Brownstone Institute
We Failed the Freedom Test
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From the Brownstone Institute
BY
The remedy is worse than the disease.
Francis Bacon
The government never cedes power willingly.
Neither should we.
If the Covid-19 debacle taught us one thing it is that, as Justice Neil Gorsuch acknowledged, “Rule by indefinite emergency edict risks leaving all of us with a shell of a democracy and civil liberties just as hollow.”
Unfortunately, we still haven’t learned.
We’re still allowing ourselves to be fully distracted by circus politics and a constant barrage of bad news screaming for attention.
Four years after the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, which gave world governments (including our own) a convenient excuse for expanding their powers, abusing their authority, and further oppressing their constituents, there’s something being concocted in the dens of power.
The danger of martial law persists.
Any government so willing to weaponize one national crisis after another in order to expand its powers and justify all manner of government tyranny in the so-called name of national security will not hesitate to override the Constitution and lockdown the nation again.
You’d better get ready, because that so-called crisis could be anything: civil unrest, national emergencies, “unforeseen economic collapse, loss of functioning political and legal order, purposeful domestic resistance or insurgency, pervasive public health emergencies, and catastrophic natural and human disasters.”
Covid-19 was a test to see how quickly the populace would march in lockstep with the government’s dictates, no questions asked, and how little resistance the citizenry would offer up to the government’s power grabs when made in the name of national security.
“We the people” failed that test spectacularly.
Characterized by Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch as “the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country,” the government’s Covid-19 response to the Covid-19 pandemic constituted a massively intrusive, coercive and authoritarian assault on the right of individual sovereignty over one’s life, self, and private property.
In a statement attached to the Supreme Court’s ruling in Arizona v. Mayorkas, a case that challenged whether the government could continue to use it pandemic powers even after declaring the public health emergency over, Gorsuch provided a catalog of the many ways in which the government used Covid-19 to massively overreach its authority and suppress civil liberties:
Executive officials across the country issued emergency decrees on a breathtaking scale. Governors and local leaders imposed lockdown orders forcing people to remain in their homes. They shuttered businesses and schools, public and private. They closed churches even as they allowed casinos and other favored businesses to carry on. They threatened violators not just with civil penalties but with criminal sanctions too. They surveilled church parking lots, recorded license plates, and issued notices warning that attendance at even outdoor services satisfying all state social-distancing and hygiene requirements could amount to criminal conduct. They divided cities and neighborhoods into color-coded zones, forced individuals to fight for their freedoms in court on emergency timetables, and then changed their color-coded schemes when defeat in court seemed imminent.
Truly, the government’s (federal and state) handling of the Covid-19 pandemic delivered a knockout blow to our civil liberties, empowering the police state to flex its powers by way of a bevy of lockdowns, mandates, restrictions, contact tracing programs, heightened surveillance, censorship, overcriminalization, etc.
What started off as an experiment in social distancing in order to flatten the curve of an unknown virus (and not overwhelm the nation’s hospitals or expose the most vulnerable to unavoidable loss of life scenarios) quickly became strongly worded suggestions for citizens to voluntarily stay at home and strong-armed house arrest orders with penalties in place for non-compliance.
Every day brought a drastic new set of restrictions by government bodies (most have been delivered by way of executive orders) at the local, state and federal level that were eager to flex their muscles for the so-called “good” of the populace.
There was talk of mass testing for Covid-19 antibodies, screening checkpoints, mass surveillance in order to carry out contact tracing, immunity passports to allow those who have recovered from the virus to move around more freely, snitch tip lines for reporting “rule breakers” to the authorities, and heavy fines and jail time for those who dared to venture out without a mask, congregate in worship without the government’s blessing, or re-open their businesses without the government’s say-so.
It was even suggested that government officials should mandate mass vaccinations and “ensure that people without proof of vaccination would not be allowed, well, anywhere.”
Those tactics were already being used abroad.
In Italy, the unvaccinated were banned from restaurants, bars and public transportation, and faced suspensions from work and monthly fines. Similarly, France banned the unvaccinated from most public venues.
In Austria, anyone who had not complied with the vaccine mandate faced fines up to $4100. Police were to be authorized to carry out routine checks and demand proof of vaccination, with penalties of as much as $685 for failure to do so.
In China, which adopted a zero tolerance, “zero Covid” strategy, whole cities—some with populations in the tens of millions—were forced into home lockdowns for weeks on end, resulting in mass shortages of food and household supplies. Reports surfaced of residents “trading cigarettes for cabbage, dishwashing liquid for apples and sanitary pads for a small pile of vegetables. One resident traded a Nintendo Switch console for a packet of instant noodles and two steamed buns.”
For those unfortunate enough to contract Covid-19, China constructed “quarantine camps” throughout the country: massive complexes boasting thousands of small, metal boxes containing little more than a bed and a toilet. Detainees—including children, pregnant women, and the elderly— were reportedly ordered to leave their homes in the middle of the night, transported to the quarantine camps in buses and held in isolation.
If this last scenario sounds chillingly familiar, it should.
Eighty years ago, another authoritarian regime established more than 44,000 quarantine camps for those perceived as “enemies of the state”: racially inferior, politically unacceptable, or simply noncompliant.
While the majority of those imprisoned in the Nazi concentration camps, forced labor camps, incarceration sites and ghettos were Jews, there were also Polish nationals, gypsies, Russians, political dissidents, resistance fighters, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and homosexuals.
Culturally, we have become so fixated on the mass murders of Jewish prisoners by the Nazis that we overlook the fact that the purpose of these concentration camps were initially intended to “incarcerate and intimidate the leaders of political, social, and cultural movements that the Nazis perceived to be a threat to the survival of the regime.”
How do you get from there to here, from Auschwitz concentration camps to Covid quarantine centers?
You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to connect the dots.
You just have to recognize the truth in the warning: power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
This is about what happens when good, generally decent people—distracted by manufactured crises, polarizing politics, and fighting that divides the populace into warring “us vs. them” camps—fail to take note of the looming danger that threatens to wipe freedom from the map and place us all in chains.
It’s about what happens when any government is empowered to adopt a comply-or-suffer-the-consequences mindset that is enforced through mandates, lockdowns, penalties, detention centers, martial law, and a disregard for the rights of the individual.
This is the slippery slope: a government empowered to restrict movements, limit individual liberty, and isolate “undesirables” to prevent the spread of a disease is a government that has the power to lockdown a country, label whole segments of the population a danger to national security, and force those undesirables—a.k.a. extremists, dissidents, troublemakers, etc.—into isolation so they don’t contaminate the rest of the populace.
The slippery slope begins with propaganda campaigns about the public good being more important than individual liberty, and it ends with lockdowns and concentration camps.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the danger signs are everywhere.
Covid-19 was merely one crisis in a long series of crises that the government has shamelessly exploited in order to justify its power grabs and acclimate the citizenry to a state of martial law disguised as emergency powers.
Everything I have warned about for years—government overreach, invasive surveillance, martial law, abuse of powers, militarized police, weaponized technology used to track and control the citizenry, and so on—has become part of the government’s arsenal of terrifying lockdown powers should the need arise.
What we should be bracing for is: what comes next?
Republished from The Rutherford Institute
Brownstone Institute
The Curious Case of Mark Zuckerberg
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From the Brownstone Institute
By
On August 27, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg issued a statement confirming what the Twitter Files, Murthy vs. Missouri, and many others had long claimed – that the Biden administration aggressively pushed to censor First Amendment-protected speech on social media, in particular relating to Covid-19 and the Hunter Biden laptop.
In the case of Covid, Zuckerberg writes that the Biden White House “repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain Covid-19 content, including “humor and satire.”
Zuckerberg also notes that the “FBI warned us about a potential Russian disinformation operation about the Biden family and Burisma,” a Ukrainian energy company that Hunter Biden sat on the board of. The laptop was not “disinformation”, it was real and Twitter and Facebook wrongly suppressed the New York Post story that exposed it.
But Zuckerberg’s statement missed a key detail – at least three Facebook staff members participated in the Aspen Institute’s Hunter Biden table-top exercise that game-planned how to suppress the story two months in advance of the New York Post story.
The Aspen Institute “table-top” brought together a host of media and Big Tech including Facebook, the New York Times, Twitter, the Washington Post, and “anti-disinformation” NGO First Draft, to create their very own disinformation operation, literally planning day-by-day how they would respond to the leak.
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Zuckerberg, however, writes, “That fall, when we saw a New York Post story reporting on corruption allegations involving then-Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s family, we sent that story to fact-checkers for review and temporarily demoted it while waiting for a reply.”
You can almost see the fall maple leaves feathering their way innocently to the forest floor.
“It’s since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we should not have demoted the story.”
But there was no surprise, as Facebook had participated in the Aspen exercise two months before the story broke.
Even for Aspen’s Garret Graff, who coordinated the exercise, things went even better than planned:
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Regarding Covid-19, Zuckerberg says the government “repeatedly pressured” Facebook to “censor.” Regarding the Hunter Biden laptop, he only mentions they were “warned” “about a potential Russian disinformation operation.” There is no mention of pressure to censor. Did the federal government push Facebook to attend the Aspen Institute exercise? It seems they attended of their own volition.
Attending the Aspen suppression planning for Facebook was Nathaniel Gleicher, “head security policy at Meta,” who continues in his position to this day. The Twitter Files show Gleicher also met regularly with the Department of Defense (DoD) and FBI, and participated in a Harvard-led pre-election tabletop with the DoD whilst the Hunter Biden story was being suppressed on Facebook.
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Surely someone as senior as Gleicher, tasked as he was with such sensitive and high-level contacts, would have told his boss about his attendance? After all, the laptop story could have a real impact on the outcome of a presidential election.
Twitter’s Yoel Roth also attended the Aspen exercise and played a critical role in suppressing the Hunter Biden story on that platform. Did Gleicher play the same role at Facebook? Gleicher’s participation has been known publicly since Michael Shellenberger first broke that story, 18 months and more than 100 million impressions ago.
If Zuckerberg believes suppressing the story was wrong, why has he kept Gleicher in such a senior role? If he knew of Gleicher’s participation in the Aspen exercise, why didn’t he blow the whistle at the time? Instead, he places all the blame at the foot of the federal government. No doubt they exerted pressure, but that does not appear to be the whole story.
Is Zuckerberg attempting to absolve himself of responsibility?
Republished from the author’s Substack
Agriculture
Glimpse into the Future of Food
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From the Brownstone Institute
By
Is your food making you sick?
Suddenly, the fact that food is making us sick, really sick, has gained a lot of attention.
When Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. announced he would suspend his presidential campaign and campaign for President Trump on August 23, both he and Trump spoke about the need to improve the food supply to regain America’s health.
The same week, Tucker Carlson interviewed the sister-brother team of Casey and Calley Means, coauthors of the #1 New York Times bestseller Good Energy: The Surprising Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Health. Their thesis, borne out by thousands of medical research studies, is that food can make us very healthy or very sick. The grocery store choices many Americans have made have led us to unprecedented levels of diabetes, obesity, and other metabolic and neurologic diseases that prematurely weaken and age us, our organs, and our arteries.
There is a whole lot wrong with our available food.
- Chemical fertilizers have led to abusing the soil, and consequently, soils became depleted of micronutrients. Unsurprisingly, foods grown in them are now lacking those nutrients.
- Pesticides and herbicides harm humans, as well as bugs and weeds.
- Some experts say we need to take supplements now because we can’t get what we need from our foods anymore.
- Subsidies for wheat, corn, and soybean exceed $5 billion annually in cash plus many other forms of support, exceeding $100 billion since 1995, resulting in vast overproduction and centralization.
- We are practically living on overprocessed junk made of sugar, salt, wheat, and seed oils.
And that is just the start. The problem could have been predicted. Food companies grew bigger and bigger, until they achieved virtual monopolies. In order to compete, they had to use the cheapest ingredients. When the few companies left standing banded together, we got industry capture of the agencies that regulated their businesses, turning regulation on its head.
Consolidation in the Meat Industry
Then the regulators issued rules that advantaged the big guys, and disadvantaged the small guys. But it was the small guys who were producing the highest quality food, in most cases. Most of them had to sell out and find something else to do. It simply became uneconomic to be a farmer.
The farmers and ranchers that were left often became the equivalent of serfs on their own land.
Did you know:
- “Ninety-seven percent of the chicken Americans eat is produced by a farmer under contract with a big chicken company. These chicken farmers are the last independent link in an otherwise completely vertically integrated, company-owned supply chain.”
- “Corporate consolidation is at the root of many of the structural ills of our food system. When corporations have the ability to dictate terms to farmers, farmers lose. Corporations place the burden of financial liability on farmers, dictate details of far.”
- ” Corporations also consolidate ownership of the other steps of the supply chain that farmers depend on — inputs, processing, distribution, and marketing — leaving farmers few options but to deal with an entity against which they have effectively no voice or bargaining power.”
When profitability alone, whether assisted by policy or not, determines which companies succeed and which fail, cutting corners is a necessity for American businesses — unless you have a niche food business, or are able to sell directly to consumers. This simple fact inevitably led to a race to the bottom for quality.
Look at the world’s ten largest food companies. Their sales are enormous, but should we really be consuming their products?
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Perhaps the regulators could have avoided the debasement of the food supply. But they didn’t.
And now it has become a truism that Americans have the worst diet in the world.
Could food shortages be looming?
If it seems like the US, blessed with abundant natural resources, could never suffer a food shortage, think again. Did you know that while the US is the world’s largest food exporter, in 2023 the US imported more food than we exported?
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Cows are under attack, allegedly because their belching methane contributes to climate change. Holland has said it must get rid of 30-50% of its cows. Ireland and Canada are also preparing to reduce the number of their cows, using the same justification.
In the US, the number of cows being raised has gradually lessened, so that now we have the same number of cows that were being raised in 1951 — but the population has increased by 125% since then. We have more than double the people, but the same number of cows. What!? Much of our beef comes from Brazil.
Pigs and chickens are now mostly raised indoors. Their industries are already consolidated to the max. But cows and other ungulates graze for most of their life, and so the beef industry has been unable to be consolidated in the same way.
But consolidation is happening instead in the slaughterhouses because you cannot process beef without a USDA inspector in a USDA-approved facility — and the number of these facilities has been dropping, as have the number of cows they can handle. Four companies now process over 80% of US beef. And that is how the ranchers are being squeezed.
Meanwhile, efforts are afoot to reduce available farmland for both planting crops and grazing animals. Bill Gates is now the #1 owner of US farmland, much of which lies fallow. Solar farms are covering land that used to grow crops — a practice recently outlawed in Italy. Plans are afoot to impose new restrictions on how land that is under conservation easements can be used.
Brave New Food
That isn’t all. The World Economic Forum, along with many governments and multinational agencies, wants to redesign our food supply. So-called plant-based meats, lab-grown meats, “synbio” products, insect protein, and other totally new foods are to replace much of the real meat people enjoy — potentially leading to even greater consolidation of food production. This would allow “rewilding” of grazing areas, allowing them to return to their natural state and, it is claimed, this would be kinder to the planet. But would it?
Much of the land used for grazing is unsuitable for growing crops or for other purposes. The manure of the animals grazing on it replenishes soil nutrients and contributes to the soil microbiome and plant growth. “Rewilding” may in fact lead to the loss of what topsoil is there and desertification of many grazing areas.
Of course, transitioning the food supply to mostly foods coming from factories is a crazy idea, because how can you make a major change in what people eat and expect it to be good for them? What micronutrients are you missing? What will the new chemicals, or newly designed proteins, or even computer-designed DNA (that will inevitably be present in these novel foods) do to us over time? What will companies be feeding the insects they farm, when food production is governed by ever cheaper inputs?
It gets worse. Real food production, by gardeners and small farmers or homesteaders, is decentralized. It cannot be controlled. Until the last 150 years, almost everyone fed themselves from food they caught, gathered, or grew.
But if food comes mainly from factories, access can be cut off. Supply chains can break down. You can be priced out of buying it. Or it could make you sick, and it might take years or generations before the source of the problem is identified. How long has it taken us to figure out that overprocessed foods are a slow poison?
There are some very big problems brewing in the food realm. Whether we like it or not, powerful forces are moving us into the Great Reset, threatening our diet in new ways, ways that most of us never dreamed of.
Identifying the Problems and Solutions
But we can get on top of what is happening, learn what we need to, and we can resist. That’s why Door to Freedom and Children’s Health Defense have unpacked all of these problems and identified possible solutions.
During a jam-packed two-day online symposium, you will learn about all facets of the attack on food, and how to resist. This is an entirely free event, with a fantastic lineup of speakers and topics. Grab a pad and pencil, because you will definitely want to take notes!
The Attack on Food and Farmers, and How to Fight Back premieres on September 6 and 7. It will remain on our channels for later viewing and sharing as well. By the end of Day 2, you will know what actions to take, both in your own backyard, and in the halls of your legislatures to create a healthier, tastier, safer, and more secure food supply.
See below for a summary and for the complete program.
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