence against misinformation is better information, and it’s the policy wonks’ job to provide it. Modern science itself depends on this tug-of-war of ideas, which filters out weaker hypotheses and moves stronger ones ahead for further testing.
Besides, misinformation comes not just from cranks, but from “official sources” – especially those tasked with persuading the public, rather than informing it. Remember when Rochelle Walensky, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the US, asserted that “vaccinated people do not carry the virus?” Or when Anthony Fauci maintained that getting vaccinated makes you a “dead end” in the chain of transmission? I rest my case.
The marketplace of ideas is like a souk, with a lot of hollering and arguing and the odd snatched purse – and that’s exactly how it should be. It’s an ingenious and irreplaceable process for getting to the truth. There are few ideas too sacrosanct to question or too ridiculous to consider. That’s why, unlike just about everyone in my left-leaning circle, I take no issue with Elon Musk’s shakedown of the old Twitter, now the Wild West of X.
Under Musk’s algorithms, my feed has become a true philosophical souk, with wildly disparate views smashing into each other, leaving me to sift through the rubble in search of a gold nugget or two. Love him or hate him, Musk offers a much-needed counterweight to the ideological lockstep in much of the mainstream media. And when it comes to free speech, Musk has put his money where his mouth is: when media personality Keith Olbermann recently hopped on X, where he boasts a million followers, to call for Musk’s arrest and detainment, Musk made no move to censor him. Works for me.
While the “old normal” has thankfully returned to our daily lives, save the odd mask in a shopping mall or subway car, the stench of censorship that blew in with the pandemic has yet to dissipate. An obsession with disinformation permeates the zeitgeist, spurring lawmakers in several Western countries to censor the flow of thoughts and ideas that gives a free society its pulse.
We cannot excise personal freedom from a democratic society, even in the interests of the “public good,” without poisoning the roots of democracy itself. Article 3 of UNESCO’s 2005 Universal Declaration of Bioethics and Human Rights states this plainly: “The interests and welfare of the individual should have priority over the sole interest of science or society.” In our post-pandemic reality, the statement seems almost quaint. Nonetheless, it expresses an enduring truth: that a democracy must never discard the idea of freedom – even in a pandemic.
Freedom desperately needs a comeback from its current incarnation as an expendable frill. In my own small way I’m trying to make this happen: never much of an activist before Covid, I’m now part of a small group preparing to launch a Free Speech Union in Canada, modelled after the highly successful one in the UK. The organisation will offer legal advice to individuals facing censorship, cancellation, or job loss because of their words. I look forward to supporting people caught in this anti-freedom web, including those whose words I heartily disagree with.
My newfound respect for free speech is also what propels me to keep talking about Covid. The response to the pandemic exceeded the bounds of public health, and we need to expose the forces that drove it. Here’s Daley again: “The world went crazy. There is no other way to account for what was an almost nihilistic dismantling not just of particular liberties and rights, but of the very idea of liberty.” We can’t let it happen again.
Republished from Perspective Media
Author
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