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 Dragnet in Lombardy: Patient Zero of Lockdowns

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By way of one Health Minister Roberto Speranza, on whose order 50,000 Lombardy residents were placed under lockdown on February 21, 2020, the first lockdown in the modern western world. Within weeks, lockdown had spread to cities across Italy, until the entire nation was placed on lockdown on March 9. By April 2020, more than half the world’s population—some 3.9 billion people—had been placed under lockdown.

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New Evidence: Fauci Imposed a Vaccine Delay that Cost Trump the Election

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The key piece of information comes from a new book, The Messenger, published last week by Harvard Business Review Press. The author, Peter Loftus, is a reporter for the Wall Street Journal and they published his essay about the book in their Review section on Saturday. What’s astonishing is that Loftus does not even realize the enormity of the story he just stumbled upon.

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They Thought They Were Free

They Thought They Were Free

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The men and women of Germany in the 1930s and 40s were not unlike Americans in the 2010s and 20s—or the people of any nation at any time throughout history. They are human, just as we are human. And as humans, we have a great tendency to harshly judge the evils of other societies but fail to recognize our own moral failures—failures that have been on full display the past two years during the covid panic.

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pro-lockdown

The 2014 Template to Export Lockdowns

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The significance of this pro-lockdown campaign in 2014 can’t be overstated. Even among lockdown skeptics, the widely-held view is that the world essentially bumbled into lockdown in 2020. Although China’s global lockdown propaganda campaign utilizing tens of thousands of bots in virtually every language and dialect across the world is well documented, moderates have argued that this campaign merely represented China celebrating its own “success” against Covid—whether real or not—rather than any premeditated plan to export lockdown as policy.

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The Day Anthony Fauci Wrecked American Freedom

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Fauci demonstrated at that press conference special knowledge of a fine print that not even the president of the United States had seen. He was itching to read it. Did he have a hand in its creation? Most certainly. And what about the typesetting? Are we really supposed to believe that it was an accident that the text with the devastating material was so small as to be barely visible whereas the large text featured mostly common hygiene tips?

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dictator chic

Dictatorship Chic 

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The great debate between democracy and dictatorship, between freedom and despotism, between a government by the people and a government imposed upon the people is here at last. I’m glad for the clarification of terms. They are saying the quiet part out loud: they want dictatorship. All partisans of freedom should similarly stand up and say the loud part even louder: we tried life without freedom and found it intolerable. We are never going back. 

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Mozart, Mediocrity, and the Administrative State 

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While the story is fiction, the moral drama here is real and affects the whole of history. Every highly productive person – we don’t even have to speak of geniuses here – often ends up surrounded by resentful and mediocre people who have too much time on their hands. They use whatever limited talents they have to plot, confound, confuse, and ultimately wreck their betters. The demand to “comply” is always the watchword: it’s a tool of destruction. 

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Matt Pottinger

The Talented Mr. Pottinger: The US Intelligence Agent Who Pushed Lockdowns

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Pottinger may have simply been overly-trusting of his sources, thinking they were the little people in China trying to help their American friends. But why did Pottinger push so hard for sweeping Chinese policies like mask mandates that were far outside his field of expertise? Why did he so often breach protocol? Why seek out and appoint Deborah Birx?

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woodstock

The 1968-69 “Hong Kong Flu” Pandemic Revisited

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What happened between then and now? Was there some kind of lost knowledge, as happened with scurvy, when we once had sophistication and then the knowledge was lost and had to be re-found? For COVID-19, we reverted to medieval-style understandings and policies, even in the 21st century, and at the urging of the media and myopic advice from governments. It’s all very strange. And it cries out for answers.

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