History

History articles provide critical analysis of historical context in relation to censorship, policy, technology, media, economics, social life, public health, and individual liberty.

We explore recurring themes such as pandemic profit motives, medical thinking collapse, ignored warnings, industry capture of regulation, government restrictions on freedom, societal cowardice in crises, addiction politics, plus pathways to restore truth, wisdom, and human-centered systems.

All history articles from Brownstone Institute are translated into multiple languages to enable global access, encourage international dialogue on historical lessons, and support readers worldwide in applying past insights to defend liberty and challenge overreach.

The Blind Brute Blunders Forth

The Blind Brute Blunders Forth

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What are the chances that a natural addition of the PB2 gene segment to the H5N1 bird flu virus would occur? Pretty slight, if not impossible, one would guess. The mere fact that such research (which also includes the laboratory construction of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in Wuhan) has occurred, and is probably still taking place, is an unmistakable manifestation of the kind of irrationality that Kafka, Schopenhauer, and Freud unmasked on the part of the not-so-sapiens human race.

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This Silence Is Not Golden

This Silence Is Not Golden

By / / , , / 6 minute read / Articles
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The silence is not golden. It’s dangerous. It is even treacherous. The Covid response ruined everything the world identified with America: freedom, rights, decentralism, commerce, individual liberty, and bravery in the face of trial. Governments together with all the commanding heights betrayed all those values. We need to know why. We need to know how. We need to know who. The silence could mean there is more to come. Which is to say that silence equals death. 

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Boris Was Right Not to Trust Neil Ferguson

Boris Was Right Not to Trust Neil Ferguson

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We have held the belief that no politician who has not experienced the bestiality of war should ever be elected Prime Minister of any state. Ours is a belief and an aspiration, as those who have been in action are nowadays thin on the ground. Enforcing such a belief would entail restricting democracy: only veterans, front-line media and humanitarian agencies could be elected. 

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The Covid-19 Inquiry is a Sham...So Far

The Covid-19 Inquiry is a Sham…So Far

By / / , / 8 minute read / Articles
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The Covid-19 Inquiry is the latest demonstration that UK public inquiries have long since been reduced to an unfunny joke at the expense of UK citizens, and one would have to be naïve in the extreme to expect to find much of anything of value in the conclusions they publish. One did, however, think that useful information might be found in the evidence inquiries gathered, but over the major issues which it should address the Covid-19 Inquiry will not even attain this more modest objective.

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White House Covid Task Force Members Cashed in on Pandemic Panic

White House Covid Task Force Members Cashed in on Pandemic Panic

By / / , , / 4 minute read / Articles
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Operation Warp Speed and the resulting Task Force operation was, by all objective accounts, a catastrophic blunder, but that didn’t stop many of its members from parlaying their roles on the high visibility government detail into successful post service gigs. So we thought now would be a good time to take a look at some of the healthcare/pharma-related government officials responsible for some of those fateful decisions, and where they are today.

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We Must Save Ourselves from the Public Health Professionals

We Must Save Ourselves from the Public Health Professionals

By / / , , / 7 minute read / Articles
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We need legislators, and the public, to reclaim public health ethics and to return to credible concepts of health and well-being – as the WHO once did – “physical, mental and social.” This is what was intended when previous generations fought to overthrow dictators, striving for equality and for the rights of individuals over those who would control them. History tells us that public health professions tend to follow self-interest, taking the side of those who would be dictators. If our democracies, freedom, and health are to survive, we must accept reality and address this as a basic issue of individual freedom and good governance for which we are all responsible. There is too much at stake to leave this to self-interested corporatists and the notorious enforcers they control.

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Living Everywhere in a Carceral Surveillance State

Living Everywhere in a Carceral Surveillance State

By / / , , / 11 minute read / Articles
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If you live in a Chinese city, or even in London, you are probably so used to surveillance cameras all around you – on lamp posts, the corners of buildings, and so on – that you would hardly bat an eyelid. Yet what contemporary city-denizens take for granted was not always the case, and most people would be surprised to know that surveillance has a long history, and was linked to modes of punishment from early on. 

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The Historian of Decline: Ludwig von Mises’s Relevance Today

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The mistake we made was in believing that there is logic to history. There isn’t. There is only the march of good ideas and bad, and the forever competition between the two. And this is a central message of Mises’s 1954 overlooked masterwork Theory and History. Here he offers a devastating rebuttal to determinism of all sorts, whether from old liberals or Hegel or Fukuyama. 

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Michael Gove Supported Lockdowns Due to Information from "Friends Outside Government"

Michael Gove Supported Lockdowns Due to Information from “Friends Outside Government”

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The idea that behind the scenes intelligence sources were pushing warnings that the virus was a deadly manmade biological agent warranting an extreme response has much to commend it as an explanation, the more so as time has gone on. Michael Gove’s comments to the inquiry today have just added to this.

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In Praise of Semantic Warfare

In Praise of Semantic Warfare

By / / , , / 7 minute read / Articles
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Could it be that most of us, in fact, are pre-programmed to surrender our agency at the first sign of a canceling putdown or threat of ostracism, however absurd, emanating from someone presented to us as being authoritative, even when that “authoritative” figure issuing the “conspiracy theorist” or “disinformation” fatwa these days is often nothing more a 26-year-old twit with an overly-expensive diploma working in a Silicon Valley cubicle or a Brooklyn coffee shop? 

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Lessons Learned from the West African Slave Trade

Forgive but Never Forget: Lessons from the West African Slave Trade

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West Africans endured slavery for 400 years, when 15 million human beings were forcibly captured and sold into bondage. During this era, the world’s major secular and sectarian institutions regarded slaves as no better than animals, but modern West Africans look to the future, adopting a philosophy of forgiving but never forgetting.

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