History

History articles feature analysis of historical context in relation to censorship, policy, technology, media, economics, and social life.

All Brownstone Institute articles on the topic of history are translated into multiple languages.

The Deeper History of ‘Social Distancing’ — the Western Term for Lockdown (封锁)

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One way or another, the ancient policy of “lockdown” in response to an outbreak thus came full circle. Having been thoroughly discredited as counterproductive by 20th-century epidemiological research, this medieval policy of lockdown (封锁) was kept alive in China

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Cuomo

Governor Andrew Cuomo: From Hero to Goofball in One Seasonal Virus 

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Cuomo can’t imagine – truly – that he might have done anything wrong except perhaps communicated more clearly. In truth, governments could have forced everyone to paint their faces bright blue and wear frying pans for shoes and it would not have changed the pandemic outcome from what it was going to be. The virus never cared. But don’t tell that to Cuomo: the upshot of his book is that he saved New York. Nothing will convince him otherwise. 

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The Story of Jared Kushner and His Ventilators

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You know the phrase self-aware? It does not apply to Jared Kushner, the former president’s son-in-law. He somehow weaseled his way into the center of Covid planning in the White House. He dragged along two college buds, Nat Turner and Adam Boehler, two mega-rich kids without a lick of experience in pandemics or public health. 

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No Way Was the Huanan Market the Epicenter of Covid

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There’s something rotten in the state of virology. The study performed by these leading virologists, who’ve been dead centre in the Covid saga from the earliest secret calls about the virus in early 2020, is entirely reliant on a critical assumption that an early cluster of cases around the Huanan Market in Wuhan in December 2019 represented “the earliest known 174 COVID-19 cases in the world”—an assumption which is belied by an overwhelming amount of replicable, peer-reviewed evidence to the contrary.

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Deborah Birx Lockdowns

Debi Does Lockdowns 

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Each anti-scientific, non-public-health measure in itself – e.g., universal cloth masking, testing and quarantining after the virus was widespread, focusing on cases instead of hospitalizations or deaths – was not intended to achieve anything, except the singular goal of fomenting massive fear. And the purpose of the fear was to ensure maximum compliance with lockdowns.

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Religious Individuals Versus Collectivist Control 

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One significant gift of Judaism and Christianity is the concept that an individual is responsible and valuable apart from the group. As Larry Siedentop explains in his book Inventing the Individual, Western civilization’s moral and legal foundations owe a great deal to that legacy. Before that, the ancient Romans and Greeks considered loyalty to the family-clan to be an absolute religious duty. 

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Fauci’s Red Guards: The Mass Censoring of Social Media

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By simultaneously threatening both the federal bureaucracy and social media companies, a handful of high-level officials could effectively transform the federal government into a sprawling censorship army reminiscent of Mao’s Red Guards, silencing any opposition to tin-pot public health policies with increasing detachment and certitude as this systematic silencing falsely convinced them that the regime’s policies were just and good.

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Cold War Nostalgia Explained

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With lockdowns and the current political and economic chaos, the global empire has come home to oppress us all in the most personal possible way. We now read tales of life in the Soviet Union and we recognize it all too well. We read 1984 by George Orwell and recognize it in our own experience. This is not what winning the Cold War was supposed to mean. 

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