Brownstone Institute
The Tragedy of the Brooklyn Literary Scene
From the Brownstone Institute
I recently came home from a visit to Hipster Brooklyn.
I had found that Brooklyn — alongside literary Manhattan — was oddly frozen in an amber of denial and silence.
First, there is that restored state of freedom, that no one will discuss.
I’d wandered the cute little boîtes and trendy underground hand-pulled-noodle postmodern food courts, with mixed emotions.
There were the chic young moms with babies in strollers, both of them breathing freely in the chill just-before-Spring air. There were slouching Millennials, with every demographic likelihood of having been mask-y and COVID-culty, now enjoying their freedom to assemble at will, to flirt and to window-shop, to stroll and to chat and to try on new sweaters in person at Uniqlo.
Many of these folks, no doubt, would have been repelled from 2020 to the present, by people like my brothers and sisters in arms, and by me; as we struggled in the trenches of the liberty movement.
Some of them may have called us anti-vaxxers, extremists, insurrectionists; selfish, “Trumpers,” or whatever other nonsense was the epithet of the day.
Some of them may have wanted to lock down harder, and lock us down harder.
My brothers and sisters in the freedom movement, though we lost employment, savings, status, and affiliations, fought every day — for these very folks; we fought for everyone; we fought so that some day, these young moms could indeed stroll with their babies, breathing fresh air; so that these slouching Millennials could one day indeed wander at will, not “locked down” still, not “mandated” any longer, and not living in fear of an internment camp.
It was bittersweet, seeing this demographic so chill, so relaxed, so back to “normal” — many of whom had been once so oblivious of, or so actively disrespectful of, the sacrifices we on the outside of society had waged for their very freedom.
Who knows where they would be now, if it were not for our combat on their behalf?
Still without their rights regained, like Canada? Still “mandated,” like Canada? Still scared to speak, scared of having bank accounts frozen, scared of losing licenses, scared of being beaten in protests, forbidden to travel without dangerous injections — like Canada?
We are not entirely free again in the US, but we regained many of our freedoms. Not because the evildoers wanted to give them back; but because my brothers and sisters fought hard, strategically, bitterly and furiously, for all of this liberty that I witnessed in front of me, on that almost-spring day on the crowded, tumultuous Fulton Avenue.
It was bittersweet to know that these people would never witness us, or acknowledge what we did for them and their children; let alone thank us; let alone apologize to people like me for the years in which they were just fine with folks such as us banished to the outer edges of society, to eat in the cold streets of New York like animals, or made jobless, or ostracized.
In addition to the dissonance of seeing people who had been perfectly okay with discriminating against the very people who had fought to return to them the liberties they now enjoyed, I suffered a sense of disorientation at realizing that there was a giant cognitive hole in the middle of contemporary culture.
The staffers at the Brooklyn branch of McNally Jackson Bookstore, an independent bookstore which had for years been a stalwart outpost of free-thinking publishing, were still masked, against all reason. I walked in with some trepidation.
Peacefully, faces covered, three years on, they stacked books on the shelves.
I was astonished, as I wandered the well-stocked aisles. Independent bookstores usually reflect the burning issues in a culture at that given time.
But — now — nothing.
It takes about two years to write a book, and about six months to publish one. It was surely time for the new important books from public intellectuals, about the world-historical years through which we had just lived, to appear.
But — no.
In the center of an altar to literate culture, it was as if the years 2020-2023 simply did not exist and had never existed.
This can’t be possible, I thought. This all — the “pandemic,”
lockdowns, denial of education for children, forced masking, forced vaccinations, “mandates” — a crashed economy — globally — this all, as an aggregate, was of course the most important thing ever to have happened to us as a generation of intellectuals.
I kept on searching the stacks. Nothing.
I checked the Top Ten Nonfiction Books in Time.
None had to do with the pandemic policies or the “lockdowns” or the mandated mRNA injections into billions of humans.
I surveyed the lanes lined with books, perplexed and saddened.
Surely the wonderful novelists of my generation, astute observers of the contemporary scene — Jennifer Egan, Rebecca Miller — would have written their Great American Novels about the mania that swept over the globe from 2020-2023 — one which provided once-in-a-century fodder for fiction writers?
No — or at least, not yet.
Surely Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, the distinguished nonfiction observer of group dynamics, would have tracked how a psychotic delusion intoxicated nations?
No, nothing.
Wouldn’t Samantha Power, author of A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide have exposed the pandemic policies that sent millions of children into starvation unto death?
Nothing.
Of course Michael Eric Dyson, brilliant and brave commentator on race in America, author most recently of Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America, would have written an excoriating expose of how pandemic policies in the US drove brown and black children into even greater learning deficits, and drained millions from small business owners of color?
No, nothing at all.
How about Susan Faludi, respected feminist author of Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women? She would have addressed how decades of women’s professional advancement were overturned by “lockdown” policies that drove women out of the workforce because someone had to watch the kids stranded at home?
No.
Undoubtedly Robert Reich, longtime champion of working people, author of The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It would have analyzed the greatest wealth transfer in modern history?
Nothing there.
Certainly Michael Moore, author of Downsize This! Random Threats from an Unarmed American, who for decades amplified the voices of working men and women left behind in rustbelt America, would have likewise assailed the flow of wealth in the “pandemic” era from the locked-down, “distanced,” forbidden-to-work working class, to tech CEOs and Pharma shills and their oligarch friends?
Nothing to see.
I could go on and on.
From some of the other important public intellectuals whom I know or whom I have followed for decades — and I do not mean to shame anyone needlessly, so I won’t name them — there were indeed some new books.
There were books on walks through the city.
There were books on “difficult conversations.”
There were books on growing up with unusual parents.
There were books on how meaningful animals are, and how wondrous is their world.
Public intellectuals produced a lot of new books on eating more vegetables.
The bizarre thing about this moment in culture is that the really important journalism, and the really important nonfiction books about the history, the racial and gender injustice, the economics, the public policy, of the “pandemic” years — are being written by — non-writers; by people who are trained as doctors, medical researchers, lawyers, politicians, and activists.
And their books are not displayed or even stocked in bookstores such as McNally Jackson.
So there is a massive hole in the central thought process of our culture.
The courageous non-writers have stepped in to tell the truth, because the famous writers, for the most part, can’t.
Or won’t. Or, for whatever reason, didn’t.
This is because the public intellectuals are by necessity, for the most part, AWOL to the truth-telling demands of this time.
You cannot be a public intellectual whose work is alive, if you have participated in manufacturing, or even accepting quietly, state-run lies.
The work of the cultural elite of every tyranny, from Nazi Germany to Stalin’s Russia, reveals this fact.
Participation in lies by the artist makes the creation of a vibrant cultural text impossible.
Nazi art is bad art. Socialist-realist Soviet fiction is bad fiction.
Journalism in a tyranny; that is, written by state-approved scribes, is always going to be a mess of cliches and obsequiousness that no one wants to read, and that cannot stand the test of time. It vanishes like snow into the cauldron of the future — even as works by the hated, forbidden dissidents who can and do tell the truth — the Solzhenitzyns of the time, the Anne Franks — are like diamonds, that cannot be crushed or lost to time.
It is only these that survive.
Because lies embraced our whole culture since 2020, and because public intellectuals for the most part did not stand up to the lies at the time, and because many even participated in the lies (hello, Sam Harris); since horrible things happened to those of us who did stand up to the lies — most public intellectuals at this moment cannot address the really important events of the recent past.
And from conversations I had with people in liberal-elite publishing, media, education, and the arts — these public intellectuals are being enabled in their silence or distraction or collusion, by a cultural nexus that wants them silent.
The consensus in media-elite land is that no one wants to talk about these issues at all.
“People just want to move on,” I keep hearing, in my former haunts in Manhattan and Brooklyn.
Don’t talk about it.
So this all leads to a weird situation, culturally, now, indeed.
In the world of alt-media independent exiled dissidents, where I live most of the time, we are having the most riveting, important conversations of our lives. This is because we all know civilization itself, and liberty itself, and maybe even the fate of the human race itself, are at stake every day.
In the polite elite-media circles of Brooklyn and New York, to which I returned briefly to dip a toe in the water, people are — not talking about any of it.
They are not talking about the enslavement of humanity. They are not talking about young adults dropping dead.
They are talking about fermentation. They are talking about pets. They are talking, endlessly, like stalkers who cannot let it go, about how bad Donald Trump is, down to what he has for dinner in Mar-a-Lago.
The New York Times these days has the most boring headlines I have read in my life, and it is for this reason: the truth of our time is toxic to the editors of that newspaper, because they bathed in the money of the lies.
In addition to these cruelly soporific headlines, the New York Times is down to running fully imaginary stories that the editors must believe someone somewhere will accept without howling skepticism: “New Data Links Pandemic’s Origins to Raccoon Dogs at Wuhan Market.”
Then, of course, having committed that journalistic crime, the editors need to run this tragically hilarious sub-headline:
A formerly great newspaper has run its way through through bats and civet cats, burning its credibility wholesale in a gigantic bonfire of flat-out state-mouthpiece deception and uncorrected assertions for 3 full years, and is now digging up the specter of raccoon dogs. It is explaining their mating habits to its readers — stop the presses! — even as elsewhere in untouchable-reality-land, Dr Fauci furiously backpedals, trying to avoid charges of crimes against humanity.
A formerly great city of public intellectuals is unable to address current reality and is taking walks.
It is as if New York City and all its thought leaders are enchanted, ensorcelled, staring at one another, mouths open, unspeaking, inside of a conceptual snow globe, while all the rest of us ostracized dissidents are carrying on around this frozen spectacle, fighting a hand-to-hand-combat revolution.
I sighed, as I left the bookstore, and made my way through the freely moving hipster crowds.
We don’t fight for freedom so that we can get credit.
We don’t fight for truth because we want a byline.
We do both just because we can’t help it.
We do both because our Founders fought to the death so that we ourselves would be free one day.
And we fight so that little children whom we will never live to see, will grow up free.
But it is painful to witness the beating heart of what had been a great culture, stunned and muted in denial, and unable to function intellectually.
I guess we just need to leave the sadly rotting carcass of the establishment culture of lies and denial behind.
I say that with sorrow. I will miss the bookstores, universities, newspapers that I once revered.
I guess we have to follow the voices of the truth-tellers of the moment, to other, surprising, beleaguered campfires.
I guess we need to pitch our tents in new fields, outside the walls of the crumbling, breached, and decadent city.
I guess we need to learn new songs and tell new stories, as we find ourselves alongside other — surprising — fierce, and unbowed, and determined, new comrades in arms.
Reprinted from the author’s Substack
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
Anthony “I represent science” Fauci can now stand beside Richard “I am not a crook” Nixon in the history books as someone who received the poison pill of a preemptive pardon.
While Nixon was pardoned for specific charges related to Watergate, the exact crimes for which Fauci was pardoned are not specified. Rather, the pardon specifies:
Baseless and politically motivated investigations wreak havoc on the lives, safety, and financial security of targeted individuals and their families. Even when individuals have done nothing wrong – and in fact have done the right things – and will ultimately be exonerated, the mere fact of being investigated and prosecuted can irreparably damage reputations and finances.
In other words, the dying breath of the Biden administration appears to be pardoning Fauci for crimes he didn’t commit, which would seem to make a pardon null and void. The pardon goes further than simply granting clemency for crimes. Clemency usually alleviates the punishment associated with a crime, but here Biden attempts to alleviate the burden of investigations and prosecutions, the likes of which our justice system uses to uncover crimes.
It’s one thing to pardon someone who has been subjected to a fair trial and convicted, to say they have already paid their dues. Gerald Ford, in his pardon of Richard Nixon, admitted that Nixon had already paid the high cost of resigning from the highest office in the land. Nixon’s resignation came as the final chapter of prolonged investigations into his illegal and unpresidential conduct during Watergate, and those investigations provided us the truth we needed to know that Nixon was a crook and move on content that his ignominious reputation was carve d into stone for all of history.
Fauci, meanwhile, has evaded investigations on matters far more serious than Watergate. In 2017, DARPA organized a grant call – the PREEMPT call – aiming to preempt pathogen spillover from wildlife to people. In 2018 a newly formed collaborative group of scientists from the US, Singapore, and Wuhan wrote a grant – the DEFUSE grant – proposing to modify a bat sarbecovirus in Wuhan in a very unusual way. DARPA did not fund the team because their work was too risky for the Department of Defense, but in 2019 Fauci’s NIAID funded this exact set of scientists who never wrote a paper together prior or since. In late 2019, SARS-CoV-2 emerged in Wuhan with the precise modifications proposed in the DEFUSE grant submitted to PREEMPT.
It’s reasonable to be concerned that this line of research funded by Fauci’s NIAID may have caused the pandemic. In fact, if we’re sharp-penciled and honest with our probabilities, it’s likely beyond reasonable doubt that SARS-CoV-2 emerged as a consequence of research proposed in DEFUSE. What we don’t know, however, is whether the research proceeded with US involvement or not.
Congress used its constitutionally-granted investigation and oversight responsibilities to investigate and oversee NIAID in search of answers. In the process of these investigations, they found endless pages of emails with unjustified redactions, evidence that Fauci’s FOIA lady could “make emails disappear,” Fauci’s right-hand-man David Morens aided the DEFUSE authors as they navigated disciplinary measures at NIH and NIAID, and there were significant concerns that NIAID sought to obstruct investigations and destroy federal records.
Such obstructive actions did not inspire confidence in the innocence of Anthony Fauci or the US scientists he funded in 2019. On the contrary, Fauci testified twice under oath saying NIAID did not fund gain-of-function research of concern in Wuhan…but then we discovered a 2018 progress report of research NIAID funded in Wuhan revealing research they funded had enhanced the transmissibility of a bat SARS-related coronavirus 10,000 times higher than the wild virus. That is, indisputably, gain-of-function research of concern. Fauci thus lied to the American public and perjured himself in his testimony to Congress, and Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) has referred Fauci’s perjury charges to the Department of Justice.
What was NIAID trying to preempt with their obstruction of Congressional investigations? What is Biden trying to preempt with his pardon of Fauci? Why do we not have the 2019 NIAID progress report from the PI’s who submitted DEFUSE to PREEMPT and later received funding from NIAID?
It is deplorable for Biden to preemptively pardon Fauci on his last day in office, with so little known about the research NIAID funded in 2019 and voters so clearly eager to learn more. With Nixon’s preemptive pardon, the truth of his wrongdoing was known and all that was left was punishment. With Fauci’s preemptive pardon, the truth is not yet known, NIAID officials in Fauci’s orbit violated federal records laws in their effort to avoid the truth from being known, and Biden didn’t preemptively pardon Fauci to grant clemency and alleviate punishment, but to stop investigations and prosecutions the likes of which could uncover the truth.
I’m not a Constitutional scholar prepared to argue the legality of this maneuver, but I am an ethical human being, a scientist who contributed another grant to the PREEMPT call, and a scientist who helped uncover some of the evidence consistent with a lab origin and quantify the likelihood of a lab origin from research proposed in the DEFUSE grant. Any ethical human being knows that we need to know what caused the pandemic, and to deprive the citizenry of such information from open investigations of NIAID research in 2019 would be to deprive us of critical information we need to self-govern and elect people who manage scientific risks in ways we see fit. As a scientist, there are critical questions about bioattribution that require testing, and the way to test our hypotheses is to uncover the redacted and withheld documents from Fauci’s NIAID in 2019.
The Biden administration’s dying breath was to pardon Anthony Fauci not for the convictions for crimes he didn’t commit (?) but to avoid investigations that could be a reputational and financial burden for Anthony Fauci. A pardon to preempt an investigation is not a pardon; it is obstruction. The Biden administration’s dying breath is to obstruct our pursuit of truth and reconciliation on the ultimate cause of 1 million Americans’ dying breaths.
To remind everyone what we still need to know, it helps to look through the peephole of what we’ve already found to inspire curiosity about what else we’d find if only the peephole could be widened. Below is one of the precious few emails investigative journalists pursuing FOIAs against NIAID have managed to obtain from the critical period when SARS-CoV-2 is believed to have emerged. The email connects DEFUSE PI’s Peter Daszak (EcoHealth Alliance), Ralph Baric (UNC), Linfa Wang (Duke-NUS), Ben Hu (Wuhan Institute of Virology), Shi ZhengLi (Wuhan Institute of Virology) and others in October 2019. The subject line “NIAID SARS-CoV Call – October 30/31” connects these authors to NIAID.
It is approximately in that time range – October/November 2019 – when SARS-CoV-2 is hypothesized to have entered the human population in Wuhan. When it emerged, SARS-CoV-2 was unique among sarbecoviruses in having a furin cleavage site, as proposed by these authors in their 2019 DEFUSE grant. Of all the places the furin cleavage site could be, the furin cleavage site of SARS-CoV-2 was in the S1/S2 junction of the Spike protein, precisely as proposed by these authors.
In order to insert a furin cleavage site in a SARS-CoV, however, the researchers would’ve needed to build a reverse genetic system, i.e. a DNA copy of the virus. SARS-CoV-2 is unique among coronaviruses in having exactly the fingerprint we would expect from reverse genetic systems. There is an unusual even spacing in the cutting/pasting sites for the enzymes BsaI and BsmBI and an anomalous hot-spot of silent mutations in precisely these sites, exactly as researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology have done for other coronavirus reverse genetic systems. The odds of such an extreme synthetic-looking pattern occurring in nature are, conservatively, about 1 in 50 billion.
The virus did not emerge in Bangkok, Hanoi, Bago, Kunming, Guangdong, or any of the myriad other places with similar animal trade networks and greater contact rates between people and sarbecovirus reservoirs. No. The virus emerged in Wuhan, the exact place and time one would expect from DEFUSE.
With all the evidence pointing the hounds towards NIAID, it is essential for global health security that we further investigate the research NIAID funded in 2019. It is imperative for our constitutional democracy, for our ability to self-govern, that we learn the truth. The only way to learn the truth is to investigate NIAID, the agency Fauci led for 38 years, the agency that funded gain-of-function research of concern, the agency named in the October 2019 call by DEFUSE PI’s, the agency that funded this exact group in 2019.
A preemptive pardon prior to the discovery of truth is a fancy name for obstruction of justice. The Biden administration’s dying breath must be challenged, and we must allow Congress and the incoming administration to investigate the possibility that Anthony Fauci’s NIAID-supported research caused the Covid-19 pandemic.
Republished from the author’s Substack
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
This article was co-authored with Mary Beth Pfieffer.
In a seismic political shift, Republicans have laid claim to an issue that Democrats left in the gutter—the declining health of Americans. True, it took a Democrat with a famous name to ask why so many people are chronically ill, disabled, and dying younger than in 47 other countries. But the message resonated with the GOP.
We have a proposal in this unfolding milieu. Let’s have a serious, nuanced discussion. Let’s retire labels that have been weaponized against Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., nominated for Health and Human Services Secretary, and many people like him.
Start with discarding threadbare words like “conspiracy theory,” “anti-vax,” and the ever-changing “misinformation.”
These linguistic sleights of hand have been deployed—by government, media, and vested interests—to dismiss policy critics and thwart debate. If post-election developments tell us anything, it is that such scorn may no longer work for a population skeptical of government overreach.
Although RFK has been lambasted for months in the press, he just scored a 47 percent approval rating in a CBS poll.
Americans are asking: Is RFK on to something?
Perhaps, as he contends, a 1986 law that all but absolved vaccine manufacturers from liability has spawned an industry driven more by profit than protection.
Maybe Americans agree with RFK that the FDA, which gets 69 percent of its budget from pharmaceutical companies, is potentially compromised. Maybe Big Pharma, similarly, gets a free pass from the television news media that it generously supports. The US and New Zealand, incidentally, are the only nations on earth that allow “direct-to-consumer” TV ads.
Finally, just maybe there’s a straight line from this unhealthy alliance to the growing list of 80 childhood shots, inevitably approved after cursory industry studies with no placebo controls. The Hepatitis B vaccine trial, for one, monitored the effects on newborns for just five days. Babies are given three doses of this questionably necessary product—intended to prevent a disease spread through sex and drug use.
Pointing out such conflicts and flaws earns critics a label: “anti-vaxxer.”
Misinformation?
If RFK is accused of being extreme or misdirected, consider the Covid-19 axioms that Americans were told by their government.
The first: The pandemic started in animals in Wuhan, China. To think otherwise, Wikipedia states, is a “conspiracy theory,” fueled by “misplaced suspicion” and “anti-Chinese racism.”
Not so fast. In a new 520-page report, a Congressional subcommittee linked the outbreak to risky US-supported virus research at a Wuhan lab at the pandemic epicenter. After 25 hearings, the subcommittee found no evidence of “natural origin.”
Is the report a slam dunk? Maybe not. But neither is an outright dismissal of a lab leak.
The same goes for other pandemic dogma, including the utility of (ineffective) masks, (harmful) lockdowns, (arbitrary) six-foot spacing, and, most prominently, vaccines that millions were coerced to take and that harmed some.
Americans were told, wrongly, that two shots would prevent Covid and stop the spread. Natural immunity from previous infection was ignored to maximize vaccine uptake.
Yet there was scant scientific support for vaccinating babies with little risk, which few other countries did; pregnant women (whose deaths soared 40 percent after the rollout), and healthy adolescents, including some who suffered a heart injury called myocarditis. The CDC calls the condition “rare;” but a new study found 223 times more cases in 2021 than the average for all vaccines in the previous 30 years.
Truth Muzzled?
Beyond this, pandemic decrees were not open to question. Millions of social media posts were removed at the behest of the White House. The ranks grew both of well-funded fact-checkers and retractions of countervailing science.
The FDA, meantime, created a popular and false storyline that the Nobel Prize-winning early-treatment drug ivermectin was for horses, not people, and might cause coma and death. Under pressure from a federal court, the FDA removed its infamous webpage, but not before it cleared the way for unapproved vaccines, possible under the law only if no alternative was available.
An emergency situation can spawn official missteps. But they become insidious when dissent is suppressed and truth is molded to fit a narrative.
The government’s failures of transparency and oversight are why we are at this juncture today. RFK—should he overcome powerful opposition—may have the last word.
The conversation he proposes won’t mean the end of vaccines or of respect for science. It will mean accountability for what happened in Covid and reform of a dysfunctional system that made it possible.
Republished from RealClearHealth
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