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Brownstone Journal features in-depth articles, news, research, and commentary on public health, science, economics, social theory, and related policy issues — offering critical perspectives on institutional failures, government interventions, and threats to liberty.

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Methadone Maintenance Ignited America's Opioid Crisis
By | | , | 26 minute read

Methadone Maintenance Ignited America’s Opioid Crisis

The newly adapted and widely adopted “Disease Model of Addiction” soon analogized narcotics’ methadone with diabetics’ insulin as both requiring long-term “replacement” medication—however, for any similar “disease” of addiction to tranquilizers, cocaine, alcohol, or barbiturates—abstinence (antithetically and hypocritically) remained the endgame. It remains notable that to this day not a single ardent advocate of the Disease Model supports maintaining people on benzodiazepines or cocaine. This glaring contrast cannot be unseen. 

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The Service of Dissent
By | | , , | 5 minute read

The Service of Dissent

In the last four years we have seen an astonishing rise in censorship, as in other forms of bullying and coercion, inside and outside the academy, even from governments and state agencies. We can’t reverse that by regret. We can only reverse it by acts of resistance. The first antidote to censorship is bold speech and consistent action. Of that, Patrick Provost has provided an admirable example that we ought all to follow.

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The Populist Wave and Its Discontents
By | | , , | 6 minute read

The Populist Wave and Its Discontents

Quite possibly, the type of reform Western democracies require is more radical than anything either populists or their critics are willing to contemplate. For what is required is far-reaching decentralising reforms that anchor political and economic power not in a centralised state, but in a federal pact among municipal and regional governments and grassroots institutions such as local citizen assemblies, professional associations, and worker co-operatives. Under such reforms, the old national political establishment would lose much of its power. But so would national populist leaders and movements.

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Ancient Political Advice for Today's Rulers
By | | , , | 11 minute read

Ancient Political Advice for Today’s Rulers

Psy-ops employ a diversity of psychological strategies and techniques to exercise influence over the feelings, thoughts, and behaviour of a selected group, with the obvious goal of persuading the people comprising the latter, usually via various modes of deception, to act in a desired manner. If this sounds familiar, don’t be surprised. It has been carried out on the populations of the world’s countries since at least 2020, and arguably for much longer.

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False Knowledge is Our Fool's Gold
By | | , | 6 minute read

False Knowledge is Our Fool’s Gold

Many others, including Brownstone writers, have met with far worse treatment than that, including threats, insults, punishments, and the loss of jobs for sharing helpful information. Understandably, it is hard to admit that one has been ignorant or duped. However, the acquisition and propagation of real knowledge is immensely preferable to a pandemic of ignorance, especially when the ignorance may have very dire consequences.

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The Four Sins of 'Thawteffery'
By | | , , | 5 minute read

The Four Sins of ‘Thawteffery’

Thawteffery is the wicked management of thought, election-to-election, by wicked people for wicked purposes. I speak of the wicked as forming “the junta,” even though the conspiracy may be rather spontaneous. We are talking about some amalgam of a wicked faction, the Deep State, the administrative state, the swamp, the blob, and so on. It has become clear that the CIA and other intel agencies, and the Left Pole, are central in the junta.

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Illusions in Vaccine Effectiveness
By | | , | 6 minute read

Illusions in Vaccine Effectiveness

The pseudo-effectiveness of Covid vaccines against death from unrelated causes is not a new observation. The same kind of pseudo-effectiveness was discovered long ago for the flu vaccines. It is called the “healthy vaccinee effect.” For various reasons, unrelated to the vaccines, people who are vaccinated have better background health (on average) than people who are not, and therefore, they are less likely to die from “anything,” including flu and Covid. Vaccinated or not, they would have had lower Covid mortality than their unvaccinated counterparts.

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Wuhan's Unsolved Question
By | | , | 5 minute read

Wuhan’s Unsolved Question

The apparent cluelessness of the Chinese Government until the sequence was published, and the abrupt switch afterwards to something that looks a lot like a biosecurity response, indicates the Chinese Government may have been alerted to the leak only after the sequence was published. This is consistent with, and even suggestive of, an American origin with the EcoHealth Alliance crowd, via Linfa and Dani.

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The Smoking Gun in Wuhan
By | | , | 7 minute read

The Smoking Gun in Wuhan

Theories of a lab origin of SARS-CoV-2 have largely focused on the presence in the genome of the famous furin cleavage site. Less attention has been paid to other anomalies and, in particular, the presence of the so-called HIV inserts first flagged by the Indian research team Pradhan et al. in late January 2020 and quickly dismissed as untenable conspiracy-mongering.

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