Articles

Brownstone Journal Articles, News, Research, and Commentary on public health, science, economics, & social theory

free speech rights

A Tremendous Victory for Free Speech 

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Friday’s decision provides a crucial step in fighting against that informational totalitarianism. The Fifth Circuit issued an injunction that prohibits the Biden Administration from taking actions, “to coerce or significantly encourage social-media companies to remove, delete, suppress, or reduce, including through altering their algorithms, posted social-media content containing protected free speech.”  

A Tremendous Victory for Free Speech  Read Journal Article

DSA

You Should Be Very Worried About the Digital Services Act

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The only hope is that this ugly, complicated and regressive piece of legislation ends up before a judge who understands that freedom of expression means nothing if held hostage to the views of the European Commission on pandemic-preparedness, the Russia-Ukraine war, or what counts as “offensive” or “hateful” speech.

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informed consent

Whatever Happened to Informed Consent?

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Every American is a sovereign individual with inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, not a sack of meat to be treated as a profit opportunity.  Informed consent must be revived from the grave if Americans are to have a fighting chance against powerful financial interests allied against them.

Whatever Happened to Informed Consent? Read Journal Article

fact-checking

How “Fact Checking” Obliterates Truth

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For “fact-checking” to have any legitimacy whatsoever, it needs to ditch rating the crazies. It also should start each week with releasing a list of 20 items, check each of those, and then write about all of them, true or false. At the very least, the public would know the fact-checkers aren’t hiding facts they don’t like.

How “Fact Checking” Obliterates Truth Read Journal Article

Cochrane Mask

Lead Author of Cochrane Mask Review Responds to Fauci’s Dismissal of Evidence 

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Jefferson explains that the entire point of the Cochrane review was to systematically sift through all the available randomised data on physical interventions such as masks and determine what was useful and what was not. “It might be that Fauci is relying on trash studies,” said Jefferson. “Many of them are observational, some are cross-sectional, and some actually use modelling. That is not strong evidence.”

Lead Author of Cochrane Mask Review Responds to Fauci’s Dismissal of Evidence  Read Journal Article

public-private tyranny

The Rise of the Public-Private Partnership in Tyranny

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Call it the public-private tyranny partnership. Traditionally coercion and tyranny have been the preserve of states, with citizen consent the exclusive preserve of liberal democratic states. The private sector has been the domain of choice and competition where the customer is always right. Now the citizen must hew to state-dictated morality and the customer must bow to the corporate moral compass.

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Fauci's very bad week

Anthony Fauci’s Very Bad Week

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Despite Fauci’s wishes, the most extreme aspects of lockdowns gradually faded away in time, most anointed experts can pretend as if the vaccine ended the worst aspects of the pandemic (that’s why the mandates became necessary, if only to maximize uptake and confound the science), and Fauci keeps going on national television, despite his age and wealth, to dial back his responsibility for any aspect of it, including the lockdowns he is on record backing from February 26, 2020, onward. 

Anthony Fauci’s Very Bad Week Read Journal Article

laborers

The Dignity of Labor Requires Freedom and Truth

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The same dynamic that Jesus encountered in Nazareth held true today; bringing “glad tidings to the poor” is a popular slogan but very often those who embrace it most quickly care little for being called out for their own sins which prevent delivery of these glad tidings. Sadly, this is precisely what has happened to those whose political history has been tied up with what was once called the labor movement.

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unredacted

Unredacted: The EU’s Hidden Contract with Pfizer-BioNTech

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The ‘acknowledgement’ clause in the order form – acknowledgement, in effect, that the manufacturers knew neither if the vaccine was safe nor if it was effective, at any rate in the long term – is in addition to the clauses which already provide the manufacturers extremely wide-reaching indemnification in the section on indemnification of the contract proper.

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CJ Hopkins

The Vicious Punishment of CJ Hopkins 

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When asked what gives him courage, Freda said, “I look at this as this a spiritual battle. The people who censor are not good people. If they believed in their ideas, then they would stand up to scrutiny.” He added that many smart people fell in line with dominant and controlling narratives during the Covid period, and, he said, “I lost a lot of heroes. They just crumbled.”

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no evidence, biased

Get a New Covid Shot? The Evidence Suggests Otherwise

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Taking a new Covid shot every winter has no empirical basis. The burden of proving effectiveness against death squarely rests on public health officials and anything short of a double-blind, placebo-controlled randomized trial is unacceptable. And that applies to the flu shot as well.

Get a New Covid Shot? The Evidence Suggests Otherwise Read Journal Article