By Bert Olivier at Brownstone dot org.

The most courageous person I know was involved in a collision with a kudu – a very large South African antelope – in the year 2000, when he was 21 years old. 'The kudu lost,' as he put it laconically when an orthopaedic surgeon inquired about the accident where he lay in the emergency ward of a hospital. He had been driving to a city 120 kilometres from where he lived, taking his girlfriend back to the university where she was a student, when the kudu scaled a low fence on the side of the road and landed on their car's windscreen. This was the equivalent of a bull, or a big cow, landing on a car's windscreen.

I visited him the day after he was admitted to the intensive care ward of a hospital in the city where he lived. To see this once healthy, strong, and active young man reduced to a person who has essentially lost the use of his body – someone who has become an 'I cannot,' instead of the 'I can' he was before, in the words of phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty – was heart-wrenching. Particularly because he is my son. This was exacerbated by his wry rhetorical comment to me: 'What is worse than waking up from a nightmare? When you realise that you have awakened to the nightmare.'

Marco is now in his late forties, and despite his disability, has a good job and earns a decent salary. Most importantly – attesting to my observation, that he is the most courageous person I know – he never complains, has a sense of humour and likes going out with us, despite the difficulties involving moving into the car from his wheelchair and back again. He faces a difficult life with resolve and fortitude, and I never stop learning from him about the question concerning the meaning of one's life. As he put it to me once: 'Dad, I used to ask the obvious question, why this happened to me. Then, when reading Nietzsche, I realised that I am the only one who can answer that – by the way I live.'

Why have I related this story about my younger son and how an unpredictable event changed his life forever? Because there is an analogy to be drawn between the nightmare he awakened to, on the one hand, and waking to the nightmarish world we have inhabited since roughly 2020, on the other. Every day when I wake up, it dawns on me, once more, that this is the true nightmare, and one may add that, as in the case of Marco, the answer to the question, why it has happened to (or been inflicted upon) humanity, is one that only we ourselves can provide – through the manner in which we respond to it.

Filipe Rafaeli has given us a vivid account of the apathetic 'response' – if it could be called that – to the ongoing attempt to enslave humanity, by comparing the creative cultural 'answer' to the threat of nuclear catastrophe behind the Cold War by particularly young people – in the guise of life-affirming music, among other things – to the cowardly withdrawal from the possibility of totalitarian rule, today. Instead of finding creative ways to resist it, the majority of people at present resort to hiding in cyberspace, or not questioning questionable decisions by 'authorities,' for instance. Rafaeli is right to describe ours as a 'cowardly society.'

Just yesterday a friend of ours told me about someone throwing up his arms in the course of a conversation (which presumably involved what are still, incongruously, called 'conspiracy theories,' instead of 'conspiracy realism,' as it should be), and querulously wondering aloud why people are 'so distrustful.' That's a manifestation of cowardice, because acknowledging that the stench of a large rat hangs everywhere in the air would entail the need to adopt a stance to it: either acceptance or rejection, with their respective consequences for action.

Such a person would probably question my use of the term 'nightmare,' above. However, apart from the analogy in question, between a disabled person realising what a nightmare he has awakened to, and humanity having a similarly disco...

By Sinead Murphy at Brownstone dot org.

In What Autism Is, I characterized autism as exclusion from the existential empathy on which meaningful human experience relies.

Autistic people are irretrievably remote from the conditions for meaning. Whatever they learn is learnt as a simulation and from outside of human connection.

Further clarity about autism comes from considering what autism is not. An opportunity has arisen in this regard, with a discussion between psychologists Jordan Peterson and Simon Baron-Cohen.

The discussion is titled What Do We Actually Know About Autism? It concludes that autism is a talent for understanding, not thoughts and feelings but structures, not intentions but arrangements. Some of us tend to be good with people. Autistics tend to be good with things. Some of us tend to 'empathize.' Autistics tend to 'systemize.'

But autism is not a talent for understanding things. Autism is not an attunement to structures and arrangements. Autism is not a propensity for systemizing.

Why not?

Because appreciation of structures and arrangements requires precisely the same baseline aptitude that is required by appreciation of thoughts and feelings – and it is this baseline aptitude that autistic people lack.

It may be true that most of us are more or less good with people or good with things. It is certainly true that those with autism are good with neither.

The idea that those with autism are good with things is often heard, admittedly – Peterson and Baron-Cohen do little more than frame the idea in professional speak.

Those with autism are not attuned to people. It is natural for us to assume that they are attuned to something. We conclude that they're attuned to things.

We are thereby prepared for the hypothesis that those with autism are on a spectrum with those talented at the workings of things – engineers, mechanics, technicians.

And so we take autism to be merely a different style of attention to the world – less adept with people, more adept with things; less empathetic, more systematic.

It is a common mistake.

But it is not only a mistake. It is a category mistake. It posits as a form of meaningful human experience what is categorically impossible as meaningful human experience.

Nothing – not people, not things – means anything without a baseline empathy. The distinction between 'systemizers' and 'empathizers,' between engineers and nurses, is of little significance. All in the end is empathy.

Autism, as the lack of capacity for empathy, is not an attunement to the meaning of things. It is a wholesale exclusion from the meaning of anything. To describe it as a style of meaningful experience is to commit a categorical error, albeit a common one.

What is uncommon about the discussion between Peterson and Baron-Cohen is that it does not simply commit this categorical error – it unfolds it quite explicitly.

In their opening exchange, Peterson and Baron-Cohen immediately dismiss the baseline empathy on which meaning relies. In doing so, they make it clear what must be suppressed so as to normalize autism in our midst: the very achievement that makes our experiences human.

What do we actually know about autism? That autism is not an attunement to the meaning of things. That autism is rather an assault on meaning itself – hiding in the plain sight even of men of science.

At the outset of his discussion with Baron-Cohen, Peterson introduces Martin Heidegger's insight that the fundamental human attitude is one of 'care.'

It is a promising beginning. There are few better philosophical resources for coming to know about autism than the work of Heidegger with its central concept of 'care.'

And Peterson does not only introduce Heidegger's concept of 'care,' he explains it as implying that human beings inhabit 'a shared structure of value that…foregrounds certain perceptions and hides others.'

Peterson's explanation is good. In describing the baseline human attitude as one of care, Heidegger points to the essential...

By Jeffrey A. Tucker at Brownstone dot org.

When Scott Adams died, People Magazine led with a line that dominated most of the media for days: "Scott Adams, Disgraced Dilbert Creator, Dies at 69." It's a message for the living: depart from saying what you are supposed to say and you will lose everything. Even in death, your life will be called worthless. This was not eulogy but rather an enforcement action to keep the opinion cartel functioning.

It was in 2015 that the famed creator of the Dilbert cartoon first started speculating that Donald Trump had what it takes to become president. The feeling of shock was palpable. No one else was saying anything like this – more specifically, no one of his status and reach as a cultural influence. In those days, the opinions of The Nation and National Review were identical: this clown cannot be president.

For my own part, I recall feeling appalled by Adams' statements. At the time, I was firmly in the Never Trump camp, without fully understanding that I was then accepting the most conventional opinion possible at the time. I further failed to understand the complex dynamic operating beneath the surface, namely that a broken system of government/media/tech had long ago stopped serving the cause of freedom and dignity and turned to full-time exploitation in surreptitious forms.

In words, Trump was out there saying that the system was gravely broken and needed to be fixed. This was Adams' view as well, and he further saw that Trump had the gravitas necessary to pull people over to this view.

Adams of course turned out to be correct about this. It's difficult to recreate the sense of those times to understand just how disruptive his views were. It was a universally shared opinion at the time that Trump was an unwelcome and deeply dangerous invader into electoral politics.

The establishment figured that the best way to shut down Trump's effort was to treat them as wholly inadmissible to public life. The Huffington Post put their coverage under the entertainment category, while every other mainstream venue ran countless millions of articles on his evils.

Adams saw something others did not. He saw that Trump was compelling in ways no other political figure was. He was talking about real issues no one else would mention. He was a master improviser on stage. He was also funny. It was only after Adams's comments that I started to listen. I realized that he was onto something important.

For holding this view, and then becoming ever more open about his support of Trump, Adams lost everything. His high-paid corporate speaking gigs were cancelled. He lost his income stream and social/cultural status. Eventually his syndication was cancelled too, on thin pretext. This cannot have come as a shock to him. He knew exactly what the consequences would be for departing from the status quo. He did it anyway.

We need to appreciate just how rare this is in higher circles of public influencers. This is a world in which everyone knows what they are supposed to say and what is unsayable. No one needs to send memos or give marching orders. The proper orthodoxy is in the air, discerned from all the signs by all intelligent people.

Entering into the upper echelons of opinion making, whether in academia or media or civil society generally, requires three types of training. First, you need to develop expertise in some area or at least be able to present evidence that other experts regard you as an expert. Second, you need to show evidence that you can speak the rarified form of language that is reserved to elite opinion, which has its own special vocabulary for communication and cultural signalling. And third, you need to develop proficiency in knowing what to say and believe.

This is what advanced training amounts to. Master all three, and you cross into a different realm from that inhabited by the rabble. Staying in that place requires close adherence to the rules and the presentation of ongoing evidence that you...

By Brownstone Institute at Brownstone dot org.

Harvard Law Professor Larry Tribe was once the preeminent legal scholar in the country. The New York Times referred to him as a "legal icon" and "President Obama's mentor." New York Magazine called him "the nation's foremost scholar of constitutional law."

But in reality, Tribe is the archetype for the supposedly solemn legal practitioner who is merely a stooge for the Democratic Party establishment. The cast of lawyers maintain facades of jurisprudential seriousness, but beneath their suits there is a Bolshevik thirst for power.

Tribe began his work in this field nearly four decades ago when he testified against the nomination of Judge Robert Bork to the Supreme Court, calling Bork "hostile to individual rights and deferential to executive power."

With time, however, Tribe's dedication to unravelling the social fabric and destroying his political enemies became more apparent. He sought to upend property rights during the Covid response by supporting a CDC eviction moratorium. He later lobbied President Biden to unilaterally cancel student loans, though he never acknowledged if that would be considered "hostile to individual rights" or "deferential to executive power." He later defended the Biden regime's censorship of online dissent, writing that the proliferation of ideas would "make us less secure as a nation" and "endanger us all every day."

Most recently, Professor Tribe joined a slew of the nation's largest law firms in arguing that it is unconstitutional for public schools to divide their sports teams by sex. Behemoth law firms like Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, LLP ($2.7 billion in annual revenue) and Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP ($1.6 billion in annual revenue) filed amicus briefs opposing West Virginia's law limiting female sports to biological women.

Kathleen Hartnett, a partner at Cooley LLP ($2.1 billion in annual revenue), argued on behalf of the challenge to the law. Despite billing approximately $3,000 per hour to paying clients, she was unable to provide a definition of what it means "to be a man or woman, a boy or girl" when asked by Justice Samuel Alito.

This occurrence is no anomaly; Big Law fundamentally distorts the American legal system by offering billions of dollars in free legal services to unconstitutional crusades and liberal pet projects while denying access to any opposition group.

For example, Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom (annual revenue $3.6 billion) dedicated approximately 40,000 pro bono hours to immigration cases in 2022 alone (accounting for at least $5 million in legal work) and has continued to oppose any form of deportations of illegal aliens. The firm dedicates millions in resources to advancing other left-wing causes, including affirmative action, the trans agenda, and a "fellowship" program that states its desire to expand access to food stamps, combat election integrity efforts, and support "sanctuary city laws."

Big Law generally is much the same. Willkie Farr & Gallagher (annual revenue $1.5 billion) touts on its website that it served pro bono to support continued "surgical abortions" in Tennessee. In 2020, Law360 described how firms like Ropes & Gray (annual revenue $3.4 billion), Arnold & Porter (annual revenue $1.19 billion), and WilmerHale "jumped into court fights" to support mail-in voting gratis.

Notably, these gratuitous in-kind donations only extend in one direction. None of these firms offered defense services to January 6 protestors locked away in solitary confinement or to Christians targeted by Merrick Garland's Department of Justice. Skadden did not offer counsel to dissidents debanked for resisting the regime. WilmerHale never stood in pro bono to stop states from shuttering churches or businesses through lockdowns. Cooley will never argue a case before the Supreme Court on behalf of the vaccine-injured.

To the contrary, they work to destroy anyone who resists their manipulation of the scales...

By Maryanne Demasi at Brownstone dot org.

For the first time in a generation, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has rewritten its official position on whether vaccines can cause autism.

This is a change that could reshape one of the most politically charged and emotionally fraught debates in modern medicine.

In a website update published on 19 November 2025, the agency now states that the long-standing claim "vaccines do not cause autism" is "not an evidence-based claim" because scientific studies "have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism."

The page also acknowledges that "studies supporting a link have been ignored by health authorities."

It's difficult to overstate the significance of these statements. For nearly two decades, they would have been unthinkable for a federal public health agency.

The timing is equally striking.

The change arrives at a moment when the political and scientific landscape around vaccine safety is undergoing a marked shift inside the Trump–Kennedy administration.

For months, critics have accused Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr and several of the administration's appointees of holding unconventional views on vaccine safety.

The CDC's revised language now places the agency closer to Kennedy's long-standing argument that federal agencies had ignored crucial evidence.

The CDC explains the shift by pointing to the Data Quality Act, which requires federal communications to accurately reflect the evidence.

Because studies have not excluded the possibility that infant vaccines could contribute to autism, the agency concedes that its long-standing categorical statement was not scientifically justified.

The update states plainly that scientific uncertainty remains, particularly for vaccines administered in the first year of life.

Scientific Uncertainty Finally Acknowledged

The information on the website draws a sharp distinction between the infant vaccine schedule — which includes DTaP, HepB, Hib, IPV, PCV and others — and the measles–mumps–rubella (MMR) vaccine.

For the MMR, the CDC continues to cite observational evidence showing "no association … with autism spectrum disorders," describing the conclusion as supported by "high strength of evidence."

But the agency also acknowledges that these studies had "serious methodological limitations" and were all retrospective epidemiological analyses, the type that cannot establish cause and effect or identify subgroups who may be more vulnerable.

The acknowledgement of limitations is unusually candid for a federal agency discussing vaccines and autism.

For the infant vaccine schedule, the shift is even more dramatic.

The CDC cites a series of authoritative reviews — including the 1991 and 2012 Institute of Medicine's assessments, and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality's review in 2021 — all concluding that the evidence was "inadequate to accept or reject" a causal relationship between early-life vaccines and autism.

In other words, the fundamental scientific question remains unresolved.

Political Dynamite

The political context makes this change even more consequential. Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA), who chairs the Senate Health Committee, has been one of the most vocal critics of Kennedy's vaccine views.

Cassidy has repeatedly insisted that the science on autism and vaccination was settled years ago. Now the CDC states that the claim "vaccines do not cause autism" does not meet evidence standards.

Remarkably, the CDC states that the headline phrase remains on the page only "due to an agreement with the chair of the U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee."

The implication — that the wording is a political compromise rather than a scientific one — will undoubtedly invite scrutiny on Capitol Hill.

Attorney Aaron Siri, who has spent years litigating against federal agencies for greater transparency around vaccine safety, said the update marks a long-overdue shift in honesty from...

By James Bovard at Brownstone dot org.

There is no censorship here in Germany," according to Steffen Meyer, a top spokesman for the German government. In reality, Germans have freedom of speech except for ideas that politicians and government contractors and nonprofit activists don't like. Germany is providing a road map for freedom that can be squashed throughout the Western world.

Germany was the scene of some of the 20th century's worst tyranny but today's German leaders have only noble intentions for oppression. Berlin's Best and Brightest "improved" democracy by turning politicians into a privileged caste. After a conservative editor mocked a top German law enforcement official by posting a meme showing her holding a sign, "I hate freedom of opinion," he was convicted and sentenced to seven months in jail for "abuse, slander or defamation against persons in political life." The editor is on probation while the sentence is suspended but many other Germans have been locked up for similar offenses.

The US State Department Human Rights Report stated that German police "routinely raided homes, confiscated electronic devices, interrogated suspects and prosecuted individuals for the exercise of freedom of speech, including online." German Chancellor Friedrich Merz personally filed almost 5,000 complaints against his online critics, sometimes resulting in police raids against people he accused.

The German media are gung-ho for government censorship of average Germans. TheNew York Times noted, "Authorities in Lower Saxony raid homes up to multiple times per month, sometimes with a local television crew in tow." The Times reported that in 2022, "Christian Endt, a journalist in Berlin whose coverage of Covid drew a steady stream of insults online, reached a breaking point. After an anonymous Twitter user had called him 'stupid' and mentally ill, he embarked on a mission to see if he could get the person prosecuted."

The Twitter account didn't have a real name but Endt used an image search of his picture and tracked it down to a small-business owner. Local prosecutors fined that guy more than a thousand dollars. Endt told the New York Times, "I was not even sure if what this guy wrote was a crime or not. In the end, I'm happy they did something about it and this person got a signal that there are some limits on free speech." But is there no limit to the cowardliness of some German journalists? Publicly admitting that you ran crying to the authorities after some dweeb called you stupid and crazy makes a journalist unfit for writing about anything that offends anyone.

Journalist J.D. Tuccille, writing in Reason, notes:

"Last November, a Bavarian man was investigated for referring online to then-Deputy Chancellor Robert Habeck with a pun that roughly translates as 'idiot.' Police raided the home of a Hamburg man for calling a local politician a 'pimmel' (dick). Berlin banned the pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel slogan 'from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.' And Irish protesters in Germany were forbidden to speak in Gaelic because police wouldn't be able to tell if they were saying verboten things."

Going back almost a decade, Germany was the most aggressive online censor among advanced nations. I noted in USA Today in 2017:

"In June, German police raided dozens of homes across the nation suspected of offensive social media postings and "conducted home searches and interrogations," according to The New York Times. Facebook is deleting 15,000 posts a month in Germany but the government is threatening a $50-million-plus fine unless Facebook suppresses far more comments. Judith Bergman of the Gatestone Institute commented on the German mandate: 'When employees of social media companies are appointed as the state's private thought police…free speech becomes nothing more than a fairy tale. Or is that perhaps the point?'"

Writing in The Hill, I warned in late 2017 that American politicians sought the "Germanification of Facebook...

By Joseph Varon at Brownstone dot org.

My experience in medicine allows me to distinguish between genuine innovation and subtle reclassification that fundamentally alters practice while appearing unchanged. Artificial intelligence has recently attracted considerable attention, including the widely circulated assertion that AI has been "legally authorized to practice medicine" in the United States. Interpreted literally, this claim is inaccurate. No medical board has licensed a machine. No algorithm has sworn an oath, accepted fiduciary duty, or assumed personal liability for patient harm. No robot physician is opening a clinic, billing insurers, or standing before a malpractice jury.

However, stopping at this observation overlooks the broader issue. Legal concepts of liability are currently being redefined, often without public awareness.

A significant transformation is underway, warranting more than either reflexive dismissal or uncritical technological enthusiasm. The current development is not the licensure of artificial intelligence as a physician, but rather the gradual erosion of medicine's core boundary: the intrinsic link between clinical judgment and human accountability. Clinical judgment involves making informed decisions tailored to each patient's unique needs and circumstances, requiring empathy, intuition, and a deep understanding of medical ethics.

Human accountability refers to the responsibility healthcare providers assume for these decisions and their outcomes. This erosion is not the result of dramatic legislation or public debate, but occurs quietly through pilot programs, regulatory reinterpretations, and language that intentionally obscures responsibility. Once this boundary dissolves, medicine is transformed in ways that are difficult to reverse.

The main concern isn't whether AI can refill prescriptions or spot abnormal lab results. Medicine has long used tools, and healthcare providers generally welcome help that reduces administrative tasks or improves pattern recognition. The real issue is whether medical judgment—deciding on the right actions, patients, and risks—can be viewed as a computer-generated outcome separated from moral responsibility. Historically, efforts to disconnect judgment from accountability have often caused harm without taking ownership.

Recent developments clarify the origins of current confusion. In several states, limited pilot programs now allow AI-driven systems to assist with prescription renewals for stable chronic conditions under narrowly defined protocols. At the federal level, proposed legislation has considered whether artificial intelligence might qualify as a "practitioner" for specific statutory purposes, provided it is appropriately regulated. These initiatives are typically presented as pragmatic responses to physician shortages, access delays, and administrative inefficiencies. While none explicitly designates AI as a physician, collectively they normalize the more concerning premise that medical actions can occur without a clearly identifiable human decision-maker.

In practice, this distinction is fundamental. Medicine is defined not by the mechanical execution of tasks, but by the assignment of responsibility when outcomes are unfavorable. Writing a prescription is straightforward; accepting responsibility for its consequences—particularly when considering comorbidities, social context, patient values, or incomplete information—is far more complex. Throughout my career, this responsibility has continuously resided with a human who could be questioned, challenged, corrected, and held accountable. When Dr. Smith makes an error, the family knows whom to contact, ensuring a direct line to human accountability. No algorithm, regardless of sophistication, can fulfill this role.

The primary risk is not technological, but regulatory and philosophical. This transition represents a shift from virtue ethics to proceduralism. When lawmakers and institutions redefine med...

By Roger Bate at Brownstone dot org.

When the Trump administration announced its withdrawal from, and defunding of, 66 international organizations and treaty bodies on January 7th, much of the media coverage framed the move as reckless isolationism or short-term budget cutting. That framing misunderstands what is actually happening.

This is not primarily a cost-saving exercise. It is a deliberate strategic break from a model of global governance that increasingly perpetuates problems rather than resolving them, and that relies on the continuous expansion of mandates, budgets, and crises to justify its own existence.

Money matters here, but only insofar as it reveals intent.

What the United States Is Actually Saving

Using the most recent consolidated US government contribution tables, a conservative reading shows that the United States was spending at least $90 million per year on a subset of the 66 organizations now being exited. That figure is a lower bound, based only on clearly identifiable FY2023 obligations tied to a handful of the largest recipients.

Among the biggest recipients of recent US funding on the withdrawal list were the United Nations Population Fund, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, UN Women, and UN-Habitat. Together, just these four entities account for the bulk of the identifiable spending in the conservative estimate above, with the population fund alone receiving tens of millions of dollars annually from the United States.

Climate-related bodies illustrate particularly clearly what Washington is stepping away from. US funding for the UNFCCC secretariat and associated climate processes has typically run into the low tens of millions of dollars annually, largely through voluntary contributions. These funds do not finance emissions reductions or energy innovation directly; they support the administrative machinery of global climate governance — conferences, reporting frameworks, expert panels, working groups, and compliance processes that expand year after year regardless of measurable climate outcomes.

This design is not accidental. Climate institutions are structured around process rather than resolution. There is no condition under which the UNFCCC can declare success and wind itself down. Progress justifies more funding; failure justifies even more.

The conservative $90 million estimate excludes dozens of smaller agencies among the 66, indirect funding routed through multi-donor trust funds, and future escalations embedded in open-ended commitments. In other words, $90 million is not the headline; it is the floor.

Even if total savings ultimately land in the low hundreds of millions rather than the billions, the scale is large enough to matter and small enough to clarify intent. This is not a budgetary stunt. Washington routinely spends more than this on programs few can recall authorizing. What makes this decision different is where the cuts are aimed.

Why These Organizations Were Chosen

The administration did not withdraw randomly. The organizations selected for exit share a common institutional pathology. Bodies created to solve specific, technical problems have gradually evolved into permanent advocacy platforms. Climate secretariats, population agencies, and norm-setting bodies rarely declare success because success would undermine their relevance and funding base.

Funding models reinforce this dynamic by rewarding the identification of ever-expanding risks rather than measurable improvement. In climate policy, each missed target becomes justification for additional conferences, additional frameworks, and additional global coordination. Over time, this has produced institutions with weak performance metrics but strong moral authority.

Critics of the withdrawals often reveal this logic unintentionally. Climate advocates quoted in The Guardian warned that leaving UN climate bodies would "undermine global cooperation" and abandon "decades of climate leadership." That concern is reveali...

By Thomas Harrington at Brownstone dot org.

The following piece is the English translation text of a talk delivered by Brownstone Fellow Thomas Harrington, on December 20, 2025 at the "Seconda Festa Della Scienza a Servizio Dell'Uomo" (Second Festival of Science in the Service of Man) held in Venice, Italy. In his address, Harrington explains that Brownstone was founded as a direct response to the totalitarian management of the Covid-19 crisis imposed by the Government and its private sector partners. He then outlines the numerous projects the organization has launched and sustained over the last five years.

Good morning everyone. It is a true honor to be here, among so many people who have worked so hard and with such dedication to expose the truth about the Covid Operation and to rebuild the foundations of a culture of human dignity in Italy.

One of the main objectives of the propaganda that bombards us daily is to present Covid as a strictly medical phenomenon that was so dangerous that ordinary citizens needed to obey the edicts of an unelected class of supposed medical experts with no questions asked.

And it is sad to admit that the majority of Western citizens, and probably an even larger percentage of the so-called intellectual class in our countries, surrendered to this enormous operation of emotional, moral, and intellectual blackmail with little or no resistance.

And when, in the early months of the crisis, when a number of the medical experts and other public figures with their rational capacities still intact dared to oppose this organized campaign of nonsense that went against many of the agreed precepts of immunology and public health up to February 2020, they were attacked by gangs of cyber-thugs who, as we were able to verify later, were working in concert with the United States government and, from there, with the military and intelligence services of all European countries to tightly control our economy of ideas.

It was in this absurd and intimidating context that Jeffrey Tucker, an economist, and Lucio "Lou" Eastman, an IT professional and his colleague at the think tank where he worked at the time—the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER)—decided not only to raise their voices, but to organize a high-level challenge to the growing wave of medical totalitarianism.

In early October 2020, they invited three internationally renowned experts in public health—Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford, Martin Kulldorff of Harvard, and Sunetra Gupta of Oxford—to visit the AIER campus in the small town of Great Barrington, in western Massachusetts. The initial plan was to invite journalists to engage in dialogue with these experts who were questioning the logic of the virus containment policies then being adopted by almost all Western governments. But the intellectual atmosphere at the time was so pervasively stifling that no journalist deigned to take them up on their offer. So, making a virtue of necessity, the three academics drafted and signed what would become known as the Great Barrington Declaration on the afternoon of October 4, 2020.

There was absolutely nothing radical about the document. It was simply a reaffirmation of the fundamental principles of public health in place prior to the emergence of the new virus at the beginning of that year. It acknowledged the enormous long-term costs of lockdowns, especially on the lives of the most economically vulnerable. It also identified the widely varying negative effects of the virus on the different age cohorts of the society.

The document therefore advocated, on the one hand, for a policy of special protection for those known to be most vulnerable to the effects of the virus and, on the other, a policy of relative freedom for citizens in a position to survive the virus without serious problems, a stance that they believed would have the added benefit of catalyzing the development of herd immunity within the population.

That same evening of October 4, Lou Eastma...

By Brownstone Institute at Brownstone dot org.

In a single week in January 2026, new managers of public health in the Trump administration – backed by a vigorous citizens' movement of highly informed writers and researchers – have made some dramatic decisions to disrupt the status quo of decades. Within the ranks of the institutional gatekeepers, there is a sense of shock and awe. May this be just the beginning.

First, the childhood vaccine schedule has been entirely reformulated to fit with the better science and practices of other nations. The schedule had ballooned out of control since the industry received a liability shield in 1986, from a few diseases to 17, from a few shots to a possible 82 doses.

The indemnification rewarded a cynical raid of the childhood schedule to earn huge profits without risk. The industry push clearly came at the expense of kids because the added shots had weak or nonexistent safety profiles, plus the cocktail mix in total has completely evaded serious study. It's not unreasonable to speculate that the schedule contributed to documented increases in suffering and crisis.

The correction had already begun with the meetings of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). The role of this committee in the past was to provide a scientific veneer to industrial and agency priorities. The conflicts on the old committee – patent holders, grant receivers, industry shills – were palpable. The new independent committee, appointed by new leadership, started looking under the hood and asking the right questions. The three meetings of 2025 were grueling and frustrating, not to mention slow going.

This is where the Department of Health and Human Services swung into action, together with CDC Acting Director Jim O'Neill. In early January, HHS released an eye-popping report on the childhood schedule. It is signed not by some anonymous committee but by two top experts in the field. They are Tracy Beth Høeg, MD, Ph.D., Acting Director for the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research and Martin Kulldorff, Ph.D., Chief Science and Data Officer for the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation and among the most published and cited authors on vaccines in the world.

Signing off on this document is a bold move. It reveals honesty, transparency, and tremendous confidence in the conclusions of their work. After all, the usual academic strategy is to sign a study with as many names as possible so that no one is responsible. When trouble comes, they throw each other under the bus. Similarly, the usual bureaucratic strategy on documents like this is to have only the whole committee sign but not with names. When the trouble begins, and committee members are called, they invariably claim to have been the outlier on the committee and otherwise pressured.

The authors of this study boldly stood up and said: these are our findings. If you disagree, fine, but at least you know who is to blame. This kind of academic courage is too rare these days, especially when dealing with such a dicey topic as this.

The report pushes four core principles of a successful childhood vaccination program: 1) scientific honesty about vaccines, including what is known and not known; 2) informed consent, not coercion; 3) a vaccine approval process using evidence-based science and thorough post-licensure evaluation of vaccine safety and risks; and 4) recommendations that take account of the experience of peer nations.

The CDC under O'Neill accepted the document and ordered the changes. The initial results born of moral courage have stunned industry watchers, while greeted with universal praise from parents and the burgeoning movement that is fed up with shot proliferation without accountability.

Still, this is just a beginning. Much more needs to be done. The vaccine industry needs to be normalized as a conventional market product: no indemnifications, no mandates, no subsidies, no patent-sharing scams, no censorship, no fake science, ...