Free Republic

It’s been a continuing mystery for three years, at least to me but many others too. In October 2020, in the midst of a genuine crisis, three scientists made a very short statement of highly public health wisdom, a summary of what everyone in the profession, apart from a few oddballs, believed only a year earlier. The astonishing frenzy of denunciation following that document’s release was on a level I’ve never seen before, reaching to the highest levels of government and flowing through the whole of media and tech. It was mind-boggling. For proof that nothing in the document was...

ust how much mental and psychological trauma exists in the country and world today cannot be quantified, and I would not trust any studies that tried. But this much is clear. We have lost our footing in knowing something that scientists long believed we could know: whether and to what extent an economy is growing and prospering or going the opposite way. Everyone seems just to be winging it these days. Ever since lockdowns utterly broke reporting, it’s been hard to tell up from down. The substantial hits taken by major financial indexes over the last two months seem to...

The Trump administration, pushed by the Department of Government Efficiency and deployed by the Office of Personnel Management, has sent another email to all federal employees with a normal request to present five tasks accomplished in the last week. It’s an easy task. It takes 5 minutes. In the service industry, this is entirely normal, even routine. Taking inventory of the workforce is standard for any new management in the private sector. Oddly, absolute mania broke out among the pundit class. Government unions are preparing lawsuits. The panic and frenzy is palpable. As it turns out, no new president has...

Brownstone Institute has been tracking a little-known federal agency for years. It is part of the Department of Homeland Security created after 9-11. It is called the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency or CISA. It was created in 2018 out of a 2017 executive order that seemed to make sense. It was a mandate to secure American digital infrastructure against foreign attack and infiltration. And yet during the Covid year, it assumed three huge jobs. It was the agency responsible for dividing the workforce between essential and nonessential. It led the way on censorship efforts. And it handled election security...

One reporter has proven brave enough not to take the deal. The deal is: you can interview Trump provided you don’t ask perfectly obvious questions about his COVID response that shredded the Bill of Rights, wrecked his presidency, enabled mass mail-in ballots, elevated agencies to the status of dictators, and kicked off the biggest national crisis of our lifetimes from which we aren’t even close to recovering. We still do not know when or if we will get the Constitution back. Inflation still rages, education nationwide is slipping more by the day, there is a resulting crime epidemic, and the...

No matter how bad you think Covid policies were, they were intended to be worse. Consider the vaccine passports alone. Six cities were locked down to include only the vaccinated in public indoor places. They were New York City, Boston, Chicago, New Orleans, Washington, D.C., and Seattle. The plan was to enforce this with a vaccine passport. It broke. Once the news leaked that the shot didn’t stop infection or transmission, the planners lost public support and the scheme collapsed. It was undoubtedly planned to be permanent and nationwide if not worldwide. Instead, the scheme had to be dialed back....

The Meltdown of Commercial Real EstateIn case you’ve still got money in a bank, Bloomberg is warning that defaults in commercial real estate loans could “topple” hundreds of US banks.Leaving taxpayers on the hook for trillions in losses.The note, by Senior Editor James Crombie, walks us through the festering hellscape that is commercial real estate.To set the mood, a new study predicts that nearly half of downtown Pittsburgh office space could be vacant in 4 years. Major cities like San Francisco are already sporting zombie-apocalypse downtowns, with abandoned office buildings baking in the sun.So what happened? The Fed’s yo-yo interest...

I have praised the Trump administration’s accomplishments many times, but there is one huge blot on Trump’s record: his administration’s response to the covid epidemic. Via InstaPundit, Jeffrey Tucker of the Brownstone Institute comments on Megyn Kelly’s interview of Trump. Kelly, to her credit, began the process of asking Trump the tough questions about covid: We need to know why the churches, schools, and businesses were closed at the urging of the White House. We need to know why we faced travel restrictions, why government printed and spent multiple trillions that produced crushing inflation, why the hospitals were shut to...

The CDC removed “COVID vaccine” as the cause of death on a number of Minnesota death certificates, according to an anonymous tipster — and that has the Brownstone Institute referring to the health agency as the “Centers for Data Concealment.” The tipster — and I’m sure you can understand why they chose to remain anonymous — was able to get their hands on the complete set of Minnesota death certificates from 2015 on. Aaron Hertzberg’s deeply detailed report digs deep into the federal bureaucratic requirements involved in filling out local death certificates all over the country. The extremely short version...

Don’t Let Them Memory-Hole This On a video podcast the other day, I made reference to the lockdown orders of March 2020. The host turned off the recording. He said it was fine to talk about this subject but from now on please refer to “the events of March 2020” with no specifics. Otherwise, it will be taken down by YouTube and Facebook. He needs those platforms for reach, and reach is necessary for his business model. I complied, but I was spooked. Are we really now in the position that talking about what happened to us is verboten on...

Writing in The Atlantic on October 31, Brown University economist Emily Oster penned a pre-emptive plea for amnesty for Covid-policy hardliners. Why? Because they were all well-intentioned and their pronouncements rested on benign ignorance. Judging by the numerous responses in print and social media and online commentary, the viral article lit the fuse on widespread, simmering but still raw anger. To many it suggests the lockdown zealots are incapable of introspection, of accepting culpability. Instead, they just want to move on to the next excuse to unleash blanket authoritarian control all over again. Jessica Hockett has coined the word “Osterism”...

Say Only What We Want to Hear, or We Will Take Away Your LivelihoodThe attacks on free and open discussion are becoming more and more widespread. Now, as Toby Young explains in an article this morning, the payment service PayPal has closed the accounts of the Daily Sceptic, which often publishes criticism of the government policy in various matters. Paypal has also closed the account of the Free Speech Union, which provides support to people whose freedom of opinion is under attack, for example those fired from their jobs because of their opinions. Paypal has even gone as far as...

The Gettysburg Address celebrated “government of the people, by the people, for the people,” echoing the ideals of the Enlightenment: equality for all, and liberation from the yoke of tyrannical rulers. Since 1863 when Abraham Lincoln made his iconic speech, the “government of the people” bit has just purred along without a glitch. There has been no dearth of individuals wanting to rule others, whether by election or by birthright. The people have been thoroughly governed, and governed more still. The “government for the people” bit has had its ups and downs. Every government claims it rules for the people...

The possibility of U.S. lockdowns—never attempted on this scale in the history of pandemics—was already in the air in early March 2020. The theory of lockdown had been floating around for 15 years but now China was first to try it, and claim enormous success, however fraudulently. Incredibly, the United States was set to try it out too but getting Trump on board was going to take some doing. The federal government had the quarantine power since 1944. That much we knew. But just how expansive could its exercise be? Would they dare quarantine the well with the sick? How...

The outrageous prices at the grocery store and gas stations – the highest ever recorded and increasing at rates too fast to calculate with precision – are yet more collateral damage from the initial lockdowns two years ago. The story unfolds over two years but the line of causality is direct. Apparently it’s going to get much worse. I wonder if at some point, no one will remember how this all began. Maybe everyone has already forgotten. I asked a friend: do you think people understand the relationship between the March 2020 lockdowns and the wild price increases two years...

Early in the pandemic, I had been furiously writing articles about lockdowns. My phone rang with a call from a man named Dr. Rajeev Venkayya. He is the head of a vaccine company but introduced himself as former head of pandemic policy for the Gates Foundation. Now I was listening. I did not know it then, but I’ve since learned from Michael Lewis’s (mostly terrible) book The Premonition that Venkayya was, in fact, the founding father of lockdowns. While working for George W. Bush’s White House in 2005, he headed a bioterrorism study group. From his perch of influence –...