By Jeffrey A. Tucker at Brownstone dot org.

[The following is an excerpt from Jeffrey Tucker's book, Spirits of America: On the Semiquincentennial.]

Of all the chapters in Eric Sloane's book, his fifth chapter on pioneering is the most melancholy. He reflects on the hardships of life in the 18th and 19th centuries, the strange and spectacular ways people unrooted themselves to travel for months on end to find new homes in uncharted land and make new homes for themselves, leaving all comforts behind.

They had adventure, but we do not, certainly not in our push-button, app-driven lives of endless electronics, software, and now AI, which tells us everything to think so that we don't have to. We see adventure on screens but don't participate in it. We watch it but don't create it. We admire it from afar but work hard to keep it at bay so that it never really touches us.

I often think about my great-great-great-grandfather, son of a Massachusetts Congregationalist minister, who at the age of 18 in 1830 happened upon a flyer advertising freedom and adventure in Texas. For whatever reason, he left. I don't know why. It seems crazy because he had every privilege. He seemed to want something else, perhaps to make it on his own.

He made a stop in New Orleans and met with an uncle who gave him tools, horses, and a covered wagon, which he took to East Texas and started farming. He didn't like it and sold it all and made it to Southwest Texas to learn blacksmithing as an apprentice. He later set up his own shop.

He participated in the war for independence from Mexico and then enjoyed a brief period as a Texas Ranger in the Republic before it became a state. Having married, he had a son who found himself embroiled in the Civil War, not fighting Yankees but going West to settle more lands. He was a medic because he had tools, not because he had medical skills.

Strange times.

No need to tell the whole story, which is quite dramatic, but if you have ever been to the Big Bend, you know the terrain. There seems to be no water. It is scary and threatening. It is hot, dusty, and dry, seemingly gentle on the beautiful surface but angry just beneath. Why did he not just turn around and go home?

It's hard to say, but this much is clear: that generation was made of sterner stuff. And there were many thousands just like him, spreading out from New England in all directions. They cleared land. They planted crops. They figured out the water situation. They felled trees and built homes. They started businesses. They struggled daily to survive and work their way toward the ability to thrive.

That experience is still visible in our culture, but the rationale is gone.

Do you know the wonderful books Little House on the Prairie? I hope so. They tell the story but don't neglect Farmer Boy and the books by the author's daughter, Rose Wilder Lane. What a writer and what a visionary!

The subject matter should be understood by every American kid and owned by every American family. Our pioneer history shaped this country and its love of freedom and its passion for the new and the possible.

We are no longer pioneers. You could say that we still invent things. We still start businesses and embark on innovations. But we do not venture into wholly unchartered territory and plant our own flag to make a new life for ourselves.

Elon Musk tries to revive all this with his talk about colonizing Mars. I admit that this just does not inspire me. First, it is not going to happen. Second, why would we want it to happen? Third, this just sounds like a big lame excuse for abandoning the job we have to do right here. It seems odd to me to say "Make America Great Again," but if we fail, we can all move to Mars.

Just a few choice quotes from Sloane on this whole subject.

"Adventure is not outside a man, but within."

"Without adventure, civilization is automatically in the process of decay."

"Each scientific advance makes life simpler but duller, without adventure."

There is trut...

By Steve Templeton at Brownstone dot org.

The following is an excerpt from Steve Templeton's book, Fear of a Microbial Planet: How a Germophobic Safety Culture Makes Us Less Safe.

As I discussed in the first two chapters, much of what germophobes do has little effect on their ability to avoid getting sick and might even be counterproductive. Studies of antimicrobial products have shown they don't provide any advantage over soap and water.

The antimicrobial triclosan, which for years was incorporated into a deluge of products from toys to toothpaste to cosmetics, was found to induce microbiome disruption and colonic inflammation and exacerbated colon cancer in animal models. In humans, urine and blood levels of triclosan were highest in children with allergies and asthma. Yet triclosan wasn't targeted by the US FDA until 2016 and was gradually removed from antiseptic products in the following year.

Hand sanitizers might be better than nothing, but not much better. A 2011 study of nursing homes showed preferential use of hand sanitizer among the staff was associated with a significantly higher rate of norovirus infection, which causes acute gastroenteritis, more commonly known as the stomach flu, when compared to facilities that more often used soap and water. Hand washing with soap and water was also shown to be superior to hand sanitizer alone in inactivating influenza viruses.

A systematic review of multiple studies of hand sanitizer use in daycares found only a small, and likely insignificant benefit of hand sanitizers in reducing absenteeism in school children.

However, articles reporting the lack of efficacy of hand sanitizer received very little recognition in the media. No one wants to hear that something they've been doing is ineffective, so why tell them? Instead, CNN, Reuters, USA Today, and People magazine all reported on a single study of a daycares in Spain that reported benefits of hand sanitizer use on absenteeism and antibiotic use in addition to washing with soap and water.

The study had all sorts of red flags, including behavioral interventions that included stories and songs about hand hygiene and infection (could introduce bias), a higher proportion of immigrant families in the soap and water only group (groups weren't matched demographically), and lack of monitoring for compliance. In other words, the potential for bias was difficult to control and the effectiveness of their interventions on actual behaviors wasn't observed, yet only a weak correlation remained.

But that was enough for multiple news outlets to report the authors' conclusions as gospel.

Media outlets love the "Ten things you can do to prevent _____" listicles, because people love to read them. People have exquisite control over their environments these days and they always want more. The media is happy to give it to them. Quoting an expert that agrees with the premise of the article gives an added layer of authenticity. For many years the media's favorite go-to expert in disinfection has been Dr.

Charles Gerba, a professor in the University of Arizona's Department of Environmental Science. Gerba is famous for his studies cataloging the mass of deadly bacteria that can be found in almost any home environment and how to kill them. He never met a germ he didn't attempt to eradicate.

In a profile article in Good Housekeeping titled, "How a Microbiologist Keeps His Home Clean to Avoid Spreading Germs," Gerba tossed some serious irradiated red meat at germophobic readers with quotes like, "I use hand sanitizer about four or five times a day," and "I won't let my grandchildren go into playgrounds…Playgrounds are essentially public toilets for birds, and you'll never see, say, a soccer ball without E. coli on it.

Anytime we have little kids over we make them use hand sanitizer - we've tested kid's hands and they all have E. coli on them." Not mentioned is the fact that most normal kids' hands have E. coli on them; it rarely matters unless it's an...

By Jeffrey A. Tucker at Brownstone dot org.

[The following is an excerpt from Jeffrey Tucker's book, Spirits of America: On the Semiquincentennial.]

It's no longer fashionable to pray before meals, especially with guests around. Don't want to offend anyone, invoke a god someone else rejects, or otherwise be seen as old-fashioned or superstitious. I get it, and I too feel the sense that we should all just sit down and start eating.

But you know what? No matter how long the habit of not praying before meals has been with us - is it decades or a half-century or more? - it always seems like something is missing. Something is supposed to happen that does not happen. When we start eating, I cannot shake the sense that we are not supposed to be doing that.

Maybe it is because I was raised in a very religious home, and Dad always used the family prayer before meals to either make a point to the kids or train them in how to practice piety and gratitude.

Yes, that is it: thankfulness. This is the theme of the fourth chapter of Eric Sloane's 1973 book on the Bicentennial, a mini-treatise on what America was and could be again. His theme concerning thankfulness reflects a bit on the holiday of Thanksgiving.

It long predates the founding. It started in 1621 as a copy of the Indian tradition. It took place in June. It gradually moved from the time of George Washington all the way to FDR when it finally landed as the fourth Thursday of November.

It is intriguing that it ranks among the top favorite American holidays, has no precedent in the religious calendar, and doesn't seem to be practiced in other countries. Sloane believes that America had a unique appreciation of thankfulness because we built the country from a native land into the greatest country on earth, all the while never leaving our historical roots.

Maybe that is right. Regardless, he is also correct to say in 1973 that the attitude of gratitude toward our blessings seemed to be dying. We stopped at some point even imagining our lives without material plenty and thereby took it all for granted, thus no longer giving thanks. Why give thanks for that to which one is entitled?

It's true that Thanksgiving has become rather humdrum as compared with when I was a kid. It was a big deal back then because we rarely had big meals. We had small meals and never went out to eat. It was mostly the same thing over and over, not because my parents were poor but rather because they learned frugality from their parents.

So when the whole family would gather around a huge turkey, vast rolls and veggies, and pies everywhere, it was quite a sight and a feast. Now one wonders why we bother except as performance art. We eat great food daily and have huge meals all the time. We order from menus with 30 choices and get what we want. The stores are filled with endless choice.

Where is the distinct experience of this one meal? For our ancestors, Thanksgiving was preceded by a long period of fasting. That does not mean not eating. It means eating plain food, less food, not much food, staying trim and fit, denying ourselves, and otherwise working hard. The meal of Thanksgiving was a symbol of plenty for which people thanked God and his blessings.

The mealtime prayer was an acknowledgement that we deserve nothing - nature is barren and dangerous - and yet blessings have been bestowed upon us. Food is only one of them. It is for nourishment. But there are so many more. We dare not devour it without considering the possibility of its absence. So too with all our material possessions.

Praying is also a way of saying that our blessings will not change us into spoiled and entitled children but rather remind us of to whom we owe real thanks. It is an act of humility. It brings people together. And like a good toast at cocktail hour, a prayer for meals becomes a community activity, something memorable that people can share as one.

Just practically speaking, it signals: time to eat. If nothing else, that serves...

By Bill Rice at Brownstone dot org.

Note: this article was originally published in June 2024.

In a recent interview with Chris Cuomo, former CDC director Dr. Robert Redfield made several eye-opening comments about the government's Covid response and "vaccines." However, what stood out to me (and has generated scant coverage) were Redfield's views that the novel coronavirus was being transmitted in Wuhan between "August and October 2019."

While I appreciate this former prominent public health official's seeming corroboration of "early spread," other Redfield comments on the subject struck me as incongruous or non-sensical.

I also note that Chris Cuomo didn't follow-up on Redfield's observation that virus spread might have begun four months before the official narrative, which shows that mainstream journalists still don't understand the implications of this hypothesis - namely, "early spread" = a virus that is not "deadly"…because wide-spread early infections clearly didn't cause a spike in all-cause deaths in these three or four months of early spread.

Summary

(Emphasis added by author).

"We now know that the transmission of Covid-19 probably began between August and October of 2019 …and clearly (Chinese officials) knew it. They were well-informed," said Redfield.

Redfileld notes that "in the middle of September (2019)," three things happened at the Wuhan Institute of Virology that "raise high suspicion."

1. Chinese officials "changed the leadership at the lab" from civilian to military control. It had previously been a "dual-use" lab, but now the military was in charge.

2. The Chinese "deleted sequence data on historical coronaviruses, which is highly irregular."

3. Chinese officials "put a contract in for a new ventilation system" at the WIV.

Redfield added that "based on intelligence that's been classified, but some that has made it out to the lay press, there were reports of new infections in China by at least "late September."

Questions:

Why is/was this "intelligence" classified?

If "intelligence" sources knew of reports of "new infections by at least late September," why did Fauci, Collins et al go to so much trouble to push the Wuhan Wet Market natural origins theory? (The Wet Market or natural-origins theory holds that infection began in mid-December 2019 - at least three months after these classified intelligence reports.)

World Military Games Allowed no Spectators

Redfield also stated that "By October it (the virus and disease) was pretty wide-spread," and noted that the World Military Games were held in Wuhan in October 2019.

Redfield: "It's very odd the Wuhan government didn't allow any spectators to those games, which tells you something was going on at that time."

My Comment: This is the first time I've heard local spectators were not allowed to attend these games, which, if true, is indeed odd.

As many "Covid contrarians" are aware, several media reports documented that athletes and non-athletes from several countries became sick while at these Games, including an unknown number of Americans.

Common sense suggests that members of the military and government intelligence community would have quickly taken note of these illnesses (as well as the fact no spectators were allowed). Once China finally reported a new virus to the WHO on December 31, 2019, these two facts should have been deemed significant.

Still, neither U.S. "intelligence" - or no person who was part of the sizable U.S. military delegation - apparently notified Fauci and his braintrust of possible, much earlier, virus spread in Wuhan.

To this day, I've seen no reports that any member of the U.S. Military Games' delegation was interviewed or given Covid antibody tests as soon as these tests were available.

Note: I know from my research that Chinese scientists and doctors were performing antibody tests in January 2020. I still don't know when the first antibody tests were available in America. Whatever this date, serological assays were apparently n...

By Joseph Varon at Brownstone dot org.

For 715 consecutive days - every single day - I put on full protective gear in the ICU at Houston's United Memorial Medical Center, fighting Covid-19 on the frontlines. I never took a day off, because when lives hang in the balance, doctors don't get the luxury of excuses. We act. We fight. We serve.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was created to serve with that same urgency - to protect Americans from infectious disease through science, transparency, and rapid response. But what the public got instead during the pandemic was an agency more obsessed with narratives and control than with saving lives.

During the pandemic, the CDC didn't just make mistakes - it fundamentally betrayed its mission. It manipulated data, censored debate, and colluded with Big Tech to silence dissenting physicians. That isn't science - that's politics and narrative-control masquerading as public health, and it comes at a dear cost to this nation.

That's why HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. must enact a forceful and immediate, top-to-bottom house cleaning.

Consider just a few of the documented failures.

The CDC released Covid-19 test kits with internally known fundamental defects, contributing to catastrophic delays in detecting the virus.

It shifted guidance back and forth on whether to require masks - not based on any evidence but under political pressure. This helped destroy public trust.

Then there's the data manipulation - at least 25 documented statistical errors, 80 percent of them exaggerating the severity of the pandemic.

The agency suppressed transparency, refusing to release full vaccine injury data because the public "might misinterpret it."

It colluded in censorship, training Facebook, X, and Google employees to erase posts from experienced physicians who challenged CDC orthodoxy.

It surveilled US citizens, buying massive location-tracking databases to monitor lockdown compliance.

It also buried risk data, scrubbing evidence of myocarditis risk from the vaccine and overcounting child deaths from the virus. This fueled destructive school closures and unnecessary child masking.

These are not minor missteps. They represent institutional malpractice - an agency actively choosing political control over scientific honesty. It has cost countless lives.

Even as frontline doctors treated wave after wave of patients, the CDC insulated itself behind bureaucratic walls, doubling down on arrogance and ideology. Instead of humbly correcting course, the agency turned inward, obsessed with power and control.

The result? Americans no longer know if they can trust the very institution designed to protect them. Public health depends on trust. Once lost, it is nearly impossible to rebuild.

Again, that's why Kennedy must take bold action now, at this juncture, to restore integrity. That means purging the political operatives and career bureaucrats who turned the CDC into a fortress of ideology. It means bringing in real doctors - leaders with actual hands-on clinical experience, not detached administrators or partisan activists. It means requiring full, unredacted release of all data - good, bad, or inconvenient.

In short, to rebuild trust, Kennedy must make sure the CDC is putting patients and science first, not politics and profit.

The CDC desperately needs leaders who understand that their first duty is not to narratives, not to politicians, and not to authority or control, but to the health and well-being of the American people.

The CDC's failures during the Covid-19 pandemic were not just bureaucratic errors. They were betrayals that cost lives, undermined freedom, and shattered trust. Unless we act now, the next public health crisis will expose an even weaker, more distrusted CDC - one that Americans may simply ignore from the outset.

As a doctor who has dedicated my life to saving patients, I will not stand silent. The American people deserve a CDC worthy of its name, that works harder to con...

By Toby Rogers at Brownstone dot org.

Good afternoon, Chairman Johnson, Ranking Member Blumenthal, and members of the Permanent Subcommittee:

On July 4, 2015, my then-partner's son was diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum. I was in a Ph.D. program in Political Economy at the University of Sydney where I had access to almost all current scientific and medical journals. I wanted to better understand what was happening, so I went to the CDC's webpage on the causes of autism. As a Ph.D. student I was trained to focus on primary source documents, so I read all of the references in their footnotes.

To my surprise, I quickly discovered that the CDC's narrative did not add up:

Claims that autism is genetic don't make sense because autism prevalence was rising too fast - there's no such thing as a genetic epidemic.

Then the CDC blamed valproic acid, a treatment for epilepsy that is contraindicated in pregnancy, and thalidomide, which was never approved for use in the US - so those factors could only explain a handful of cases stemming from inadvertent use.

Finally, the CDC pointed to advanced parental age; however, the effect sizes were modest and the increase in the proportion of older parents is insufficient to explain the surge in autism prevalence.

Furthermore, the cost of autism was already in the hundreds of billions of dollars a year in the US and yet government was not responding with a sense of urgency.

I changed my doctoral thesis topic to "The Political Economy of Autism" and spent the next four years reading and analyzing nearly everything that has been written on autism prevalence, causation, and cost. In 2019, my thesis passed rigorous external peer review. It's now in the top 10 of the most downloaded doctoral research papers in the history of the University of Sydney.

Since then I've continued my research with Children's Health Defense, as an independent journalist, and as a Fellow at Brownstone Institute.

Here are the facts:

In 1970, the first autism prevalence study in the US found an autism rate of less than 1 in 10,000 children (Treffert, 1970).

According to a study by the EPA, sometime around 1987 the autism rate in the US began to skyrocket (McDonald and Paul, 2010).

The most recent report from the CDC showed that 1 in 31 eight-year-old children in the US in 2022 were on the autism spectrum (Shaw et al., 2025).

That's a 32,158% increase in the last 52 years.

Two massive studies from the best epidemiologists in California show that changes in diagnostic criteria only explain a small fraction of the rise in autism prevalence (Byrd et al., 2002 and Hertz-Picciotto and Delwiche, 2009).

There are 22 studies that claim that vaccines don't cause autism. None of these studies have a completely unvaccinated control group. So unfortunately, if you want to understand what's causing the autism epidemic, these studies are of no use.

Then there are five large genetic research projects - AGRE, SSC, ASC, MSSNG, and SPARK. Together they have produced 501 published papers. The search for "the gene for autism" has consumed over $2.3 billion and researchers have almost nothing to show for it because genes don't suddenly create epidemics - the human genome just doesn't change that fast.

Next there are four large epigenetic research projects (genes and the environment)

CHARGE, MARBLES, SEED, and EARLI. Combined they've produced 437 publications that look at the effects of:

air pollution

pesticides

heavy metals

fluorinated substances

polychlorinated biphenyls

nutritional factors

flame retardants

maternal metabolic conditions (including obesity and diabetes); and

volatile organic compounds.

None of these studies control for vaccines as a possible covariate or confounder, so it's impossible to know the true impact of these variables.

The best available evidence suggests that anything that causes an immune activation event - an infectious disease, an industrial toxicant, or a vaccine - can cause autism. But research from Thomas and...

By Jennifer Smith at Brownstone dot org.

"Toxic and Effective" Does Not Make for a Snappy Marketing Slogan

Over the last 4+ years, we have heard the slogan "safe and effective" ad nauseum in relation to vaccines - repeated by health agencies, media, and pharmaceutical companies. But what does "safe" really mean?

This post isn't about fear. It's about precision.

The word "safe" is not scientific, especially when evaluating the effects of substances, such as vaccines, on living organisms. Every substance that is taken into the body, either by ingesting or injection, can be toxic, even water and oxygen.

Toxicity is not binary.

Substances aren't simply "toxic" or "non-toxic" - toxicity is measured on a spectrum.

The same logic applies to vaccines: they contain active and inactive components that should be assessed across a spectrum of toxicity.

"What is it that is not poison? All things are poison and nothing is without poison. It is the dose only that makes a thing not a poison."

Paracelsus (1493-1541)

Toxicity: An Overview

Toxicity refers to the inherent capacity of a substance to cause harmful effects on living organisms and the degree to which a substance can harm living organisms. It can affect whole organisms, like humans, animals, plants, and microorganisms, or specific parts of them, such as cells or organs. For example, neurotoxicity is damage to the nervous system from exposure to a substance, or reproductive toxicity, the adverse effects on sexual function, fertility, or offspring.

The toxicity of a chemical is referred to numerically using the term Lethal Dose 50 (LD50). The LD50 describes the amount of chemical ingested or absorbed by the skin in test animals that causes death in 50% of the test animals used during a toxicity test study.

Another common term is Lethal Concentration 50 (LC50), which describes the amount of chemical inhaled by test animals that causes death in 50% of test animals used during a toxicity test study. The lower the LD50 or LC50 number, the more toxic the chemical.

There are a number of factors that influence the toxic effects of chemicals on the body. These include, but are not limited to:

The quantity and concentration of the chemical. Even typically harmless substances can be toxic at high doses (e.g., water intoxication), while highly toxic substances may have no detectable effects at low doses (e.g., snake venom).

The length of time and the frequency of the exposure.

The route of the exposure. Substances can enter the body through inhalation (breathing), ingestion (swallowing), or direct contact with the skin or eyes.

If mixtures of chemicals are involved.

Genetics, age, health status of the individual, and environment can affect how someone responds to any medical product - including vaccines.

Toxic effects are generally classified as acute toxicity or chronic toxicity.

Acute toxicity is generally thought of as a single, short-term exposure where effects appear immediately and are often reversible. An example of acute toxicity relates to the overconsumption of alcohol and "hangovers."

Chronic toxicity is generally thought of as frequent exposures where effects may be delayed (even for years) and are generally irreversible. Chronic toxicity can also result in acute exposures, with long-term chronic effects. An example of chronic toxicity relates to cigarette smoking and lung cancer.

Toxicology studies aim to define the limits of toxicity, determining how much exposure can be tolerated before adverse effects appear. This often involves identifying target organs, evaluating dose-response relationships, and assessing the potential for recovery.

Vaccines and Toxicity: A Measurable Spectrum

A Proposed Framework: Rating Vaccines on a Spectrum of Toxicity

Current vaccine safety evaluations focus on overall adverse events and statistical safety profiles. But what if we had a transparent, ingredient-level, biology-based toxicity index - a way to give each vaccine a score based on measurable t...

By Yaakov Ophir at Brownstone dot org.

"I'm approaching this as a doctor, not as a senator… I applaud you [Secretary Kennedy] for joining the president in a call for radical transparency…I believe it that President Trump deserves a Nobel Prize for Operation Warp Speed. If he had been President Obama, he would have gotten it.

But because of Operation Warp Speed, forcing the federal government to come to a vaccine development within 10 months when others said it couldn't be done, we saved millions of lives globally, trillions of dollars."

The opening quote of this column was not pulled from a campaign rally or a cable news hit. It was stated by Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA) during the Senate Finance Committee hearing on September 4, 2025. Cassidy addressed Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., pressing him to agree that Trump deserves a Nobel Prize for Operation Warp Speed.

Later in the same hearing, Senator Maria Cantwell (D-WA) returned to the same point, demanding that Kennedy state clearly whether he agreed.

So where did this sudden talk of a Nobel Prize come from? To answer that, we need to go back a few days. On September 1, 2025, Trump surprised the world with a puzzling social media post:

"It is very important that the Drug Companies justify the success of their various Covid Drugs. Many people think they are a miracle that saved Millions of lives. Others disagree! With CDC being ripped apart over this question, I want the answer, and I want it NOW…I hope OPERATION WARP SPEED was as 'BRILLIANT' as many say it was. If not, we all want to know about it, and why???"

The post had dramatic effects. Suddenly, the "brilliancy" of the Covid vaccines was being questioned by the President of the United States himself - and at a very delicate moment. A federal investigation team was established by the CDC to review the efficacy and safety of these vaccines and determine whether reports of adverse events and vaccine-related mortality had been concealed. It is now clear why Trump addressed the pharmaceutical companies explicitly in that post:

I have been shown information from Pfizer, and others, that is extraordinary, but they never seem to show those results to the public. Why not???…I want them to show them NOW, to CDC and the public, and clear up this MESS, one way or the other!!!

This direct engagement - almost an accusation - required a reply. And indeed, shortly thereafter, on September 3, Pfizer published a statement under the title: "Pfizer Responds to Success of Operation Warp Speed and Reaffirms Transparency of COVID Vaccine Data." The statement was carefully crafted. It added the Nobel Prize to the stakes. Perhaps now, Trump would be persuaded to favor their side in the looming battle. Pfizer put it this way:

"The success of Operation Warp Speed (OWS) and U.S. development of mRNA vaccines is a profound public health achievement. Under President Trump's leadership, American innovation led the world, helping prevent economic collapse and saving more than 14 million lives globally…Such an accomplishment would typically be worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize, given its significant impact."

Two Truths That Shatter the Nobel Hype

Importantly, the Nobel motif is not only a tactic to flatter President Trump. It also serves as a sophisticated method to establish a supposedly uncontroversial premise for the entire debate - that the vaccines "saved millions of lives" - while diverting attention away from their harms.

We saw this tactic already in May 2025, when Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) opened a Senate hearing with the following statement:

"As we talk about the side effects of COVID vaccines, I think we need to be clear about the most important fact. For all Americans, COVID-19 vaccines have saved millions and millions of lives. There is no scientific question about that fact…"

This brings us to the heart of the matter. There are two essential points that must not be lost beneath the glitter of Nobel rheto...

By Brownstone Institute at Brownstone dot org.

Charlie Kirk had a gift for embracing his critics, for refuting their arguments, for harnessing their hatred. He loved debate and he loved ideas. He believed in discussion and openness, and urged this country to open it up so that everyone had a place, not just those who agreed with codified claims of mainstream media.

Kirk ran a nationwide debating society, building it from its founding to a huge national presence. His talent for debate, more than any other force in the country, was responsible for President Trump winning the Gen Z vote in November.

He also stood against the nation's most powerful forces, their efforts to loot the country, and the squalor they inflicted. He promoted order, justice, liberty, and Christianity against the pervasive forces of lawlessness and nihilism. He was also a strong supporter of the work of Brownstone Institute, even if our precise focus was not his. It's because he lived through the Covid years and knew the dangers and evils of totalitarianism.

From universities to legacy media to Antifa to Black Lives Matter to Big Pharma, Kirk fought the most influential cartels in our midst. They noticed.

The Southern Poverty Law Center put Kirk's grassroots organization, Turning Point USA, on its "Hate Map" along with chapters of the Klu Klux Klan. The New York Times derided him as a "right-wing influencer" in their news coverage of the assassination.

After he was shot, an MSNBC commentator seemingly applauded the assassination attempt, stating "[Kirk] has been one of the most divisive, especially divisive younger figures in this, who is constantly sort of pushing this sort of hate speech or sort of aimed at certain groups. And I always go back to hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions.

And I think that's the environment we're in, that the people just can't… [say] these awful words and not expect awful actions to take place."

They excused the violence because Kirk was effective. For years, a corporate class has funneled millions of dollars into operations and organizations designed to unravel our social fabric; Black Lives Matter, ANTIFA, the Covid response, the trans movement, and other projects of globalist cabals sowed chaos and reaped profits. Not only did Kirk oppose those forces, but he convinced millions of young men to join his cause. That success was the most potent threat to his opponents' aims.

Amid the torrent of name-calling and threats of violence, Kirk was unwaveringly brave. He was well aware of the risks he encountered, and he warned about the rising tide of "assassination culture" just five months ago. It is a cruel irony that physical violence struck him down in the process of intellectual debate, for he dedicated his career to the peaceful conflict of ideas.

We can't help but notice a pattern of the culture that Kirk opposed. The 2017 Congressional baseball shooting, the attempt to kill Justice Kavanaugh, the Trump assassination attempts, widespread ANTIFA mobs, BLM attacks. Kamala Harris raised money for the groups that burned Minneapolis to the ground in 2020. Illinois Governor and presidential hopeful J.B.

Pritzker announced that "Republicans cannot know a moment of peace." Just yesterday, Senator Chris Murphy remarked, "you have to be willing to do whatever is necessary in order to save the country."

Billionaire Reid Hoffman has given tens of millions of dollars to radical left-wing causes and told backers that he wished Trump was "an actual martyr."

This is not about partisanship or even ideology. It is about human life and whether society can survive this onslaught of violence whether private, public, or somewhere in between. We must expose those who fund the unraveling of our society and see that they are stopped by legal means.

In the aftermath of the tragedy of Charlie Kirk's assassination, Dan Bongino, Kash Patel, and their allies can dedicate their resources to taking down the machine th...

By Josh Stylman at Brownstone dot org.

I didn't want to feed my soul into a machine. That was my first instinct when AI tools started appearing everywhere - not concern about jobs or privacy, but something deeper. These tools promise to make us smarter while systematically making us more dependent. After decades of working in the internet industry, I'd already watched it transform into something more insidious than just a surveillance machine - a system designed to shape how we think, what we believe, and how we see ourselves.

AI felt like the culmination of that trajectory.

But resistance became futile when I realized we're already participating whether we know it or not. We're already interacting with AI when we call customer service, use Google Search, or rely on basic smartphone features. A few months ago I finally capitulated and started using these tools because I could see how quickly they were proliferating - becoming as unavoidable as the internet or smartphones.

Look, I'm not just an old man resistant to change. I understand that every generation faces technological shifts that reshape how we live. The printing press disrupted how knowledge spread. The telegraph collapsed barriers of distance. The automobile transformed how communities formed.

But the AI revolution feels different in both pace and scope. To understand how dramatically the rate of technological change has accelerated, consider this: anyone under 35 likely doesn't remember life before the internet transformed how we access information. Anyone under 20 has never known a world without smartphones. Now we're witnessing a third epoch with AI tools proliferating faster than either previous shift.

More fundamentally, AI represents something qualitatively different from previous technological disruptions - a convergence that touches labor, cognition, and potentially consciousness itself. Understanding how these domains interconnect is essential for preserving personal agency in an age of algorithmic mediation.

My primary fear about AI isn't just the dramatic scenario where it becomes hostile, but the subtler threat: that it will make us subordinate to systems in ways we don't recognize until it's too late, weakening the very capacities it promises to strengthen.

What we're witnessing isn't just technological advancement - it's what Ivan Illich called iatrogenic dependency in his seminal work, Medical Nemesis. Illich coined this term for medicine - institutions that promise to heal while creating new forms of illness - but the pattern applies perfectly to AI as well. That's exactly what I'd been sensing about these new tools - it promises to enhance our cognitive abilities while systematically weakening them.

It's not the hostile takeover science fiction warned us about. It's the quiet erosion of individual capacity disguised as help.

This iatrogenic pattern became clear through direct experience. Once I started playing around with AI myself, I began to notice how subtly it attempts to reshape thinking - not just providing answers, but gradually training users to reach for algorithmic assistance before attempting independent reasoning.

Jeffrey Tucker of Brownstone Institute observed something revealing in a brief but illuminating exchange with AI expert Joe Allen: AI emerged just as Covid lockdowns had shattered social connection and institutional trust, when people were most isolated and susceptible to technological substitutes for relationship. The technology arrived when there was "mass disorientation, demoralization" and loss of community.

We can already see these everyday effects taking hold across all our digital tools. Watch someone try to navigate an unfamiliar city without GPS, or notice how many students struggle to spell common words without spellcheck. We're already seeing the atrophy that comes from outsourcing mental processes we used to consider fundamental to thinking itself.

This generational shift means kids today face uncharted territory....