History ⋆ Page 19 of 44 ⋆ Brownstone Institute

Three Years to Slow the Spread Marked the Advent of Push-Button Tyranny

Jordan Schachtel / March 18, 2023 / Economics, History, Public Health / 5 minute read

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Covid hysteria and the three-year anniversary of 15 Days To Slow The Spread serves as the beginning period of a permanent scar resulting from government power grabs and federal overreach. While life is back to normal in most of the country, the Overton window of acceptable policy has slid even further in the direction of push-button tyranny. Hopefully, much of the world has awakened to the reality that most of the people in charge aren’t actually doing what’s best for their respective populations.

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The Day the Sunrise Was a Curse

Jeffrey A. Tucker / March 17, 2023 / History, Philosophy / 6 minute read

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We recall those days now and wonder how and why this all happened. Not one minute has passed since that day when I’ve rested from asking that question. Every day it feels like we get closer to knowing. And yet the truth keeps being ever more elusive with every revelation of the depths of the conspiracy, the range of the players, the interests at work, and the forever toggle between fear, plot, ignorance and malice.

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Curious: Angela Merkel’s September 2019 Visit to Wuhan

Robert Kogon / March 17, 2023 / History / 7 minute read

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What an incredible coincidence that the German Chancellor was visiting Wuhan’s Tongji Hospital at almost precisely the time when, according to Redfield’s speculations, a potentially catastrophic event was taking place across the river at the Wuhan Institute of Virology! This was, moreover, merely three months before the first officially acknowledged cases of Covid-19 began to turn up in the city.

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A Brief History of Stolen Lives

Mark Oshinskie / March 16, 2023 / History / 2 minute read

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Very few who aggressively supported the futile, destructive “mitigation” measures have admitted that they’ve been wrong throughout. The few who have belatedly admitted this absolve themselves by falsely insisting they “couldn’t have known” that these interventions would cause serious, lasting damage.

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Balaji Srinivasan: The Man Who Was Fired Up for Covid

Michael Senger / March 16, 2023 / History, Policy / 9 minute read

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Unlike Tomás Pueyo, it’s unlikely that Balaji’s Twitter prophecies had a major effect on policy—though he did spread a bit of panic to bring these outcomes about. Rather, aside from the uncanny global coordination we observed in COVID policies and propaganda, Balaji’s tweets might be the best evidence so far that this plan to recreate China’s response did, in fact, exist, down to the particular terms and details of how the world would transform.

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Bonfire of the Covid Vanities

Gabrielle Bauer / March 15, 2023 / History, Policy / 7 minute read

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Freedom to take a walk on the beach? Stop killing the vulnerable! Freedom to earn a living? The economy will recover! The demotion of freedom—that noble ideal of liberal democracy—to a caricature has been painful to observe. Without freedom, we have nothing resembling a life. Pandemic or not, freedom needs a place at the discussion table.

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Was Trump Tricked Into Lockdowns or Not?

Jeffrey A. Tucker / March 14, 2023 / History, Law, Policy / 7 minute read

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How do we know for sure that Trump was not selling his advisors on lockdowns rather than that reverse? We do not actually know that. The most plausible scenario is that everyone in that hot house of Oval Office power pretension was equally enthusiastic for the most catastrophic public-health decision in modern history.

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How to Cut Through the New Gordian Knots

Paul Frijters,

Gigi Foster,

Michael Baker / March 12, 2023 / History, Policy / 13 minute read

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We can forget about seemingly simple fixes, like giving politicians the right to fire civil servants on the spot. Besides, giving clueless and corrupted politicians yet more power is not going to make matters better. Real reform will have to be dramatic, and it will come about only in dramatic circumstances.

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The Covid Response Museum

Bhaskaran Raman / March 11, 2023 / History / 4 minute read

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The target inauguration date for the museum is March 25, 2023, which is the third anniversary of mass incarceration of one-sixth of humanity, i.e. India’s first lockdown. To start, the museum will be online. We also encourage people to setup physical museums using the material from this website, under creative commons license: free to share with attribution.

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The Sanitation Power Does Not Permission Tyranny

Jeffrey A. Tucker / March 10, 2023 / History, Public Health / 6 minute read

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The enlargement of the term sanitation beyond its vernacular meaning is fraught with danger. Indeed, it threatens to undermine all the achievements of public health over a century. Perhaps, then, it stands to reason that the CDC, which got so much wrong during the pandemic, would now be trying to convince us that a power designed to protect us from foreign disease-carrying rubbish would entitle them to make us cover up our faces and inhibit our ability to breath or communicate through non-verbal signals.

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The Greatest Lie Told During Covid

el gato malo / March 9, 2023 / History, Policy, Public Health / 18 minute read

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Deaths in the US used to be more volatile. but since the advent of penicillin, that stopped. Pre-covid, I do not think there has been a single year in US history since 1945 where the age adjusted death rate exceeded something “normal” from within the five years prior to “pandemic” year.

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Conspiracy Theories Become Conspiracy Facts

Ramesh Thakur / March 9, 2023 / History, Law, Media, Public Health / 12 minute read

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Interventions rooted in panic, driven by political machinations, and using all the levers of state power to terrify citizens and muzzle critics in the end needlessly killed massive numbers of the most vulnerable while putting the vast low-risk majority under house arrest. The benefits are questionable but the harms are increasingly obvious. The Johnson government in general and Hancock in particular revalidate Lord Acton’s astute observation that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

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